Sweet Romance15 min read
"Not a Signature, Don't Be Nervous"
ButterPicks13 views
I never liked late study sessions, but that winter evening the darkness came faster than I expected. The classroom heat felt like a heavy blanket—dozens of breathing bodies steaming the air until it felt thick. Someone left the back door cracked; a cold gust slid through and for a minute the stale classroom felt bearable. Then someone slammed it shut and the warmth rushed back.
"Everyone, look up," Regina Duffy tapped the blackboard, her voice a practiced bell. "We’ll go register fingerprints after this. Line up by gender. Keep the stairs quiet."
I nearly jumped out of my skin. "Finally," my chest wanted to shout. Instead I stayed my face—the same impassive, alone shield I always wore. The group surged like water when she said that. Most of my classmates didn't come to evening study willingly; a chance to get outside set them loose.
I lagged at the back. I was used to being last. Years of one-person routines made me awkward in crowds—too blunt, too quiet, bad at fitting in. I kept my collar closed and breathed the cold air that followed us down the steps.
When I reached the little office to scan my thumb, the room was small and sleepy. Two boys were there already. One half-asleep, and the other leaning like he thought he ruled the place.
"Name?" the boy on the right asked, voice rough.
"Leonardo David," the first replied. He slid an ID across.
"Press your thumb down."
The boy on the left lounged with his elbow supported on the desk, jaw slack. He squinted at his phone, then at me when I came forward.
"Name?" he called.
"Delilah Gomez," I answered. My name sounded quieter than it should.
"Press your thumb."
I did. The machine barked once. I thought I was done.
"Wait." The left boy's voice stopped the trickle of my steps. "It didn't register. Again."
My palms got hot. His tone—half bored, half amused—wasn't kind. He reached across the table and offered what looked like a tissue.
"Here. Wipe it."
A hand slid into my line of vision. It stopped there, palm up, with a mole near the web between thumb and index. The hand was pale, strong. He passed me something and the scent of cigarette smoke clung faintly to his sleeve.
"Don’t be nervous," he said, and there was a lazy smirk in his voice. "It’s not like signing a contract."
I wiped my thumb. The machine registered. I mumbled, "Thanks," and stepped away before the weirdness could grow roots.
When my back was out of view, Victor Christensen stretched and laughed. "That girl—cold as a block of ice."
"She's…different," the other, Carlos Gentile, observed. "Like she carries winter with her."
I kept walking. I kept my silence. It was easier.
I didn't know then that the cigarette-smelling boy belonged to the handful of names that filled my private archive—the ones I watched without letting myself be watched back. His name was Sebastian Romano.
The winter pressed on. At home the apartment felt empty; my parents had moved away years ago because of work and left me with my grandmother until she passed. The world had a way of rearranging itself around that absence. I learned not to depend on people to show up. It became safer that way.
The first time I noticed Sebastian it wasn't at night. It was during high school drill. He moved differently from the rest—an easy, dangerous tilt in his shoulders, and an indifferent smile like he owned the sun rising over the field.
"Go," a boy behind me joked as they pushed forward to get breakfast. "Sebastian tossed his breakfast at someone—classic."
He threw food like it was a safe joke. He glanced at me as his silhouette crossed the line of light. For a second, the sun caught his eyes and shifted something cold inside me.
I kept looking, not out of bravery. It was a small, secret bead of attention—no one else knew. Later people described him as a perpetual chaos, the kind of golden-boy who took whatever he wanted and left nothing but rumors. I was safer watching from a distance.
Rumors clung to him: top of the grade, a student association presence, a parade of girlfriends. One of those girls was Hailey Fleming, until the night she left a party in tears.
I heard it in fragments the next morning.
"Sebastian dumped Hailey!"
"Really? They said he'd settled down."
"At her birthday party, she left crying. I saw it."
I sat there at my desk, blank-faced. A part of me felt something like a small, guilty flourish of relief. I knew how fickle these things could be; Hailey’s heartbreak would be a short-lived headline.
In class the next day Sebastian's group swaggered in like always. "You were at the party?" someone teased him.
"She's dramatic," he shrugged. "Not my responsibility."
He flicked his cigarette without looking.
Later, when I slipped and almost fell on the wet stair rail, strong hands caught me. A voice by my ear said, "Careful. Don’t trip."
