Sweet Romance14 min read
Locked Together, Unfinished Confessions
ButterPicks13 views
I should have been delivering New Year packages and leaving. Instead, I stood on the threshold of Ernesto Drake’s apartment with two heavy boxes and a heart that kept forgetting how to beat.
"You're here?" he said behind me, like he had been waiting in the shadow of the doorway. He sounded calm. Too calm.
"I—" I tried to be casual. "Delivery. For your mom."
He glanced at the boxes, then at me. The hallway light made his cheekbones look like a quiet sculpture. "Come in."
We had not spoken properly in three years. I had avoided him on purpose after the KTV accident, after the cake, after the way I had ruined a night he had planned for someone else—someone I thought he liked. The memory still made me ache.
"I can leave them on the step," I said, hopeful. "Really, I don't want to bother—"
"It's fine." He used the fingerprint and the door clicked. "My mom's out for errands. You're keeping her company, then."
"I won't be long." I forced a laugh, but my fingers trembled as I pushed the boxes toward the kitchen.
He watched me. "You should tell her you came."
"I texted her." My phone felt too heavy in my pocket. "She said stay in case something happens."
"Stay," he repeated. His voice was so plain it might have been a command if we were children again. "Okay. Stay."
We were both pretending to be adult about the small domestic things—the boxes, the tea—while a thousand awkward memories clattered between us like loose plates.
"Ernesto," I said, trying to find a place to put the conversation, "how are you? How's work?"
He rolled his eyes. "Same. Bugs, meetings, caffeine. You know—the heroic life."
"You always made it sound heroic when you were in college." I couldn't help the smile. It came out small and unpracticed.
He looked at me like he had never looked at me before—long, as if he were trying to read a book he'd put down years ago. "You look different," he said finally.
I saw then the way his eyes softened when he said it. It was a small thing, a tiny tilt of kindness that my anxious heart turned into fire.
"Different how?" I asked because I needed to hear more, even though a thousand reasons told me to leave.
"In a good way," he said, and that was the moment I felt something open inside me. Like a window that had been nailed shut long ago, finally creaking.
The city announced that the building would be locked down that night. One case, they said. We would be sealed for a period. "You'll have to register," a staffer in protective gear told us at the door. "Please stay put."
"Stay put," I repeated to myself as if to lock the command into my bones.
Ernesto tried once more, gentle and careful. "There's only one bedroom," he said, eyes flat with logic. "I'll sleep on the couch."
I was not expecting that. I had brought something—an old habit—an expectation that he would guard his personal space. "You sure?"
He shrugged as though shrugging could change nothing. "Couch is fine."
The couch barely fit him. Or, to be fair, the couch barely fit many things: my embarrassment, our past, his quiet. That first evening, I watched him as he fixed a bowl of fried rice and pushed it across to me. "Eat," he said.
"Thank you," I said, and the bowl warmed my hands more than the rice warmed my belly.
Days passed in a weird domestic loop. We woke, ate the limited food the building allowed, did the daily temperature checks. The city tested everyone in the block. There were routines, and the routines began to build a shelter between us.
One afternoon, I walked into the living room to find a pale lace sleep set folded on the coffee table. My chest made a small, confused jump.
"I thought—" I began.
"It's for you." His voice was plain. "My neighbor said she had an extra set. I brought it down."
"You... borrowed a woman's sleep set for me?" I asked, suspicious and oddly delighted.
"It's clean," he said as if that settled any argument about propriety. "Put it on if you want."
Embarrassment bubbled and then something softer—the sense that someone was thinking of me in the small way that says I noticed you. I went to the bedroom and hesitated before changing. The lace was not like anything I would have chosen for myself. It felt small and intimate. I put it on and came back out, half wanting applause, half wanting to crawl into a hole.
He pretended not to notice, then when I sat on the bed he sat closer than necessary. "It suits you," he said. The sound of that compliment sent heat up my neck.
One night I woke hungry and disoriented and walked to the kitchen in only a camisole. He was there, bare-chested because the apartment was hot. I stopped dead, and my whole body betrayed me.
"Ah—" I slammed a hand to my chest. "I'm sorry. I thought this was my apartment—"
"I..." He blinked. He did not move. Then he said, "I forgot too just now. You still live here."
We stared at each other, ridiculous and suddenly vulnerable. The air between us felt electric and terribly fragile.
"Do you remember, when we were kids," he said, voice low, "when you used to cry when you scraped your knees? I took you home and we changed your pants."
I felt a dizzy sort of tenderness. The timeline of my life braided itself with his until I could not tell where one ended and the other began. "You carried me," I murmured. "You always did."
"Yeah." He smiled then. It was the first real smile I'd seen on him in years, and it landed like a promise. "You were stubborn even then."
