Sweet Romance15 min read
I Said He Was My Brother — Then He Became the Only Star I Had
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"I don't want to be your brother anymore."
He had a cigarette between two fingers and a lazy, moonlit face. He leaned me against the cold wall and brushed his fingers along a freckle at the corner of my eye.
"Be my girlfriend."
"You don't get to say no."
I remember the first time I said the word 'brother' to him. Not because I wanted to lie. Because it was the one safe shell I could put myself into. Because in a neighborhood where faces turn away, calling someone family is an invitation to stay.
He looked at me, one eyebrow up, and the corner of his mouth went small.
"I don't play house."
"I know," I said. "But can you be my brother?"
A circle of sneers met the question. His voice was low and young.
"You'll regret asking something like that."
"You might," I said. "But I can do anything for you if you'll help me."
They laughed again. I said it deliberately to sound like I meant more than I did. He didn't move.
"Little sister," he said, then crouched to my height. Leaves rimmed his jacket in late sunlight making him look clean when the rest were messy. "You will regret this."
I didn't know if I would regret it. I only knew I needed him.
"Being a brother means you go to parent-teacher night for me," I said.
He tilted his head, teasing. "You have parents?"
"No."
"Born from a rock, then?"
"My mom remarried. My father, I don't know where he sleeps tonight."
He went quiet. Then, as if to hide it, he shrugged and asked, "If I dress like this, will the teacher notice I'm not your real brother?"
I shook my head. "Pretty people look polite no matter what they wear."
"Then I'm your brother."
He said it like a dare and a promise both. I looked up at his profile. Sharp jaw, long lashes. He was half-boy, half-something else. He said cruel things often, but he also did things that felt like salt on an old wound—he warmed it.
After the parent-teacher meeting, I waited outside the classroom until he came out last.
"Why are you so slow?" I ran up to him.
He shoved a red certificate into my hands and rubbed the back of his neck.
"My teacher kept hanging on me," he said. "Wouldn't stop talking."
I crumpled the certificate on purpose, then moved to drop it into a bin. He caught my wrist.
"Why throw it?" he asked.
"There's no one to show off to," I said.
He smoothed the paper open, and his voice turned light.
"Grade nine of the year. Not bad."
He looked at me then in a way that set leaves on fire.
"Now you have someone to show off."
"My noble 'big brother,'" I said.
He was not my real family. I found him in the places where light and trouble met—the corner by the abandoned store, the back alleys where kids traded dares and cigarettes. He belonged to a crowd that moved with a loose law of its own. Still, when I said his name enough, something in him softened.
Weeks later, there were girls who looked for me.
"Don't come near me," I said, bag clutched in front of me.
"I know Alejandro," one of them said, flat like a knife.
They scoffed when I tried to call him. "Call him now, then," the leader taunted, a pink phone brandished like a prize.
I dialed. It rung and rung. No answer.
I had planned an ugly scene. I didn't plan to run. But when the shame and the pushing started, I panicked and flung my bag into the lead girl's face. I ran. I was caught. I bit, I scratched. I threw my shoulder. The bottle hit my skull. Pain bright and hot washed through me. I had only been trying to stay small and invisible and the world made a meal of me.
Then my phone buzzed. A name lit the screen.
"Alejandro."
His voice was thick with sleep. It sounded like someone who had been woken from the wrong side of the world.
"You're the one who called?" I asked, breathless.
"Jada?" He seemed awake enough to take in the sound. "Are you crying?"
Tears slipped out. The pain numbed my legs. He asked where I was and came.
He arrived with a quickness that made the cold fall away. He wrapped me up like a secret. He touched the bruise on my temple with a care I had not expected. He laughed when I flinched. I wanted him to say, "I'll get them." He said, instead:
"Let's go to the hospital."
He looked like someone who belonged somewhere else—neat, fast, and certain—when he sat at my bedside. Nurses circled with that practiced suspicion reserved for teens who looked like trouble. He told them I was his sister. They scowled and warned him to keep away from fights. He smirked.
"She's my sister," he said simply, leaning with his forearms on the seatback.
