Sweet Romance14 min read
I Moved In for the Rent. He Moved In My Heart.
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"I can't carry both. You take one."
I dropped a suitcase on the cheap runner and watched the man in the crisp suit lift the other like it weighed nothing.
"Thanks," I said. "I'm Bridget."
He smiled without trying to be charming. "Cairo sent me. Welcome."
"I said I wanted a kitchen big enough to film in. I did not say I wanted a palace for five hundred a month."
"You did," he said, opening the door. "And you got it. The price has terms."
I stepped inside and my breath went light at the sight of two kitchens side by side, a table that could seat ten, light that made the dishes look ready to be tasted.
"Terms?" I asked.
"Share the apartment. There's someone in the master suite. He needs simple meals. You cook; he tries one bite. Five hundred a month." Cairo Lundberg pushed his glasses up. "Reasonable?"
I had called Cairo because he was the man who found things. He had also forwarded my feed to the tenant. I had watched my own profile hum with likes and comments, then a message, then a car ride I couldn't have paid for.
"I do take food safety seriously," I said. "I film. I can't have other people in shots."
"You won't," Cairo promised. "He won't want to be in shots."
"Is he male?" I asked, because Cairo's tone had been odd.
"Yes," he said, and then, with a small smirk: "He's not what you expect."
He meant "famous." He meant "dangerous to my privacy." He meant "Karim Washington." I only knew the name because it was impossible not to know it. I read-label celebrities like items in a store. But I did not expect him to be my roommate.
"You met him?" I asked, taking out my phone.
"I know him enough to keep his door safe," Cairo said. "He'll be careful. And he needs someone who can cook real food."
Karim Washington met me on the third day I moved in. He sat on the couch with a folded pink throw over the armrest and the TV on low. He looked up when I came out of my room wearing a tank top and pajama shorts and the morning still in my hair.
"You're loud for a roommate," he said without malice.
"You're loud for a celebrity," I said, because honesty is a habit. He lifted the pink throw.
"You adapt fast," he said, handing it to me like it was mine. "Take it."
"I thought you'd be... taller," I admitted, taking the blanket.
"People imagine me bigger, softer, meaner, nicer," he said. "I'm just Karim. Need something?"
"I make food. Do you have any allergies? No peanuts? No nightshades?"
"Nothing specific," he said. "But I have trouble with food. I want to try. You can cook. Cairo says you're all right at it."
"I have a channel," I said. "I teach people to make comfort food on a budget. I like simple. People like my bowls."
"Good," he said. "Then make me a bowl."
Days blurred into a domestic rhythm faster than I expected. I woke early to film. I moved lights and camera into the big kitchen and set up a frame that showed my hands and the pot. Karim left for rehearsals or interviews with a calm face and came home raw and honest, taking the first spoon I offered like a test.
"Is it as good as my fan comments say?" I asked once, while we ate at a small table pushed into the corner.
He lifted the spoon and nodded slowly. "Yes."
Those two words landed in me. I didn't expect a celebrity to say them with silence in his eyes and no cameras nearby.
"You can stay," he said months later, joking as we argued about whether coriander belongs in egg fried rice.
"You told me I could stay since I gave you meals," I said.
"Only because you cook the kind of food that doesn't make me sick," he said. "You make a bowl feel like a place that's safe."
We made rules. He insisted on sleep at ten. I insisted on freedom after midnight for editing. We both agreed he would not comment while I cooked and I would not flinch when he was sarcastic. The rules worked because we both kept them until our rules needed to break.
"You're doing something you shouldn't," he said one night, watching me cook at one a.m., a guilty habit that kept my channel alive.
"I'm alive because of the night," I said. "The night is mine."
"You've been up three nights this week."
"I've been up for shoots. That's different."
"Enough," he said, and for once he sounded like someone who cared. "Go sleep."
I argued. He sighed. We argued again. He left for two days of a show, and the house felt big and empty. I cheated on the ten o'clock rule twice. I ate fries at midnight and logged the calories the next afternoon, because old habits are honest.
The late night after the episode where he was on location—he had been bright and ridiculous on a mountain with geese and a village elder—I watched him live and felt a thing I had no name for. The show made him warmer, simpler, happier. When he returned, there was a light around him I thought was the edit's magic.
"I liked how you laughed on that shot," I said.
He looked sideways. "You watched me because I was distant."
"I watched you because I didn't know how else to be soft in public," I said. "And you made it easy."
He looked like he might say more, but the oven timer went and we ate hot pasta and made bland jokes and called it a night.
Then my phone buzzed. An invite glowed: an industry evening for creators, hosted by the new tech firm in the city—Anton Keller's team had pulled strings and my friend Brittany Bradley called it a "door to real growth."
"Go," Brittany said when I told her. "Don't be silly. Your spot is reserved."
"But I don't have a dress," I said.
