Entertainment Circle18 min read
I Ran into Ashton at a Bar and He Stayed Until I Woke Up
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"I-I'm fine," I lied and wrapped my arms around my ribs like they could stop the cold.
"You're not," Maureen said, and her voice had that careless, breathy edge that meant she had already lost interest in the truth. "Come sit. One drink, Gemma."
"No." I kept my voice low. "I told you I can't—"
"You're the group leader." Maureen slid her phone across the table. "You have to finish the report."
"I know." I rubbed my temple. "I'll send my part tonight."
The music was too loud for an academic worry, but Maureen didn't hear my tone anyway. She flicked through the bar photos on her phone and then shoved one at me.
"Look at this," she said. "My friend brought a friend. Dude in the white T? Captain-level hot."
A man in a wide shirt, eating an orange juice as though it were a secret sin, sat two tables away. He was quiet and wrong for a bar—too clean, too patient.
I felt my breath hitch for no reason I could name.
"You coming or not?" Maureen pleaded. "I can't taxi."
I should have said no. I should have typed one word, "No," and left it. Instead I found myself answering, "Fine. Ten minutes."
"I'll wait." I shut my door, checked the group chat, and called the counselor like I always did when I left late nights. The club had to be monitored, and I had the responsibility of being the leader. It's what grown-ups call being careful.
Inside the bar, light scattered. Maureen clapped when she saw me and stuck a seat out like she expected me to be grateful.
"Gemma!" someone shouted. A guy raised a plastic cup and winked.
The man with the orange juice looked at me once. His eyes were flat, calm—like a lake that doesn't wind up. He turned back to his drink.
"Over here," Maureen said, sliding a glass of something trapped between bitter and sweet under my nose. "Celebrate my friend Gavin's birthday."
"I don't drink," I said. I didn't want to, and I wanted the line between me and people like Gavin to stay clear.
Gavin reached out, wrongly sure of himself, and his hand slid toward my hip.
"Stop." I closed my fingers on his wrist and twisted like a hinge. A tiny click like a dry twig sounded. He yelped and pulled back.
"Hey—" Gavin reddened. "What's your problem?"
"Learn respect," I replied. I shouldn't have made a scene. I was tired.
A shadow fell across the booth. "Leave her alone."
It was the man in the white tee. He had risen like someone who took up space quietly when it suited him. He didn't look like someone who belonged on the stage of a bar birthday party. He looked like someone who was used to being in charge.
"Gavin," the man said, low and even. "Go back."
Gavin sputtered and slunk off. Maureen tried to play peacemaker and I went to sink into the seat. The man sat two seats away. Up close, his face was sharper than in the photo—fine jaw, eyes like glass.
"Thanks," I said, because the world still ran on small courtesies.
He only said, "If he bothers you again, call the club number on the site."
I expected a name, a follow-up. He looked like a stranger who'd done a brief favor. We left that small, warm moment between us and stepped out into the rain.
Later that night, alone in my bed, I found the old picture in my wallet—the two of us at seventeen. I traced the arc of a younger smile that had been mine when someone told me he loved me and I believed we could be something two people who had to fight the world together.
I shouldn't have kept it. I couldn't tell anyone how stupid I felt. I put the photo back, and I slept.
*
The stadium smelled like fried food and plastic and a hundred bottled emotions.
"Xenon on stage!" someone shouted from the crowd. The lights traced lines through dust. We were at a charity match, but the stadium still roared when his name flashed on the screen.
I had the camera on my shoulder and my hands in that slow, automatic motion where focus becomes muscle. I photographed him the way I photographed storms—trying to capture motion that would otherwise never pause. His face was all angles, attention tight as a bowstring.
"He looks better in person," the girl sitting next to me whispered.
"He's colder in real life," another said.
I couldn't stop looking. He was still the same man from the bar, and I could still feel that small panic in my chest when our eyes crossed. He didn't wave. He didn't look at me with something soft. He was the captain, and captains were not private.
"Gemma?" Kaya leaned in. "Are you okay? You look like you count every breath."
