Sweet Romance11 min read
Letting Go, Lighting the Sky
ButterPicks15 views
I woke to a sky full of tiny lights spelling someone else's name.
"Look," someone whispered behind me, phones up, faces lit blue.
"They're doing it for her," another voice said.
I pressed the flimsy cold medicine box in my fist until it creased. My fingers went numb before my heart did.
Last night he had kissed my mouth. This morning two hundred drones looped his confession above us: "Catalina, I like you," "Be with me," "Make my life yours."
"I thought he had better taste," I said to no one.
Everleigh squeezed my shoulder. "He has terrible taste in everything but drama."
"Everleigh," I said, and the name sounded like a small island I kept clinging to.
He stood in the center of the square, white shirt catching the winter light, eyes full of a careful, foolish love. Marcus Keller. He had called me "sister" sometimes, had kissed my mouth sometimes, had made me think a slow affection could become something else. I had believed him enough to drop plans, to linger.
"I'll go buy him some medicine," I thought. I left the square with a coat wrapped tighter and the drones' little hearts still blinking across the cold.
Back home the fever came like a hand across my face. I took the pills in a shower's steam and slept so deep that the phone's ring could not reach me.
"You're warm," Everleigh said when I woke in a hospital bed with a drip in my hand.
"How—"
"Marcus brought you," she said flatly. "Out of pity, or something worse. Everyone's talking about his drone show. There was a video online—your face in it."
"He—"
"I told you, Eloise. You can't half-love someone like that."
"I know," I whispered, and my voice surprised me with its thinness.
When Marcus came with a bowl of porridge, he looked smaller than the boy I had once loved. "Sis," he said, meaning me or meaning his cousin Everleigh, and Everleigh scolded him like the captain of a ship scolding a mutinous sailor.
"Get out," she hissed, then softer, "Go see Catalina."
"You're cruel," Marcus said to her, which only made Everleigh huff more.
He dropped to his knees to wipe spilled soup, muttering apologies. "I'm sorry. I came back early. I didn't—"
"You can't stay," I said. It came out quieter than I wanted. "I already decided to go."
"Go where?"
"Teach. Somewhere with fewer drones."
He stared as if I had changed to a season he didn't recognize. "Don't go."
"I have to," I said. "It's been my plan since high school. You were the reason I postponed it. Now I finally have to leave."
He fumbled a keychain from his pocket—our first tiny, silly token. He offered it like an oath.
"Throw it away," I said. "Please. Throw it away and don't come after me."
He didn't throw it. He watched me walk out with Everleigh and left the keychain in my shadow.
We went to the barbecue he had told me about once. Marcus and Catalina came later, hand in hand.
"Stop being dramatic," Everleigh hissed.
Marcus tried anyway. "Eloise, you can't eat spicy—"
"Mind your own tips," Everleigh said. "Get a room."
When he called my name with that old warmth and then turned back to Catalina, the warmth left me like wind from a blown-out candle. I had never been his first. I had been his habit. I had been the pause that sounded like a promise.
"Why do people do that?" I asked Everleigh later, rubbing my palms together against the cold. "Why do they let something they like chain them to moments they don't own?"
"Because," she said, "they're human. And some people are worse at not wanting what they can't have."
I left my job, I returned my lease, and pulled my things into the old rhythm of home. My parents worried. My father quoted neighbors. My mother poured soup like it could stitch my heart. I smiled and said I was gone to teach. It felt true.
"You're really going?" Everleigh asked when she helped me pack.
"I am," I said. Something in me had finally stopped looking for him in windows.
Then I saw him in the street corner by chance after a ridiculous blind date—Griffin Mills, like a careful, warm hand proffered without fanfare.
"Is that—" I started.
"Griffin," he said, with the faint laugh I remembered from the lab. "I thought you'd vanished into the mountains."
"Is that your line?" I laughed. "Nice to see you."
He had gone up into the mountains on some quiet errand and ended up staying to teach other people's children. He was an old-fashioned hero in cheap jeans.
