Sweet Romance15 min read
My Boss, His Dark Stream, and the Mess I Loved
ButterPicks11 views
I work in investment banking. I say that like it's a job title and not an entire lifestyle of late nights, coffee stains, and the slow erosion of weekends.
"I need that deck by eight," Torsten Amin said the first time he ever spoke to me in a way that counted. His voice was flat. His face was important. His stride was a blade.
"I have it, Torsten." I smiled because smiling is easier than insisting I was exhausted. I am Kori Browning, twenty-six, stubborn, and alarmingly optimistic about things I have no right to be optimistic about.
"You write like it's still kindergarten," he said, and there it was—his favorite unit of judgment.
"Sorry," I said.
But at midnight, when the office hummed and the building slept, I opened a tab I had no right to open at work: the live-streaming site I hid in when the markets were merciless.
"Welcome, Six-Married-Two-Kids!" a voice said on my headphones. The screen was lit by a sleepy orange lamp. A young man knelt on a chair, legs up, hair damp.
"Six-Married—" I muttered. I changed my screen name because pressure breeds nonsense.
A comment rolled across: "Welcome, Six-Married-Two-Kids, our top bro tonight."
I tensed because "Six-Married-Two-Kids" was my stupid nickname from a night five years back, and because the voice on the stream had a lazy, singing way of saying "welcome."
"I came to say hi," the man said. "You there?"
I typed, "Luke."
He replied, small and shy: "Call me Luke-y, please."
"Okay, Luke-y," I typed.
Torsten walked past the office glass and caught me by the shoulder. "Where are you?" he asked.
"Reading," I lied. He didn’t believe me, but he didn't ask again that night.
I told no one I scrolled those midnight live rooms. I told no one that certain voices and the way light fell on someone's jaw could let me work through three dozen slides without flinching. I told no one that I collected streamers like postcards: Flavian Gonzales—handsome and blunt, a firework of a streamer who once made me feel like I could breathe; Torsten Amin—quiet and serious in the office, ridiculous and warm on rare clips; and Luke Hernandez—green, earnest, a kid with a stadium frame who lived in a closet and dreamed of being a real performer.
"You watch those people too?" my friend Dawn once asked like it was a small ridiculous vice we both shared.
"Not like you," I said. "I watch them. That's different."
Weeks passed. I learned my boss had a private life I hadn't expected.
"Torsten—" I tried to joke once, "I didn't know you were a 'sports influencer.'"
He said one word: "shit."
That became his meter. He hung "shit" on sentences like weather reports.
"Your report is less than shit," he'd say.
"You recommended a vendor who's basically shit," he'd say.
I learned to translate his versions of "shit" into what I needed to fix. I stayed.
Late one night, when the office was a skeleton and I was half-assembling an analyst presentation, a conversation popped up in my streaming chat.
"Who's your nastiest first-ten?" a viewer asked a streamer whose name I recognized from the home page: Flavian Gonzales, handsome and blunt, now a big star.
"Six-Married-Two-Kids," he replied, bored-smooth.
The chat froze. "Who is that?"
I realized my nickname had become anonymous theater on that screen.
The chat laughed. "Why?"
He tapped his lip. "Just... irritating. Never mind."
I didn't mind at all. I stared at the screen, then felt a hand rest on my shoulder.
"Working late?" Torsten asked.
"Yeah." I folded. I hid the open stream. He didn't look annoyed. He looked like a man watching the flicker of a map in his head.
"You're early tomorrow," he said.
"I—" I tried to protest. "I have the draft."
He looked at me with a half-inch of something like softness and then walked away.
In the weeks that followed, two live things happened.
Luke grew. I clicked into his shaky first streams and watched him learn lighting, sound, persona. He called me "sister" the first night I gave him some pointers on how to position his camera. He believed in being unabashed. He was a scrappy twenty, tall like a lamppost, earnest like fresh money, and he began to send me messages that would make me smile without meaning to.
"Teach me," he wrote. "Teach me tone, teach me jokes."
"Stop calling me sister," I typed back once, and he replied: "Okay, then Kori."
And then Torsten's voice slipped into my world in a way I could not have predicted on the night a stream called "Sunlit Fitness & Gentle Guidance" went on with an odd title.