"Breathe. I sent a box. Try. Trust me."
When I walked red-carpeted into the venue, Anton Keller swept me aside with a practiced smile and a hand to the small of my back. I should have been unreal and nervy and professional. Instead, I felt small and real and loved the lights too much. Karim texted me a photo mid-event: a single line—"Be my show tonight. Be safe."—and I felt fingers around my back as I crossed the floor like a silly secret.
"You're Bridget 'Good Food Diary' Wolff, right?" a soft voice asked. A young creator called Lee Northby called himself a fan with a voice like sugar and asked for a selfie.
"Nice to meet you," I said, and kept walking.
The night ended in a blur of champagne and promises. The driver had been arranged by Karim's assistant Isaac Barbier, a boy with a calm face who had become a friend. I promised Brittany I'd get home early. I promised Karim I'd be careful.
The car stopped outside our building. Lee Northby waved. "I'm going to text you," he said into the night.
"Don't," I whispered, because I had a mouthful of tired.
"Fine," he grinned. "Goodnight."
I climbed the stairs, pulled the door closed, and the lights went out.
I froze.
The spare power kicked; Karim was at the door in the instant before my mind made threats of midnight prowlers and old movies.
"Scared?" he asked, as the portable lamp clicked on.
"You're back," I said. "I thought—"
He smiled and took the lamp from me. "I called Cairo and asked about the building. It was a minor outage. Come on. Let's eat."
He had made soup. The time and care in the broth made it more than soup. He had tried and failed at many dishes before he could make something that smelled like home.
"I don't understand why you care so much about me being good on camera," I said. "I edit in my pajamas. This is small work."
"It isn't small to me," Karim said. "You make things that help people feel. That matters."
"You make people scream on the internet."
He let the words land. "I make people scream because they feel something when I move. It's messy. I like this mess."
There were nights he didn't come home for weeks, and then there were nights he came with a bag of script pages and a small smile. Once, he told me in the kitchen, "My mother asked me to house a family member for a few days. I said no."
"Why?" I asked, mid-chop.
"Because I don't know how to be needed for something that's not polished," he said. "Because I don't know how to sit with a guilt that isn't performance."
"You're allowed to be messy," I said, and then I realized I sounded like someone older and kinder than I felt. "You can be human."
He listened. He watched me cook him congee when I got a fever. He stood in the doorway and said little things that roped tighter than any promise.
When my mother called one morning and put me on a pressure cooker of "why are you single" and "why are you twenty-four," Karim took the phone to pretend to be my fake fiancé with five minutes of practice and a voice that calmed my frantic mother into a peaceful hum.
"Hello, ma'am. I am Karim. I'm Bridget's boyfriend," he said with that slow gravity and a joke on the edge. "She's safe. She's eating."
My mother relaxed and praised the stranger in a thousand lines of warm approval. I looked at Karim and wanted to kiss him for the simplest trick in the book: make someone's mother comfortable.
"Don't get used to it," he said when he returned my phone.
I pressed my face into my hands and laughed because my life had become a small, fragile thing that folded itself into his hands.
It was not all a soft river. Fans swam in ways that cut. When a story dropped about a woman in a production set who had tried to trespass at a party carrying strange powders, it painted a picture of danger I had chewed over. Comments spiral even when they are lies. Karim's team sternly denied much, but the rumor stung. I read the late-night threads and imagined poison cream and strangers at the cake.
"It's messy," I told Karim one night, the internet became a rumor mill.
"It's not your mess," he said, but his mouth was small. "I keep the doors closed. You close your blinds. We make soup."
Then family arrived. Karim's mother and a small boy with a head of curls came to the door, a woman named Helen who had the raw time of the world etched on her face.
"Karim," she said, with more memory than grace. "I didn't come to cause trouble."
She wanted help, a small favor. A cousin needed time for a surgery; she needed someone to look after the child. Karim said no at first and then, in front of his mother, the big frame folded and he said yes. He set down the iron defenses and took in the small boy like a breath.
"What's his name?" I asked, showing him a plate of noodles.
"Calvin," Karim said. "Call him Cal."
Calvin with the cartoonish grin made a beeline for the kitchen. He peeled into the house like sunshine. He called me "sister" the first hour and giggled at my jokes the day after.
"Is he your son?" Calvin asked bluntly at dinner.
"No," Karim said. "We're temporary family help."
Calvin tilted his head and studied us both like a scientist building a theory.
"Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?" he asked.
"Not exactly," I said, and watched Karim sit taller.
Calvin's logic was honest and fast. "If you are girlfriend, you should sleep in the same room. If you are not girlfriend, you can stay my sister."
"Deal," I said.
Karim rolled his eyes, but he smiled quickly and purely. The smile made my chest click.
He began to show me how to make more than bowls. He learned to cut, to time, to salt a dressing. He became clumsy and careful and lovely at the stove.