"Want to go to Nanjing for a week?" he asked, that first week before I left for the real mountains. "I'll show you places that feel steadier than this city."
"Yes," I said. "Show me steadier things."
We saw the river with lanterns, we ate noodles by lantern light, and he treated me like a person who might be trusted. He wrapped an arm around me when I shivered under a tree and I felt protected in a way I had never expected.
"Call me Griffin," he said once, when I was being silly and formal.
"Call me Eloise," I said back. "Call me yours."
He smiled and refused my awkwardness with a hand against my mouth. "No," he said. "Call me yours later."
I went to the plateau to teach and the place felt cleaner for the simple truth that an empty sky shows only what you bring to it.
"Will you be okay?" Everleigh asked before I left.
"I will be," I said.
"I'll send you stupid photos," she promised.
"You better."
The school was better than I had imagined: real classrooms, laughing children, a principal who made jokes about everything in two languages. Griffin was there, more gentle than ever, and his presence turned the days into a simpler, quieter joy.
We planted potatoes, we shared single-serve coffee, and in a hammock built from bamboo he taught me how to say my own name without blurting the past.
"What's the strangest thing you've done for someone you liked?" he asked once as we sat under a great camphor.
"I gave up a plan to stay for him," I said.
"That sounds stupid," Griffin said. "You gave him a chance he never deserved."
"I thought he would be good at receiving it," I admitted.
He touched my hair like it was a delicate fire that might burn and then make light. "You deserve someone who learns to give back."
And then one midnight the world I was trying to build cracked.
I was in my small house, lights off, when a shadow burst in. He landed on the bed like an animal, hard and heavy, hands over my mouth. I tasted copper and fear.
"Don't," I gasped. "Please—"
He had the name Wyatt Santos. He had always been seen as a simple delivery man who brought produce to the school. His face split into a grin that belonged behind other people's doors.
"You're mine," he muttered, and the words were heavier than anything.
I bit. I screamed. He slapped me. The room swam.
Someone kicked the door in.
"Get off her!" a voice roared like thunder. "Get off her!"
Griffin's shadow filled the doorway. He smashed a stool into Wyatt's head and the room was a mess of sound and light and blood.
"We're calling the police!" Griffin yelled, phone in hand. He was everywhere at once, both ferocious and precise.
They took Wyatt. The police were steady. The station smelled like paper and coffee. I could not stop shaking even when they told me he would be held.
"You okay?" Griffin asked at dawn, arms around me like a shell. "Are you okay?"
"No," I said. "But I will be."
The trial was awful in the best way: terrible details laid out, evidence anchored, Wyatt ashamed and then defiant and then cornered. He was sentenced. He wore a face that shrank in the courtroom and he tried to look proud. The judge told him he had taken someone else's safety and given nothing in return.
Griffin stayed like a human shield, and Everleigh arrived with a thermos and a bad joke that made me snort even in the middle of everything. "You always pick the dramatic stuff," she said.
"I pick the people who show up," Griffin said.
I decided to tell the truth. I sat for an interview and put all of it in the open—my fear, my fever, the shame, the lack of love that had followed me like a shadow. We didn't mention Marcus or Catalina at first. But someone found the thread that tied things together.
"You're sure you want to say it?" Griffin asked.
"Yes," I said. "It's time."
The story went out the next morning.
"People will call you brave," Everleigh said. "People will call you whatever."
"Call me what they want." I felt a calm settle. "I want them to know the truth."
Marcus had been trying to stitch his image back together in silence. He donated goods, he came to the mountain with a truck full of toys, he cleaned his face and offered a polite, awkward apology.
"Forgive me," he said, happening upon my classroom. "I didn't mean to—"
"Don't," I said. My voice cracked. "I can't."
He watched me then, anger and longing making his jaw a hard line. "You can't ask me to leave."
"I can and I will," I said.
A week later, in a city buzzing with cameras and people who smelled like curiosity, Marcus planned to woo me again.
He hired drones.
