Sweet Romance11 min read
My Account, His Shadow, The Red Bean
ButterPicks12 views
I opened my phone and the username hit me like a cold wave: "BlaineHomeWife." The videos filled the screen—hands, shoulders, a back in motion, a smile that never showed me entirely. My heart tried to fit a face into the blank space in my head, and it did.
"I have a husband?" I said to the empty hospital room.
A nurse laughed softly at the doorway. "Yes. He says you're home now."
"What's his name?"
"You called him Blaine when you woke up."
The words were small, but when the name landed in me, something like a photograph snapped into place: a face I had filmed my whole secret life for, the man whose presence was the frame of every clip—Blaine Burnett.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"He's at home. He asked me to tell you not to worry." The nurse's eyes were kind, almost amused. "He says you should come back tonight."
I did not understand why my hands trembled packing a small bag. I did not understand why every memory around that face felt easy and raw, but the center—the memory of being loved and loving—was a blank.
The evening air smelled like cold metal and river water. The doorman at the building knew me by name and opened the door with a small salute. The keycard beeped familiar patterns as if I'd lived here for years. I stood in front of the door that had no memory but a body memory: a pressure, a rhythm, a want.
Blaine opened the door, and his face—sharp, patient, a little amused—came into the frame.
"You've come home," he said.
"Home," I echoed and then, without thinking, I lunged forward.
"Old habits," he said softly when I wrapped my arms around him. "You always wanted to be held like this."
"Then hold me," I said. "Kiss me, hug me, lift me up."
He held me. He kissed the top of my head. He wrapped his arms and, for a few heartbeats, the world made sense.
"Do you remember anything?" he asked after a while, voice carefully neutral.
"Bits," I said. "I remember... your smile in videos. I remember... that I made videos."
"And your account?" His tone stayed even. "The one where you post me?"
"I—" Paper-thin panic. "It says BlaineHomeWife."
He made a small sound that might have been a laugh and half a rueful exhale. "Yes. You made it a thing a long time ago."
"Long time?" My head hurt at the stretch of time.
He kissed my forehead like a promise. "Come. Sit. There are things to explain, and there are things better left to feel."
The house; the big windows; the kitchen with a sink that had a sponge left the way someone expected you to clean up after them—all of it was a set I had lived inside of on screen but never fully in person. I wanted to narrate everything at once. Instead I watched him move like I had watched him in clips a thousand times—steady hands, careful with plates, the small impatience of someone who learned to do household tasks slowly, as though making them into ritual.
"You're a good cook," I said.
He smiled without irony. "You like it."
That night a doctor—Fabien Perrin—came in at Blaine's request and said the same safe things: concussion, time, familiar friends and places would help the brain re-link the missing pieces. He gave us exercises. He recommended rest. He left his card and a very clear instruction: let the patient be the patient.
Blaine listened like someone holding a script. He ticked off the doctor's suggestions with a dutiful tone and a domestic tenderness that was a second skin.
"You will go to familiar places," he told me afterward. "You will see people who knew you before, and we'll let the memory come. For now, rest."
"Rest," I said, a child's agreement.
"Good." He tucked the blanket around me like someone who'd done it a hundred times. "Good night, my wife."
He said it so gently that even the blank inside my head wanted to accept it.
Days leaned into themselves. We settled into a weird intimacy where I played the part I had filmed so many times—me, and my camera, singing silent praises in captions. The account feeds were a map of the man: Blaine making coffee, Blaine untying his shoes, Blaine at the window, Blaine laughing. My comments were a choir of strangers calling him "husband" on my behalf. I watched the comments and felt both shamed and proud; my private worship had leaked into public adoration.
"Your account's been... active," Lauryn said on the phone one night, her voice half laughter, half scolding.
"Active?" I said.
"Viral active." She had the straightforward way that steadied me. "You should be finishing your client drafts. Where are you?"
"In bed." I was not. "With Blaine."
"Oh my God. No way." There was a long silence and then—"What's his last name again?"
"Burnett." I said it as if testing whether the sound could make the blank narrower.
"Lauryn got on a plane within the hour."
She burst into the apartment like a small storm, all elbows and concern. "You literally packed up and moved in? In one night?"
"I thought he was my husband."
She stared at me like I'd told her I'd become a pirate. "Do you realize your videos...?"
"What about them?"
"They're all shot like—" She tapped the screen on my phone, and I watched it as if I'd never seen it before. The camera hovered close to his actions and never turned to show me. The phrase that nailed me felt like a slap: the videos were from the vantage of somebody else—my vantage point entirely erased.
"You're filming him," Lauryn said, eyes sharp. "You're the eyes. You're the narrator that never shows the narrator."
"I thought it was love," I said. "I thought the account was our life."
She hummed and then, with a conspiratorial grin, said, "Then maybe this life is actually his. Maybe we were always the stage."