The nurse rolled her eyes. "Where did you come from?"
"From here," he said, with the kind of light lie that fit him. "I'm a local."
"Keep him around then," one nurse muttered, "he's a good scapegoat."
When they left, he wiped a smear of blood from my mouth with his sleeve and made a joke.
"First time a boy carried a girl," he told me, half-teasing, half-proud.
"You've never carried anyone before?" I asked, surprised. It was a small thing, the way the world sometimes gives a soft moment to a hardened person.
"No."
"So be my brother," I said in a whisper.
He grinned like sunlight folding over winter.
"Today, I'm your big brother."
After that, the girls who had chased me disappeared. I heard later he'd gathered a crowd and told them to stop. I'd seen him disappear into corners where other boys fought to be someone. He had a way of making threats without yelling. The rumor did its work. People who were loud often grew silent around him.
He invited me to his house, which sat like a tidy secret: an old courtyard with a warm lamp and a swing that moved on its own. A woman in a soft voice, who everyone called grandmother, treated me like a misplaced treasure. Alejandro looked surprised to be asked to show me off. He let me sit at his study and used a small smile when she fussed over me.
"I think she thinks you're my lost sister," he said, when we were alone.
"She calls you 'little brother,'" I teased.
"I told you, she calls many things what she remembers," he replied.
He disappeared for stretches. He came back with bruises and quiet, and once with a book that had margin notes in neat, cramped handwriting. I used that book for studying. He would watch me from the bed behind me like a watchful moon. Once I found him awake and staring at me. He didn't say anything. He was a map of contradictions: careless and calculated, rough and soft.
"Why did you give me the book?"
He shrugged. "Because it fits you. And because I wanted you to have something that could take you out."
"Out?"
"Out of all this."
I trained. I worked. I wanted a way out of nights that smelled of cigarettes and the mornings that tasted of old things. The only way I knew was numbers and tests. I fought to make the book's pages mine. The prep camp in the next province became a promise: a month away, a chance to be selected for a higher training that could carry me to a far school, a life that was not made of scraps.
"Go," Alejandro told me when buses took us away. "Just keep going."
He pressed the little worn practice notebook into my hands. His thumb ran over the cover for a beat.
"Don't forget to call."
He was back in town more than he wasn't, and I started to see him in pieces: the photo in the hall of fame at the training hall, the way his face caught light and looked like a stranger. The hall had a picture of a boy who was brilliant then vanished. Someone told a story about the boy who ran away. Somebody pointed and we all smiled in parts like nothing had changed. The notebook he gave me had belonged to someone who learned and forgot and learned again.
At camp, I worked until my fingers cramped. I climbed the ranking and then higher until I earned the opportunity I'd been promised. The competition was fierce. I passed the provincial qualifying. I had been given a thread to pull and the thread led outside the terrible housekeeping of my childhood.
I called him the day I found out.
"Where are you?" I wanted to shout.
"Where I always am," he said, then paused. I heard a strange silence. "I can't come."
"Why not?"
"It's complicated."
"Do you ever come for me?" I demanded.
"Always," he said, and there was a small lie there, or maybe a hope. He never said he loved me then. He said, "You must promise me you'll keep walking."
"I promise," I said. I said it the way you say a vow to a person who has left you their last map.
The next time I came home, his room was empty. The little cactus on the desk still stood. The photograph of a boy who had been bright same as him was missing a face. The grandmother rocked in her chair and wanted to remember someone else. Her story tumbled out like a broken stream: a break-in, men who took him away because of old debts and old life, words that didn't fit.
"He left to go back to his place," she said. "He had to go. He always had to go."
"Who took him?" I asked.
"People who think they own people," she answered.
He was gone. So the world closed in again.
I finished the competition. The school made a ceremony. I stood on stage with a ribbon, and the murmurs started: "Cheater," "Who did she sleep with?" "She's not even from here." People wanted to pull the story apart. Does a good thing belong to someone broken? They said I had help, something like a dirty rumor like oil on water. I didn't answer. My chest was a single empty place that had been shrunk.