"Small teachers, is my push-up form okay?" a low voice murmured through my headphones. The breath was a perfectly practiced inhale and an exhale that could have been a promise.
Torsten said "thank you" when a screen name I'd used made a joke. He was on, warm and casual on a live stream at midnight, dropping a kind breeze of "do some more" into the chat like he'd been waiting months to say it. He laughed in the stream with a softness that never existed in our meeting rooms.
My world split in two: the man I sat with in corporate morning light, and the man who breathed into a microphone at midnight and asked strangers about their day.
The first time I saw Torsten on a live feed, I nearly spat out my coffee.
"What is this?" I whispered to myself. He was wearing gym clothes and a low-lit room, looking like someone who'd practiced being everything he wasn't all day.
He called me "An older sister" once live and my heart did something stupid.
"Stop," I whispered into my phone, and then, foolishly, I typed him a message. "Torsten, you streaming?"
He answered: "Slight fever. I said I'd go live."
"Don't. Get rest." I typed.
He responded seconds later: "Hold on. I'll answer one more DM. Be back to you."
He came back to the firm the next day with a plaster at his temple.
"Car accident?" someone whispered in the hallway.
"I ran into a lamppost," he said. Then, more quietly to me: "I misread a crosswalk."
His face was raw but stubborn. He blamed fatigue like it was fog. I thought it was a lie and then I watched his messages—quiet, apologetic, "shit" threaded through the dismissal of himself.
There were advantages to knowing streamers before they were big: I watched Flavian's rise, Luke's flinch, and other people—teams—arrive with contracts and promises. I watched the ways managers would pinch and prod, the ways agencies turned young men into signals to be lit.
Flavian—Flash as some fans called him—went into the top slot with a blaze. He used to be small-town, awkward, and suddenly he was on huge stages, a dangerous, beautiful thing.
Luke's first full-room night was a catastrophe because of an idea Flavian had: a public "PK"—a duel between rooms where winners take the prize and losers do silly punishments.
"Do dog noises," Flavian suggested with the sugar-coat of someone bored.
Luke blinked. "Dog noises?"
"In front of everyone," Flavian clarified.
"I can't—" Luke said.
"Watch me," Flavian said. He leaned in and did an airy mimic of a dog's whine that cost him nothing but made an awful loop in the chat.
Luke was small. He agreed. He learned and fumbled and then cried because the idea of being watched to humiliate stung worse than missing prom.
I kept throwing money at the stream because I was panicked for him, because he was mine in a way that made me protective. I spent a night on a stupid spending spree and the bar of my personal budget broke like glass.
Later, Luke tried to refund me in increments. He sent me bank transfers with apologies. "It's okay, Kori," he wrote. "I'll pay you back. I will."
He kept at it. He worked all night and studied scripts and did not fold.
Then Flavian—someone I admired and watched like folklore—began to unravel on camera.
Someone dug up videos of him doing the weirdest things to be visible: he once did a humiliating, ritualized challenge where he was bound and forced to lick sugar off fruit as viewers tipped to add more strings. He did it for an agency promise and for a thrill and because someone in the room had said they wanted the "real" thing—no soft porn, no pretending.
He signed contracts he barely read. He let teams escalate his shows into rawness he had not intended.
One day I watched a recorded clip that knocked the air from my lungs. Flavian's head was bowed, eyes red, hands tied. The chat flew with slurs. He licked and he did not laugh. He looked for someone in the crowd, over and over, eyes scanning the left corner of the screen as if for a single presence. At the bottom left, a number flicked—someone's user signal.
He was looking for me. For me.
I typed to him: "I am so sorry." I wrote it and then took the message back. He already knew; he'd been waiting, eyes searching for me in the black sea.
When the scandal hit—his contracts, the ugly truths—my recording became evidence. And people who were cruel found cruelty to be delicious.
"Why didn't you speak up?" someone screamed at me on the chat.
"I didn't know," I wanted to answer.
The agency that had 'pushed' Flavian for clicks, the moderators who turned a camera into a lever, the people who laughed—Flavian's fall became a cannonball and everyone watched the waves.
But the platform is not justice. It is a mirror with teeth.
A week after the recording spread, Flavian posted on his personal profile and then removed it. He spoke in a raw, thin video.
