Revenge14 min read
I Loved You Quietly — Four Confessions
ButterPicks12 views
Part I — I Lost to You, Underclassman
“Morning, senior,” he said, still half asleep, arm hooked around my waist.
I almost tumbled off the bed before his hand tightened and pulled me close again. Warmth, a clean, sharp smell like rain on pavement. For a second I thought of some perfume called “After-Last-Night.”
“What—” I pushed him away and sat up, inundated by indignation and embarrassment. “What happened last night?”
Avery Lemaire smiled with that barely-there curl at the corner of his mouth. “Nothing happened.”
“You changed me into a robe,” I said, fumbling at the dull fabric.
“You were sick,” he answered calmly. “You drank too much, passed out in the alley after the party. Dorm was locked. I brought you to the hotel, washed your shirt. Nothing happened.” He gestured like the logic closed itself in a neat loop.
I blinked. My mouth had nothing to say.
“You left a mess,” he added, then softer: “You fell asleep while holding me.”
My face must have betrayed me because he laughed, an odd little laugh that made the hollow of his cheek dip.
“Don’t you dare play coy.” I tried to stand, then stumbled and he caught me with an easy, practiced motion. His hand on my waist felt solid, steady—suddenly like armor.
“You’re my senior?” he asked, teasing.
“Stop it.” I scowled, but my heartbeat sounded brazenly loud.
Walking out of the hotel, his arm around me like he owned the scene, my last place in the world—my dignity—felt very fragile.
We ran right into them.
Edsel Perry and Jolie Bishop, holding hands like they’d meant to sting me.
I probably overreacted.
Avery lowered his voice into my ear. “Do you want me to pretend to be your boyfriend?”
“Pretend?” I said. My voice sounded thinner than I wanted.
“You said yes,” he whispered when I looked away. Then he looped his arm around my shoulders as if to stake a claim. “Come on. Say it.”
“I—” I swallowed. “Okay. Pretend boyfriend.”
Avery hugged me like a shield. Jolie blinked politely. Edsel’s smile flickered like a candle. He’d been the reason for my bad mood the whole week—drifting attention, promises made then broken. Seeing him with Jolie felt like a small blade lodged behind my ribs.
“Meet my boyfriend,” I said in the calmest voice I could find. It made them stumble. It made someone in the teetering crowd of their friends chuckle.
Avery murmured, “I’ll invite your dorm to dinner. Friday. Don’t look shocked.”
“You expect me to pay?” I hissed.
“Nope. I’m paying.”
That made me flush. He looked at me with an intensity that felt like a private joke. “I’m glad to see you again,” he said later, almost like a sentence he’d been rehearsing.
“You could’ve just told me earlier,” I said.
He shrugged. “You didn’t notice me.”
I wanted to shout, I want you to have noticed me, but what came out was a laugh that sounded ridiculous to my own ears. “I noticed you,” I said. “Always.”
He looked pleased, then tilted his head. “Prove it: come sit in my lecture this afternoon.”
So I did.
In the big hall, he waved from the back. “Not boyfriend yet,” he told the class like a private announcement, and my cheeks melted into some pink I couldn’t control.
Outside the classroom, I heard girls whisper. “He’s got a girlfriend,” someone said. “He’s dating the senior.”
Avery scooped me up easy as gravity later when a party game demanded that the loser sit on someone else’s lap. He put his hat over half my face so no one would see me go scarlet, and when someone started whispering, “She sits like a princess,” Avery looked back at me: “Don’t move. I’ll end this game soon.”
“Why do you keep saying stuff like ‘I’ll end this soon’?” I asked as we walked away that night.
“You weren’t the one who was losing,” he said. “I was.”
That honesty was the kind that made me fall further in. He told me stories no one else had asked for; he knew things like what I liked for breakfast and where I kept the embarrassing old photos. We ended up talking until the streetlights blurred.
“You said once you followed me since middle school,” I asked, suddenly afraid.
He blushed like someone who’d been caught stealing a song. “A little,” he admitted. “You helped me once. I kept looking until I found you.”