"You're getting cocky," I teased one night when he under-salted a sauce and then corrected it with rocket speed.
"You're my teacher," he said. "You're my mirror."
We found cheap rhythm in early mornings and late-night butter on toast. Calvin read us books with over-acted voices and demanded egg twice a day. He taught me childish songs and then asked me to teach him how to make my signature dumpling. His small hands worried the dough until it was soft as a promise.
The more Karim opened, the more he became a man who liked to be ordinary with me. He would stand at the door in the afternoon and wait until I left a spoon in a bowl, and then lick it as if it was not a performance but an honest pleasure. My fingers would twitch with a laugh.
"You like this," I said once, watching him lick a wet spoon like a child.
"If I'm honest, yes," he said. "I like seeing you make things. It tells me you live."
He told me about his father in fragments. He told me about the performance of being a star. He told me about the day he almost got hurt by someone who wanted him to be only that image.
"It's easier to be photos and scripts," he said. "It's harder to be someone who makes soup."
"Then do both," I said. "Be both. Make good art and also eat in the kitchen alone sometimes."
Finally, one evening, he crossed the kitchen and stopped me from washing a bowl. The light hit his hand as he took mine.
"Bridget," he said, and the word made my heart slow. "I want to try something honest."
"What?" I asked, with a careful laugh.
"I don't want to be famous and alone," he said. "I don't want to be loved only when I'm on a stage."
"It won't be easy," I said. "There are millions who like what you are."
"I know." He squeezed my fingers like a promise. "But I want to be what I am when I'm here. I want to be the man who learns how to fry an egg and almost burns his fingers and then eats it and smiles. I want to be the man who will stand in front of the internet and tell them he made a bowl because he needed to survive. I want to be—"
He paused and looked at me with a steady, quiet need.
"—with you."
I heard a laugh from my own chest and did not put it down as a joke.
"Are you asking me out?" I asked.
He folded his face into a serious, blushing thing. "I'm asking you to let me try. Not on the show, not in front of millions, just here. Will you be my girlfriend?"
The word landed like a dove. Calvin snorted from the sofa where he'd dozed into a book and woke to clap like a judge.
"Yes," I said, because how could I not?
Then we had to face the predictable storms. Fans, internet threads, paparazzi. There was a night when a woman tried to break into the set of one of Karim's press events not to hurt him but to plant something on a table that would make him come to harm. He had once walked into that exact moment and stopped it. He had told me in parts: about a cake, about powder, about a woman with the wrongness of obsession.
When the truth leaked—almost nothing, the truth was messy—Karim faced it with my help. He posted one small clip of him in the kitchen, eyes raw and voice steady.
"Some of you want to make me only the image you need," he said. "Some of you think you know me best. You don't know the nights I felt weak. You don't know the nights I found light in other people's hands."
He didn't shout. He didn't threaten. He made rice in a bowl and showed his hands doing steady work. The internet spun. Some people dug up uglier things. But he had a truth now, and the truth needed neither apology nor armor.
We grew through quiet days. I filmed a sponsored video with a new recipe and breathed when he came into my frame not as a star but as a man with flour on his shirt. My viewers screamed. My comments filled with jokes and, surprisingly, warmth.
"She makes good soup," one comment said.
"Who is the man behind her?" another asked.
Karim sat beside me on the couch and wrapped an arm around my shoulders like a lover and not a co-star. We folded into domestic life. He accompanied me to my mother's house and spoke politely and fiercely when needed. He held Calvin like a small, temporary son and taught him to hold a spoon properly.
Once, his mother Helen came to the apartment after her procedure. She apologized for things that had been left unsaid for too long. Karim held her hand without rancor. I made tea. We found places where things could be gentle again.
Then came the night Anton Keller invited both of us to a charity dinner. He introduced me as a creator to a table of people who wore labels like armor. A producer sat near me and offered a cookbook opportunity. Karim stood up and announced a small, impulsive thing.
"I want to make a small show," he said quietly into the microphone. "A short web series of people who cook to survive, to remember, to love. Bridget, will you be my co-host?"
I laughed into my champagne. "You mean the show where I keep making you slightly nervous and you try to keep your sleeve clean?"
"Yes," Karim said. "Real food. No scripts. We'll go to kitchens of people who taught us how to love."
I thought about the man who had stopped a powder from touching a cake on a set, who had, by accident, learned to like my soup. I thought about a million small lines—the way he folded the pink throw, the way he'd hand me the wrong bottle and then smile when I corrected him.
"Okay," I said. "We'll try it."
The show was a small thing at first, but it rolled into lives. We traveled to a coastal town where an old man taught us how to smoke fish. We traveled to a tiny mountain town where a woman made tea with her arthritic hands. Karim learned the honesty of small kitchen tasks and the weight of unadorned people. I learned to take the camera off my face and into someone else's life.
