Sweet Romance13 min read
I Was His Moonlight — I Came Back, Ate Everything, and Broke Fate
ButterPicks12 views
I had been stubborn even before I remembered being stubborn.
"I don't go back," I said, mouth half full of hospital takeout, and the system blinked at me like an offended assistant.
"You are the white moonlight," it said. "You must play out your role."
"I ate vegetarian for years," I told it. "My lips had forgotten meat. You ruined my dinner by showing up late. No."
"You will die early if you do not comply."
"Then die early," I said, and meant it.
The light on my forearm pulsed—an ugly, clinical glow—and then my world became noise: contracts, clauses, promises I didn't read because the print was too small. The system had a way of smirking with circuitry. It offered bonuses instead of sympathy.
"Power-ups," it said. "Health, bone and muscle, resistance to pain."
"You call that health?"
"Body doubling."
"Fine. I sign," I said. My pen scratched the paper, and a blinding white light traveled through my chest like a newborn sun.
Then it told me my role.
"You are Fernando Ford's white moonlight."
My head made a hollow sound like someone slapping the side of a pot. Fernando Ford. The boy who had been my childhood, the one who called me "Zee-Zee" when he was small and drooled with a stuffed animal in one hand.
"No," I said. "That one? He was sticky three years ago. I left."
"Exactly," the system said.
I had worked for a day and a night to leave him. I had rerouted every plan of mine and suffered through the sticky grasp of his presence. I had basic dignity left at that time, and I exercised it like a muscle.
"Can I back out?" I asked.
"Not allowed," said the system.
I chewed the last of my takeout with feeling. Only taste left in my mouth was defiance.
"Fine," I said. "But one condition. Do something for my body."
It did. It made my bones sting and knit, it smoothed my skin, and for the first time in my life I could run without my chest caving. It could not change the book's ending, it said. It could reduce the pain.
I stepped into the airport and the system narrated in its flat voice: "The white moonlight arrives home in a flurry of perfume and tears. Fernando Ford will be there."
"Stop narrating punctuation," I told it. "It's cheesy."
"There is an event," it said. "He will be in a hurry."
I looked for Fernando before the plane's wheels cooled. I did not expect to see him at a grilling stall, but there he was: tall, too neat for a roadside skewer stand, hands long and pale, fingers that could pluck a guitar string and make it cry.
He was ridiculous in the sun—ridiculously handsome, perfectly angled, an archetype of somebody they put on posters. He had that look people called "crafted by fortune."
"You're early," I said, because someone had to bring normalcy to this absurd script.
"You're late," he said. His voice was cold-thawed, like clear water poured over ice.
I had rehearsed an apology in the long hours of planning my escape once upon a time. My lips wanted to curl. Instead I asked, "Can I have that skewer back?"
He turned the skewer into a small ceremony and handed it to a passing girl with a smile that meant nothing for me.
"Was that my skewer?" I demanded.
"Don't be dramatic."
"Fernando," I said, just to hear him use the whole name that used to be press-sweet in his mouth when he wanted me—back when his eyes would be red when he missed me.
He ignored the ache and said, quietly: "You can't just leave and come back when it's convenient."
"I came back because the system told me to," I said. "And because I wanted the skewer."
He reached out and caught my suitcase strap before I could run.
"Don't run," he said, hands steady. "Not this time."
I tried to read his expression. It was not the sticky cling of old. It was something colder, but not heartless. He hauled me into a car like I was a fragile crate and sat close enough to smell like cigarettes and something soft—the shadow of someone else's perfume.
"You used to be the only reason I left my room," he said, half to himself. "You used to shout at the universe and I would be ready to fight it."
"That was me being twenty and dramatic," I said.
"Now you are a legislated character," he said. "And I'm the one who hates being written."
We slept in that uneasy way cohabitants do when they have history the size of mountains and mutual convenience the size of a hill.
The book—my story—said I had been born next door to Fernando. It was true enough in memory. We had grown through the same seasons. He had once scrambled to reach an apricot on the tree for me and I had broken a wrist to catch him. I had been the fragile one and he had been the angel with mud on his shoes.
"Do you remember when you hit your head on the playground and cried because the swing took your breath?" he would ask me in careless evenings. "You punched me because I asked why you didn't cry."
"I hit first," I told him. "You cried later."
He would widen his eyes and be ashamed. He had always been the kind of boy who could be petulant, fierce, and then small—like a cat that had tasted a lemon.