"I'm fine," I said. I wasn't. I had this whole private history with Ashton—Ashton Herve, the name I had learned to say slowly, the name he'd grown into like a second skin. We had dated for ten rushed days after graduation when the world felt infinite, and then I had run away to an uncertain start in a city with no one who knew me.
"I saw him last night," I told Kaya. "At a bar. He protected me from some jerk."
Kaya grinned. "Protective men are sexy."
"Hush," I whispered.
Ashton—Xenon online, but Ashton in the line I printed on my resume—was a star. Captain of CAP, the esports team that people said had the hands of gods and the brain of a chess master. He played as if every match could be the one that changed the world. He had won and he had made enemies and he had everything the public wanted.
He had the look that drove young reporters and older managers into neat rows of devotion. He had a manager who called him a miracle every week and an army that cheered for him like a second religion. He also had a small boy who called him "big brother" and a life that wasn't entirely shaped around scoreboard glory.
That afternoon a manager named Finley cornered Ashton during a quiet moment. "You saw the reports," he said. "Some people said Gavin used cheats in the training matches."
Ashton didn't look up. "I know."
"Don't make it dramatic," Finley pressed. "It is a small thing—"
"Then let it be handled."
Ashton sounded tired like someone who had learned not to throw his hands at tiny storms.
No one could work out if he was cruel or simply precise. People used words like "distant." They wrote columns about focus. He read the words like weather and found them no threat.
On the second round, while other teams puzzled over their maps, Ashton did what Ashton always did when everything threatened to skew: he turned to the map, breathed, and made a plan.
He played clean. He played ruthless. When he eliminated Gavin, the stadium played the kill-feed in giant letters: CAP-Ashton eliminated CAP-Gavin. People laughed and the feed filled with a messy chorus of disbelief and amusement. Gavin had no idea how quick the crowd could be to say you belonged to them and not to yourself.
After the show, I wandered backstage on a staff pass from a friend—one of those small, lucky decisions that feel huge in the moment. I had been granted access like some kind of blessing.
He was sitting in a quiet dressing room, half a sandwich on one side, his little brother, Finch, on the other—Feathery hair, enormous eyes, and a scowl already in place because life taught kids the lesson of being serious too early.
"Is he yours?" Finch shoved a finger in my direction, half accusing, half delighted. "You're my brother's friend."
"No," I said. "I'm—"
"I'm Gemma." I stuck out my hand. Finch inspected it like it might be edible. "You made a mess on your shirt."
"Finch." Ashton folded the boy into a familiar maneuver. He had something old-fashioned in his hands when he picked a child up: correctness and calm like he had always known how.
I handed over the forgotten sandwich and as I left, Finch bounded ahead, calling, "Tell my brother I made a dragon."
That night in my dorm, I found myself thinking less about why I had left Ashton years ago and more about what had changed in the short hours since I'd seen him. I still loved him. That thought was ridiculous and private, like an old coin you try to spend and find brittle.
Two days later, when a flyer for an official "fun match" landed in my hands, Kaya was already squealing. "Insider ticket, Gem. We can go. Maybe we'll run into him again."
I almost said no. Instead, I took the ticket.
At the stadium, I shot his pictures. He shot his enemies with equal parts focus and contempt. When he beat Gavin again, the crowd felt like an orchestra snapping into a single perfect chord. Gavin looked small and furious and the stadium loved it.
"He hates Gavin," someone whispered. "Isn't that obvious?"
I couldn't agree. Or maybe I could. I couldn't tell.
When the match finished, I walked into the corridors with my press badge buzzing and felt the world tilt. A man with arms full of equipment bumped into me.
"Careful," he muttered. "This is a corridor for staff."
"I'm staff," I lied. My chest felt tight. "PR."
He laughed and moved on. The man who had been casual in the photos sat at the greenroom table, had a child on his lap, and let the world fuss around him.
"You were at the bar," I said when we were alone enough that the noise slid distant.
He looked up. "You were drunk."
"I was not," I said. I had the selfish urge to make him laugh. "I was fine."
"You were not," he said. He didn't say why he remembered, why he had waited for an instinct that might have been pointless.
"Why do you let your phone go to spam?" I asked, and then wished I had not said it.