That night he kissed me. It was short and stunned and like a cliff in the dark. My first instinct was to pull away. My second was to lean in. When he pulled back, he said, soft and strange, "I didn't mean to—"
"I did," I whispered.
He laughed—a small breathy thing that broke into a real grin. "Then don't pretend."
We stepped over a line and found that stepping had consequences. For me it unlocked everything I had been holding in for three years. For him it seemed to open a quiet place where he kept patient things.
Kynlee Saito lived upstairs. People called her the "goddess" in the stairwell jokes the second week, because she walked like summer and always had a neat cat carrier on her arm. She came down one day, by chance or plan, when the wifi went out.
"Are you Ernesto?" she asked politely at the door.
He nodded like a good-natured machine. "Yes. Can I help?"
"I think my router died," she said, smiling as if it were a small mischief instead of a spatial threat.
Ernesto offered to help. He was patient and practical. Watching them walk to the elevator together struck something inside me. Not because he had to be interested in her—he did not—but because when they were side by side my confidence felt thin. Kynlee's smile was the kind you could not argue with. It made sense that she would glimmer in the edges of any crowd.
She was kind to me. When I got my period early and was embarrassed and stuck, she brought ginger tea and practical things in a small neat bag. She sat on my couch for two minutes, chatted about the building, and then left. She smelled faintly of citrus and laundry detergent.
"You're lucky," my friend in messages said when I told her about it. "He is the romantic lead in every college drama. You are sitting in his apartment. Close the deal!"
I wanted to close the deal like anyone else, but reality was messy. I had lived with the guilt of a ruined confession for years. I had run for three years. I had built a shell of cashing out and distance and slowly learned to breathe in its thin air. To be here, in the same apartment, with him—kissing, holding, cooking—made me dizzy.
"Do you—" I asked one night as we washed the sparsely available dishes, "ever think of the past? About the night—"
"The cake," he finished. His hands were in sudsy water. "You fell. You fell on purpose."
"My face was in your cake," I said, petulant. "I didn't mean to ruin your night."
"You still ran," he said simply. "You left me the next day. You didn't answer my messages. I was confused. I thought you hated me."
"I tried to apologize," I said. "I wasn't brave enough. I ran because I couldn't face it."
He looked at me then, and for a moment his expression was equal parts wounded and patient. "Why didn't you tell me you liked me? Why did you ruin it?"
His question landed like a weight. My silence filled the room.
"I was scared you'd say no," I whispered. "I was scared you'd like someone else. I thought—"
"You thought of someone else then?" he asked, voice flat.
"I saw you with her outside the library," I said. "I thought she was the one. I thought you loved her."
He was silent for a long time. I watched each breath move his shoulders. Then he tilted his head and said, "I liked you. I didn't expect you to be brave. I thought you'd tell me. When you ruined my night, I thought you hated me."
We were walking different solitudes for years. The things we told ourselves became the walls that kept us separate. When the walls finally came down they were messy in the place where honesty had been missing.
We argued. We made up. We learned how to live under the same roof. He taught me to make coffee the way he liked it, bitter and precise. I taught him how to make dumplings from a messy family recipe my mom had taught me over the phone.
"Your mother calls every day," he said one afternoon, wiping his hands on a towel.
"She worries," I said. "Her name is Stefanie. She calls me 'my little heart' all the time."
"Mine is Emelia," he said. "She rearranged the fridge when we weren't looking."
"You still sleep on the couch?" I asked, because I could not help myself.
"Lately no," he said.
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Because sometimes you fall asleep making funny faces and it annoys me, and I can't help watching you. It makes the couch inconvenient."
I laughed. "That's possessive."
"It's caring," he corrected.
We had three small heart-stopping moments in the first month that felt like volcanic twinges inside my chest.
The first: one night the power went out. Streetlights blinked. The apartment was a dark theater except for a single candle Ernesto found in a drawer. We shared a bowl of instant noodles. He suddenly laughed and reached over, brushing a lock of hair behind my ear. His fingers were warm. He looked at me, eyes bright. "You still bite your lip when you're thinking," he said. "You did it when you were eight and broke your school's science kit. You would always hide in the bushes after recess."
I felt blood rush to my face. He had said my small, ridiculous habits aloud—proof that he had watched me all those years. His smile then—the kind that reached his eyes—was like a place passing from winter into spring.
The second: one morning I woke shivering from fever. I was sweating and cold and embarrassed. He took my temperature and frowned. "You should rest," he said. "I'll make you soup." He put a towel on my head, then took his own jacket off even though he was shivering, and laid it across my lap. "Take it," he said. "You'll be warmer."
I felt the jacket around my legs like armor. He had given me his warmth without a word. In that small sacrifice I recognized a devotion I had not allowed myself to expect.
