Sweet Romance11 min read
My Time-Traveling Son, My Cold Idol, and the Neighbor Who Stayed
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I never imagined that a hand holding my wrist would change the course of my life.
"Mom!" he cried, face lit like a child about to tell the best joke in the world.
I blinked. He was at the school gate, earnest and bright, clinging to my arm as if I belonged to him.
"Excuse me?" I said. "Who's your mom?"
He looked at me like I had asked the sun to stop shining. "You are. I'm your son. I'm from thirty years later. I'm here to save you."
I pulled my phone out like a reflex. "Hello, 911? There's a guy with a broken brain here."
He pouted. "We can do a DNA test," he said. "If you don't believe me."
"Do you know how old I am?" I asked, leaving sarcasm wide open.
He flashed a grin that belonged on a poster: "Eighteen."
"Great," I said. "I'm nineteen. How was I pregnant when I was one?"
"Because I—" He began, but didn't finish, because a cool voice cut through the noise.
"What is going on here?"
My breath stopped like someone had put a hand over my chest. He was the reason I stayed late at the library, the reason my phone screen had his name saved in a dozen quiet folders. Leonardo Brown—my senior, the kind who seemed carved from winter.
"Let go," he told the boy holding my arm.
"I won't!" the boy snapped.
Then he did something I did not expect: he spun, swung me behind him like a shield, and faced Leonardo with the kind of small fury I would later learn he had in excess.
"Who are you?" Leonardo asked, cold and precise.
"Briggs." The boy said it like a name that needed no last word.
His back was a bristle of sharpness. He was terrified of Leonardo, but bristling at anyone else. That alone made my eyebrows climb.
"Erin?" Leonardo's voice softened the tiniest fraction when he looked at me. It was not much, but my heart did the stupid thing it always did—hop.
"He's insane," I mouthed to Leonardo.
"She's my mom," Briggs answered stubbornly.
I stared at Briggs, then at the senior I had loved from the distance of ten lecture halls. My mouth felt like cotton.
"Briggs, right?" I said finally. "Show me your ID."
He opened his mouth, then shut it. "They'll check and don't find me," he said. "They'll call me a fake. But I'm not."
"I'm going to the police," I told him.
"Please don't," Briggs begged. "You'll be in danger. You can't be with Leonardo."
I almost laughed. "Why are you telling me this like he's a source of plague?"
"Because he is," Briggs said, eyes a little too serious for someone who had just sprinted away from campus security with me on his shoulders.
I kept my face calm. You couldn't convince a lunatic to stop being a lunatic by looking mad. "Okay, mister time traveler," I said. "Prove it."
He stared. "You once nearly died for him," he whispered.
I imagined a soap opera. I imagined a prank. I imagined an elaborate lie. But Briggs' tone carried something that didn't feel staged. Worry, maybe. Or grief that hadn't learned to hide.
"Leave me alone," I said. "If you try anything, I call the police."
"Please," he said, folding his hands like someone praying. "Don't like Leonardo."
"Why?" I asked, unable to help it. "He's perfect."
"He's cold," Briggs said. "He has someone—someone he loved before, and he never stopped loving her."
"Everyone has someone," I said. "What's wrong with that?"
"She gets sick. He uses you."
It sounded absurd, sudden, and jagged like a stone in my shoe. I decided to hum along. "Prove it."
He told a story so quiet it felt like being read to in a midnight ward. Leonardo, the white moon—someone important and absent, a need for organs, a bargain made in desperation. "He asked you to save her," Briggs said. "You agreed because you loved him. You gave a piece of yourself. You didn't wake up."
"That's impossible," I whispered.
"Listen, please," Briggs pleaded. "If you love him, you will be used. If you step close, someone you love will be taken."
By the time he left, the campus had formed a small ring of gossip and murmurs. People photographing, whispering about a crazy boy and his claims. My cheeks burned, and not just from embarrassment. There was a splinter in my chest now—an ugly question I could not swat away.
Days passed. Briggs found ways to appear—on my way back from class, leaning against the gate like he'd never gone, in the library stacks with dog-eared manga (he told me he loved the art), outside the cafeteria carrying two trays like a decent son bringing lunch.
At first I treated him like a child. Then like a nuisance. Then, irreparably, like a person.
Easton Ford lived next door. He was the kind of neighbor who bakes when he’s nervous and laughs at my worst jokes. He rolled into my life with an easy grin and a dangerous habit of taking my hand as if I were already his.
"You're sure you don't like Leonardo anymore?" Briggs would ask sometimes, with that small, accusing innocence.
"Fine," I'd say. "I don't."
Easton became the steady thing in all the oddities. He cooked me simple meals, made me tea without asking, and stared a little too long when he thought I wasn't looking. He also fought when he had to. When Leonardo acted sniffily at my presence, Easton’s jaw would set. When Leonardo's indifference hurt me, Easton's patience wrapped like a bandage.