He opened his mouth like he might have a straightforward answer and then closed it. "Other people tell me things," he said finally. "Someone told me you watched the matches."
"Oh." I laughed at the smallness of that sentence. "Was that Reed? Your manager leaked that you were seen with a girl."
He looked like he wanted to be a man of fewer words. "Someone in high school told me everything."
"You asked them?" I remembered the seventeen-year-old me, waiting under the old banyan tree. I felt small and embarrassed and oddly raw. "Why didn't you—"
"I waited for you once," he said like it was a flat fact. "I won't do it again."
I felt the world tilt. The small bitter part of me opened like an old map and found a place named 'regret' with his handwriting across it.
"That's not—" My voice stuck. I wanted to make him understand why I had left—my home was broken, my parents were unkind, and I had been scared that my mistakes would be a chain he couldn't bear. "I didn't know how to tell you then."
He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
*
After the match, my life tilted in the kind of ways that were stubborn and strange.
I took an internship interview with a company I had never expected to work for—MuSen Media. They were building a new PR and content team around esports, and CAP was the jewel. The job offer slid into my inbox like a thin, tempting knife: one-month base pay, reasonable office, and the team—my team—waiting.
"Your office will be at CAP's base," the interviewer said. "You will be the only PR assigned directly to the team at first. You will get to know players and staff. Are you comfortable with long hours?"
"I can handle it," I lied, like everyone else in the world. I wanted this thing. It tasted like a rope that might anchor me.
Within a week I had keys, a badge, and a small desk at the front of CAP's base. They had decorated my corner like a stage prop: an empty coffee mug, a stack of old press clippings, and a large whiteboard that said "CAP: WIN."
On my first day, Caleb—our coach, a man who had run teams the old way—took me around and insisted the ground rules be clear. "Guys," he said, "this is Gemma. Gemma, this is the team."
Ashton came down the corridor like someone who had been moving in a direction and refused to be distracted. He stopped the breath in my chest with a look that touched something too deep to be barked down by practice. He said, "We have a new PR."
"Hi." I tried on my office voice. It felt like a costume. "Gemma."
"Good," he said. "Keep the team out of trouble."
"Noted," I replied. I wanted to ask about his phone, about the banyan tree, about the four hours he said he had waited. But words get stuck. They are like stubborn kids who won't leave a playground.
The team was both a demonstration of chaos and a family portrait at once. They lived together at the base for months at a time, training and screwing up and winning. My job was the soft, warm edge of their world: photos, short videos, interviews that made them look like people and not gods.
I learned the rhythm of their lives. Ashton trained hard. Jacob—the youngest of the team, who loved to laugh at bad jokes—kept the camp alive with a steady light. Finch came round a lot. The small boy had a key to their hearts because, while Ashton's face could be distant, the child offered a place for softness.
"Is it weird to have your old boyfriend working here?" Kaya asked when she came to visit, eyes bright with curiosity and worry.
"It will be work," I said. "It will be a job."
"Maybe he'll be nice," she said, which is what all best friends say—hope like a safety glove.
"He was nice before," I admitted.
"He is also Ashton Herve," Kaya said sharply. "That's a warning by itself."
He kept his distance for days. He wasn't cold so much as careful. He would pass me in the corridor and let his eyes find mine for a breath longer than necessary and then go, as if afraid to break some silvered rule.
"You two used to date, right?" Jacob asked one afternoon when we were alone at the pantry.
"Long story," I said.
"Short version," he pressed. "Do I approve?"
"Not yet," I said.
Jacob smiled, as if conspiracy were his favorite word.
The company wanted content. I fed it the story of small human things: Ashton teaching Finch how to tie a shoe; Jacob letting a rookie have the last energy drink; the coach trying to make the team eat vegetables. People loved it. Fans wrote kind notes. A few sent nasty ones.
One day a nasty post exploded—the old kind of campus gossip that can bite like frost. Someone accused me of falsifying team documents for a friend named Maureen. My inbox was soon muddy with messages.
"What?" I told myself. "No."
The voice of the internet is loud and cruel. Rumors grew and widened. A thread claimed I had a sugar daddy. Another claimed I had stolen grades in high school. The attack was messy and cruel. I felt the old bruises from home open like a hand, and something inside me went cold.