"Two thousand drones," Everleigh read aloud from a gossip piece on her phone. "He wants to write your name tonight."
"Don't go," she said, and then, softer: "But if you go, I will be with you."
"Let's go," I said. The children had given me drawings that morning and I kept them in my pocket like talismans.
He stood in the square like a king of nothing, white shirt still, but his hands trembled. Above us the night blossomed: two thousand drones arranged into letters that flushed like a giant confession.
"Eloise Flowers," the sky said in blinks. "Give me one more chance. I love you."
"People are recording," Everleigh said, and her voice was a small, practical thing amid the light. "This is very on-brand for him."
"Go on," I told myself. "Say something clever."
Instead I walked up in the crowd, and everyone felt me come. Phones swung my way like a tide.
"Why do you like her?" I asked Marcus, loud, because the air was the best place to make truth audible.
He looked at me as if he had not expected me to answer his show.
"Because she said yes," he said too fast. He was exposed a little by his own words.
"Is that why you hurt me, Marcus? Because someone else said yes to you?" my voice ran down the line like a bell.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. The drones blinked: "Eloise, please," and even the machines seemed to waver.
"You used me for a rehearsal?" I asked. "You kissed me for practice."
"You're being unfair," someone called from the back. It was Catalina; she had that porcelain, practiced helplessness.
"Unfair?" I said. "To whom? You took money, talent, and the louder drums, and let a real person wait."
Catalina stepped forward, eyes wide. "He loves me," she said. "You knew that."
"I knew he liked you more than he liked me," I said. "I knew he used me because he could. But you? You stood in the light and let him perform without seeing the people he shoved aside."
She flushed, the practiced white face showing a crack. "You're making this a spectacle," she snapped. "You want him, why don't you fight for him privately?"
"Because private harm needs public justice," I said, and the words surprised me with their surety. "Because he made me a private thing to be tested in public. I'm telling a story that belongs to more than the two of us—it's about what he did and what you enabled."
The crowd drew closer. "Tell it," someone said. "Tell us what else."
"I will," I said. "I have receipts. I have messages. Tonight is not about confession, it's about accountability."
A phone flashed. A reporter stepped forward. "Are you accusing Marcus Keller of deception?" she asked, voice hungry.
"Yes," I said. "And I'm asking a question: how much of your grand public apology is real, and how much of it is a spectacle for likes?"
Marcus had been rehearsing his sincerity like a song. The music stopped.
"You're lying," he said, voice small. "You can't do this to me here."
"Watch me," I said.
I uploaded the messages, the recordings—our kisses, his voice on a message where he said he didn't love the act but loved the chase, and a clip of Catalina laughing in an offhand way about being "the prettier trophy." The screen of a news van took them and threw the images across its panels like confession.
Catalina's face lost its reason for staying white. "I—" she started, and the stammer did what truth always does: it inflamed the crowd.
"Shame on you," someone said. "How can you two be so cruel?"
"It was just fun," Marcus said, as if that excused everything. "I didn't mean to—"
"Meaning doesn't unmake pain," I said. "Meaning doesn't undo nights where I thought I was loved. Meaning doesn't repair hours of waiting because you were performing in public."
Catalina began to cry, not the quiet shocked tears of someone surprised by consequences, but the theatrical sobs one practices. People hissed.
"Look at her," one woman said, "that fake little cry."
A man near us started a chant. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Phones were out. People filmed. Some applauded. Someone took Catalina's face in two hands and shook her head like a parent scolding a teenager for dangerous toys. She tried to speak, to say she didn't know, that she was manipulated, but the crowd's sentiment boiled.
Marcus's confident posture shrank like fabric in rain. He reached for me, "Eloise—"
"Stop," I said. My voice steadied. "This is public because you made my life a rehearsal. You used people. You used money. You used spectacle. You used her. And now you'll have to watch what spectacle can do to men who believe money buys forgiveness."
He staggered like someone who had been punched by truth. "You're ruining me!"
"Good," someone shouted from the crowd. "You deserve ruin."