"I shouldn't have let it happen," he said into a camera. "I'm sorry." He looked like he wanted to tear his skin off.
But apologies and truth are not equal. They arrive in bundles and sometimes the law and the public bash one in the same moment.
People attacked him online and even the companies that had backed him distanced themselves. Sponsors disappeared like smoke.
His punishment, public and personal, became a spectacle I could not watch without turning my face away.
At the same time, Torsten—my boss—sat in his office and played with his "shit" as a metronome. He collected tasks, he rapped critiques like blades. He apologized in odd, small ways. He nearly admitted he had a fever. He made me do the big deal pitch. I worked through the powerpoint and the spreadsheet while the company's higher-ups watched and tried to swallow.
Then the senior partner—Zachariah Jorgensen—said at the Monday review: "She can't run the deal. Throwing projects to juniors has sunk our numbers. Torsten, you had an accident? Can't manage. Project fails."
My chest convulsed.
"No," Torsten said. He looked like he was the hinge of a door that wouldn't budge. "She can do it."
"Torsten," Zachariah said, "you go break your leg and we will replace your people."
Torsten limped up, and he offered to stake himself—his reputation—on me.
"She will not fail," he said, voice a low ember. "If she fails, I pay the difference."
Zachariah's eyes darkened, and he backed down because Torsten had the sort of ruthless reputation where words were deeds.
That moment didn't feel like triumph. It felt like the last sane animal in a trap had roared and bought a few hours of air.
The days after were a treadmill.
I slept in five-minute bursts. Luke called me like a pest when he could, sending pictures of lunch, pictures of his studio glow. Flavian disappeared. Torsten's texts multiplied. The team worked through two am.
"You're the only one I trust for this," Torsten told me in the late hours. "Don't blow it."
"I won't," I said.
At the climax of the IPO roadshow, when we presented to a critical board, the room smelled of burned toast and fear.
"She is ready," Torsten said, before I could open my mouth. He set a file on the table. Then he said in a voice so low I felt it in my kidneys: "Go."
I walked to the front and spoke. I told the story of the markets and the platform and the numbers like a woman who had spent nights whispering to spreadsheets until the turning became clear. The board's questions sailed like knives. I answered. I did not breathe until the room stopped.
When I sat down, Torsten's hand brushed my shoulder. A small innocent touch. No one else had touched me with permission for months.
"Good," he said, and then, quietly, "You did good."
Later that night, when I sent him a message thanking him, Torsten answered: "Stay out of live rooms."
"Why?" I texted.
"Because they make you soft in the wrong places," he said.
"And you?" I typed. "Torsten, are you—"
He answered one word: "Shit."
It was enough.
Because then someone—Luke—showed up on my doorstep.
"You're the analyst who taught me to angle my desk," he said when I opened the door. He was taller in person, a lamppost and a smile.
"Luke," I breathed.
We ate microwave dinners at my small table and he told me about college and the way campus had made him both brave and foolish. He asked me things that were pure and embarrassing and soft; he wanted to know what I thought about love and failure.
"Do you like someone?" he blurted out over a shared brownie.
"Torsten?" I asked, and both of us laughed and then didn't.
Luke considered. "You deserve someone who says fewer shits and more 'I'll stay.'"
"If he says 'shit' sixty times a day, is that a deal breaker?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Maybe you need someone who says 'shit' and then goes and buys you dumplings."
Our friendship warmed like leftover soup. It was practical, affectionate, unhurried.
And then the public punishment happened.
Flavian's full-recording—months of worst practices captured and stitched into one file—went viral across platforms. Headlines read: "Top Streamer Exposed." Fans felt justified. Sponsors felt threatened. The streaming agency that had pushed him toward the humiliations had their own misdeeds surfacing: records of coerced stunts, pay-skimming, threatening messages.
Flavian tried to defend himself in a live video. He spoke through the same exhausted throat I had seen before.
"I made mistakes," he said. "They promised me better deals."
"You sold your dignity," a commenter yelled.
"Tell us which manager," another demanded.
He looked smaller than any of his videos had ever shown him.
They organized a press confrontation—an arranged public apology meant to be cathartic. I showed up because I had a part to play: a lot of people expected me to be angry; I had to be the one who told the truth I had held.