She was blunt, as always. "You should ask him. Ask him now."
So I did.
"Blaine," I said that evening, trying to not sound accusatory. "Why do my videos only show you?"
He looked at me for a long moment, then answered as one would when offering a small, inevitable truth.
"You wanted to be close to me without being seen," he said. "You liked being the eye that watched me. It was safer for you."
"Safer?"
"You were afraid, Leonor." He used my real name like a window opening. "You were afraid to be seen. So you filmed me instead."
I tried to stitch my shame into a question. "Was I... selfish?"
He laughed. "No. You were brave in the way some people are brave only at a distance."
But as the weeks passed, another fear.
"Blaine," I said one night, the television muted, the city breathing outside like a soft thing. "Do you love me?"
He turned from the kitchen where he was arranging plates. The light found the plane of his cheek and the fine hair at his temple.
"I do," he said simply.
"Because you sometimes say you needed someone to help for your family, someone to be 'my wife' in front of them." My voice cracked on the word needed. "Is that all?"
He came and sat beside me. He didn't take my hand at first. He let the space exist. Then he took it anyway.
"I thought," he said, "that if I gave you the life you filmed in your videos, maybe you'd stay. Maybe you'd realize you wanted what you had—what we could have."
"I was afraid you'd think less of me if you knew the truth," I said. "If you knew I... filmed you like a museum piece."
"You filmed someone you loved." He shrugged in a way that made it clear he forgave and also held a private amusement. "You turned him into art. And art, somehow, made a place for you."
That answer could have been enough. It should have been. But my brain, fragile and healing, wanted certainty. I wanted a promise that wasn't an improvisation.
"Will you tell your parents we're together? For real?" I asked one afternoon when he had to go pick up a gift his mother had insisted on dropping off.
"I'm already doing it."
He opened the door and behind him were two figures I had seen only in his videos: Case Emerson—tall, gentle-featured—and Johanna Guerin—warm, hands like a gardener's. They came in with a softness that made me dizzy.
"Leonor!" Johanna called with a bright surprise. "It's so good to finally meet you."
"Please sit," Case said, and I noticed the way he looked at me like a man seeing a well-loved painting in someone's home.
"You've been making him so happy," Johanna said, and the bracelet she took off her wrist and slid onto my arm made my breath stop. It was old jade, cool and round and heavy with other hands' stories.
"My mom likes you," Blaine whispered in my ear that night. "She wanted you to have this because she said she trusts you to be gentle with me."
I wanted to laugh, to cry, to confess that I had been filming him into perfection, turning his smallest gestures into a shrine. Instead I said only, "Thank you."
In the weeks after, life arranged itself into the small ceremonies of domesticity. There were long walks by the river; there were the fifteen-second experimental clips Blaine insisted we film—hands interlocked, a silhouette beneath the old trees. "You need to be seen," he kept telling me. "Not just in comment sections. In real life."
One night, he took my hand in public and, with a quick, practiced motion, lifted me enough that my laugh escaped like something alive.
"You always liked being picked up," he said, exercising a memory that might have been ours both.
"You remembered that," I said. "But I don't."
"People remember small things about one another all the time," he replied. "They collect them like shells."
"You collected me," I said.
He kissed my forehead. "Only after you filmed me every day."
The thing about living with the man who was the center of my camera is that sometimes I felt invisible even when the world was focused on us. He would cook and bring me a plate; he would sit in his study and answer emails late into the night; he would kiss me in the morning and then, when the sun dipped, retreat to the office like a lighthouse keeper returning to his lamp.
"Do you ever get tired of pretending?" I asked one evening.
He looked surprised. "Pretending what?"
"This—us—if it's partly a performance for your mother, for your family, for your life. Do you ever want something that isn't rehearsed?"
He turned to me fully then, like a man meeting a question for the first time.
"Sometimes." He admitted it. "But the pretending became real. Watching you fall asleep beside me, reading the notes you tag me in, hearing you call me 'husband'—all of that was practice for something true."
He spoke slowly, and the words landed like stones in water, making small, expanding rings.
"Do you think you'll ever stop filming?" I asked.
"Maybe," he said. "But your videos turned me into a better man. They made me uncover things I hid. They made me learn domestic patience."
"Then keep me," I said, strangely fierce. "Keep me even when you're bored."
"I will," he promised and then, because promises are better with proof, took me by the hand and, out on the balcony, made me stand and look at the city.
"Say it," he said.
"Say what?"
"Say you want to be mine in front of everyone."
My cheeks burned. Part of me understood the performative gesture. Another part of me—the part that had loved from the other side of the camera—wanted to be offered a ring, a small thing that belonged to both of us.
He had already planned it.
