Sweet Romance12 min read
"I'll Buy Your Ice Cream for Life"
ButterPicks14 views
"I promised you ice cream after the exams," I said to myself like a spell as I walked into the supermarket with Drew.
Drew Peters—my older brother—was carrying himself like the king of thrift today, a lollipop stuck in the corner of his mouth, as if that would hide the fact he was counting his coins with his eyes. "Take whatever you like," he said, more loudly than necessary.
"Really?" I answered, already running down the frozen aisle.
Drew rolled his eyes. "Don't go for the fancy ones. We're not made of money."
"I only want one basket," I told him as I filled it fast, my hands moving like they had a secret to catch. "Just the expensive kind, the ones that look like tiny cakes."
"What's wrong with ordinary ice cream?" Drew asked, following behind, voice half teasing, half warning.
"I want to know why something can cost twenty times what my childhood popsicle did," I said, smiling.
When the cashier announced "four hundred eighty dollars," Drew's face did the exact thing it does when he loses at a game—small disbelief, then loud protest. "How much?"
"It's ice cream," I said, blinking. "Do you remember sticky rice balls? They were cheap."
"You expect me to—" Drew started.
Before he could find a way to refuse, Marco Hawkins stepped sideways from the next register lane, his phone already open. Marco, Drew's friend and my obsession—he and Drew went to A University where I wanted to go—leaned over with the kind of smile that made light bend.
"Let me," Marco said, and his thumb flicked the payment app.
Drew was irate about being shown up in front of me, his pride and his empty wallet both wounded. "You can't let him pay."
Marco gave me a soft, close smile when he leaned in. "Say 'brother' and I'll buy ice cream for your whole life."
I did not pause. My mouth knew its favorite mischief without my brain's permission.
"Hubby," I said, the word slipping out like it had always lived on my tongue.
Marco blinked. For half a second he looked surprised, and then something lazy and warm passed across his face like evening sunlight.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" I asked because I was brave and ridiculous.
"No," he said, low.
"Then be my boyfriend," I offered, the way a child hands over a toy.
Drew nearly choked on his indignation. "Kelly, what are you doing?"
"You'd rather me be old and single forever, huh?" I snapped. "Would having dignity help me win a boyfriend?"
"Since when did you—"
"First time seeing him," I said simply.
Drew clutched the little plastic handle of his dignity and dragged Marco aside. "She's a kid. Don't play with her."
"I'm not playing," Marco said, and he looked at me like it mattered. "Are you serious?"
I nodded fiercely. Marco's smile widened. "Okay," he said.
That simple.
Drew exploded in a stream of threats and family rules and all the drama only an older brother could produce. "I'll tell Mom and Dad you started dating!"
"Go ahead," I said, and left without waiting for the next round of yelling.
Later, with our bag of ice cream between us, Marco and I walked the block back toward my apartment. He carried my basket like it was precious, the way he carried small, bright things in his hands—confident, careless.
"Are you going to be my boyfriend then?" I asked when we slowed at my building.
"Yeah," he said, as if answering a trivia question. He put the bag into my hand and slid his palm across mine for a moment, nothing heavy, everything electric.
I wanted a kiss, a promise, a stamp of belonging. I wanted small public things: a hand held, a kiss stolen, a hug that felt like a shelter.
"Marco," I said, and when he turned, I leaned in. Our faces were a whisper apart.
He smiled with a soft, slow smile and asked, "You want to kiss me?"
"Yes," I said.
"Okay," he said, and his words fell like a benediction.
I moved, but before anything happened my phone buzzed—Drew again, "Kelly, if you kiss him I'm coming up there."
I jumped. "I'll do it later!" I cried, and sprinted up the elevator.
Drew was at the door, leaning with the tired arrogance of someone who thought grown-ups were puppets. Mom peered at us like an orchestra conductor about to start the show. "So is this serious?" she asked, mostly to me.
"Yes!" I declared with all the confidence of a person who had just declared a new country.