The internet loved the truth. His fans were furious—then they were curious—then they were tender. They spotted a shift in him and decided it was theirs to support.
Brittany watched it all and sighed. "I wasn't sure," she said over takeout. "But you two work."
"Work?"
"Yes," she said. "It's honest. It's not glitter for money. It's the good kind of thing."
We kept the kitchen as our anchor. We locked the doors when needed. We had a fight once when he read my messages to a fan and I had to shout at him for not trusting me. He had to apologize in a million tiny ways—tea in the morning, taking the trash out, cutting my hair with a steady hand—and his apologies were never public.
"Why don't you want me to see the bad parts?" I asked on Tuesday night when he washed dishes without being asked.
"Because I wanted you to choose me when you knew me all of me," he said. "Because I want you to be the nearest person."
I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek because life is too short for long speeches and too long for small hesitations.
We welcomed a small future around the stove. Calvin painted me a picture of Karim as a hero and me as a "food queen." Karim posted an old photo of his father at a sink and wrote: "Thanks for teaching me how to wash dishes."
We had an argument once that got loud, and then we apologized louder. That was how we learned to be honest.
The final night came at a small dinner in our apartment. The lamp was low and the pink throw slung across the arm of the sofa like the beginning of a familiar story. Karim took my hand.
"I don't want fans to make you small," he whispered. "I don't want your work to be eclipsed."
"You don't have to guard me," I said. "I'm not fragile."
"No," he said. "I want to stand with you."
He slid a small card across the table. Inside, in a neat hand, it said: "Will you be mine? Officially?"
Calvin cheered. Brittany sent a string of heart emojis on the video call. Isaac pretended to be a tough manager but cry-laughed into his cup.
"Yes," I said.
He opened his arms and held me like a person who had practiced gentleness all his life. Outside, the city hummed. Inside, the oven was warm and the plate between us held a bowl we would never get tired of.
I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder, the pink throw around my knees, and the sound of a small boy's breathing two rooms away. I had moved into an apartment for the rent and found a life where someone learned to eat again, where someone learned to be modest and brave, where someone—me—was held in a hand that was real.
Weeks later, at a small outdoor market while we filmed for the web show, a woman stepped forward, furious. She had hurt people with whispers and had tried to harm a performance once. She was dragged away by security and, for once, the crowd applauded not in the fan way but in the "this is wrong" way. The woman broke down, begged for forgiveness in front of cameras, and her shame became a public lesson. It was neither revenge nor spectacle. It was a fall that was real and hard and necessary, and when it ended, people looked at us with new eyes—human eyes.
"That was ugly," Karim said when we sat down and watched the clip we had no part in making.
"Yes," I said. "But it stopped."
He held my hand under the table without thinking. My brain tried to catalog the sequence: we made soup. We sat by the window. We went to the market. We taught. We learned. We loved.
"Stay," he said later that night. "Not for rent. Not for food. Stay because this is my home too."
"I stayed for the kitchen," I said. "I stayed for the quiet, for the weird little things." I touched the pink throw. "I stayed because you said yes to being human."
He kissed me there, in the doorway, with a tired mouth and the sudden clarity of someone who had been training himself to be brave long enough to be gentle.
"Then let's be brave," he whispered.
We became brave in small ways. We wrote a cookbook together. We filmed a second season. We set rules and broke them. We forgave and apologized and held hands. We told each other the small truths, and the big ones, too.
On a Sunday in August, while the kitchen smelled of lemon and thyme, Karim took my hand in front of a tiny table with old dishes and a new card. He looked at me with that slow heavy love that doesn't require cameras and doesn't sound like a headline.
"Bridget Wolff," he said, smiling until his face was only light. "Will you marry me?"
I didn't laugh this time. I studied his face. I thought of every bowl, every night, every spoon. I thought of his mother, his small boy friend, of Brittany's brash joy, of Cairo's steady hands, of Isaac's soft jokes.
"Yes," I said, and the word felt like an answer and a promise and a dish, warm and ready to share.
Calvin danced around the table, Anton Keller clapped extra loudly when he heard. The internet noticed, of course. It commented in threads and memes, but that night we ate soup and read small notes from old people about how to make a broth right, and we fell asleep with a bowl between us like a talisman.
I had moved in for the rent, but what I kept was home. The pink throw would stay, sometimes forgotten on the couch like a secret. The rules will bend and change, but we will keep the dinner rituals and the small honesty. We will keep telling each other facts of the day: who had a bad call, who burned the toast, who laughed until milk came out their nose.
"What if it gets too loud?" I asked Karim once, in bed, while the city lights kept their slow watch.
"Then we'll close the window," he said. "We'll make soup. We'll keep cooking."
And we did.
The End
— Thank you for reading —