Sweet Romance15 min read
I Accidentally Slept with My Childhood Neighbor
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up with my whole life spinning—and a stranger who looked alarmingly familiar beside me.
"Hey," a voice said, sleepy and steady.
I stared at him. He was sleeping—no, not sleeping, just still—and some of the last night's haze broke when I realized whose face that was: Aiden Cox. Long lashes, fair skin, a small red mark on his throat and a faint flush on his lips. He looked like he belonged in a book, like a calm page I was not supposed to open.
"Margot?" He murmured, and the sound of my name from his mouth felt like being accused and forgiven at once.
I tasted wine in my mouth and instant shame like a hot hand. "I—" I tried to crawl backward, but my legs felt brittle and wrong.
"You drank a lot," he said, not unkind. "You called me for forty-two minutes at three in the morning. You said your boyfriend cheated and you were going to kick him out of your life."
I blinked. "I called? I—Aiden, you weren't even here. You're in another country. You told me that."
He showed me his phone. There it was—my number, a long call, a string of messages. "You said you missed me for three years," he read, and I felt my cheeks combust. "You said you hated yourself and you wanted to apologize. You said you liked me. Forty-two minutes, Margot."
"No, no—" I tried to rearrange the memory. I had been furious, and Birgitta had dragged me to celebrate, and I had stomped a cheating boyfriend into holy oblivion—Chase Conrad, a mistake who deserved better scorn than I had had time to type into a text. Then would come the bar, the hotel, and a version of myself I barely recognized.
"You said you were sorry for leaving me alone," Aiden kept reading, voice low. "You said you'd been thinking about me every day for three years."
I clamped my hand over my mouth. Had I really said that? Forty-two minutes of confessions in blackout prose—this was not the graceful exit I'd hoped for.
"Margot," he breathed close enough for the warmth to make my spine tremble. "You slept with me."
"I did not." I lied and hated the sound. The truth arrived like a heavy, terrible stone. I had. I had let the wine and my own reckless mouth do what my sober brain would never allow. "I—" My fingers felt clumsy. "I need to go."
"Where?" Aiden asked, amused and faintly exasperated.
"Anywhere but here!"
He sat up, and the right side of his smile was still sleepy and tolerant. "You're staying."
"That's not—" I started, then the bathroom door across the hall banged as Birgitta's voice cut like a brass horn. "Margot! Open up! I thought you were kidnapped!"
I nearly fainted with relief; even if I had slept with my childhood neighbor, at least I was not alone in my shame. Birgitta's voice was slurred, but decisive.
"Open up!" she called again. Aiden's face, normally so cool, went unreadable. He moved, took me by the hand, and shoved me into the bathroom, then closed the door with a gentleness that made me want to laugh and cry at once.
"You're a drama queen." Birgitta said from the other side of the door, sleep thick in her vowels. "What did you do?"
"Nothing!" I shouted, which was the truth in the sense that I hadn't planned to. "I just—"
"You called him for forty-two minutes." Aiden's voice cut across the cramped tile air like a blade.
I went cold. "I called who?"
"You called me," he said. Then slower: "You said you liked me."
My heart did that small clumsy beat that makes you think you might vanish. "I did not. I was drunk."
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe you were brave."
I thought of the last time I had seen Aiden. Three years ago, when my father had been dead and a whole history had been dragged through the press. He had been the boy next door, the one who gave me candies at six and insisted on tutoring me at thirteen. He was the one who had been hauled into the collapse of my family's world because of his father's mistakes, because of a man named Erasmus Berg—Aiden's father—who had once been powerful and had once been accused and jailed for things that affected my father more than any headline could justify.
We had cut off contact, each nursing our own grief and pride. He went abroad; I moved south for university and tried to forget. Then in a night of righteous fury—Chase Conrad's betrayal freshly discovered—I had called, barleying the bridge between us, and apparently, I had not let go.
"Margot?" Aiden asked when I wouldn't look up. "Do you like me?"
The room held just our breaths. I thought of every small kindness he'd ever given me. I thought of the time he'd slipped a jacket over my shivering shoulders, of the mornings he'd put a bit of bread on my desk. I thought of what I'd told myself those years when I refused to answer him: It wasn't his fault.