"Do you want me to handle it?" Ashton asked over a coffee he left on my desk like a truce.
"No." My answer came quick and sharp because I didn't want favors, not from him. I was supposed to be my own anchor. "I'll handle it."
"You could let me," he said. There was no pressure, just a very clean offer.
I understood then what he had given me that night at the bar and in the rain: he paid attention. Not a small thing in a world obsessed with noise. "Thank you," I said. "But no. I can do this."
He didn't argue. He only said, "If you need a copy of that invoice, let me know."
That close, I wondered how many pieces of kindness he'd given me over the years and how many of them I had refused because I thought acceptance meant losing.
Then the big tournament came and the team was under pressure the way a planet is under gravity. They had to win. We filmed their practice runs. I wrote captions until my thumb hurt. Fans liked and shared. There were nights I signed off and went into the quiet to cry because the world was still a complicated place.
On the night of the final game, the arena trembled. Our lead had slipped. The commentators told the story like an old verse: CAP had to eat chicken and eliminate five to exceed their rivals. It felt impossible and beautiful.
From my seat at the media table, I watched Ashton make decisions with the surgical calm of someone who has been in a thousand storms and come out alive. He moved pieces on the map like a chess master. My chest ached.
They won.
The trophy was heavy and the crowd louder than thunder. Inside the media room, fans streamed in with glowing signs that said, "Xenon Forever," and "Thanks CAP." My phone pinged with messages and some of them were from people who had once called me a liar and were now writing "congrats."
He looked up and found me and gave me a small, private smile that I interpreted like a benediction. I smiled back with something fierce and childish and then opened the message I'd been saving like a coin.
"Meet me tomorrow. You win." I typed too fast and then stopped. It was an invitation. Then I laid my phone to rest and let the night be for the team.
We had agreed to dinner. He had agreed, and now the world smelled like war and victory and the scent of fresh takeout. I opened my wardrobe and tried on a dozen things and then finally settled on a dress that made me feel like a person who had learned to risk.
At seven, I stood outside a small restaurant with lights like fireflies. My phone vibrated.
"Running late," he wrote.
"Okay," I typed. It was a message I've learned to send a hundred times in my life. I had learned how to wait.
"Sorry," the message arrived thirty minutes later. "Traffic."
Thirty minutes became an hour. My hands tapped my knee and then still. At nine-thirty the restaurant lights dimmed and I sat alone with a plate untouched. My phone had a string of missed calls. At midnight a taxi arrived and a familiar silhouette lit the door.
"I'm sorry," Ashton said, plain and clean like a blade. He sat across from me like a judge and a guard.
"It was the hospital," he said. "Finch had stomach pain. They gave him treatment. I stayed."
"You could have—" I started.
He looked like a boy and not the captain for a moment. "I shouldn't have waited four hours and then said never again," he said. "I did not mean to hurt you. I was tired of waiting and pretending like the waiting mattered."
Tired of waiting. The sentence said two things: he had loved me once, and he had chosen to protect himself. The room tilted with the weight of that truth.
"I didn't call because my phone was blocked with a weird spam filter," I lied. The words tasted like old excuses. "It was nothing. I had to sign a consent for a friend at the hospital. I couldn't get to the phone."
He listened. He didn't soften.
"I won't ask you to stop living your life," he said. "If you want to rebuild something, don't expect me to be the wasted hour."
Then he left. He paid for the room and took the keys and told the driver where to wait. He left my heart like an empty apartment.
I walked home in that kind of daze where the city moves slow and the neon becomes a smear. When I reached the dorm, I saw the missed calls. The messages. When I played them back, I realized his voice had been everywhere—calls unheard—but the food he'd paid for had not been on the bill. It had been on his card, a statement like a small apology.
I wanted to call him, to say, "I still love you," the way a child pleads for candy. I didn't.
The next morning my inbox had an email that changed everything. The company had printed a clause in my contract: "Gemma Watanabe to be promoted to CAP content manager." I leaned back. It was a promise and a new role that made my chest jitter. I could do this job well. I would be needed.
"You're in," Finley said, sharp and pleased. "You're the face of the team."