Home did not have warmth. My father—never a father—saw my name as a ledger: things owed, things traded. Men with cheap suits approached him. "We can sell this," he said to me one night, talking about my prize. "We can get money from it. You can do the test again. You can make us money."
"What?" I said, as if I hadn't heard.
"A man will pay for your rank," he said. His eyes had the wet look of gamblers. "Double the money and we get out."
I laughed, a high, broken thing. "You want me to sell myself? To trade a future?"
He looked at me like I'd asked for jewels. "Do you not see this family needs it?"
I left. I walked away and called Alejandro because my chest had an ache I couldn't name. The phone line was dead.
He wasn't there in the way I had counted on. He had been a star and now the sky had been stripped.
My father's deal fell apart in my fevered mind. I took my acceptance letter and wore it like armor. I left the house. In a city that barely cared, I found friends who taught me to survive without bargains.
Years blurred. Work began. I learned how to make my own money. I learned to take care of myself. The memory of a boy with a cigarette at the corner of his mouth kept me going. I told myself I was done needing miracles.
The year I got my first job, a winter where lights burned early and the air had the taste of metal, my boss—Bruno Doyle—brought me to a business party. He introduced me to men whose suits smelled of money. I was a small light in a cold room.
"Your file is impressive," one man said. "Who taught you?"
"It's her own work," Bruno said. He smiled like a man who keeps other people's secrets.
Then I saw him across the room like a bad memory and a song all at once—Alejandro Day in a suit that fit too well. He was taller, older, polished. People circled him. He was like a comet that some people believed they could catch. A woman in a gown spoke to him and he smiled the kind that belonged to a richer world.
He came toward me and the ground dared to drop.
"You're here," he said. "You look different."
"I have to work," I said. I tried to be cool.
"You always look like that," he said.
"I came with my boss," I said. "Bruno Doyle."
He nodded at Bruno, who now kept a watchful eye. A strange satisfaction threaded through Bruno's face like a map of the night.
Later, when the party thinned, Alejandro found me in a quiet garden and said, "I followed you."
"I don't believe in that romantic stuff anymore," I replied.
"I do."
His breath smelled of smoke and winter. He was nearer than I had allowed in my head.
"Do me a favor," I said. "Don't pretend you're my brother."
"Then be my girlfriend," he said, in the same breath that had once been a dare.
"You're an impossible person."
"You're stubborn."
We argued like a good two-handed game of tag until he came close and kissed me under a statue that had been lit to look older than it was.
Afterward, the world was less certain. I started to accept his small invasions: he waited for me like a shadow in the rain, he brought cinnamon rolls on gray mornings, he tapped my shoulder in busy rooms like a secret signature.
"What's your plan?" I asked him once, sitting on the steps outside his house.
"My plan?" He flicked a crumb from his jacket. "To keep you."
"You keep people and then leave."
"Not this time."
"I won't trust words alone."
He let me have that. He let his life show instead: the way his grandmother made him tea, the way his father called out impossible jokes from a distance—except that sometimes jokes broke into something hard. Tomas Washington, a man who worked in the company where Alejandro had some ties, came around sometimes. He treated Alejandro with a father-like steadiness. Bruno Doyle, my boss, started inviting Alejandro to business dinners. They fit like parts of a machine I did not understand.
The day everything changed, I was at a company dinner. Someone mentioned that Alejandro had a private foundation, that he had relatives in places like these—people with the power to move things. A woman at the table, beautiful and sharp, smiled at Alejandro like she had first claim on him. I felt a cold prickle. She was Catalina Albrecht, and she carried herself like a trophy.
That night Alejandro found me in the garden again but this time he was different: a smolder that had been fed. "Will you come with me?" he said.
"Where?"
"Everywhere you want."
"You told me once you'd always disappear."
"I won't disappear."
He took my hand.
I let him.
But not everyone wanted us to be. Kenneth Hicks had been an old enemy from the school. He was the leader of the gang that once tried to extort me for petty money. Years ago, he had led the pack that left me on the pavement. Kenneth had not changed. He moved through rooms with the ease of someone who thinks a name buys him respect.