I couldn’t stop smiling.
We built a tiny, private world in the middle of campus—dinners paid by him, whispered jokes, him pretending to be my boyfriend in front of the people I wanted to sting. The sting on my wallet was worth the warmth in my chest.
Then Edsel and Jolie announced their London program and a champagne dinner.
“You’re still going to bring everyone?” I asked. I didn’t want to be the broke host, but I wanted him to keep looking at me the way he did.
“Everything’s on me,” Avery said, and the way his eyes lit when he said it made something inside me smile wider than I could control.
On the way back, he asked, “Do you want to be real?”
I froze. The world narrowed to his face, to the curve between his lips. “Do you mean girlfriend?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he tilted his chin a little, watching me as if he’d been waiting a long time to hear the answer.
“Yes,” I breathed.
He kissed me like the city folded around us. It wasn’t dramatic—just very certain, the kind of certainty I could believe in.
That night, lying in bed, I thought: late-night hugs, unannounced text messages, a boy who’d once been a far-away star and now took my hand—maybe I had been defeated by him, but I was happy to lose.
Part II — Wind and Sails
“Lolo, you really look awful first thing in the morning,” he said, half amused and half tender, as if we were children again.
He leaned on our kitchen frame like he had never been gone. Cael Lopez had moved away years ago to a life I’d thought would always be separate from mine—governed by a faraway map. He’d been the brother next door, the one I loved quietly all the way through school, the one I sent letters to and never got replies from.
“Back from Sweden,” my dad said, slapping Cael on the shoulder.
He smiled at me with that lazy grace, then nudged my hand with his phone. “Your application—did you send it?” he asked softly.
“I did,” I lied. Ember Cherry felt my palms sweat.
We ate, and he teased me about the sun and my hair and something about being pale. The day blurred, and later he texted simply: “Come with me to the rooftop.”
He’d come back because his father’s business needed him, and he stayed because he couldn’t stand to be away. Or so he said.
An evening arrived when he showed up at my dorm, breathless from a party, and his golden-haired girlfriend Emely Madsen had been waiting in their doorway. I felt myself step back, a reflexive ache that told me how much I’d kept for him all these years.
“Neighbor?” she teased, stepping out in a robe.
He looked at me like someone apologizing with eyes. “Not anymore,” he said quietly. “Just Ember.”
I tried to be calm. “Sara?” I said once, because old habits die in the wrong language.
Emely laughed. “Insistent neighbor? Cute.”
She misread the whole thing and rambled about shared apartments and being grown-ups. I looked at the open suitcase in Cael’s empty room and wondered why his life had moved into someone else’s hands while I’d been stashing application forms in secret.
I left for Sweden anyway.
The city wasn’t as foreign as I’d imagined. I knew the calendar of winds and the palette of light in that seaside town. I found an Asian grocery by instinct, a tiny mainland store run by a woman who treated me like a niece. The shopkeeper, Ethel Shaw, listened to every story as if my small details mattered.
When an autumn storm blunted my lungs and a fever took me, I stubbornly went to the store anyway to buy rice. I meant to tell Ethel to keep the delivery, but my legs failed me and I fell into the wet night.
Someone carried me back.
I woke to Cael’s grin, messy hair wet and rubbing my forehead, his jacket against my shoulders. He wouldn’t let me scold him. “I told you not to do this alone,” he said.
“You didn’t tell me you were coming back,” I mumbled.
He drew the blanket up and smoothed a curl against my brow. “I was always coming back,” Cael said. “Just not always in the way you expected.”
He lived above my apartment now. The girl with golden hair lived up the stairs; the neighbor who never left me alone had returned anyway.
Months passed in snow and warm coffee. He learned to fold my laundry. He told me his story in fragments—how he’d been bullied in school, how the world could be loud and small. He told me, quietly, that he’d followed my letters and felt them like a thread tugging him toward home.
One winter night, under a sky cut with stars, he said, “Ember, if you wanted to stay, we could make plans together. I’ll follow. I’ll fail. I’ll try.”