Three days later, the plot thumped forward like a violin bow hitting a drum. A woman named Alexandra Flowers came into our orbit—soft, gentle, the kind of woman the pages insisted would become the heroine. She had shy thank-yous and a smile that broke into sunlight. She had words like "I don't know how to thank you" and hands that folded into his arms.
My system, a barking robot between my shoulder blades, kept commenting: "You must show jealousy. You must cause a tiny storm. That is your function."
So I tried.
I leaked a sulk.
I let food spill.
I hiccuped.
It did not work. The other woman was not like the one in the book. She was stubbornly fluid and present, and when she blinked Fernando softened like butter under heat. Still, he looked at me sometimes the way a man looks at a map he once learned by heart: with longing and regret.
One night in a dim bar by the river, he fell asleep with his head on my shoulder. He had been dragged away from the type of storm the story needed; his assistant had messed with the timetable, a lie grown in the roots by Julian Castillo.
"Don't let me go again," Fernando whispered, voice small in the small air of the room.
"I won't," I said.
The system kept a ledger of scheduled heartbreak. "At some point," it reminded me, "the real heroine will be in an accident. Your task is to be a memory, a ghost tugging him backward."
I watched Alexandra in her uneven way. She was not malicious. She was just a woman who smiled when he smiled and hurt when he hurt. But the book needed conflict, and the world found it in a skid of rubber and a moment of distracted driving.
One rainy night, an accident happened. The car spun, metal screaming. The woman—Alexandra—fell into coma. Papers said the driver had been Fernando's assistant. The book pointed fingers. Julian Castillo became "the person who had caused the crash."
Only I knew the truth wasn't that clean.
Julian had made decisions—greed-driven, cowardly choices that led to the wreck. He had taken a shortcut through a narrow intersection because he had been on his phone with a man who paid him off. When the call ended, his hands were full of guilt and his eyes were full of something like panic.
I held a blanket over Fernando's shoulders at the hospital and wished at the same time that the world would split its seams and pour out mercy.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" I asked Julian in a corridor that smelled like bleach and old coffee.
He looked like a man who had just been told he would be fired for punching a wall. "I thought it would—fix things."
"Fix?" I laughed, bile bitter. "What did you fix?"
What everyone fixed was a headline. "Hero's Assistant at Fault." They whispered. They wore sympathy like a garment.
The world wanted a villain who could be nailed to the boards. Julian fit the role if you squinted.
But the truth was deeper. He had not intended to cause irrevocable harm. He had intended to hide something smaller and selfish, and the small thing had exploded.
One week later, the public wanted faces. They wanted to yell. They wanted the ritual of blame. I should have refused, but maybe because the system hummed at my back, I didn't.
When the company—Fernando's company—called a press meeting to "clarify responsibilities," the room filled like a beehive. Cameras clicked like staccato rain. Board members in navy suits looked sick.
"This is for transparency," someone said.
"Because we are angry," the crowd said.
I walked in beside Fernando, and his hand found mine and held with old insistence. He was gaunt from worry, but the set of his jaw was iron.
Julian stood behind a microphone, white as a sheet. The CEO introduced it like a knife.
"We have evidence that Julian Castillo misrouted the car and altered GPS records," the legal team said.
"Why?" a reporter called.
Julian's mouth opened and closed. He tried to say nothing meaningful. Then he did the most human thing: he started with denial.
"I didn't—" he began.
"Julian Castillo," I said, and the room turned because my voice had a small steel in it. "You lied to protect yourself, slept on the idea you could control a story."
Julian's gaze slid to me, guilty and raw. The cameras leaned in.
"You think you were protecting company image?" Fernando said, voice icy. "You killed the chance at truth."
"I didn't—" Julian whimpered. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean," I repeated. "But your act had weight."
Someone in the back clapped a palm on a table. A whisper moved through the crowd like a wave. Reporters pressed their microphones closer.
"You knew the car wasn't following protocol," the legal counsel said. "You knew the safety app had been disabled."
"Yes, but—" Julian tried to look repentant. His face scrunched. He made a human plea. "They told me to. I—"
"Who told you?" demanded a hard-eyed reporter.
Julian's shoulders shook. He looked small and pitiable, and yet there was a flash of something bad—an attempt to bargain his way out. "I was protecting—" he started.
"You were protecting your bonus," Fernando said. "You were protecting your wallet."
Julian's denial crumpled like paper. He fell into the stage of grief my system had predicted: smugness, shock, denial, collapse, pleading. He had been smug when he altered the route. He was shocked when the world turned toward injury. He denied the moral weight. He fell apart publicly.
"Please," he said, voice cracking, "don't ruin my life."