From that afternoon, Marco and I tumbled into something that felt like a movie but was mostly awkward laughter, whispers, and little dares. He was silent and private, with a voice that slowed the room, and he had a habit of sending me a single text asking if I had eaten. Little things, like when he took his jacket off and draped it lightly over my shoulders because I said I felt cold. I noticed them all, as if each was a new constellation.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" I asked later, when the three of us were walking home and Drew kept trying to get under Marco's skin.
"No," Marco said, soft as always. He wasn't a man who gave words like confetti, but when he said something he often meant it.
"Then be my boyfriend," I repeated, and it wasn't a game anymore.
He glanced sideways at me. "You're bold." He smiled, but I felt his eyes take me in like a careful measurement.
It felt simple to become his. It felt like a secret passed under the table.
But then there was the sister, Bristol Lopez. She arrived like a wind-cut scarf: polished, sharp, and impossibly beautiful in a way that made Drew sputter about being "outclassed." Bristol straightened her sunglasses and said my brother's name like a verdict.
"This is Bristol," Marco said when we met her. "My sister."
Bristol looked me over the way a judge inspects evidence. "A pleasure," she said, voice cool as late autumn water.
When we sat in the theater—Marco, me, Drew and Bristol—she leaned across and then left halfway through. She had a way of being everywhere and nowhere that made people unsteady.
During the movie, I fell asleep on Marco's arm like I had every right to be there. When I woke up, Drew and Bristol were gone and I got a message: "They had a fight." That was the beginning of a complication that would hand me a sharp object inside a velvet glove.
Bristol wasn't like any girl I had met. She had the air of someone who kept plans folded like origami and only opened them when it suited her. She wore money well and carried disdain like perfume. You don't argue with someone like Bristol and expect the world to remain the same. My brother, meanwhile, was a boy who thought heartache could be fixed by spending cash or making grand promises.
"You're lucky to have this," Bristol said one night in a bar when she found me alone with Marco. People were singing and the lights were warm. She smiled in a way that made my skin go cool.
"I'm not sure I'm lucky," I said.
"You will learn to be," she said. Then she studied Marco. "He's quiet. He makes promises only when he has to."
"Is that an insult?" I asked.
"No," she said. "It's a fact."
I didn't understand the half of what she knew—or pretended to know.
"Don't let him be cruel," she added, as if telling a friend how to tie shoes.
But complicated things always have small, honest corners. For example, Marco would sometimes leave messages for me on the same night he posted a picture with Bristol. He called her "sis" and she called him "baby" in front of others. It made my throat close.
One night, Marco invited me to go for a ride. "Come," he said, leaning against his car like an advertisement for midnight stories.
He took me to a quiet corner of the city. The lights were thin there, and the car hummed. He spoke softly, as if courting a hush. "You know I have to go abroad eventually," he said, and for a second the world shifted.
"I know," I said, because I had heard it before. "Does that matter?"
"It matters if you want me," he said, his voice even. "If you want us."
"I want you," I said.
He smiled and then frowned. "If you're thinking this is a game—"
"I'm not," I said.
"Do you understand how far this could go?" he asked. "I am not one to make promises lightly. My family has plans for me. Bristol is part of that picture."
I swallowed. "So what are you saying?"
He reached out, steadying my hair behind my ear like a careful hand. "I'm saying I want to try."
Everything small felt enormous after that. He started posting a picture—a silly one of me from high school—on his social feed as if to frame me as his. People joked. I was both embarrassed and thrilled.
Then came the night I saw him standing with another woman, the same woman I had seen at the bar and outside his work. I walked straight over because I had read the signs of danger like road maps.
"Who is she?" I asked, because I believed asking could clean the dust.
"She's an older friend," Marco said quickly. "She helps with the club."
"Is she the owner?" I asked.
"She's part of the business," he said. "And she's family—my cousin."
"Your cousin?" I repeated, surprised and skeptical.
"Yes. She isn't trying to take anything," he said. "I have shares. I helped her."
I didn't know how to process it. I felt both relieved and a new kind of shame—as if I had misread everything and also been honest about all of it.
