Sweet Romance13 min read
My Little Nose, Big Plans
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I was born twice.
"I know that's a strange way to start," I said, watching the chandelier glitter over the long table, feeling my soft cheek pressed to a silk cushion because that was what three worried brothers did when they wanted a nap and a drama at once. "But it's true."
My name? Marta Sullivan. I remembered mistakes, lab notebooks, the smell of antiseptic and success—then a rash of bright light and the body of a one-month-old in velvet. I blinked three times, and the world's big hands kept doing what big hands do.
"Why is there a banquet?" I asked, and someone laughed like they’d been asking the same question all their lives.
"It's your full-month, sweetheart," my mother, Jen Delgado, said, smoothing my skirt. "And it's also an engagement ceremony. Keep that smile on."
"Engagement?" I felt every adult in the room settle like a weight. "With who?"
"With the Gu family," my father, Calvin Blackburn, explained in that low, dangerous tone that meant they'd been making alliances since before I could toddle. "A promise between houses."
Promise. I was old enough inside to know what that word meant: obligations that lasted. I did not like how my tiny palms felt already tied.
Across the room, a boy sat like a statue with hair black as midnight and eyes that held a small storm. He was ten then, and already his face looked carved by a careful hand.
"Who is that?" I squinted.
"That's Edison Payne," someone whispered. "He'll be your betrothed."
Edison looked at me, expression unreadable. I, who had once diagnosed complex syndromes with a sniff and a glance, found my senses sharp even in this small body. I smelled garden rain, cedar, and a faint, stubborn bitterness from the boy's clothes.
"Would you like to sit with him, Marta?" my mother sang, pinning a ribbon to my dress.
"I would rather not," I said, and then: "Wait—that's my unspoken thought, but I'm a baby, so no one listens to that part."
They laughed. They set me into Edison's arms, and everyone cooed.
"Look at them," my aunt chuckled. "A future couple."
Edison hugged me stiffly, the way someone who has been trained into a role does. His face paled as warmth pooled down his black shirt. I felt a wetness soak into the cloth.
"He's been marked!" one cousin cried, and the room dissolved into teasing.
"That's a special honor," an uncle declared.
I squirmed. I squawked. I had never wanted a life predetermined. As the laughter rose, a strange scent brushed my nose—something like morning pine and old books, layered with a chemical tang. It tickled a memory: the smell of a failed lab run, the metallic tang of panic.
"Someone bathed him," Edison said, a brittle smile in his voice. "I'll wash him up."
"No!" I pre-empted with a wail so earnest it cooled the room. "I will not be bathed by him!"
My mother scooped me back, but years later I'd remember the way Edison watched me: confounded, annoyed, and a little bit curious. It would be a small, steady curiosity that would soften in ways neither of us expected.
Later, in the hush of a sunlit nursery, a girl with a neck of curls and a face polished like a doll peered down at me.
"Why do you get everything?" she hissed. "Why do you get the ribbon, the attention, the good things?"
"You mean the fortune handed down by generations of people with agendas?" My tiny jaw set.
"Are you speaking?" she demanded. "You're only a baby."
"That is an offensive thing to say to someone with a doctorate in my head," I thought. "And then she pinched my leg."
I screamed. Her fingers left red crescents on my soft skin.
"She grabbed me!" I tried to explain, but adults are deaf to infants' reasoning unless gold or profit is involved.
"How dare you touch our Marta," Isaac Ryan—my eldest brother—snapped, appearing like a shield. "Get out."
"She could be hurt," he said to the assembled family. "We won't have it."
The scene escalated. The other girl's parents protested. The school and business alliances clicked like gears. They bowed to money and influence and named winners.
"Remove them," my father said. "The safety of our daughter is not a bargaining chip."
They left. I stayed inside, small and oddly protected by the weight of people who suddenly circled like satellites.
Years passed by, the kind of fast my memory reassembled in shards. I learned to walk. I learned to read faces. I discovered that my sense of smell had become supernaturally precise—the faintest chemical variance told me if someone was tired, sick, or lying. It was a scientist's curse and a child's advantage.
"Edison, you shouldn't have come earlier," my brother Luciano Dean said one afternoon as we played in a garden that smelled like jasmine and home. "It's our family day."
"I came to say thank you," Edison answered quietly. "For the other day—"
"You saved my grandfather," I blurted.
Edison's hand was still. "You have a nose," he said in a tone that suggested novelty. "Can you tell what's in this bottle?"
He held up a small vial. I sniffed: pepper, cassia, a base note of vetiver, and a trace of jasmine absolute. The list came from a mouth I didn't own: "Cardamom, cassia, jasmine absolute, vetiver, sandalwood."
