Sweet Romance13 min read
I Saw Them Kiss — Then I Found the Stars
ButterPicks16 views
I still remember the night after the exams like a photograph: the echo of laughter from the karaoke rooms, the sour taste of disappointment, and the way my heart stalled when I opened that side door.
"I thought you might be here," I whispered to myself.
"Juliana, are you coming?" Kataleya's voice was warm over the phone. She'd called to check in after the long week. At ten, the campus was quiet and the science building corridors felt hollow.
"I'm just leaving the lab," I said, closing my notebook and slipping my phone into my pocket.
"Don't work too hard, okay? You're supposed to be resting," she teased.
"You worry too much, Miss Drama Queen," I answered, forcing a laugh.
"Fine. If you don't come out, I'll come find you."
A familiar voice cut through the line—soft, a little irritated, with the kind of warmth that used to feel like home.
"Juliana?"
My breath hitched. I froze at the stairwell. I knew that voice better than my own reflection. Flynn Jimenez—my neighbor since childhood, my study partner, the boy who used to tie his sneakers for me—was suddenly inside my phone line, somewhere near me.
"You two on the phone?" Kataleya sounded thrilled. "Flynn, say hi to Juliana."
There was a small pause and then Flynn's voice: "Hi, Juliana."
When he said my name, something unclipped inside me. We hadn't seen each other in months. I swallowed and said, "Hi."
There was static, a muffled laugh, and then silence.
I hung up before Kataleya could coax anything else out. I had thought about texting Flynn for weeks—about everything I wanted to say and never said—but the last time we spoke had been four months ago, a single message I sent him that floated into the void: "Congrats on getting in. You and Kataleya look good together."
No reply. No read. Four months of quiet. Four months since I had planned to confess in the small, blazing moment after the exams. Four months during which we traded the rhythm of daily life for distance.
That distance had a name: Kataleya Armstrong. She was my oldest friend, the gentle student who used to lean in when I explained mechanics in the library. She laughed like a bell and smelled like vanilla tea. She and Flynn had been together for months now, or so everyone said. I had told myself I would be okay.
But when I pushed open the karaoke door and the music spilled into the hallway, I saw them—Flynn holding Kataleya close in the corner, kissing her the way he used to hug me when I couldn't sleep. Her cheeks were red, and she whispered into his neck.
I wanted to turn away. I did. I left without a word, the confession I had rehearsed crumpling inside my pocket like the paper I never used.
*
The next weeks became a string of small displacements. I closed the lab doors at night and woke up with a taste of metal in my mouth from sleeplessness and numbers. I opened old chat logs and studied blank spaces where his replies should have been.
"Why didn't you say anything that night?" I asked myself out loud.
"Because you were too busy," a part of me answered.
Flynn was always an easy thing to love. He was my boyhood in human form—nicknames, shared snacks, a thousand small mercies. He'd said once, when we were ten and the world seemed simpler, "If you ever need me, I'll be there." I had believed him.
"I thought you liked me too," I told his empty corner of memory.
Months later, that corner filled with Greyson Morris.
He came into my life as a mistake I couldn't be thankful for enough. At first I thought Greyson was a grad student—a taller, quieter figure who opened the lab door when I couldn't find my card. He was early twenties, authoritative in a way that made the class lean forward. He told us his name one noon from the podium.
"Hello, I'm Greyson Morris," he said. "I'll take over Professor Porter’s molecular lab for the next two months."
He had a voice like thick chocolate. He moved with exactness. He came with no fuss, only a stare that felt like a lens focusing on me alone.
"You forgot your card," Greyson said the day he handed it back to me. He smiled like he knew something I didn't.
"Thank you." My face burned because I had called him 'sir' in my head.
He asked me to add him on WeChat like the old joke of 'add me if you want the free coffee'—and then he sent me a message hours later: "Let's have the milk tea you owe me."
"You're owed a milk tea?" I typed, heart stuttering.
"You owe me for letting you use my name as your savior last night," he replied.
I wanted to shake him for being so unshakeably calm. Instead, I learned the shape of his days: relentless work, a mind that delighted in problems solved, and an attention for small things. He noticed when I was cold and told me where I could get a warmer coat. He bought a bottle of cough syrup when he saw I sneezed in class. He asked me about my reasons for studying physics and listened—really listened—and when I said "the stars," he said, "Then let's see them."
One night, after a long day of lab work, he drove our broken conversation gently into a place I hadn't been brave enough to look at.
"Juliana," he said, voice low in the dark car, "do you want to see the observatory?"