I thought of the exchange programs, of the forked paths. “Would you change your life for me?” I asked.
He smiled like someone who had always kept a map in his pocket. “I would move a continent for you.”
I let him. I applied for the university’s local graduate track instead of the distant exchange. We learned to fold our choices around one another like careful paper boats.
Part III — Lu Wei’an, Overdue No More
I used to be the girl everyone laughed at.
“I’m Jane Schaefer,” I told them. “I am loud like life.”
They called me clumsy, called me a joke.
He, Jaxon Peters, made me the butt of his midnight entertainment.
“It’s just a dare,” he’d say afterward, laughing. “It was supposed to be funny.”
Funny only if you’re the one at the center of it, I thought while I scrubbed at my dignity.
He proposed a cruel game on a summer night and, in the middle of a smoky karaoke box, orchestrated my humiliation for his amusement. Friends read my private notes out loud. They laughed as my lunch spilled. They called me every name; they taped my shame. Men who scrolled for a thrill posted those videos like trophies.
I ran until the alley tasted like metal.
I didn’t know who would come for me.
Then Benito Dumont did.
“You don’t have to keep running,” he said flatly, when he found me in the rain, soaked to the bone. He was not grandiose; he was careful, steady, like a hand on an overfull glass.
“I have to,” I said. “I have to make them see.”
He wrapped his jacket around me and stayed. For months he stayed behind me at the track, bringing water, walking the stretch as I ran past.
“You owe yourself the kindness you give other people,” Benito said, taking the last sip of his own water and handing it to me. “Now run.”
I did.
One summer later, I was smaller—smarter about shoes and food—and Jaxon found his way through life with the kind of arrogance that doesn’t age into humility.
He came back to campus a man who thought the world still owed him applause. He strutted into the lecture halls expecting to be queen. For years he’d worn the prank like armor.
But on an overcast afternoon at the alumni gala—an event dressed in candles and old photographs—I decided that the only way to repay ten years of humiliation was to give the truth its loudest stage.
The gala hall smelled of wine and old wood. Jaxon sipped from a glass like a man eating the world. His friends clustered around him, a perfect constellation of smug faces.
I felt my pulse thrumming like a drum. Benito stood behind me in the shadows. He placed a hand on my shoulder once, then removed it as if to signal: do it your way.
I walked to the microphone as if the floor were mine.
“Hello, everyone,” I said, voice steady and soft. “I want to tell a story.”
Heads turned. Cameras lifted. People smiled politely like they liked the sound of themselves hearing a story.
“I used to be small in your eyes,” I said. “I was the person you used to laugh at.”
Click. A photo sprang up on the projector behind me—a younger me, hair in disarray, the girls from their table laughing.
“In this room,” I continued, “there were people who made a game of my life. They wrote things down and shared them. They thought it funny.”
I let the silence settle, like flour on a table.
The slide changed. Jaxon’s face, laughing at the back of a video, filled the screen. “This is Jaxon Peters,” I said quietly. “He’s brilliant and charismatic and very good at telling stories. Tonight I want to tell one about consequences.”
I taped my own voice into the hall: the timeline of the prank, the messages he’d sent bragging to friends, the evening in the karaoke box when they read my private notes aloud. I had collected screenshots and recordings over the years: the message that called me a “project,” the threads where they called me a “trophy to be amused.”
“And I thought,” I said, “that small things should be small. But small things add up.”
The projector switched again. This time, it showed the messages that proved the planning—his voice memo included, laughing before he sent the tape. The room shifted. Somewhere a fork clinked against a plate.
Jaxon’s face changed in real time. Smugness thinned, then creased.
“What is this?” someone hissed.
Jaxon’s hand tightened on his glass. He stood to interrupt, to laugh, to say it was just a joke like every other time. “That wasn’t—” he started.
“—meant to hurt,” I supplied, calm like a wind that won’t be swayed. “But it did.”