We spent nights walking and talking. He came to my school one day, with Drew, and when he asked the girl next to me to add him, the room exploded into whispers. I felt like a queen on a sound stage, and my friends wanted to map every moment of our lives.
"Do you really want to be with me?" he asked one afternoon when we sat on a bench after a long practice.
"I do," I said. I meant it, but I added, "But I don't know what to do if you go abroad."
"I might go," he said plainly. "My parents are arranging for me to study overseas. I will be managing the business later. I thought I could find a way to keep everything."
That admission was a hand on the fragile bridge between us. "Will it be long?" I asked.
"Maybe," he said. "But if you want to be with me, you'll know I'll try."
So we tried. We opened an account of small rituals: he would text me to ask if I ate. He would arrive at the campus like a secret and leave like a promise. He taught me how to say sorry with candy and silence with a look. The tiny things—covering my shoulders with his jacket, untying my shoelace when I couldn't reach—became the pillars I leaned on.
"You're too brave sometimes," he told me once.
"Brave?" I asked.
"Wild," he corrected, smiling.
There were moments I felt like the only two people in a crowded city—the time we were in a movie theater and the lights came up and I kissed his cheek because I could, and he pulled me back with a look that said we were still secret and still together. I remember thinking then: this is mine.
Then the episode with Drew and Bristol erupted.
Drew had a way of not understanding boundaries; or perhaps I should say he tested boundaries the way a child tests glass. One night, at Bristol's hospital bed—she had been admitted after an accident—Drew, trying to be protective and clumsy, leaned in the wrong way. Bristol reacted fast and pushed him away, claiming it was self-defense. Drew ended up staggering back, humiliated.
I stood in the doorway, hands trembling. "What's happening?" I asked.
"You shouldn't be here," Drew muttered, half-crying, half-mad.
"She pushed you," Bristol said coldly, and her eyes were knife-sharp.
"She—" Drew started, then stopped.
This scene rocked through our small group. Bristol never missed a chance to show disdain toward Drew. When she told Marco privately that my relationship with him was impractical—because he might go abroad—I felt like someone had taken a chalk and erased the line I thought we were drawing.
Bristol's voice in the hospital had been thin. "You should be with someone who follows you," she had said to me like mercy.
Later, she told me another piece of truth: "I told you to stop this because I did not want you to hurt yourself."
"Or because you wanted to protect him," I said, helpless.
She smiled in a way that made me feel like a child again. "A person can be two things. I can be dangerous and necessary."
That confusion became a pattern. Sometimes Bristol's presence at events made Drew look two inches shorter. But in another twist, I learned that Bristol had been promised to someone else in a marriage arrangement. Her life was not as simple as she let on. Her future was a chessboard, and she moved pieces with the same cool precision she used to arrange her scarf.
When the news came that her wedding might be cancelled, Drew lit up with hope. He started making plans, telling me he would make himself worthy. "I'll have a company," he said, eyes bright. "I'll be someone she could want."
I loved him a little more in that moment for the way he declared ambition, for the way he let the world make something necessary out of his heart.
Meanwhile, Marco and Bristol navigated their family complications. The family planned for Marco to go abroad. Bristol had leverage. She could accept a role abroad to manage matters there—and the marriage plans her parents arranged could be reconsidered.
"Would you stay for me?" I asked Marco one night, the city humming around us.
"I don't know," he said. "But I don't want to lose you."
Those words felt like a patch on a fraying sweater. I clung to them.
I kept testing the water. I asked him, point blank, "If you had to choose—me or the life mapped out for you—what would you choose?"
He was silent for a long time, then he said, "I'll pick you and then we will figure out where the rest sits. I can't promise we won't have to change."
"Change is okay," I whispered.
He kissed me then, with a kind of deliberate gentleness. "I will try," he said in my ear. "Try is the only thing I can promise."
That promise had weight.
When the exam results came, I didn't get into A University. I got into the state's tech university instead. For days I moved around like a bird that had been told to land but not told where. I felt small and ashamed and a little relieved—all messy things.