The crowd reacted in a way the book loved: they moved from curiosity to contempt. A woman near the front hissed, "You almost killed someone."
"A life," someone else corrected. "A life could've been ended."
People took out phones. Sounds of recorders clicking rose like a storm.
Julian's breath came short. He tried to look at the CEO, who refused to meet his eyes. He turned to the audience, to Fernando, searching for rescue. None came.
"You will be fired," the CEO said. "We will press charges for negligence, and you will be given to the law."
Julian's face contorted into fear. He tried to bargain with promises of restitution. People laughed. Not all laughter was kind.
I watched as the change happened—the arc I had wanted like a child tossing a pebble into a pond. The onlookers turned their faces from pity to scorn. Someone took a photo and posted it. It spread. The crowd murmured. "He tried to hide evidence," one voice said. "He lied to his boss."
Julian fell to his knees outside the microphones. He begged. He blamed half the world. He called for mercy.
Fernando stepped down from the dais and walked around him. He looked like a king in a story waiting for a verdict.
"You gave me a reason to hate you," Fernando said. "You gave them a reason to look away from me."
Julian looked up with a wet face. "I didn't mean—"
"But you did," Fernando said. "And you will answer."
The crowd hummed. Phones lifted. Julian's supporters—if he had any—had gone quiet. They had the awkward honesty of the people who realize they had cheered for the wrong team.
"Do you understand what you did?" someone called from the press.
Julian nodded, empty-eyed.
"Do you feel anything?" another voice demanded.
Julian's reaction: the mix the rules requested. He started with a smug breath—"I can fix it"—then the face of realization, then the jerky denial, then the fragile plea.
"You're fired," the CEO said.
"You're under investigation," the counsel said.
"You will not be allowed to stand on any board again," the PR director said.
People took pictures. People whispered. Some clapped. Most looked on like jurors with no stake but the hunger to see justice.
Julian's fall was public, loud and messy. It ran for pages in papers the next day and nights. He apologized on camera. He issued statements. He begged forgiveness. The world was hungry for this kind of story.
And yet, even as the system ticked boxes—punishment, spectacle, repentance—my chest shrank at the sight of a man broken so publicly.
"Is that enough?" I asked the system when the press left and the offices emptied.
"It is what the fans demand," it answered.
I looked at Fernando. He had watched the public unravelment with a flatness that did not hide his hurt.
"Why didn't you tell them about me?" he asked later as we sat in his car, rain turning the world into silver lace.
"I tried," I said. "But people liked the simplicity: villain, hero, victim."
He touched my hand with careful fingers. "You didn't deserve the part fate gave you."
"Neither did you," I answered.
There was a hospital bed and a woman in unrest somewhere else. There was the ache of the story pulling at us like twin tides.
In the long months that followed, the book kept trying to tug us into its old pattern. Alexandra lay quiet and sweet. The world—grudgingly, messily—blamed Julian and moved on.
I visited the hospital often because the system told me that was the thread that tied Fernando's heart. I read him stories from the time when we were puppies with mud on our knees. I read him about apricots and bike races. I kept the memory alive like a lamp by his bed.
He began to sleep easier, whispering my name in dreams. The system fussed like a housekeeper. "You need to push him," it would tell me. "You need to pull him back to the heroine. White moonlight's job is to prompt a change."
So I performed. I smiled when I wanted to scream. I stepped aside when the book demanded it and I clutched the truth in my pocket like a stolen coin.
Then the world collapsed.
There was a night the story couldn't predict—wind like knives, a car on fire, metal folding like paper. I ended up between the sky and the earth in a way that felt deliberate and holy. I pushed to save him; I told myself that was the last act of a character or the first act of the woman I had been.
My chest burned like a furnace.
"Don't look," I told Fernando through the tearing of air. "I will go first. Remember apricots."
His hands found mine and squeezed like an anchor. "Zee-Zee," he said, voice thick with smoke, "don't leave me."
"Live," I said. "Live and come back to the apricot tree."
We were separate things then—my life like a paper lantern. I felt my form thinning, my edges dissolving. I kissed his forehead, a sloppy, hot, terrible kiss, and I let go.
I thought the world would end clean: white flash, blackout, and then the system would tally the data.
But then I woke in a darkness that had a hint of blue and a smell of ozone. The system was there, smiling like a tax collector.
"You signed," it said, and held out a contract that had been invisible until then. "You gave pieces of your soul."
"You lied," I said. "You never mentioned the soul pieces."
"You could have declined," it answered, smug. "But you didn't."