"Maybe," I said, so quietly I almost surprised myself. "I don't know."
His fingers brushed mine. It was dangerous and soft.
2.
I used to know Aiden like a map. He moved into the house next door when I was six: clean shirts, a polite little bow in his voice, an aunt who doted on him, a quiet boy who offered two candies like a treaty. My mother—Chloe Eklund—was ready to tear me limb from limb for being a walking disgrace, but when Aiden's small voice asked permission to help me play, my mother's scolding melted.
"Can he come?" Aiden asked in a tone that made my mother give me a look that said: behave. He took me by the hand and taught me how to be a small citizen in a big world of bullies and bric-a-brac. He gave me candies, and then a small, patient attention that lasted through years. I became the person who protected him, as much as he protected me.
He tutored me in a way that was both tender and militant. He'd sit behind me and tap the math book until I finished my page. He would frown and say, "Margot, focus," which made my chest lift and fall in a way that made me think maybe feeling anything more than friendship was a selfish prank.
There was a girl, Kaleigh Pinto—pretty, gracious, and the kind who wore the right kind of smile. Rumors whispered that Aiden and she were a thing. I refused the rumors with a scorn I meant to be proud about, but in the quiet of the library I found myself equating every problem set with his face.
We drifted into high school as two planets in adjacent orbits. He was top of class, and I—honestly—was chaotic but improving. Then came the collapse of my father’s project: dust and steel and the hospital smell of grief. A man named Erasmus Berg was blamed, investigated, imprisoned. My father, the designer who had walked into a building that failed, did not come out. The world I lived in split into two colors: before and after the court papers.
Aiden kept his distance for a while—understandably. He tried to tell me once that "it's complicated," but I heard "you're unsafe in my orbit" and I shut him out. He left for M-country to study and care for his aunt, and I did what I could to bury the anger into motion: I enrolled far away and pretended I didn't care.
So waking up beside him—after the messy chaos of a night drunk with revenge—felt like stumbling into a past I'd been avoiding and finding it stripped of its armor.
3.
He didn't wear armor that morning. He wore a simple shirt and the sort of calm that made me feel odd and small. After the first awkward breakfast, after Birgitta's heroic entrance with her loud, unapologetic sympathies, we navigated the small nonsense of how I would explain this to my mother.
"You two should just be engaged and cut the drama," Birgitta insisted between bites of bun.
I muttered. "No."
Aiden laughed softly. "You can be dramatic. I like it."
We had a fragile day: a walk to the university where he once studied, a meeting with a professor who smiled and told us our hands looked 'perfect together' and then, unexpectedly, a conversation that made my heart fold in ways that made sense.
"You think I'm just apologizing because of the old case," I said in a patch of shade, confessing the ugly little guilt I'd been carrying. "You think I was vindictive or angry."
"I never thought that," Aiden said. "I know you. You don't run unless you are saving yourself."
"Did you—did you ever talk to Kaleigh?" I couldn't keep the sting from my voice. Kaleigh had once positioned herself like an inevitable future; it had hurt.
Aiden breathed. "I met her a couple of times. We are not...it was never right. I never stopped thinking about you."
It felt like being unshackled and hugged at once.
4.
But life has its thorns and not all wolves eat quietly. Chase Conrad—the bastard who had been my fake boyfriend, who had been caught red-handed—was still a human problem with a very public face. I had shoved him out of the bar, but Chase could not stay small. He was smug even when he'd been proven small.
"Margot!" he sniffed after a brief scene with my mother, trying to unwind his way back into my life because apparently he considered himself redeemable by snacks and apologies.
"Get out," I said clearly, but he persisted, trying to claim that the girl in the bar had been a misunderstanding, that he didn't know why there'd been photos, that we could "talk."
People heard. Neighbors peeked. The house filled with chorus: my mother, Chloe Eklund, brandishing a kitchen implement she had used for twenty years—not elegantly, but with authority. Aiden looked on, cool and a little dangerous, and at that moment, Chase miscalculated everything.
"Chase, you should leave," Aiden said softly. The voice made my chest clamp.
Chase laughed the laugh of a man who thought he was clever. "And who are you, the guardian angel with the perfect cheekbones? Back off."