Edison blinked. "That's my new blend," he said. "No one knows the formula except me."
I felt a strange thrill. For the first time since I had to be changed by an aunt's clumsy hands, someone had treated me as if my mind mattered. Edison looked at me like a person with hidden dimensions. The world, I decided, would be more complicated than I had planned.
"Will you help me again?" he asked. "No favors—just...tell me if it's right."
"Yes," I said. My voice was small but steady. "If I help, you can help me later."
He hesitated. "What do you want?"
"Freedom," I answered. "When we both want it. Or at least the chance to choose."
Edison studied me for a long beat. Then he offered a faint, carefully measured smile. "Deal."
So my life settled into patterns: play, schooling, a parade of tutors, and a curious friendship with Edison that grew like roots finding water. He was older in a way that made him careful with words but ferocious with loyalty. The world gave him everything—beauty, talent, and a scent-business family that expected miracles.
"Don't forget to practice piano," my brother Shane Bell warned one evening, smoothing my hair. "You can't let all your talents go to your nose."
"I won't," I promised. "I'll be a triumphant maestro or perfumer or both."
My little court of followers—three girls from school who first wanted to bully me—gradually became my circle. Elle Hansen, Jenna Garza, and Astrid Meyer followed my lead like three shy satellites. I named them my "small squad" and, of course, used them.
"You're making them your allies," Isaac observed. "Careful."
"I'm making them my allies," I corrected. "You'd be amazed how useful a tiny leader can be."
One by one I taught them about choices. They wanted to be loved; I taught them to be wanted for themselves. They wanted to be seen; I taught them how to shine without burning.
Then there was Kyler Lucas.
"He is arrogant," my brother Luciano whispered in a hallway one day. "He thinks he can swallow markets."
"Who?" I asked.
"Kyler Lucas. His family owns a lot of influence. They've been squeezing Edison’s company."
I smelled the bitterness before I saw Kyler—the sharp, metallic smell of money and machination. He arrived at a perfume contest months later, and his presence was a cut of winter air.
"He's been using unfair means," Luciano told me. "There's talk of copying formulas, of contracts signed in the shadows."
I frowned. "That's illegal."
"It’s also cruel," Edison said. "They'll stop at nothing."
A competition was held. The auditorium hummed with expectation. Edison worked like a man making a promise to himself. Kyler smiled like a man already crowned. My heart thudded like a little drum.
I had plans—tiny, meticulous things only a person who remembered laboratories could do. I gathered evidence, sniffing out the differences in Kyler's blend until I detected a low note that I knew was Edison’s, altered enough to be unrecognizable to most but not to me.
"He stole your heart's base," I told Edison when I found him pacing outside the stage, his hands shaking like he wanted to ache and could not. "But he didn't perfectly copy it. There are things you can prove."
He looked at me with a gratitude that made my small chest warm. "Do it," he said.
"Leave the public to me," I told him.
We set the stage like a delicate trap. Edison presented with grace. Kyler preened. The judges murmured. And then I did something only a small person could do: I walked up on stage during the final sweep of scents, arms impossibly chubby, and held up a row of small, nondescript bottles.
"May I?" I asked the head judge.
She blinked, then nodded. "Why not."
I began to tell them, in a voice as clear as any microscope glass, what I smelled: accords that fit, then notes that copied each other line by line. I spoke of cardamom and cassia, of jasmine absolute and vetiver—the exact sequence I had told Edison months before. I revealed the line of scent signatures Kyler had lifted and rearranged.
"It sounds like a child's trick," Kyler scoffed, but I had already planted the seed.
"Can you explain this?" I asked, and I held up a testing strip where a compound had fluoresced under a simple reagent we coaxed out of an ally in the lab.
The judges smelled, frowned, took their notes. Kyler's smile froze. Edison’s expression stayed even, but his fingers tightened on the bottle.
A senior judge rose. "This is a serious accusation," she said. She asked Kyler for samples. The samples were tested. The room filled with a new scent: the cold tang of betrayal.
The board decided. Kyler's award was revoked that day. The sponsors shied away. A major investor—one who had stood beside Kyler last season—quietly withdrew support in the middle of the awards.
Kyler's face shifted in front of everyone. That emotion I had read in newborns and in the lab was there: the slide from arrogance down to disbelief, then denial, then a thin hysteria at being publicly unmasked. He tried to laugh. He tried to charm. People turned away. His mother sent lawyers, but the photograph and the samples and the judge's statement stayed like witnesses carved into the room.
In the hall, a crowd had gathered. Phones recorded. Someone posted the samples' test results on social media. Kyler staggered through the crush; his friend group thinned, and even his father's boardroom allies whispered differently.