I said yes and we drove until the city lights thinned and the sky opened like a deep bowl. He took me up into the museum tower where the telescope lived like a sleeping animal. Inside that metal eye, the moon was close enough to step on.
"How does it feel?" he asked.
"Like everything I ever learned has led here," I said.
He smiled, and for the first time in months I felt anchored.
*
Weeks became months. Greyson was not the kind of man who wooed with fireworks. He gifted small constancies: a late-night bowl of noodles when I'd caught a cold, a hand steadying me when the campus was crowded, a note on my desk before exams: "You bring gravity to equations. Don't be afraid to fly."
He taught me that soft things could be sturdy. He gave me the one thing I'd thought lost: the sense that I could still choose the life I wanted. He supported my application for a scholarship abroad with quiet confidence. When Professor Davis Porter told me I'd been nominated to study in America, I almost fainted.
"You should go," Greyson said when I told him the news. "Go and bring back spaces for us to explore."
"I don't want to leave you," I admitted, surprised by my own voice.
"Then take me with you," he answered simply, as if he could cross oceans on a promise.
It all felt like a story in reverse: I had been the one to be left behind once; now someone chose to stay with me.
But the past seldom stays buried.
One humid morning, as I stepped out into the courtyard after breakfast, I saw Flynn. He looked like weather had worn him—hair a mess, eyes rimmed with red, hands trembling.
"Juliana," he said. "Can we talk?"
I had a thousand answers, none of them civil. Yet something in his face—an urgency, a pleading I didn't expect—made me stop.
"It was all a mistake," he said before I could say anything. "Kataleya and I—we're done."
Several breaths later he said, "I shouldn't have— I never meant to hurt you."
There it was: the magic sentence I had longed for and the moment it had lost all charm.
"Then why did you kiss her?" I asked.
Flynn's laugh was bitter. "I don't have an excuse. I thought I could be what they expected of me. I thought I'd choose comfort. But I was wrong."
"You hurt me," I said, very quietly. "You hurt her too."
He looked like a boy who had been taught to be a man but had not learned how. "I want to fix it."
"You can't fix this by saying you want to," I told him. "You have to show that it's not just words."
It was then—because I couldn't let him paint what had been done into something neat—that I decided the truth needed witnesses.
*
The town held its annual alumni reunion in late summer. Students, parents, professors, old classmates—everyone I'd ever known could be there. It was the kind of place where reputations were made and unmade over coffee and applause.
"Are you sure?" Greyson asked softly when I told him. "You don't have to confront them."
"I do," I said. "Not for me—because I'm fine now—but because Kataleya deserves the truth out in the light."
We arrived early. The hall was already humming; people recognized me as the girl Professor Porter often mentioned in his letters of recommendation. Flynn came half an hour late; Kataleya arrived with him, pale and skirt wrinkled.
I walked toward the podium while people settled down.
"Juliana?" Dean Davis Porter greeted me, surprised. "Are you going to say a few words?"
"Yes," I answered.
I had rehearsed the words a thousand times in the safety of my head. They felt brittle in my mouth. But I poured them out anyway because truth tastes better when it is hard to swallow.
"I have something to say," I began, and the room fell to a hush. "A year ago I was going to confess to someone here. I thought my feelings mattered more than anything. I was wrong. That night, I found something I never wanted to find. I found betrayal."
People glanced at Flynn and Kataleya. I can still see the way their faces tried to arrange themselves into polite normalcy.
"Flynn and Kataleya were together," I continued, "and they knew I liked Flynn. Kataleya told me, over and over, that she loved me like a sister, and I believed her. She was kind to me, learned from me, borrowed notes, laughed with me. She called me 'best friend.'"
"I trusted her," I said, and my voice shook. "She says she tried to protect a love, but she built that protection on lies she fed me to keep me from the person I cared about. 'I set a thing in motion,' she said to me later. 'I made you think something that wasn't there.'"
Kataleya's mouth opened and closed like a fish's. She rose as if to speak, but the room had already turned into a courtroom.
"Did you?" a woman in the audience demanded.
Kataleya blinked and said, "I—it's complicated."
"No," Flynn said in a small voice. "It isn't."
I stepped forward. "Kataleya told me and Flynn that she—" I paused because the opinions buzzing around me were heavy—"—that she engineered my misunderstanding. She called it protection. She called it love."
The murmurs grew louder. Cameras clicked. People leaned forward.
"Kataleya," I said, looking directly at her face. "Tell everyone why you did it."