I felt my face go red with a different fury. "Chase Conrad, you cheated on me. You walked into a bar with that—" I couldn't say the word I wanted. "—with someone else. You slept and smoked your arrogance all over this town."
Chase's face went hard. "You both misread it. She was there, yes, but—"
"Save it." My mother raised the feather duster she'd used for years. "You came into my house. You embarrassed my daughter. You will leave and you will never darken her door again." The room smelled of boiling soup and sunlight and something charged.
Chase staggered as if he'd been struck. He opened his mouth, then closed it. People had arrived: neighbors, Birgitta standing like a small storm with crossed arms, and then my mother walked forward: not violent but inevitable. She began to speak in a tone that could strip paint.
"Look at me," she said. "Look at me and tell me you didn't know better." She swung the feather duster in a quick, theatrically controlled arc. "You either leave my house now, or—"
Chase tried to flounder with a denial that tasted like saliva. "I—it's not like that! Please, I'm sorry—"
He had a timeline of apologies prepared. He had a legalistic "I didn't technically do X" kind of apology. He tried to sound rational, as if emotion were a math problem he could solve with logic. He had the gall to claim he had loved me—less a confession than a claim.
That was the wrong line to say.
"Love?" I felt the world tilt. "You— love? You have a newborn fear of being single, and you call it love. Get out!"
The neighbors had phones out like the chorus of a modern theater. Birgitta hissed, "Wow, he really thinks he can rewrite his past with a puppy face."
Chase's denial split into something bolder. "You are twisting this. I didn't force anything. That girl—"
"You left footprints in another girl's life," I replied. "Not only that, you tried to keep it secret. I found the pictures." I waved the memory of them like a flag. "You cheat, you lie, and then you expect compassion. That is not how it works."
He went through the stages. First, the arrogance: "You have no proof." Next, the shock: "What? Photos? No—" Then denial, then anger. "You're crazy, you set me up!" he said to me, to my mother, to the witnesses. He said it loudly enough that someone outside jerked their head in.
My mother's eyes narrowed. "If I were you," she said in a voice that belonged to someone who'd raised three children and could read the weather in anyone's skin, "I'd be apologizing properly. On my knees."
Chase tried to laugh. He tried to smooth the moment—he tried to perform contrition the way someone might practice a card trick. His mouth moved and he waved his arms like a man who had been interrupted in a rehearsal.
Then the punishment started—not in a court, not in a formal place of judgment, but in the middle of my living room, in the presence of neighbors with their phones up, with the delivery man who had come by, with Birgitta and my grandmother's two friends, a smattering of faces who had watched the old drama.
"Chase Conrad," my mother said, "listen to me." She stepped forward, the feather duster fluttering like a small flag of finality. "You will tell these people the truth. You will apologize to my daughter. You will promise—on your mother's name—never to show your face near her again."
He tried to stumble a defense, and the crowd leaned in, hungry. My mother had always had a flair for the theatrical; she had used that feather duster to shame boys twice my age in the past and won. She tapped the duster against her palm once, a punctuation mark.
The first reaction from the crowd was a hum—pitched surprise turning into savage enjoyment. "Let's make him squirm," whispered some woman by the door. "He deserves it." Phones poised, the neighbors began to murmur. Some shook their heads. Birgitta clapped, an odd, delighted sound. A man from downstairs said, "You get him, Chloe."
Chase's face shifted through colors as if someone were painting them quickly: from denial to confusion to anger to panic. He began to talk louder. "You all—this is harassment! You can't stand here and—"
A neighbor interrupted. "We can and we will. You come to our neighborhood and cause pain? No."
He tried pleading with me. "Margot, please," he said, voice thin. He knocked over a plant box with the nervy desperation of a man who is finally unable to act the part he'd rehearsed. "Please. I made a mistake."
I stepped forward, my own pulse a drum in my ears. "You don't get to perform remorse because you're called out," I said. "You get to face the consequences. Say it: 'I cheated on Margot Luna.'"
The words in his mouth were like vomit. "I—" He faltered, eyes darting. "I kissed someone, yes. She—" He tried to make it small. He tried to make it mutual.
"Say it straight," my mother commanded, and she came closer, the feather duster held like an accuser's quill. "Say it loud. Tell us what you did."