A woman nearest us took a picture and posted with a single line: "Public men, private harm. Today's lesson." The post rippled. People started telling stories about men like him. People who used grand gestures to cover small cruelties.
Catalina tried to push through, hair falling, mascara streaking. "Please!" she cried. "I didn't—"
"You decided to be visible when he needed an audience," I said. "Visibility has costs."
The security guards hovered, unsure whether to escort them away or let the crowd have its say. One man filmed Marcus's trembling hands. A young woman snatched up the keychain he had tried to give me from the ground and snapped it in half.
"No," Marcus croaked. "Please—"
He dropped to his knees as tears finally came—not the polished kind he had practiced, but real water that didn't fix the damage.
"Look at him," someone said. "He looks small now."
"Good," the crowd answered.
Catalina's face had shifted in a dozen stages: denial, shock, calculation, fear. She tried to insist she had been sincere; a few people believed her at first. But as she spoke, recordings that had been circulating showed her mockingly saying that men like Marcus "were easy to dress up." Her own words were the final collapse.
"Stop filming," she demanded, eyes frantic, but the cameras only multiplied.
"You're not allowed to shame us," she said, as if she were the victim.
No one bought it. Not the mothers in scarves, not the teenagers with dyed hair, not the woman who had once been a teacher. They turned their backs to the drones in the sky and their faces toward the two performers who had tried to rewrite the script of someone else's life.
A man in the crowd stepped forward and put a hand on Marcus's shoulder. "Make this right," he said. "Start there."
"How?" Marcus whispered.
"With humility," the man said. "With acknowledging you were wrong."
Marcus tried. He stammered. "I—I'm sorry," he said, and the sound broke in a way that a punishment must to be real.
Catalina's collapse was different. She begged. She offered explanations. She blamed "the attention." She blamed me for not being sweeter. The crowd was unsparing.
At the end of it, the cameras captured everything: Marcus's face as his friends turned away; Catalina's attempts to compose herself and the laughter that met it; the keychain snapped in two and a child picking up half and walking away.
Even later, when news cycles tried to soften it into "an unfortunate public fight," the footage remained. People debated. Some said I was cruel. Others said it was overdue.
Marcus's pride had been paid for in audacity and a thousand tiny cruelties. The sky showed his apology, but neither sky nor apology could remake the nights I had given away. The crowd's judgment did something else: it took his social currency and turned it to dust.
He tried to rebuild. He lost donors and invitations. His charity account froze while sponsors reconsidered. People he had once called friends stopped answering calls. Catalina moved to a different city under a different name. Marcus posted a statement and removed my name from his world.
I walked away with Griffin's hand in mine, the crowd's noise behind us like a distant storm. Everleigh pressed a cup of hot tea into my palms and said, "You did it."
"I did what?" I asked.
"You made them see the cost."
"Yes," I said. "I let them see."
The name in the sky had been his last, expensive plea. It had no power now except to remind me where I had been and how far I had come. I kept walking.
Months later, we set a small ritual between us. There was a keychain in the bottom of a drawer. I took it out, turned it over, and opened the tiny ring. Griffin watched like a man waiting for the sunrise.
"Ready?" he asked.
"No," I said, and then I laughed—the first real laugh in a long while. "Not ready to throw everything away. Ready to keep the part that matters."
He hugged me until the world shrank to our warmth.
Once in a while, on a clear evening, I look up.
"Do you ever miss it?" Everleigh asked once.
"The show?" I said. "No. I miss a boy who smelled like a summer shirt. But he wasn't enough."
"Good," she said. "Be greedy for enough."
I keep the broken half of that keychain only to remember the sound it made when it broke. When I wind up the tiny watch my grandmother left me, a soft "tick tick" answers like company in a quiet house.
"I learned how to leave without hating," I tell Griffin sometimes, when the nights are long and the wind is steady.
"You learned how to be brave," he says, and I look at him and the little light of his smile is like the only drone I want hovering over my life.
The End
— Thank you for reading —