One day at school, I saw Kenneth leaning against a pillar like a bored king. He smiled when he saw me and called out in that loud small voice:
"Oh look, the golden girl. Who's paying for that college now?"
My skin prickled. I ignored him.
He did not like being ignored.
Then came the public breaking.
It happened at the school's monthly assembly—a wooden stage, rows of students, a principal whose speeches were always two kinds of dull. The hall filled with the same hollow applause that had greeted my earlier awards.
Kenneth had been building a little empire of fear. He had a phone full of threats, pictures, and little lies. He'd coerced kids into silence. He had learned the rules early: people bend when you make them afraid. But he had also built a web where a single thread could unravel everything.
I had learned to hold my life together by paper and practice. One winter, when the town felt like an old photograph, Alejandro came with me to the school. He sat quietly among the audience, not calling attention. The principal called my name to the stage for a new honor, and the light made my stomach flip.
When I stepped forward, I looked down and saw Kenneth smirking. People watched with that same idle hunger. He thought he had won. Then Alejandro stepped forward a few rows and spoke, quietly at first, then with a blade of something sharp. His voice cut the hall.
"Everyone," he said. "Do you all remember how you behave when someone is small and alone? Do you remember who makes the rules?"
Heads turned. Kenneth rolled his eyes and hissed some insult under his breath.
Alejandro smiled in a way that wasn't kind. "Kenneth Hicks, come up here."
"He called me..." Kenneth's face colored with surprise and anger. The crowd stirred.
"Come on." Alejandro's voice was a rope being pulled taut. "Come tell everyone what you did."
"Who asked you?" Kenneth sneered. He walked to the stage like a man who thought he had already decided the ending.
Alejandro didn't look like he was going to fight. He looked like he had been preparing every day to remove the scales from a room.
"You extorted money from students," Alejandro said. "You filmed them. You blackmailed them. You told them they would be ruined if they didn't pay. You called the smallest people worse things than they are."
Kenneth's smile slipped. "I didn't do—"
"Let's look at the messages," Alejandro said, calm as a stone. He pulled his phone and a tablet from somewhere I had not noticed. "Let's read the texts the students gave to the principal last week."
A hand went up in the crowd—a trembling boy Alejandro had once defended—and he walked up and stood by Alejandro. He opened his mouth.
"I was scared," the boy said. "He said he'd circulate the pictures. He said he'd make me look bad. He said my family would lose face."
Kenneth's jaw tightened. People murmured. The principal's face had gone white, as if a bad cloud had passed over his plans.
"More," Alejandro said.
Another student came forward—then another. Voices rose, not with hysteria but with the simple relief of truth.
"You think you can scare everyone and get away with it," Alejandro said, eyes like a blade. "But you can't when everyone decides it's wrong."
Kenneth grew frantic. "This is a setup!" He pointed at Alejandro, then at me. "She paid you! She paid him to set me up!"
"Say the names," Alejandro said. "Say the lies you told. Say who you threatened."
"You think you're so smart? You think people will believe your little crusade?"
Students took out their phones. Cameras pointed. The hall, which had been waiting for scandal, now watched Kenneth become the scandal.
"You're lying," Kenneth yelled. His voice cracked in the open room.
"Look at your messages," Alejandro said, and someone projected the texts onto the big screen—messages naming amounts, threats, times. Photos Kenneth had taken without consent. The drama seemed sudden and slow, like a car crash in film.
People whispered. The teacher who had hounded me all year sat straight as a rod. The principal's face had the color of a man who had to stop a sinking ship.
Kenneth's face went through changes. First, he was smug. Then there was a flash of confusion. Then denial. Then anger. Then the first wave of panic.
"You don't understand—"
"Do you want to explain in front of everyone?" Alejandro asked.
Kenneth stumbled, then lashed out with cheap lies and accusations. "You stole my phone. You hacked me. You're just jealous."
The students around him shook their heads. Someone laughed. A girl said, "We kept our pictures because we were afraid of him."
"Look at him," Alejandro said softly. "He acts like he owns this place because we let him. But he can't own our lives."