Kyler's fall was not a single scene but a slow unwinding: clients canceled contracts, lenders requested audits, a major supplier pulled back. At a luncheon where Kyler’s investors gathered to ask questions, he stood up in front of a hundred eyes and tried to demand their loyalty.
"You don't understand," he pleaded. "This was a mistake. It wasn't theft!"
A woman at the back—one of his own company's long-time employees—stood up. "We signed ethics guidelines," she said quietly. "We stand by them. If you cannot respect them, you cannot lead us."
"Hear, hear," others murmured. The words were soft, the blade sharp.
Kyler's face crumpled. He tried to shout again, to point fingers, to call his detractors liars. His voice trembled. He dropped his eyes only to find cameras tracing his every move. He had become a spectacle, not of his choosing.
That very week, at a shareholders' meeting, his father publicly distanced the family firm. "We will review all affiliations," his father intoned. "Our reputation matters more than quick profit."
Kyler's silence then screamed. The man who had believed his lineage made him above reproach now found himself with investors who wanted transparency. Lawsuits followed, as did inquiries.
It was not an arrest and it was not violence, but it was ruin enough: the reputation tumbled, the cozy deals evaporated. He watched as people he had used like pawns turned their backs. The worst part, I think, was watching his own certainty—his entire map of the world—collapse.
That was my first taste of consequences done in public.
But fairy tales in real life never stay clean. The other punishments that mattered were quieter and nearer home.
Years after the banquet, when my scar—a pale arc where another girl's jealous hands had bitten—was still visible on my thigh, families gathered again in the same hall for a holiday reception. Kimber Komarov—who had been the girl then—had grown into a woman whose family had tried to claw back what they had lost.
She arrived with a smile like varnished money.
"Look at our Kimber," her mother cooed. "She's made good."
Inside, guests clinked glasses. I sat with my brothers, small and solid in their different ways. Isaac's eyes never left the door. Luciano's jaw was set into something that read like a promise. Shane munched on a canapé with the earnest belligerence of someone who loved rules.
Kimber drifted in, and I smelled perfume and desperation. People who had seen her as a child stepped back in recognition of the person she had tried to be. It was time.
"Kimber," I said, loud enough that she blinked. "Do you remember the nursery?"
"I do," she said smoothly. "How could I forget?"
"Do you remember the day you left with your parents?" I asked. "Do you remember asking for mercy?"
"You mean when you accused my family?" she said.
"No. The day you hurt me." All at once the room shifted; someone near the buffet pointed a phone.
Kimber's composure thinned. "You’re making a scene," she said. "This is ridiculous."
"Is it?" I asked. "They were children. Do you think you can hide what you did behind a fortune?"
A hush settled. My brothers moved a fraction closer. "Speak plainly," Isaac said.
I opened a small leather folder. Inside were photos, old school nurse records, letters from parents who had once allied with my family and then fled. There was a recorded conversation—a voicemail—where her mother had whispered her strategy the day they left, the exact one their family had used to try to profit from a hurt child.
"She hurt me and her parents tried to profit from my silence," I said. "You all saw it. You decided then who you wanted to be. Now, tonight, at this reception, I want you to answer in front of everyone. Why did you hurt me when we were little?"
Kimber's face went pale. Her mouth formed words, then unformed them. "This is—this is slander," she protested. "You have no proof."
"Your mother has a message on her phone," I said, and pressed play.
The room listened to a voice saying, in crisp, unrepentant tones, "If you make my daughter the hero tonight, perhaps the Sullivans will negotiate." It was a bargaining voice, a human one, small and ugly. The audio matched dates. Guests shifted. Bodies exhaled. Cameras found angles.
Kimber's bravado evaporated into a tight, animal fear.
"You...this is—" she stammered, reaching for a drink like it might anchor her.
"Why did you hurt me?" I repeated.
She tried to deny it. She blamed me for being dramatic. She accused me of fabricating evidence.
"Look at the scar," I said, lifting the hem of my dress enough that the pale patch showed. It wasn't flamboyant—nothing theatrical. Just a mark. "You used your hands like weapons. You used your parents like accountants. For what? Pride? For a contract?"
"I—" Kimber's voice broke. She looked around for rescue. No one rose. The guests were silent, many of them remembering the roaring power their own families once had when they had forced a family to retreat.
Then the whispers began. "She lied to get us business." "I remember hearing a rumor." "How dare—"
"Do you admit it?" my brother asked.
Kimber's face crumpled in a way that made her more human than any of the elaborate apologies I'd seen on television. There was no grand repentance, just the gradual collapse of someone who had bet their entire life on falsehoods.