"My face?" I laughed at the idea.
"Not just your face." Finley smiled. "Your brain."
And for a while work was a place where gifts and bruises coexisted. I made small films about the team. The fields of light on the players' faces became my focus. Fans loved the picnics with Finch. I learned to script a caption that could make the team into human beings instead of myth.
Ashton watched everything with an expression I couldn't read and slowly lessened his distance. He would slide me a cup of coffee in the early mornings and then keep his head bowed. He would busily ignore me during scrims and then walk me to the door and say simply, "Good work."
"Are you dating yet?" Jacob asked one day, cheeky as ever.
"No." My voice was firm. "Not yet."
But our lives had slipped together like two fingers. Finch came to practices sometimes. I would teach him to hold a tiny plastic trophy and he would run around the training room with a laugh that made everything right.
Then someone tried to hurt the team for real. An online scandal flared up—an old rumor that Ashton had bribed a ref in a training match. Evidence cropped up from old servers. It was old and unfair and smelled like someone looking to make a war.
We staged a press conference. I wrote the statements. I breathed and repeated lines like liturgy. At the podium, Ashton stood tall and quiet.
"Xenon," a reporter shouted. "Why did you bribe the ref?"
He looked at the person like they were petty insects. "Because the world doesn't need more lies."
He gave no more of an answer. He didn't need to. His refusal to play the game with liars was in itself a sermon.
When the tide turned and our side emerged clean, someone from the rival team tried to smear us during a victory banquet. The room smelled like cheap perfume and ambition.
"Gemma," my chief said, "handle it."
"Handle what?" I asked.
"These people," he said. "The ones who think it's fun to break what we've built."
So I did the only thing I had learned to do well: I used the truth.
"Here are the messages," I said publicly. "Here are their logs." I read them like scripture. People watched. The crowd shifted. Evidence is a savage thing. It cuts through rumors.
At the end, when the falseer—the one I had suspected—stood in the open, the audience turned. He was humiliated. Friends recorded his face. Everyone filmed. He pleaded. The cameras caught him. He begged.
"I didn't mean—" he said. His voice was thin.
"Mean nothing," the crowd answered.
It was ugly and sharp and exactly the kind of thing "revenge watchers" loved. I felt a small, fierce victory as a watching world took a breath to applaud the truth.
After that moment, Ashton found me in the quiet corridor outside the stage. The lights had gone from hot to dim and our breath fogged in the cool.
"You were brutal," he said, with a small hint of pride.
"I had to be," I said. "You'd probably have done the same."
He slid closer until the distance between us was measured in heartbeats. "Why didn't you tell me when you left?" he asked, the old question that had never been answered cleanly.
"Because I thought holding on to you would break you," I said. The truth was ugly and honest. "Because I thought you deserved someone who wouldn't be a leak of worry. Because I was afraid my wounds would be chains. I left to save you from the mess I felt I was."
"And you thought that by leaving you were saving me?" He sounded like he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
"I thought leaving was an act of care."
He looked at me so long I felt the fragile architecture of me tremble. "I waited under the tree for four hours," he said. "I asked about you. Some people told me things that made me wronged and proud and then angry. I was a child then. I thought if I waited you would come. When you didn't, I learned that waiting might be a waste for me."
"It wasn't a waste for me," I whispered. "I came because I was scared. I left because the house was burning. The reasons are messy."
He smiled, a little. "Are you asking me to forgive you?"
"No." I had no right. "I'm asking if you can know."
"Know what?" he asked.
"That I still… that I still care."
His expression softened into something that used to be our secret language: small breaths, slight smiles, the private geometry of people who know one another's edges.
"Gemma," he said, and his voice felt like the first warm day of spring. "You don't have to do anything dramatic. Don't vanish again. I can't promise I won't be stubborn. I'm asking for patience. And if you'll let me be in your life, not on the sidelines but in it, I'll be there."
I felt the ground fold into something like steady. "I'll try," I said.
"Try?" He feigned offense. "Try isn't good enough."
"What then?" I asked.
He reached across the small, flaring space between us and took my hand like a patient thief. "Stay."
"Stay how?"