The third: at a family lunch when his parents came over, I was sitting quietly and his father told a story about how Ernesto once defended me in grade school. "You two were always together," his father said, smiling at us. Ernesto took my hand under the table—casual, possessive. When our fingers met, he squeezed. His eyes flicked up to mine. For a moment the space around us bent toward something soft and certain. He smiled at me like he had chosen me and was proud of it.
We began to talk about the future, about small things at first: a holiday, a trip somewhere safe and quiet. Each plan felt like cement poured over the old cracked path to rebuild it.
But nothing is clean in real life. Kynlee’s presence continued to ripple. Rumors in the building were flowers and thorns. I heard a neighbor murmur something about them working on the same project at the office. He told me she was a teammate. She brought magazines to me. She brought a small bag of herbal tea and said lightly, "If you ever need anything, I'm nearby."
Then the past returned, disguised as a rumor. Someone on the stairwell had seen him and Kynlee laughing and assumed everything. My own insecurity ignited. I began to watch them like an amateur detective, counting the seconds of smiles, cataloging the cadence of their voices. It made me small.
One evening, I confronted him.
"Are you in love with her?" I asked. The words escaped like a whine.
He looked at me, and his face was like the first honest thing I had ever seen. "Are you sure you want the answer you expect?" he asked.
"Just tell me."
"No," he said simply. "I am not in love with Kynlee."
"I saw you at the elevator—"
"I walk people out when they need help," he said, patient. "She came to me about the router. I fixed it. We work on the same project. We had coffee once. That's it."
I wanted to be satisfied, but the old shame rose in my throat.
"Do you like me?" I asked, absurd and naked.
He reached out in the dark and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. "Yes," he said. "Have I always liked you? Yes. Did I think you were hiding from me? Yes. Do I want to be with you now? More than anything."
That night he kissed me like someone making a solemn vow. It was decisive and patient, like a man who had waited a long time and finally had permission.
Kynlee came to us once more, unexpectedly. She brought over a small dessert and said, "For sharing." She looked at us with a gentle clarity, and in an instant, my jealousy melted into gratitude. She smiled at me and said, "He likes to talk about you when he gets nervous," and then left without a fuss.
In a way her kindness humiliated me. I had been nursing my own jealousies like wounds, and she cleaned them with an innocent hand.
The days rolled into weeks. We began to tell each other things. I told him about my mother—Stefanie—her nagging and love. He told me about Emelia, how she rearranged his sock drawer when she visited. We told each other small things: who our school enemies were, who taught us how to ride a bike, our first heartbreaks.
One night, mid-argument about something silly, I said, "Why didn't you tell me earlier you're not that kind of person? You looked like a statue when I was drunk in that KTV. I thought you were distant."
He stopped. "I told you then. After you left, I sent a message. You didn't reply. I thought you left me."
"I did leave," I said. "But I didn't want to." My voice broke. "I was scared."
He took my hands in both of his, surprisingly rough and sure. "You ran from me," he said again, not accusing but cataloguing, like a final inventory. "I waited. You never came back. Now you are here."
"I'm here now," I breathed. "Can't that be enough?"
He looked at me like he was measuring the truth in my face. Then he kissed me until the words didn't matter.
We spoke in the bright simplicity of first-person confessions. I admitted every stupid thing I had done. He admitted his stubbornness. He let me see the small, private parts of him: the playlist he listened to when tired, the mug he kept for mornings, the shoes he only wore for special days.
There were rough days. Nights when he was quiet in a way that made the apartment sound full of questions. I had moments where my mind tried to invent problems—little accusations that were more about my poor sense of worth than his behavior.
One day I found a drawer of small gift boxes on top of his wardrobe. Each unlabeled. I opened one and found a tiny handmade paper crane. Another held a pressed flower. Another, a note: "For your 22nd birthday, if you forgive me." I laughed and cried all at once.
"Why didn't you give me these?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I thought you'd come back to collect them yourself."
"That sounds like an excuse."
"It is," he said. "It is an excuse and the truth."
We had our first big, public moment when my mother, Stefanie, insisted on visiting as soon as the lockdown ended and the building sent official clearance. She arrived with a bag of food and a face full of scheming.
"Ernesto," she said as if making a decree, "you look like a good boy. You let my Cloe sleep on your bed?"
"She sleeps on my bed," he said plainly.
"What?" she clucked. "And you sleep on the couch?"
"Sometimes," he admitted.
"Change that," she said, and then looked at me with a satisfied smile.
We sat for dinner in a new domestic intimacy. Stefanie and Emelia made jokes about old times. Emelia pinched her son's ear gently. "You be good," she told him with the authority of years. "You be kind to my boy."
At the table, people laughed and told stories of bad haircuts and childhood dares. My mother looked at me, then at him, and said, "You two will make a proper pair. No running away." Her voice had that steel-laced affection mothers have.