"My mother told me to," Kimber sobbed. "She said if we stitched this wound into a story...I didn't think—"
"You didn't think," someone muttered. "You hurt a child."
People leaned forward. Phones came out again. This time, though, it was not a nuance of a judge's decision. This was social accounting: leaders and neighbors watching a woman who had thought she could build a life on a lie.
Her parents came forward, ashen-faced. "We—we thought we were protecting our daughter," Kimber's father whispered. "We are sorry."
The crowd's reaction was a tide. Some whispered about resignations from parish boards, about defunding small charities the family had hoped to hold as leverage. People spoke of damage to businesses. A few guests clapped—softly, with the sound of people who had waited a long time for truth.
Kimber tried to explain, and then she began the arc most liars know: from denial to indignation to plea. "Please," she begged. "Please don't ruin us."
"What do you want?" I asked.
She said that she never imagined the consequences. She begged for forgiveness. The crowd watched her crumble as her friends withdrew with indignant politeness. A woman clicking her tongue closed a business contract negotiated by Kimber's family. A man stood up and announced he would remove Kimber's parents' names from a donors' plaque.
Kimber's eyes filled with tears that were no longer rhetorical. She realized the cost: the world had decided to withhold favor. It watched and judged. It could not make her undo the hurt, but it could retract the scaffolding of advantage she'd built.
Her reaction changed: from fierce denial to pleading, then to a hollow, stunned remorse. People took pictures. The nursery's memory hung like a curtain between judgments. She begged; people recorded. A mother in the room, who ran a small nonprofit Kimber's parents had once supported, took the stage and asked Kimber to personally apologize to every team they had harmed. Kimber had to accept.
It was ugly and it was public and it was, for once, complete.
Afterwards, the family sought to apologize in quieter rooms. The damage? Not legal destruction, but it was severe: business partners withdrew, invitations dried up, the family name became complicated in the circles they had once hoped would lift them higher. Kimber's father lost a planned partnership when sponsors deemed association too risky. They scrambled, and the scramble became a lesson in how small deceit becomes a wedge that splits everything.
"That was the only way that felt like justice," Isaac said softly later, wrapping me in a brother's arms. "You wanted exposure and clarity, not revenge."
"I wanted to be able to go to sleep without thinking my scar would decide my life," I answered. "I wanted to know that if someone hurt me, I could stand up and be heard."
Edison's hand found mine as we left the banquet—his grip warm and steady. "You were brave," he said.
"No," I replied. "I was stubborn."
We walked home. The night smelled of rain and the last note of his test bottle—sandalwood, but with an added layer of quiet cedar. I kept thinking about judgment and care, about lines people draw and what happens when someone refuses to stay inside one.
Not all endings are bright. Later, Kyler's legal fights cost him resources and pride. Kimber's family learned how fragile reputation could be. I learned that the smell of honesty was like cold water: shockingly clean.
Edison and I spoke often after that: not as two people bound by ink but as two people bound by mutual small mercies.
"Do you remember when you told me you wanted to be free?" he asked one evening, his face washed in the weak light of his perfume lab.
"I remember," I said.
He watched me. "Then let's keep the promise. When we're older, we'll do it properly. If either of us wants out, say so. We'll dissolve the expectation together."
"Deal," I said, and tucked my fingers into his. The promise felt older than the ring my mother had once pinned to my dress. It felt real.
We had small victories, too. Elle, Jenna, and Astrid worked hard; they moved from being my followers to being people who led their own causes. Elle studied biotech and could now spot contamination. Jenna became an advocate for arts in school. Astrid learned to manage money and didn't let it manage her.
"You're a small general," Isaac teased once.
"I'm a small scientist," I corrected. "One who talks a lot."
"That's practically the same thing," Luciano said, smiling.
When people asked me what I had learned, I'd say this: you can't orchestrate a life entirely, but you can change the score. You can plant small, stubborn seeds—friendship, honesty, a well-placed test result—and watch slow, stubborn justice grow.
Years from the first banquet, Edison and I stood again in a big room, but this time neither of us was forced to promise. We had chosen. We stood with a small, shiny bottle between our hands—the scent inside a map of all the things that had happened: cardamom for warmth, jasmine for memory, cedar for steadiness.
"I release you if you want to leave," Edison murmured.
"And I release you," I said.
We laughed. We kissed. The room smelled like cedar and rain and home.
I keep a tiny music box on my bedside table now. Its tune is soft and slightly off-key. When I wind it, the tin melody starts and I think of the first banquet, the nursery, the people who tried to decide my life for me. When the tune finishes, I pick up the small vial Edison and I created—our scent—and press its stopper.
"It's our story," I whisper.
And I know, quite plainly, that nothing and no one will ever decide it for me again.
The End
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