Dodging didn't help. The circle tightened like a net. He went through the pain stages again—"No way," then "Fine," then "I didn't mean it," and finally "I'm sorry."
But apologies can be empty charms. So my mother decided to add a public ritual to it. She lifted the feather duster and, with the crowd watching, she let it swish against the angle of his jaw—light, theatrical, humiliating. The sound was like a small slap. Chase gasped as if winded. The neighbors chuckled, phones snapping.
"Say it while I do this," she commanded. "Say it now."
Chase, white in the face, blurted apologies that dissolved into pleading when the duster touched his shirt cuff. He tried to drag his words into a legalistic fog—"I didn't mean to hurt anyone"—but the crowd wanted more: names, specifics, a confession pronounced clearly as if reading from a ledger. He choked out the truth: "I cheated on Margot. I was with another woman. I didn't tell you; I was a coward."
The crowd roared with the slow satisfaction of a verdict read aloud. A neighbor took a step forward and said, "Promise you won't come back." Chase's hands shook. "I promise," he said too quickly. "Please, Margot—"
Birgitta shoved forward with a triumphant grin. "Best part?" she said, loud. "You look ridiculous on camera."
He finally slumped against the couch, a man undone in ten seconds of public exposure. His face was wet with sweat and shame. The crowd's reactions had shifted from eager to scornful to, oddly, a little compassionate—this arc of emotion a small lesson.
Chase's face cracked. He began to sob—not the theatrical weeping of someone trying to manipulate, but a harsher, real sound. He dropped to his knees, hands to the carpet, and begged. "Please, Margot, don't ruin me. I have a job, I have a future—"
"Leave," my mother said, voice a steel rope. "Out. Now."
He crawled to the door with his dignity scraped away, and some onlookers took photos, some clapped, some peered with pity. He stopped at the threshold, turned, and with a last burst of fragile bravado said, "You'll regret this."
He staggered out, and the door clicked like a curtain on his performance.
The aftermath was strange: a mix of triumph and hollow relief. I felt the rawness. People patted my back. Birgitta whooped. My mother wiped her hands and snorted. Neighbors wound away like audience members after a play.
Chase's reaction had been a full arc: smugness, shock, denial, collapse, begging—now his silence. The crowd's reaction had been an audience's approval, a few jeers, and a good record for gossip. He had been publicly diminished; that was the point. He had been made to own his churlishness where everyone could see it, and for once he couldn't hide behind a phone screen or an alibi.
5.
After the door closed on Chase, Aiden took my hand like a habitual thing. "You okay?"
"I am now," I said, because I felt it. Free and raw and weirdly lighter.
He smiled, a small, steady thing. "I'm not leaving you."
"You were supposed to be in M-country," I said. "How did you...?"
"I never left you in my head," he said simply. "You disappeared, and then your anger did. I thought you hated my family. I thought you hated me."
"It was complicated," I said. I'd once told him exactly that, and it hadn't helped.
He looked at me like a secret he'd always known. "I like you. I always have."
"Then why did you go?" I demanded in a whisper. He had gone away and let winters slide.
A tender, small explanation followed about his aunt, about the muddled courtroom, about how everything had once seemed to tilt and break and how he had stayed away because he didn't want to be a problem in my life. "I went away because I didn't want to be the reason you got hurt."
"Well, congratulations, you were a hero of absence," I said, but there was no bite in it. I wrapped my hand around his and felt the old, reliable warmth of it.
We spent the next days re-learning each other. Aiden showed me the campus where he had once studied; I walked him through the market where my mother scolded the vendor for over-salt. We had small, staged fights about whose family dinner etiquette was more aggressive. We inked promises with small physical things—little touches, a hand to the small of my back, a finger that lingered on my wrist.
6.
Kaleigh appeared once more—tidily dressed, polite, the kind of girl who could switch from honeyed words to icy dagger with the speed of a camera flash.
"Margot," she said, like a small accusation wrapped in a smile. "I heard you and Aiden are together."
"We are," I said simply. She had once tried to wedge herself between us, and the memory of that still tasted acidic.
She nodded, graceful. "I was worried you would be hurt. I only ever wanted him happy."
Her voice had that old honey. She left with a "I wish you both the best," that sounded like a close shave.
It was a private victory: when Kaleigh had hoped to unnerve me, she had found a hand in mine.