I wanted to tell his parents everything: how I had ruined his confession, how cowardice had led me away, how shame had kept me silent. But I didn't. I smiled and let the warmth of that evening be a balm.
Time made us bolder. We moved in small steps—trips to the market where he bought me an orange because I said I liked them, a movie night where he fell asleep halfway through and I propped his head up so he wouldn't drool on his shirt. We were ordinary humans learning the choreography of partnership.
There was one scene people waited for in their little gossip: the moment I made a grand, humiliating mistake and then learned not to panic.
We had been dating in small, honest ways for months when an ex-colleague's message interrupted my morning. A man named a "Chen"—one of those awkwardly remembered past-contacts—called my phone, insisting I had once agreed to an introduction through my mother. I panicked. I called my mother, who immediately asked whether I was hiding anything.
"Hide?" I stammered. "No."
I lied badly. I told my mother nothing, and then my mother, as mothers do, ensured she would come over and test the household's compatibility with bright dishes and quicker questions.
In the end, it was messy and ridiculous. The man spoke to me once on the phone and I said, "No, thank you," and hung up. It was a small rejection but it confirmed something: the world liked to keep offering choices. I had finally learned how to simply say no to options that weren't mine.
At a company dinner where Ernesto's team presented a project and Kynlee led marketing, I watched them speak. She did not look at him the way I had feared. She was professional and clear. When the meeting ended, she came over and hugged me—simple and sisterly. "You look happy," she said. "Take care."
That moment sealed whatever leftover fears I had. She was a friend. He was mine. The rest would be small domestic negotiations.
There were no fairy-tale earthquakes. There were slow compromises: I learned to let him have the bedroom sometimes, he learned to make his code comments readable, I learned to stop calling him by an old nickname in front of coworkers. We learned the small anatomy of sharing space.
The end-of-year holiday approached. I insisted on bringing a cake to the family table, more as a dare than a graceful tradition. I remembered how years ago I had ruined his cake and ran away. This time, I planned and rehearsed. I walked into the party with a confident smile and a box that did not wobble. My hands did not shake.
He took my hand in the doorway and squeezed. "You look nervous," he said.
"Not anymore," I said.
Stefanie looked at me like a detective and then smiled with triumph. "It looks like we're making more than cousins out of our friendship," she said.
Ernesto kissed me then—slow, like a man putting letters into a drawer. In front of family, he took me as his, and the world was content for a while.
There were small setbacks. Once, a rumor spread in the office that I was the reason for his sudden change in coding hours. Another time, someone misread his intentions and gossip fluttered like dry leaves. We weathered them by being stubbornly normal. We answered questions honestly. We told our story in the same voice: messy, true, ours.
A year after the lockdown, he took me back to the same KTV where I had ruined the cake. I stood in the doorway and found my throat tight.
"You sure?" he asked, thumbs tucked in his pocket like a kid.
"I'm sure," I said.
We walked in together. He had booked a small room, not for confessions but for a quiet celebration. He had cake. He had lights. This time, the cake had my name on it and no traces of past disasters.
"I thought you'd run," he said, smiling.
"I thought you'd never forgive me," I admitted.
"Forgiveness is easy," he said. "I had to forgive you for leaving me. I had to forgive myself for waiting. But the important thing is this: you're here."
We had a small audience of two: his mother Emelia and my mother Stefanie, who had arrived as if summoned. They hugged us both and took pictures like proud generals.
After the cake, he stood up and took my hand. "Marry me?" he asked in a tone that was more a vow than a question. Not dramatic—just honest. "Marry me and let me keep making dinners you claim to dislike."
I laughed, half hysterical, half elated. "Yes."
We did not have a big fanfare. We did not need one. We had been through the petty disasters, the mistakes, the forgiving and the stubbornness of two people who had decided to choose each other.
Later, when people asked me how it had happened—how I ended up trapped by a lockdown only to find love—I would shrug and say, "Luck, maybe." But the truth, which is a quieter and stranger thing, is that the locking down of the building was only the beginning. The real confinement was the time we both let ourselves stop running and sit down with the truth. The biggest lock was the fear inside me that I would never be wanted. The key was his patience, his hands, and the small kindnesses that added up.
One night before our wedding, we sat on the old couch cleaning out the drawers. He found the little crane I had discovered earlier and handed it to me. "You still collect things," he said.
"You still keep them," I said.
He kissed my forehead. "I won't stop," he said. "I'll keep saving things for you. Even stupid things."
"And I'll stop running," I promised.
He laughed softly. "Good. Because I hate running."
I put my head on his shoulder. In the hush of our apartment, the city outside moved and the rest of the world did too. But right there, with food boxes and a lace sleep set and two mothers who secretly matched our habits, I felt a quiet and certain kind of home.
We learned to be ordinary and that ordinary was enough.
The End
— Thank you for reading —