I muttered thanks and fled before the encounter could get complicated.
People around Sebastian thought he was made of sharp edges and sparks. He made blunt jokes the way someone tosses a grenade—freely, uncaring of the mess. When he and his friends teased each other, the classroom laughed. But when he stared at me, there was a softness I couldn't name—then he'd shift and be stormy again.
"You're cold," a friend teased him, and he replied, "Not my type."
That settled it in my head. He could be cruel, sure—Northern winters breed cold people—but no one’s heart is that bulletproof.
Weeks passed. I watched him avoid people and create trouble, but I also learned strange things—the small kindnesses he did when no one looked. He gave a lighter to a girl who had never held one. He picked up a stray page from the floor and smoothed it like it mattered. He could be both a storm and a warm shelter, in a confusing at-once way I didn't know how to name.
One night I followed a strange impulse and walked to the glittering heart of town, thinking I'd find Sebastian there. The city looked like a jewelry box—light spilling from the windows of the "city within the city." I stood at the edge and watched him from across the street leaning against a wall outside a billiard hall. Smoke coiled from his mouth.
Hailey was there too, in a silk dress that glowed under the streetlights. "Please," she pleaded, voice frayed, "let’s just work this out. I know you didn't mean it."
Sebastian said, flat and cold, "I did it on purpose. Did I think you'd like that?"
Her face crumpled. He watched her walk away and finished his cigarette.
I didn't move from my hiding place. For the first time, pity and something more complicated rose up in me. I hated how easily he shredded people. I hated that the pain in Hailey's eyes felt like a proof.
Outside the pool hall, he laughed with friends and rumbled off on a row of silver bikes. The movement made me feel both sick and electric.
One night, after a rough rumor stirred, Sebastian came to my building. I saw him through the dim stairwell light. He hammered on my front door and stood there, puffing, restless. When my door opened he shoved it and my apartment splintered into fragile normalcy.
"What do you want?" I hissed.
"To tell you to avoid me," he answered with a forceful calm. "Or do you want me to explode in front of you? Either you learn to avoid me or you accept what happens."
He turned and left, throwing a bag of over-the-counter pills on my steps—acetaminophen, stomach medicine, a paper bag of small bottles. The gesture was half apology, half vague threat. I picked them up and carried them inside like some weird offering.
He didn't come back anymore after that night. The absence felt like relief and a missed chance—both heavy.
A new student came to class. His name was Ludwig Alvarez. He had a gentleness that was quiet and steady. He sat next to me and offered to help with a hard physics problem.
"Need help with this?" he asked, inclination to his voice.
"Yes." I handed him my notebook. He explained simply, and I understood. For the first time in a long while, someone offered me patience. It felt good, like finding a stable chair in a crowded room.
We studied together. Word spread. People speculated. "Are they dating?" murmurs went around. I didn't answer. I didn't want to be labeled or pulled into some crude storyline. I only wanted the math problems to stop feeling like walls.
At the same time, Sebastian watched. Once, he came by the classroom and leaned against the doorway while I worked with Ludwig. There was an edge in his voice that I couldn't decode.
"Your desk is messy," he said, then, to Ludwig: "Be a good student."
I didn't know what to do with the way my chest fluttered. Part of me wanted to collect those flutterings and call them brave. Another part warned me to bury them.
Rumors swelled that I had become "his girlfriend." Once, at a fancy gathering Sebastian dragged me to when I didn't know where else to go, a returning friend—Cassandra Friedrich—walked in and blurted, "Is she Sebastian's girlfriend?"
Sebastian wrapped an arm around me and said, casual as a shrug, "Yes."
It was the first time anyone had claimed me. The room tilted. I felt like a marionette being pulled in an unfamiliar direction. Cassandra's face went taut, then hurt, and she looked like she had swallowed gristle. The party buzzed with that electricity—some people celebrated, some whispered. Sebastian's arm around me was warm and possessive. He said things like, "Don't talk like you own me," and I learned how his mouth could sound cruel and tender in the same sentence.
The weeks after that were a blur of small, electric moments.
"You're trembling," he said one night when our hands brushed. He smoothed my sleeve as if the act cost nothing, and I felt like the world made sense for a second.
A few mornings later he put his jacket around my shoulders when my teeth were chattering from the cold. "Don't catch a cold," he murmured.