"You look like an old woman," Drew teased later, leaning in the doorway. "What happened to the girl who used to jump at life?"
"Maybe love made me cautious," I said.
"No," he protested with the fierce love only a brother can have. "You're still you. You always were the one who would move the world."
"Did you tell Marco?" I asked. I wanted to know if my heartbreak was visible to him.
Drew looked at his phone and handed it to me. On the screen were messages between him and Marco that showed Marco asking after me, worrying, and saying simple things like "is she okay?" I felt something unfurl in my chest like soft, warm cloth.
"He's been asking about you," Drew said.
That meant something. The day I sat across from Marco for a late-night snack, he reached out and put his hand across the table and, shockingly, asked me to be patient. "I might have to go," he said. "But I want you to know—I'm not playing."
"Then don't." I replied, soft as a dove.
And life kept moving like small stones down a stream—sometimes hitting the edge and sparking, sometimes sinking and staying hidden.
There were so many tiny moments that became big: him taking off his jacket when I shivered; the way he used my nickname in private text messages; the night he came to campus with Drew and stood waiting for me like he'd always planned it; the day he posted my old school photo and called me "current," as if claiming that the past was part of his present.
When Bristol left to take care of business abroad, she sent a message: "Take care of him." She said it with a peculiar tenderness; I wondered whether she meant it for real, or as a diplomatic note to keep the table tidy.
The trust between Marco and me became a ladder built one rung at a time. Sometimes a rung came loose and we had to stand still until he fixed it. The only consistent thing was that he asked, "Are you staying?" and I answered that I was trying.
One afternoon, months later, Drew told me he had given up chasing Bristol because he wanted to focus on building something that could stand up next to her. "I will be the kind of man she deserves," he told me. He meant it in a way that made me love him, because he was learning to become for someone else the man he wanted to be for me. It was silly and noble.
We graduated into summers that smelled like gasoline and burgers. Marco sat down with his parents and argued about plans and promises. Bristol returned at times and carried herself like an empress, but she had softened toward Drew when he stopped asking for certainties and instead started creating them.
Everything shifted subtly, impossibly, like the way ice cream melts if you leave it in the sun. We learned to make our own chilling pockets.
In the end, there was no fireworks or dramatic ultimatums, no villain on public stage to be humiliated in a crowd. Life dissolved its tensions in quiet ways: exes going their own directions, family plans pulled and rewoven, apologies said in grocery stores and hospital rooms.
The final scenes of that year were small and perfect. Marco drove me out to the pier where the lights were simple, and he took my hand in his with that familiar, careful strength.
"Are you sure about this?" he asked.
"I am," I said. He pulled me close and kissed me like a promise.
Later, when I ate a cone of the expensive ice cream—one that cost more than my father's monthly phone plan—I laughed because Drew had to cough up the money, and he did so with exaggerated offense and a grin.
"I told you," Marco said, watching me. "Your happiness is cheap for me."
"You said you'd buy me ice cream for life," I said, remembering the supermarket moment.
"I did," he said. "I meant it."
And so, months later, sitting on a faded bench, my hand tucked into his sleeve against the warm night, I thought about the simple things that had turned into the map of my life. The lollipop Drew bit on while counting money. The tiny, reckless word "hubby" I had said for a laugh. Bristol's cool voice, then her unexpected kindness. Drew deciding to build himself into someone who can stand beside the woman he loved. Marco promising to try.
I had been a child who wanted something shiny and expensive, and then I had become the person who was learning to hold someone through the weather that life demanded. Love had been a curriculum I never expected to pass, but one I studied every day.
"Will you always buy my ice cream?" I asked Marco, like a test.
"Always," he said, and the way he said it meant he would count the years, the flavors, the small rebellions against time itself.
I put my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes. The night smelled like salt and sugar and the future. I had my ice cream, my brother had his plans, and the rest of the city was wide open.
We still had a lot to figure out—who would move where, how to fold two maps into one. But I had something that was not a plan and not a piece of paper: a warm hand in mine and a man who had once said with a laugh, "I'll buy your ice cream for life," and then meant it.
The End
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