"Stay and be messy," he said. "Let me help. Let us be a thing without fireworks and without pressure. Just—let me."
I laughed, sudden and near-sobbing, because the offer was simple and daring. "I don't know how," I said.
"Neither do I," he said. "But we can learn."
We began with small things. He brought Finch little model cars and asked me what to do with them. I taught him how to caption a video without sounding like an advertiser. He taught me how to slow down and breathe when training day threatened to swallow us.
We had days that went sideways—fans asked too many questions, old rumors returned like ghosts, and sometimes he would leave for an intense training stint and not come back for days. But when he came home, he came with present honesty.
One rainy night after a match, he met me outside my little apartment with a damp umbrella and two sandwiches.
"I didn't plan anything," he said. "I just thought you should eat."
We ate on the steps. The rain made everyone slippery and soft. Finch fell asleep on his shoulder. I leaned in. The warmth between us was simple and needed.
"Do you still have the picture?" he asked out of nowhere.
"The old one?" I looked at him. I had kept it like a relic, like something that proves I had once been brave.
He nodded.
"No," I said. "I put it away on purpose so I wouldn't be an idiot."
"Good," he said. "You don't need proof. You need tomorrow."
We began to be careful with one another like gardeners share seed. We learned to talk when we were afraid. We learned to step back when the other needed air.
One month after I'd almost left the restaurant cold and empty, we had lunch with Finch and the team at the training base. Fans walked by, and I smiled into the camera with the easy muscle I had learned. Ashton caught my eye and mouthed, "Good job."
That night, alone in my small place, I typed out a message I had practiced a hundred times: "Stay with me."
He replied: "I'll do my best."
"Best isn't enough," I typed.
"I know." He sent a string of emojis and then wrote, "But it's what I have."
We laughed. We argued. We reconciled. We learned the language of small promises.
At the end of the season, CAP won the championship again. We stood in the locker room among beers and towels and trophies. Finch threw confetti in the air like tiny, optimistic snow. Jacob danced like an idiot. The coach cried once and then laughed.
Ashton stepped out into the light and drew me close. "You were amazing," he said.
"You were," I said. "You keep winning everything."
"I want to win us the same way," he said, suddenly very quiet. He took my hand and made me look at him. "Gemma Watanabe, will you stay? Not as a plan, not as a strategy, but everyday-slow and real?"
I felt every odd corner of my world align. It was the kind of question that could not be rushed; you either felt the answer or you didn't.
"Yes," I said. "I will stay."
He smiled wider than I'd seen and kissed me like a promise being kept. Finch cheered and Jacob filmed like a professional, and the coach slapped Ashton's back until the boy flinched.
We built a life like building a house—board by board. We made room for training and tournaments and Finch's stickers on the fridge. We let time do the slow work of trust.
One night, standing on the balcony of the training base, watching the city lights breathe, Ashton reached for my hand.
"We're messy," he said softly.
"We are," I agreed.
"But I'm yours," he said.
"And I'm yours," I answered.
We laughed and then sat in peaceful silence, the city a soft hum below us. The small apartment we had been given by the team no longer looked like a stage prop. It looked like a home.
"Promise me something else," I said.
"Anything."
"Promise you won't ever again tell me you're done waiting." My chest felt tight.
He kissed my knuckles. "I promise."
We were not perfect. We would have fights and cold days and fans who wanted pieces of our lives. But we would try, and we would stay. That was the deal.
When the spring came, Finch made a clay dragon at school and gave it to me like the small king he'd trained, proud and fierce.
"Keep it," he told me. "For you and my brother."
I put it on the windowsill where the day could catch it. The clay wasn't pretty, but it was ours. The world, once a place that could make me leave, had its teeth, but we had each other, and that felt enough.
The story didn't end on a stage with fireworks and confetti alone. It ended with tea in the morning and a small boy arguing about breakfast, with Ashton reading lines aloud and laughing at the silly way I said "marmalade."
"Stay," he said again, in the small hours when the world was thin and honest.
"I am staying," I told him.
He pressed his forehead to mine and sighed. "Good. Then let me be stubborn with you forever."
"Deal," I said.
We stayed.
The End
— Thank you for reading —