Leonardo, for his part, evaporated when the mess around me swelled. He watched like someone viewing a problem through glass. He saw me carried off by Briggs and didn't move. He watched others hold me and didn't reach out. When I tried to speak, he'd offer distant advice and a cool correction. Cold, precise—enough to make me feel small.
"You're letting him tell you lies," Leonardo said once, face set like the marble statue in the quad. "Don't be childish."
I hadn't told him everything. I hadn't told anyone everything. But the story kept cracking like old paint. Briggs kept dropping hints. Easton protected me in ways that weren't always loud. People watched.
Then came the day I had to decide whether to walk into a life built on a lie or walk away and break someone else's heart.
"We're not compatible," I said to Leonardo in the small, sunlit coffee shop where he usually sat alone. "You and I don't… we shouldn't fall together."
He blinked like someone unaccustomed to being told what to do.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I found out," I said. "Briggs told me. About the surgery, about the bargain. I won't be someone's tool."
His face went through a few small stages—discomfort, surprise, indignation, and then something cold and sculptural. "You're wrong," he said simply. "That never happened."
It wasn't the denial that stung as much as the casualness. The way he could recast the past like a chess move. But I had a stubbornness now. I had a boy who claimed to be my son, who carried my foolishness as if it were his armor, and someone who held my wrist with gentleness. I had reasons to test truth. I had to.
What followed was not neat. Briggs told me more: dates, hospital wings, names that didn't belong to my time. Easton learned to glare like a man with purpose. Leonardo's posture hardened. Rumors picked up wind. Evidence is a tricky thing, though—real evidence takes time.
And then everything collapsed into the one place where everyone would be watching.
It was the university's annual gala. A thousand faces in small lights, cameras hovering like moths. The faculty, alumni, the news desk from a local channel—everybody important enough to matter.
I didn't intend to make it a battlefield. I came because Easton and I had promised to go, and because Briggs—insistent as ever—put a small recorder into my hand.
"Put it on the table," he said. "When it comes on, don't hide."
I slid the recorder beneath a floral centerpiece, my fingers trembling.
Leonardo came later than expected, all sharp collar and practiced calm. He smiled in that way that always made me forget to breathe.
"Hello," he said, like a prince in a play.
"Hello," I said, and then I let the world spin out.
Briggs started the recorder on cue. He had curated files—hospital bills, a nurse's note, a message thread between Leonardo and someone with disappearing status. The small device was a time-bomb measured in words.
The first clip leaked into the room: a voicemail—the kind where the voice cracks. Leonardo, raw, begging someone to accept help. The second had a nurse's voice, a reprimand about irregularities. The third was the hardest—an old message, stitched from pain: Leonardo asking me to donate a kidney for someone he called "her."
By the time the last clip played, the room had gone still. Conversations died mid-sentence. People looked at Leonardo with a new instrument—eyes sharpened not by admiration but by accusation.
Leonardo's face, which had been carved from frost, flushed. Pride turned to color and then to a strange heat.
"It’s a lie," he said at first, voice small.
"Those are your messages," Briggs said, stepping forward like a child who can't be scared into silence. "You promised her a cure and took Erin's life for it."
The glass chandelier seemed to lean closer. A professor whispered into a phone. Someone in the back swore. Cameras zoomed. A student raised a hand with a phone, live streaming.
Leonardo's reaction I will never forget. It changed frame by frame like a damaged photo.
He smiled first—slow, oily. "This is dramatic," he said. He swept his fingers as if dismissing smoke.
Then his jaw tightened. "Fabrication," he said. "Information about intimacy and medical records is private. You have—"
"That's your handwriting," Briggs said, voice steady.
A murmur. The dean stood. "We need to... investigate," he said, but it was hollow.
Leonardo's face went white. Denial cracked into anger. He advanced on Briggs with a fury I had not seen in him before, a man who could be efficient and ruthless in scholarship, now exposed and primal.
"You're lying," he spat, and reached for Briggs as if to silence a child.
"Hands off," Easton said, stepping between them, half a shield and half a lion.
Someone shouted: "Call security!"
But it was public; it needed spectacle. People pulled out phones. They recorded his slide from respectability to outrage. I saw the expression change—the arrogance slipped; the mask fell away. He pleaded at one point, not with Briggs but with the crowd, "You don't understand—"
Instantly, a hundred people said they did. They understood enough.
Then his attempt at reason turned raw. "It was for a life," he said. "I didn't— I didn't mean—"
"She died," Briggs said simply. "You asked her to save someone you loved, and you didn't save her."
A woman in the back started to cry. A man nearby spat. Someone clapped, half in anger, half in release.
The rest is a loop of small events that stretched like waves. Professors took out phones to capture statements. A journalist asked for comments. Two students blocked Leonardo's path. Security escorted him to the side but not before the dean grabbed onto his sleeve and said the word "expulsion" like a verdict. He reached for legal defense, for denials, for anything that would keep his name from sinking—but in a hall full of witnesses and a streaming camera, words have weight. His legalities could follow later, but social death was fast.