"Thanks," I said.
His smiles were rare. When he smiled at me—only at me—something in his eyes softened. "I don't laugh like that for anyone else," one of his friends said once. It felt absurd and somehow glorious to be the exception.
We had our private language of touching—a careful hand over mine in crowded hallways, a cigarette passed under streetlight, a lighter I hadn't known how to work until he showed me. There were small tests, dares, moments where my hands grazed a stranger's under the pretense of fun and my chest roared.
But danger was never far. Sebastian's family life was a jagged thing. His father, Maximiliano Hussein, had an anger like a churning undercurrent. I heard stories: business dinners turned ugly, men who called and threatened, the taste of shame mixed into Sebastian's silence.
One night, I walked into a house that felt like it belonged to a different climate. The living room shimmered with bright chandeliers. A man in a dark suit sat with a cigarette. He looked like a sculpted map of all the ways rage could be dignified.
"You're late," he said without looking up.
Sebastian stood still. The man—Maximiliano—suddenly threw a mug across the room. "You tell me where you were!" He grabbed a nearby ashtray and slammed it against Sebastian hard enough to leave a mark.
I watched, heart thudding against my ribs, as Sebastian absorbed each blow like a man hollowed out. He didn't fight back. My fingers clenched on the edge of a chair.
"You're a disgrace," Maximiliano spat. "You think you're better than me because you have a bit of success? You owe me obedience."
Sebastian took the blows and didn't retaliate. The sound of crockery shattering, the soft wet noise as his cheek split—it's a memory that never settles. After the man left, Sebastian rolled up his sleeve to hide the bright swelling bruise. He didn't tell anyone, and I felt like he'd bricked the truth behind his silence.
I couldn't let it stand.
Months later, while I navigated the awkwardness of being his girl—publicly on his arm but privately fragile—I learned something would change when people see the truth with their own eyes. He was not the only villain in our lives. Maximiliano's abuse wasn't locked behind closed doors forever.
One evening, our school group was invited to a charity event at a hotel where Sebastian's father had interests. The room glittered with wealth and strangers who loved to look at each other. People smiled like gulls. It was there that things changed.
I stood near the window, hands around a lukewarm cup of tea. Sebastian had been elsewhere, his attention pulled. A woman I recognized—Dixie Floyd, an older friend of the crew—had been helpful to me before. She winked over and left to take a call. I felt somewhat out of place in my uniform among silk and glitter, and that was when Maximiliano entered.
He walked into the ballroom like a storm front, taking space without asking. He looked around until his eyes landed on a small cluster of people—me included. He lifted his glass as if a toast would absolve everything.
"Good evening," he said to the room in a voice that begged applause. Instead, someone cleared their throat.
I watched him scoop our moment up like a prize. He started telling stories—about investments and influence and how he could fix problems by snapping his fingers. People nodded, lapping it up.
Then, like a strip pulled from a page, I heard a rumor cross the floor: "Didn't he make someone—"
A woman near the stage tilted her head. She had a trickle of courage in her smile. "We saw photos, you know—"
That was the spark.
"Let me tell you what I saw," someone nearby said, voice steady. A video began to play on a phone. It was a clip—raw and cold—of Maximiliano on a different night, fingers pinching Sebastian's collar, voice low and ugly. There were messages, receipts, and a neighbor's recording claiming they'd heard shouting and the smash of plates.
The air tightened.
Maximiliano's face did three things at once: surprise, then flush, then a sculpted sneer desperately trying to hold its line.
"That's not—" he began.
"Open your mouth and say it's not true," a woman in the room demanded. "How brave."
Phones came out like small cameras of judgment. The clip projected across a big screen someone had angled toward the crowd. I felt the room tilt into a collider of attention. I saw faces angle toward him, mouths forming new verdicts.
"Stop lying," someone hissed.
Maximiliano tried to laugh. The laugh had no legs.
"This is a private matter," he said fiercely, face changing color, the kind of red that was almost theatrical. He looked around at the crowd that had gathered, now forming a ring.
"It happened in public hallways," someone countered. "You can't glass-step over that and pretend it's a business disagreement."
His voice became brittle. "You have no proof."
Phones held proof. Voices listed dates, times, witnesses. One woman spoke up, "We saw bruises. We heard him drunk and screaming. You can't bully him into silence."