Flavian sat on the stage, hands white at his knees. There was a ring of cameras. His agent shuffled paper.
"Why did you do it?" the host asked.
They wanted soundbites. They wanted a theatrical implosion.
"I wanted to be big," Flavian said, voice breaking. "I wanted to repay the people who helped me. I swallowed too much pride."
"Did they force you?" a journalist pressed.
They all wanted to know where the blame ended.
A woman in the front row stood up and shouted, "You pretended to be brave. You made a kid do humiliations to be funny."
Flavian flinched and then flared. He had been humiliated by the crowd and by contracts. He tried to push back: "You don't know what it's like to have to pay rent, to be told 'we'll give you your break if you do this—'"
The crowd roared. There was a merciless quality to it.
"Nobody forced you to sign," someone in the second row yelled. "You sold your body for views. What do you expect?"
Flavian's face contorted through every step: smugness, panic, denial. He tried to smile and make jokes, then his smile crumbled. "I didn't—"
He looked at me then and the world jolted.
"You," I said aloud, and the mic took my voice and amplified it into his ears and everyone else's.
"What?" Flavian said.
"You looked at the screen," I said. "Do you remember who looked for you in the chat? In your worst segment, you searched the screen for someone to save you. It mattered."
He coughed. "I looked. I was not thinking. It was all—"
"You sold bones and voice and shame," someone else shouted. "You won't get them back."
I didn't want to be cruel. I wanted the truth. I wanted him to admit the way he had been used and how he had used others.
He swayed. The cameras caught his throat bobbing. He tried to smile. "I am sorry to everyone I've hurt," he said.
Then he did what he had always done: he tried to shift the blame.
"It wasn't just me," he said. "They told me—"
"Who told you?" the host demanded.
The sponsors stood up like a harvest of criticism. A lawyer savagely removed a list of clauses he'd hidden in a contract and read them aloud.
"You signed a waiver," the lawyer said slowly. "It says you control your content. You allowed them."
Flavian's head dropped. He began to rewind, to recollect, then to crumble.
"You made them," a woman in the crowd yelled, and in that moment Flavian's reaction changed from arrogance to brittle panic. "You profited off the corners of their lives. Luke Hernandez lost his dignity tonight because of you."
The name hit like a bullet.
Luke, who had been sitting near the back with a hoodie on, stood and his face was crimson. He had been small and earnest, and he had paid for his earnestness.
Flavian's face collapsed into something raw. He tried denial: "I—"
"Why didn't you stop?" a hundred voices asked.
He faltered, then began to cry: first distressed denial, then a pleading sequence. "I didn't mean—please—"
He lashed out in the worst reflex of a man who wanted to be big and keep it: "You were not there! You were not—"
"That's not an answer," the host said.
He begged publically—he denied that he was cruel. Then he tried to bargain: "If you let me keep streaming, I'll do better. I'll stop the stunts." He tried to laugh. That laugh didn't reach anyone.
A group of fans began to chant "Apologize." Another group chanted "Ban." Someone live-streamed the entire thing and millions watched. People recorded his mistakes and sent soundbites of his rude messages. The agency that had egged him on announced they were "investigating internal procedures." The sponsors demanded immediate remediation.
In the end, the punishment became a public strip: his contracts were terminated, his agency sacked, and his name, once glitter, was now a caution.
He had a breakdown onstage. It was raw. He went from defiant to groveling to collapsing. He begged and tried to explain. He tried to say the words were not his. He appealed to the crowd's mercy. He recorded a second video that night and cried as if the walls would listen.
The crowd's reaction changed over the day.
At first there were shouts. Then there were quiet whispers. Then, because human beings are oddly philanthropic when given a fall guy, there were people who turned his suffering into a lesson and gathered around Luke and others to support them.
It was ugly and it was public, and it was a punishment in full view.
Flavian tried to stand at center stage and then fell to his knees. He put his face in his hands and begged for forgiveness.
His agent tried to walk him out quietly but the cameras followed.
The agency's lawyer announced later that Flavian would be suspended indefinitely. People posted his old clips and rewrote his early glory as cautionary tales. Sponsors wrote letters to the platform asking for policy changes.