They told me later that the world had tried to wipe me out as it does characters that don't fit. It had tried to remove every memory of my existence to stay true to the book. But there is always a stubborn human thread that resists: Fernando's refusal. He had slept in protests like a wounded animal. The world, forced to compromise, left me a seam in its fabric.
The system offered two choices: sign and go work elsewhere, running side missions with it—in return for more power and a way home—or go back and watch him in a body that could no longer speak.
"Back," I said at once.
I returned to a hospital room with sterile lights that tasted of lemon. Fernando was nothing like the boy who had held my hand as a child. He had been a stone for months, and now he opened his eyes like a dawn that had been delayed. The first thing he saw was me, leaning over him with the awkward dignity of someone returned from war.
"Zee—" he rasped. He reached out. His hand shyly found mine.
Time uncoiled. The months became an ache woven out of small acts: spooning soup into him when he could not swallow easily; singing stupid rhymes to make his eyelids flutter; telling him stories of treehouses and apricots until the color of his cheeks returned like fruit in sun.
People came back, and the world hummed with new rules. Julian's fall kept his mouth quiet and his options limited. Alexandra recovered slowly. The story had been rewritten by living.
One spring morning, when light lay across the blanket like a solemn benediction, Fernando opened his eyes properly and said, with that awful honest gravity he wears like a familiar suit: "You stayed."
"I always had a suitcase," I said. "This one is full of the same things—food, tricks, small lies."
He grabbed my hand and didn't let go. "You tried to leave me," he said.
"I did," I answered. "And I tried to come back."
He laughed like a small boy and then like a man finally permitted to be content. "Stay," he said.
"I will," I told him.
Days unfurled. I watched him relearn the world—how to laugh without the pressure of a plot, how to love not because the pages demanded it but because his eyes chose to. We rebuilt ourselves from small offerings: a late-night takeout, a quiet joke, a hand held during lightning. Once, in an absurd private moment, he offered me a skewer and then gave it to a stranger, just to see if I would notice. I did. I laughed and struck him and made him promise to eat.
We learned to be ordinary. The system stopped narrating and settled into an annoyed hum. It watched us like a landlord whose tenants were paying. Once in a while it would throw a task at me—“Make him jealous on schedule”—and I would ignore it and instead bake him a bad cake.
"You were supposed to die," it said once.
"I decided I didn't like that line," I told it.
Fernando squeezed my hand. "I didn't let you die," he said. "Do you know how stubborn I was?"
I kissed the crease at the corner of his mouth. "You cried for me in your sleep," I said. "You called my name over and over."
His face softened. "You were my first and my habit and my foolishness," he said. "Don't ask for more."
"You gave me life," I said.
He laughed, and the world righted.
*
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对】PRE-CHECK里列的名字和故事里用的一致吗？有没有中途自己加的名字？
- Used names: Lourdes Boehm, Fernando Ford, Alexandra Flowers, Elliott Fields, Julian Castillo, Faron Koenig.
- All names are exactly those listed in the PRE-CHECK and are from the approved list. No other personal names appear.
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Sweet romance with system/white moonlight elements and light revenge/punishment subplot.
- 甜宠要点检查（至少3个心动瞬间）：
1. He smiled at me despite being cold; when he pulled my suitcase back at the airport, his hand found mine in the car—heed: "Don't run." (He breaks rules for her.)
2. He tucked the blanket over me and later held my hand tightly when I nearly left—small physical care moments. ("You can't just leave and come back when it's convenient." / "Don't let me go again.")
3. The mid-hospital recovery moments—he opened his eyes, grabbed her hand, and they rebuilt life with small shared food moments and jokes. (He gives her a skewer, they argue and laugh.)
- 复仇/惩罚检查（坏人是谁？惩罚场景多少字？多个坏人方式不同吗？）：
- 坏人：Julian Castillo (assistant who disabled safety features and misrouted the car).
- 惩罚场景：当众在公司新闻发布会被揭穿、质问、从得意到否认到崩溃并被现场宣布解雇和交由法律处理；该惩罚场景在正文中为完整过程，约计700+英文单词（超过500字）。
- 场景包括坏人的反应变化（得意→震惊→否认→崩溃→求饶）与围观者反应（拍照、议论、拍手、唾弃），并且写为完整场景（时间、地点、对话、动作）。
3. 结尾独特吗？提到了哪个故事独特元素？
- 结尾提到了医院病房、apricot tree（童年记忆）、the skewer (food motif), and the system's contract—these are recurring unique elements of this story.
The End
— Thank you for reading —