One evening in the early summer, he asked me to walk down our old neighborhood lane. As we approached the small square where our childhood friends sometimes met, I saw familiar faces. There was Lauryn, cheeks flushed with mischief, and then one by one more faces spilled out from the dusk—friends I had lost touch with, neighbors who used to play house with us when we were small. My steps slowed.
Blaine stopped and turned to face me. He held something in his palm; when he opened his hand, a small red object glinted.
"It's a bean," I said, and in my chest a memory—like a seed—sprouted: the red bean I had carried when I had a fever as a child, the silly promise that people used red beans as tokens of love.
"I made it into a ring," he said. "Do you remember why you obsessed over red beans as a kid?"
"It meant you were thinking of someone," I whispered. "We made little promises."
He sank to one knee with the easy motion of a man who had practiced for a long time. "Leonor Saleh," he said, using my full name in the hush of the square, "will you marry me?"
The crowd whooped in the background—my parents, his parents, the small-town chorus of our lives. The bracelet at my wrist felt heavier, like a circle of held hands.
"Yes," I answered, and when he slid the little red bean ring onto my finger, I could not tell whether I was answering the past or the present. The token was simple and impossibly perfect. I thought of the videos and the way they had made saints of his smallness. I thought of the way he had made me feel safe enough to be honest.
"You're crying," he said, laughing.
"Because I am happy," I said.
"And because—" he hesitated, voice small and sure—"you filmed me into feeling worthy."
It was true. My camera had been a mirror he had come to recognize as valuable. He had turned a private obsession into a life with me in it. He had chosen to be seen by me and to see me back.
We married in early July, just like the videos had hinted at—quiet, a small civil office, a snapshot of my life turning legal. We kept filming, but the lens shifted. I learned to step into frame, to show up not just as the watcher but as the watched. I learned, clumsy and grateful, to let people see me without the protection of the camera.
Blaine made a video the night we left the civil office. He sat on the edge of our bed and pointed his phone at both of us.
"This is the ending," he said into the camera, smiling like the small sun he sometimes was. "Or maybe the beginning."
"Do not say that," I scolded, half-laughing.
He turned the camera to me. "Say something you actually mean."
"I—" I looked at him, at the little bean ring, at the jade bracelet that flanked it like a promise. "I mean—"
"Say it," he insisted.
I swallowed and then, for the first time on camera and off, I said clearly, "I choose you, Blaine Burnett."
He exhaled and then, because he could not help himself, kissed me, careful and greedy at once.
Later, when I scrolled through our account, I read comments from strangers who had watched a woman find her way into a life she had once only filmed. They wrote things like "Finally," and "You two are goals," and "We cried." I smiled and felt a deep, domestic warmth. My account was no longer only my perspective. It was ours.
At night, when the city grew quiet, I would sometimes wake and find him awake, a silhouette at the window. I would shuffle over and slip my hand into his.
"Are you still filming?" I would ask, teasing.
"Not always," he'd answer honestly. "But sometimes."
"Why sometimes?"
"So there's always memory," he said. "Some memories we want to keep private. Some we want to leave as gifts."
I laughed. "Do you think the Internet interpreted us wrong?"
He thought a moment. "Maybe. But they were not wrong about this: that you loved me."
"That I loved you or loved the idea?" The bluntness came back to me like a tide.
He turned and faced me fully, the lamplight catching his cheekbone. "You loved him as much as you could, the way you knew how. And you learned to love being seen."
I snuggled into him, feeling small and solid at the same time. He stroked my hair.
"You filmed me," he murmured. "And I, in return, learned to show you."
When the world was loud, when notifications chimed, when the past nudged close and the blank in my head lifted with new pieces, I would remember the red bean on my finger and the jade on my wrist—small circles that meant people had offered me their hands and that I had taken both.
One night, months later, at a neighborhood party where the small-town voices braided into one, someone shouted, "Show us the videos!"
A hundred phones were raised like a field of tiny suns. Blaine took my hand in the middle of the light and, with the certainty I had grown to trust, led me to the little stage.
"Come on," he said, grinning. "They want to see their favorite couple."
I looked out at all the faces—some I filmed, some who filmed me back. I stood beside him and let the phone in his hand point to the crowd.
"After all this," he whispered, "do you still want to film?"
"No," I answered, and then, because I could not help but be honest, "Not the way I used to."
He nodded. "Good. Film sometimes. Live always."
We laughed. The night folded into itself like soft paper.
When I uploaded a short clip that night—two hands, mine and his, holding the red-bean ring between them—the caption I typed was simple and not designed for virality.
"Some things are better seen together."
The comments rolled in: hearts, small fireworks, strangers swapping stories about their own secret cameras and the ways they fell in love. I read them for a little while and then put my phone away. Blaine stretched and kissed the base of my neck.
"Good night, Leonor."
"Good night, husband," I replied.
And this time, the name fit without effort.
The End
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