Phones rose. A hundred small lights blinked. People recorded not the girl who cried in the alleyway but the man who had chosen to hurt a human being for sport. The sound of recorded statements tripping into the internet was a cascade.
Jaxon took a step forward. His denial was shorthand, practiced: “You’re making a scene. This is private. We were kids.”
A woman in a silk dress near him said, “Maybe it was all just a joke.”
Benito stepped forward then, his voice low and raw: “She was not a joke.”
“What will you do about it?” Jaxon snapped at me, the smile gone.
I smiled back. “Tell everyone how you made me feel? That’s a start.”
His face moved through phases: amusement, irritation, surprise, anger.
“You got what? Resentment? This is your stage for revenge?” he spat. The microphone trembled in his fist.
“You know what’s worse?” I said loud enough for the cameras. “People’s silence. People’s laughter. But tonight your laughter will not be private.”
Someone in the back muttered: “Blackmail.”
Jaxon’s cheeks flushed. “You’re insane,” he said.
“No,” I said. My voice did not shake. “I am done being someone else’s entertainment.”
Phones were clicking. A dozen people started to stand. Someone near him—one of his longtime friends—moved to shelter him. “This was meant to be a joke,” the friend said. “People change.”
“People should be called out,” a former classmate replied. “Why protect abusers?”
A murmur swept the room. Wallets were pulled out. Screens lit up. Within minutes the video spread beyond the hall. People outside who had watched those clips laughed and shared and said: “I remember them. I thought they were funny too.” The tone changed.
Jaxon’s expression collapsed. He had expected, maybe, a whispering apology that would keep him whole. Instead, every ledger of popularity he thought he’d accrued began to crack.
He tried to salvage it with charm. “Look, she and I—this is pathetic. Let’s end it.”
His voice lost its sheen. The whispers shifted to cameras and hashtags. Guests turned away. A cluster of former fans started filming him, asking pointed questions. “Do you think you owe her an apology?” they demanded. “Do you find what you did acceptable?”
He looked at them as if waiting for cover. There was none left.
The record of his transformation was quick: he went from smug to startled, then defensive, then frantic.
“This is not fair,” he said to the crowd. He begged. “I didn’t mean—”
“Then say it,” a woman shouted, camera held high. “Tell us you’re sorry.”
“Sorry,” he said, a tiny eddy of sound that could not fill the ocean.
People began to clap—not with praise but with scorn. Others snapped photos of his frightened expression. A young man recorded the scene on two phones at once. Someone uploaded the whole thirty minutes to a campus forum. The hashtag trended within hours. Old messages of his bragging were unearthed and posted. His parents, it seemed, had seen the clip by the end of the night.
He staggered, throat working. “You don’t understand—”
“I understand,” I said. “I understand what ten years of being a joke does. I understand how it feels to have your dignity stripped. I understand what it means to be alone in a crowd.”
His replies moved from anger to pleading. “Please,” he whispered. “I can’t—my family, my job.”
The onlookers’ feet shuffled. Some called for his expulsion, some for suspension. A group of his former cheerleaders who had once laughed at me now faced the flood of messages showing their complicity. One of them, flushed and pale, posted a public apology that read, “I was wrong. I was cruel.”
Another friend’s boss called; another’s scholarship adviser asked for meetings.
Jaxon’s public unraveling was slow but inexorable. He was not physically harmed. He was flayed by truth. People he’d relied upon for cover turned away. Students who’d idolized him posted stories of their own messy pasts and the harm they’d caused each other. The tide of attention made his university and his internship program initiate investigations. A few companies that had once courted him quietly rescinded job offers after internal review.
At the end, he begged me in front of everyone to take it back. “I’m sorry, please remove the evidence,” he pleaded. “I’ll do anything.”
I looked at him. “You wanted them to laugh at me when I was broken,” I said. “Now the world sees all of you. If you want anything to be different, start by fixing what you broke.”
He dropped to his knees in the center of the room, a small, human sob breaking out. Phones continued to film. People’s expressions ranged from anger to pity to a hardened satisfaction. Some made calls. Some shook their heads and walked away. A few offered briefs of scolding advice, as if this moment were a lesson from a book.