He tried to compose himself. He tried to speak. He tried to cry a small, staged apology and ask for privacy. Then someone near the stage stood up and raised a hand with a printout—an old message thread with his words, time stamps, addresses. A former nurse—someone who had worked nights and had been ignored—walked to the front and called him a liar.
"She trusted you," the nurse said, face pale. "You used her."
Outside the hall, people began to chant—not in unison, but enough to be a wave: "Shame. Shame. Shame."
Leonardo folded. The smirk that had been his policy fell away as if cut by wind. His hands shook. At first he denied until he couldn't deny the evidence pressed under his nose. Then he tried to bargain. "I did it for love," he whimpered, that same coldness melting into something wet and human. "I did it because—"
"You did it because you were selfish," the woman shouted.
He had tried for years to keep a sculpted image. Now the image was dust. There was a moment—twelve heartbeats—where he looked like a man who had watched his life unspool and had found his hands empty. Pride gave way to desperation. He moved from being the proud senior to a pleading figure seeking rescue. "Please," he begged, "I didn't know—"
The crowd had three reactions: some shook their heads and left; some recorded every frame; some stood rooted, eyes burning. Someone stepped forward, a former classmate with a steady hand, and ripped the microphone from his fingers. "You had her die for you," the classmate said. "How many lives are worth your cold heart?"
He fell apart after that—the denial cracking into tears, the arrogance dissolving into begging. He tried to summon the private dignity of a scholar to reason the crowd into calm, but the crowd had already decided. A few hands shoved him. Someone spat. A woman from the hospital faculty said, "You will never teach again." Students started a petition. The dean's face was unreadable as he instructed two administrators to start formal proceedings.
Briggs watched all of this with a calm I could not match. He looked small and huge at once, like someone who had borne a burden and now let it go.
When it was over, Leonardo was escorted out. Cameras followed his retreating figure like vultures. The live stream had half a million viewers by midnight.
That night, social media carved his reputation into overnight history. Alumni unsubscribed. A grant application was dropped. A lover I didn't know about sent a single tweet: "He promised me the world." She deleted it an hour later, too late.
He went from the kind of man who might have married a white moon to someone people muted in feeds. He went from the face I had loved to a name people spat. He had tried to hold his image with steel. He lost it all because truth, once lit, is loud.
After the storm, I sat in a hospital garden with Briggs, who hugged my knees like a kid and then smiled at me like the boy who used to tell jokes under almond trees.
"You did it," he said. "You didn't go. You didn't give him your life for a ghost."
"Did you—" I asked, voice small. "Did you come back to erase him, or to save me?"
"To save you," he said simply. "Because if you had stayed, I wouldn't have been able to remember you."
I looked at Easton, who came back with a bottle of cold water and a towel for my forehead. He sat down and didn't say much, only wrapped his arm around my shoulders like a promise.
Later, the university convened a board. There were investigations. Leonardo defended himself in the cold glare of questions and paper. Lawyers negotiated public statements. The public shaming did not finish all of it—legal systems creak under the weight of evidence—but the punishment was real. He was removed from the fellowship that week. He lost the grant. Students lessened the space for him to walk. He lost the approval of people who had once called him "brilliant." That social punishment, immediate and loud, felt like justice.
I married Easton under a parrot's hapless applause and the embarrassed cheering of friends. Briggs came to the wedding with the quiet smile of someone who had given away something heavy. Easton proposed by kneeling in the sunlight at graduation, aided by the very parrot we'd rescued long ago. He said words that made my heart bruise with sweetness, and I said yes.
We had two children. The boy woke at a small age and told me he remembered waiting. We called him Easton Jr. sometimes, but at home his name was a tumble of laughter, squeals, and pieces of paper art.
Years later, a stranger came to my door with a stack of old news clippings. "You should know," she said, and left. Leonardo, cleaned by time, had tried to rebuild but found doors closed. He had apologies and lonely exiles and a ledger of things he could not undo.
I kept one scar from the whole thing: a fist-shaped hollow in my chest where trust had been. I kept Briggs' grin like a talisman.
Once, near the river where Briggs had first told me to be careful, Easton and I sat and watched the ducks like two tired lovers.
"You look back sometimes," he said.
"I will always look back," I admitted. "To remember what almost happened. To remember him."
He put his head on my shoulder and squeezed. "We didn't lose you," he said.
"No," I said. "But I lost something else. A life I could have had, and a boy that once was."
Easton rubbed my fingers. "You have now."
At night, when the house goes quiet, sometimes I take out a small recorder Briggs once slipped me and press play. His voice says silly things—"Mom, you owe me cookies"—and I laugh and cry in the same breath.
Briggs is gone in the visible way a ghost is gone—he appears sometimes in letters, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in the little kindnesses left on the kitchen table. He taught me the hard truth: you cannot build a life on someone else's needs. Love must be given, not demanded. And when people ask who saved me, I touch the mark on my wrist and say, "A son I never had and a man who refused to be indifferent."
The End
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