He tried to blame others, to swing from anger to shame, to demand understanding. He denied, then he cried, then he sought to bargain. He implored the fans for mercy and then got up to promise he would return "a better man." The crowd's mood was a turning machine: it devoured his plea and spat it out.
At the end, somebody in the press—cruelly efficient—measured line by line that which he had done and those he had led astray. He lost followers overnight. He went from being a star to a man pleading onstage. He had to face adjunct punishment: forfeiting gifts, refunds, public apologies. People filmed him apologizing on the street. He deleted his accounts. Then he returned to do the only thing left: speak the truth in the raw.
"People are telling me my career's over," he said in a final video. "Maybe that's right. I'm tired."
He stopped. He put a hand to his mouth, eyes red.
Around him, cameras clicked. The punishment was not a legal sentence but a social execution: sponsors fled, former colleagues who had used him turned away. He lost a thousand small things: private messages, the right to be shown mercy on some social wart.
"Good," someone in the comments wrote. "Let him sit with it."
At that public reckoning, I watched Flavian boil, then break. I saw the way his expressions changed from proud to arrogant to pleading. I saw the watchers move from entertainment to morality theater. People filmed and broadcasted his implosion. It was cruel, but it was also rightful—there was a moral arc where people had to hold someone accountable instead of letting spectacle rule.
Luke was there afterward, and he hugged me. He cried quietly once and told me: "Thank you for staying."
That night I finally told Torsten—my boss—the thing I'd been avoiding.
"You looked for me," I said.
He touched the table and said nothing, and then he laughed and said: "You are very young to be so angry about fairness."
"I am not angry," I lied.
"Of course you are," he said. "It's useful."
He admitted: "When I was lower on the ladder, I said 'shit' all the time. I used it to mark things I feared losing control over. People think I'm angry. I'm not. I test."
"Why the streams?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It is honest money and honest light. It is also a place to say 'I am not a monster' in a different room."
"And the midnight broadcasts?"
"I don't know," he said. "I wanted to be less like a ledger. Also,"—he smiled with a grim edge—"it is fun to see the faces of people who think I'm all coal."
We sat in the late office while the city hummed.
"You could have told me," I said finally.
"I could have lied," he answered. "But you will only remember me either way. There is little to be gained by telling the ones who cannot keep a secret."
I laughed at that, and he said: "Kori."
"Hm?"
"Stay on the second slide," he ordered, not looking at me.
"Torsten?" I asked.
"Do your thing," he said.
That day, when my files saved, Torsten gave me a small, rare smile.
"Do not get used to it," he said.
We all get what we deserve, in pieces.
The rest of the story is long. There are nights where Torsten and I stood by a window and watched trains pass while silence enclosed us. He taught me to hold a meeting, but he also taught me to shut my mouth when the wind wanted to blow up dust.
Luke kept going. He learned to host without breaking and never again let a stranger ask for an undignified thing. He paid me back in tiny installments and generosity: he learned to be reliable and he brought me coffee.
Flavian's punishment lingered, like an echo of a theater you've left. He returned months later with a half-smile and quiet hands and strength full of cracks. He would stand in small clubs and apologize; sometimes his music was good and sometimes it wasn't. People debated whether his career should be over or rebuilt.
As for Torsten and me, we kept the odd hours. He still said "shit" like a measure, and sometimes he slipped into a live stream persona like a man trying on a strange coat.
Once, late, he said into my darkness: "You are not six-married-two-kids."
"Thank you," I said.
He looked at me and for once did not say "shit."
Instead he said, quietly, like a promise shaped into a breath: "Keep the report. And laugh."
I wanted to end the story in a simple way, but life is not tidy.
So I keep telling it: I learned to make money talk and to not let the noise of live rooms decide my worth. I learned that some people redeem themselves in stages, and some people are punished publicly until the lesson bleeds through. I learned that Torsten is not a monster and not entirely gentle. I learned that Luke's hands can hold me steady when the world tilts.
And one night, when the clock struck one—my private little bell—we both heard it and laughed. Not always because it was funny but because an alarm that once measured dread now marked a time when two people, one who said "shit" too much and one who forgave with a stubborn heart, could both be awake and still willing to stay.
The End
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