7.
We moved carefully. I finished my program. He did his work. We had nights filled with small tenderness and days with real life intrusions: the occasional snide look, the old lawsuits that lingered like a moth in the attic, Aiden's father's name still a scar in my family's memory.
There was a dinner, months later, which marked a curious turning point. Aiden's parents—Erasmus Berg and his wife—came back into town. The scent of reconciliation and an old case being revisited hovered. My mother called it a necessary meeting. She told me curtly: "You will be civil."
We arrived at a house lit with the same warm light as the day Aiden first moved in. Karin Walker—Aiden's aunt—greeted us with a softness that made my chest thaw. Jasper Branch—Aiden's uncle—smiled with the gentle kind of age. Erasmus Berg stood a little farther back.
"Margot," he said, and kindness settled over his face like a shawl. It felt strange, because his name had once been the center of a storm that took my father away. The old accusations had been turned inside out, new evidence found, truths realigned so that what had been an assumption was now under question.
Aiden held my hand through the dinner. His parents asked my mother questions; there were apologies and explanations; more than anything, there was an odd sense of things smoothing. We walked out into a small snowfall—rare and bright—and Aiden wrapped his arm around me.
"Do you want anything?" he asked.
"Only that you don't leave," I said.
He laughed softly. "I won't. This time, I'll stay."
8.
We made plans to be together even in the small inconveniences of life: grocery runs, shared classes, library nights. Our relationship was a steady glow, sometimes eclipsed by the chaos of the world but never absent. We argued, we made up, we loved. I learned how to apologize properly; he learned how to say he's sorry without making it an apology performance.
And once, months later, we walked past the place where Chase lived. He'd kept a face like nothing had happened. I had a hand in Aiden's pocket, and my mother by my side. A crowd had gathered at a charity fair.
I stared at him. My heart ticked. The world seemed small and wide at once. He caught my eye, and then the public punishment repeated itself though in a different form: he crossed paths with my mother, and she looked his direction and walked like a woman with a mission.
"Chase," she said in a voice that could cut through a market's hum. People stopped their conversations. He tried to look away.
"You again?" he said, bleary and embarrassed.
"There's a live feed," my mother said. "Tell the people what you did."
He turned pale and started stammering. Around us, someone started recording. "I... it's not what it looks like," he muttered, then louder, "It was a mistake!"
A wave of onlookers came forward. He buckled under their eyes. His attempt to charm failed; my mother's accusation was broadcasting across phones. He tried to deny, to plead, but the momentum of truth pushed him: his voice grew smaller, and the crowd drew nearer.
"Public humiliation," my mother whispered, but this time it wasn't about shaming so much as accountability in the small theater of life. He stood revealed, and the crowd—people I'd known since kindergarten—watched him unravel. He apologized, he sobbed, he tried bargaining words. It finished with him promising to disappear, which he did.
This time the punishment had ripples online. The man who thought he could pick up his life as a casual accessory found his reputation shrinking into the background like a disconnected radio.
9.
There are many tiny victories in a year. The true payoff wasn't the spectacle of Chase's fall. It was quieter: an old professor winking as he told Aiden he was proud; my mother choosing a dress for my graduation and asking if Aiden would come; Birgitta screaming on the other side of the auditorium as I accepted a small honor; Aiden slipping a tiny ring onto my finger after the last snow fell.
I had once wanted to vanish into motion and distance. Instead, I learned how to return: to be brave, to forgive selectively, to choose myself. Aiden was not perfect. I was not perfect. But the steady truth between us changed things into a life I recognized and wanted.
"Do you think about that night?" he asked once, in bed, when the moon made neat silver steps across the floorboards.
"I think I was reckless and brave in equal parts," I said.
He smiled. "I like that version of you."
I leaned into him and for the first time in a long time, I relaxed. We had the world and we had dinner plans and a future shaped by small, honest choices.
Aiden kissed my temple. "Stay this time," he murmured.
"I am staying," I answered, and it was not a promise made out of fear but one of desire.
Outside, snow melted on the pavement. Inside, our hands fit like cartography. The rest of our lives might be messy. The rest of our lives might be loud. But we were together, and that—after a lifetime of fumbling—was enough.
The End
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