The principal called the counselors. Kenneth tried to bargain—names of others, threats—then he started to cry. His look turned to pleading when he realized the cameras were rolling, the witnesses were many, and the people he had held down had finally risen.
"Please," he sobbed. "I'm sorry. It was a joke."
"No," Alejandro said, quieter now. "You did this on purpose."
People around us shifted, recording or whispering. Kenneth's friends left like crumbling cards. They had protected him until the proof was visible.
"Who will take him?" the principal asked.
Kenneth dropped to his knees. "I didn't mean it. I was trying to be something. I was trying to be feared."
The hall hummed. Some students clapped, not the cruel kind but the kind that says: sometimes truth is clean.
"What do you want?" Alejandro asked. "Do you want his friends to forgive you? Do you want the school to forget? Do you want the world to look the other way?"
"I want to not be alone," Kenneth said, voice thin. "I don't want to be hated."
The crowd thought for a second, then decided that accountability was better than silence.
The principal announced that Kenneth would be removed from leadership positions and made to face restorative actions: public apology, counseling, community service, and a ban from clubs. The parents had to be called. The messages were sent to the school board. Kenneth would carry the humiliation for a long time—long enough to think differently.
When I left the stage, people said quiet things to me. Alejandro took my hand and squeezed. I looked at Kenneth once more. His face had broken into different parts—anger, shame, and then a brittle clinging to anything the world might throw at him.
He would rebuild his identity. Some of us would never forget the sound of him on the stage. Some of us would watch him from the outside until he understood how to be in the light without hurting the small people.
It was justice of a kind. The crowd dispersed with a new memory. I felt the weight of being seen and oddly lighter for it.
After that, Alejandro's attention turned more deliberate. He did not smother me, but he kept me safe in practical ways: he helped with bills, he filled holes in my resume only I could fill, and he taught me to be brave in the small moments.
"Will you stay?" I asked one night when the city slept like a long soft animal.
"I'm not going to promise forever," he said. "People change. But I'm not leaving you alone."
Years moved as they tend to. My father died and I went to the funeral for the reasons complicated people have. Alejandro was there, standing like a dark pillar. He held me at the hospital steps when the rain came down and I felt like the sky had finally answered the kind of grief I have. He took my face in his hands.
"Jada," he said. "You said you'd keep walking."
"I kept walking." My voice was small.
He was quiet a long time, then kissed my forehead. "Then I'll walk with you."
I began to build a life with him at the edges: evenings when we argued about nothing, mornings he made tea, the small fights that make long things true.
One winter my job sent me to a different city. Bruno Doyle sent me with a promotion. Tomas Washington helped with references. Alejandro celebrated me like I had won a quiet battle. Catalina Albrecht moved into a house uptown and married a man who treated champagne like water. It all fit into the puzzle in ways I didn't expect.
We had small rituals. Alejandro and I had a rule: never go to bed without speaking one honest thing.
"Do you trust me?" he'd ask.
"I do," I would say.
And sometimes I'd say, "You hurt me once," and he would say, "I know." Then we'd start again.
People ask me sometimes if I regret calling him my brother. I think of the boy who let me sit on his bed and watch him sleep, who gave me a book that taught me to climb out. I think of the man who stood in the rain and told me not to be alone. Maybe I asked for too much from a single person. Maybe I asked too little.
But the truth is this: he was my first safe place, and when he left, the world felt colder for a long while. When he came back, he did not pretend the past had never happened. He kept his promises the way people who love you keep small stones in their pockets: they press them silently and remember where they put them.
One night, on a terrace above the city where lights were diamonds, he took my hand again.
"Be my girlfriend," he said with a crooked smile that was older and kinder.
"No," I said.
"Then?"
"Be my companion," I said.
He kissed me so gently I felt like a child again.
"I will," he whispered.
We stood together and watched the city breathe like an animal. The moon gave us pale acceptance. I turned to him and said, "Don't go."
He tucked his head against mine, steady and strange.
"I won't leave this time," he said, and he meant it.
And for once, that was all the map I needed.
The End
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