The punishment was public and varied: Jaxon’s reputation imploded; his internship offers evaporated; several of his friends lost favors when their complicity surfaced; one had suspension pending; another’s parents demanded explanations and—eventually—apologies. People who’d laughed were now being watched. Some were replaced in group chats and in portfolios. Some had to put on public statements and attend campus mediation. The humiliations were different for each of them: lost trust, lost opportunities, lost friends.
He sat there, small and unbraided, while the cameras recorded. He went through the stages: smugness, surprise, denial, anger, bargaining, shame, collapse. The crowd felt the shift; they had watched the curtain fall on a former king.
When the evening ended and the hall cleared, Benito found me. He brushed my sleeve and said, softly, “You did it.”
“Did I break him?” I asked.
“You made the truth visible,” Benito said. “That’s enough.”
I walked away and let him keep his kneeling, let his world shift. Justice is often slow and imperfect. But that night, the laughter that had once been private became a public reckoning. The man who’d made a life out of other people’s humiliation had to stand in front of the mirror and answer for it.
Part IV — The Arsonist of Her Own Heart
“You bound a person and now you’re in love?” I muttered, more to myself than to him.
I am Isabelle Vasseur. I needed money; that’s how the story began. I made a bad choice and executed it badly.
I thought it was a simple job: grab a rich target, demand a ransom, split the money. I chose a name from society pages—handsome, pale, perfectly made-up.
He was Eric Seidel, youngest son of a very public CEO. He was fragile. He had a darkness like a low sky.
“You’re so pretty,” I said one evening as I watched him clean a broken watch, hands trembling.
“It’s a trap,” he whispered, and I laughed. “What else would you expect? I tied you up, not because I wanted your heart, but because I wanted five hundred thousand.”
He smiled, but he smiled in a way that made me feel naked and foolish. “If you really needed money, you could have told me.”
“You would have given me money if I’d asked?” I asked.
“You’d be surprised,” he said, with a detachment that suggested he was telling the truth, and that truth hurt more than any blow.
He tried to take his own life twice—quiet, small attempts that left you shaken, not shocked. I had no training for this. I put my eyes on him like a watch and invented a new job description: guard, medic, friend. At three in the morning I’d find him humming to a room that had no light.
One night he said, in a voice too soft for the world, “Kill me. If you kill me, you can have everything.”
I laughed at the absurdity and then crawled under the covers the same way you do when a storm passes, and I protected him.
“Why are you being kind?” he asked once, near the window, while rain stitched the panes. “No one has ever wanted me to stay.”
“Because I like people who need saving,” I said.
He looked at me, surprised and earnestly vulnerable. “Do you?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted.
He said, without irony, “I used to love to die, but now I want tomorrow. When I see you, I want tomorrow.”
I am a thief and a liar. I am also a woman who had been tired of being alone. Somehow, the role I had intended to play toward him dissolved into something cleaner: companionship.
We ended up in small rooms with cheap food and better conversation. He painted his days in strokes of new intention. He started to go out again under the sun. I paid the ransom (with a little extra I’d earned from other illegal jobs) and handed a stack of notes like I’d hand someone a confession.
When it was over, he held my hand like a sacred thing.
“Stay,” he whispered.
So I did.
Epilogue
Years stretch, some mend, some scar. We are all imperfect maps, trying to read each other.
Avery still smiles in corners. Cael still folds my laundry the same way he folded my early doubts. Benito keeps a small kindness drawer in his head; he still leaves a bottle of water by my door. Jaxon’s story became a cautionary tale; he lost his crown and learned how thin applause can be. Eric found a reason to choose life. Isabelle, well—she learned that stealing can lead, oddly, to saving.
I remember being small and brave and making terrible choices. I remember being loved clumsily and becoming fierce in return.
I loved quietly, loudly, and in secret. I lost, I won—sometimes both at once.
And when the wind pushes the sail, you learn to hold on and let go at once.
The End
— Thank you for reading —