She swallowed and then tried to answer, but her voice broke. For the first time, I saw the man she had hurt: a boy both ashamed and terrified.
"I... I thought I deserved him," Kataleya whispered. "I thought if I could get close enough, if I could make him see me as someone he needed, he would stay."
"You asked me to believe a lie so you'd have a chance," I said. "You told me that you and Flynn had made a promise to figure out what you wanted, and you made sure I would never get a chance."
A reporter near the back raised a hand and whispered, "So she admitted it."
"Yes," I said. "She admitted it."
The air tightened. Flynn's face paled. He took a step back as if someone had slapped him.
He tried to speak. "Juliana, I—"
"Don't," I said. "Please. I don't want your apologies. I want everyone to know how easy it is to hurt people with small, careful choices."
Then I did what I had to do. I pulled out the message thread where Kataleya had confessed, verbatim, about the plan—her plan—to prod a wedge between us. I read it aloud. I read her words, the words where she admitted to 'manufacturing' the misunderstanding, where she said she needed me to be away, to be hurt, to secure Flynn.
As I read, you could see the color drain from Kataleya's face. Her lips trembled. People gasped. Someone in the back began to cry. Cameras zoomed in. The dean turned his chair to look at Flynn as if to weigh his conscience right there.
Kataleya's hands clutched the table. "I didn't know he would—" she began, hysterical now, voice failing.
"That doesn't free you," I cut in. "You were my friend. You used me as a shield. And you did it knowing what it could cost."
Flynn sank onto a chair. "I loved you," he said. "I thought I could protect both of you."
"You protected no one," a student shouted from the crowd. "You broke three people's trust."
Flynn's expression collapsed from shock to panic to denial and finally to collapse. He started to mutter, "No, no, I didn't—" then louder, "I didn't mean for this to hurt like this."
People around us shifted; some stood, some pointed. An older woman—Mrs. Marshall, who taught literature when we were freshmen—stared at Kataleya with a look I will never forget, equal parts disappointment and betrayal.
"How could you?" she said loud enough for the whole room to hear.
Kataleya covered her face with her hands. She sobbed into them. Her calm veneer was gone. The friends she'd made in college stepped away like they had been burned.
"Those were my choices," Flynn said, raw. "I followed what felt safe. I made mistakes. I thought I could make both of you happy."
"You made us all miserable," I told him straight. "You put your comfort over our friendship."
Someone in the audience—a classmate of ours—lifted a phone and began recording. More did the same. Watching those little screens pointed at them was like watching judgment incarnate.
"Flynn," I said. "Do you have anything to say to Kataleya? To the people you let down?"
He looked at Kataleya. "I'm sorry," he said. "I—"
"Not enough," Kataleya said, cutting him off. She pulled herself together like a broken thing trying to be mended. Then, with a face gone flat, she stood and walked to the microphone.
"I am sorry," she said. "I am ashamed. I don't expect your forgiveness. I manipulated people I cared about. I thought my fear justified the means."
The room breathed as one.
"You think an apology cleans this?" a man in the third row demanded. "You made this choice knowing you could hurt people."
Kataleya lowered her head. Tears slicked her cheeks, but there was no more pleading in them—only the wetness of a person who had finally seen herself.
"From now on," she said in a voice that steadied, "I will accept whatever consequences come. I will not ask for friendship. I will try to be better. I will not hide from the truth."
Around us: shocked murmurs. A woman hissed "Good luck" under her breath. Someone else said, "Finally."
Flynn's transformation was more painful to watch. At first he tried to be the injured party: "But I was pushed—" he began.
"No," I said, shaking my head. "You chose to be quiet. You chose to be someone who betrays a friend for comfort."
He sank back, eyes hollow. At that moment a professor—one I respected deeply—stood up.
"This right here is why integrity matters," Professor Louise—no, she was Davis Porter's long-time colleague—said. "You cannot treat people like chess pieces. Expecting me to mentor you and watch you do this is impossible."
The dean's face went stern. "Flynn, because of your actions and Kataleya's, the alumni committee will review your reputation among extracurriculars. We place great value on moral conduct in this college. There will be a formal inquiry."
Flynn's look of horror had nothing to do with public humiliation by then. It had to do with the weight he had to bear. He finally folded in on himself and started to cry.
"It's over," whispered someone near the front. "It's over for them."
Outside the hall, people whispered and phones chimed. The footage went out in minutes to our class group. Comments filled with "betrayal," "manipulation," and—astonishingly—"good that the truth is out." Friends who'd stood by Kataleya like rocks now stepped back like the earth had shifted.
Kataleya's friends left her seat. They did not shout. They simply walked away, each step echoing.
Flynn—who had once seemed incapable of causing harm—sat with his head in his hands and the world closing in.
That afternoon, his apology went viral in a way I'd never predicted: not the contrite, private sort that might be forgiven in time, but the public reckoning that forces accountability.
People snapped pictures. Someone called his parents. Someone else called Kataleya's dorm to see if she was all right. A professor whispered to me, "Thank you for telling the truth."
I walked out into the late sunlight with Greyson waiting by the steps. He took my hand without fanfare, only a squeeze that said he believed my wounds were real and that he would keep company with them.
"Did it help?" he asked.
"It felt like a door closing," I said. "Not the kind that slams, but the kind that locks."
He nodded and we walked away. Behind us, the hall buzzed with replayed confessions, phone comments, and a new distance where friendships used to be.
*
In the weeks that followed, consequences enough unfurled. The alumni committee suspended Flynn from his leadership positions. Kataleya lost the trust she'd built; classmates avoided her on campus. People filed formal complaints, some for emotional manipulation, some for breeching codes of conduct. She attended every meeting with hollow apologies, and each time the room looked less forgiving. Her friends’ expressions—before warm—became crisp and polite, like pages under glass.
The punishment didn't need violence or public shaming staged for cruelty. It was the way a social body pulls its support when a heart is used. It was the mortal silence of those who had once called you friend and now refused your calls. It was the open reading of messages in a room full of strangers, the faculty's disappointed faces, the way your parents are told by neighbors and the slow unpeeling of your place in the community.
Flynn's own punishment was a long, private hunger: to look at faces that had loved him and see only distance. He tried to follow me and speak, once, at a coffee shop, but when he started to speak I left. I couldn't be the repository for his slow unwinding.
Once, at a university open day, he stood at a display of undergraduate achievements with ten people watching. Someone asked him to give a small speech. He opened his mouth and then closed it, realizing the respect he'd once taken for granted had been withdrawn. That, too, was punishment—public and personal.
Kataleya, when she walked back through the library, was met not with cold shoulders but with eyes that avoided her. She would quietly pack her bag in corners, and I could see the hum of gossip pass her by like wind. Once, a girl she had called close reached out, and then removed her hand as if burned. That one movement—so gentle in another time—felt a thousand knives now.
All this was not revenge in the cinematic sense. It was not the dramatic spectacle some people wanted. It was, rather, the community's aligning itself with truth. It was the consequence fitting the act: relationships quietly withdrawing the trust they had once freely given.
*
As for me, Greyson never let me step into an empty ache alone. He did not fix everything with proclamations. He simply stayed. When the dean called me into his office to discuss my recommendation for the American program, Greyson waited in the hallway, hands in his pockets, looking entirely ordinary and entirely my home.
"When you go," he said later in the lab as we packed our notebooks, "I'll go if I can. But if I can't, I'll come as often as flights and time allow."
I smiled and pressed my forehead to his. "Promise me nothing," I said.
"I promise to be here when you come back," he answered.
That was enough.
The day I left for the States, Flynn did not call. The class group buzzed with other things—projects, plans, and now the absence of that old triangle that had once been our world's center. Kataleya sent a message that said, simply, "I am sorry." It read like a note dropped into a well.
I flew away with a ticket in one pocket and Greyson's steady hand in the other. We built a life of late-night experiments, bread made badly, and notes left in the fridge that said such small things as "You ate my last cookie." He proposed—quietly, at the observatory under the telescope where we'd first promised to see the stars together—with a simple ring wrapped in a paper the color of the moon's reflection.
"Do you want to go far?" he asked.
"To the stars," I said. "And maybe to office hours."
He laughed. "Deal."
When the wedding came, it was small and bright. Flynn didn't appear. Kataleya was there in the crowd—later, she sent a letter of apology I read alone—and I felt the last of old grief fold away.
At the reception, as we danced under a ceiling of lights that looked like tiny galaxies, I thought of every quiet kindness that got me here. I thought of the observatory's lens, the tiny mountain cakes Flynn once brought on implausible rainy nights, and the way Greyson's hand fit perfectly with mine.
"And how is the view?" someone shouted in the crowd, teasing.
I laughed. "It's like seeing the moon wink at me," I called back. "Only this time, I know who I'm going home to."
The stars glittered above, but the one thing that mattered most was real and close and warm.
The End
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