He pivoted and tried a classical defense: deny, then belittle. "He's a liar," he snapped at his son, trying to turn it inward. "You're making this up."
Sebastian didn't defend himself. That's what made it sting worse. There was a hush, then a rumble like waves against a cliff as the room's judgment gathered strength. A few people shifted away. A clear official-looking man rose and said, "If this is true, this is assault. We won't stand for it here. Security—"
Cameras buzzed.
Maximiliano's face fell from arrogance into something like panic. First he snapped, then he blurted, "It’s fabricated! I will sue you for slander!" He tried to switch masters—appeal to reputation. People laughed softly. Someone clicked record.
I watched a great man collapse. He backed up, obvious shaking in his jaw. He became small. "I'm the offended party," he lied. "This is ridiculous."
"Ridiculous?" a woman said, voice like gravel. "You break your son's face and wonder why people talk?"
The crowd turned, bristling. There were gasps and whispers and then—this strange, humiliating crescendo—people began to boo.
"You little—" he sputtered, moving from anger into denial. The comic flip of his demeanor unhinged any remaining dignity.
Several students from our school—archives of tiny rebellions—stood up then. One of my classmates, Victor, stepped forward with a steady face. Victor told a story about the man he'd seen at the back alley that evening, how he had stormed out of a car like a tyrant. A woman who worked at the venue mentioned she'd seen Sebastian on the stairs bruised days ago.
The tide turned. The crowd grew loud and unkind in a way that no expensive suit could stop. Phones flashed like miniature courthouse windows. Somebody had the sense to call security and the hotel's PR person. A reporter in a shimmer of smart clothes asked Maximiliano for a statement—he paused and folded like paper.
When the cameras were on him and the accusation rolled, his reactions were ritualistic and telling: first shocked, then angry, then denial, then frantic bargaining. "I am wealthy, influential, beloved!" he wavered. "You are lying for attention. You will ruin me with your falsehoods. Make them stop!"
People around laughed. A circle formed. A man in a black jacket took out a microphone and asked Sebastian if he wanted to say anything. Sebastian looked at his father with a flat, exhausted face and shook his head.
The crowd's response crashed like ice. Some people hissed. One bold woman spat, "Get out of here." Someone else took out their phone and filmed as Maximiliano's mouth formed pleas—first to lawyers, then to a distant conservatory of social connections. He begged people not to judge him too quickly. He said all the things powerful men say when their scaffolding collapses.
A hotel staffer came forward—young, fierce-eyed—and said, "We cannot have this behavior. We will be releasing a statement. Security will escort you out if the evidence continues."
Maximiliano’s show of power withered under the headlamps of witnesses and a crowd’s sudden appetite for truth. He began bargaining for favor. "Listen, let's step outside and solve this," he pleaded. He looked at Sebastian—then at me. His lips quivered, and I could see the real thing under his public mask: fear.
Phones kept rolling. People whispered "assault" like a verdict and "shame" like a cloak. The room's attention made him implode. He tried to control it—once with a blinding smirk—but then he finally started to whine and then to beg.
"I didn't—" he insisted. "Please, stop. I'm sorry—if I hurt you, I'm sorry. We'll settle. Please, don't destroy me. We can apologize. We can hush this up."
"Too late," someone snapped. "You made a choice."
The crowd's reactions were vicious and oddly cleansing. People recorded, shouted, some clapped. A few held out their phones like judges' gavels. The man who had once thrown porcelain now stammered for mercy and couldn't invent a fix.
"Don't touch my son," a woman snapped from the edge of the ring.
Maximiliano's expression went from arrogant to hollow and then to crumbling panic. He made steps to charm, then to threaten, then to offer money—ridiculous amounts—then he begged like a street performer begging for leftovers. The room's laughter turned to outrage and pity. His mask had cracked and the person beneath was tiny and pitiful.
Security finally stepped in and asked him to leave. People recorded as the man stormed out, leaving behind a smear of perfume and the sound of his outraged, broken shouting.
It was public. It was shaming. It was long. It was also somehow necessary.
Afterwards, in the hush of the crowd, Sebastian disappeared. I waited on the edge like a stone, feeling the whole night settle into a new, sharp architecture. People would talk about it. Papers would pick it up. A stain had been revealed and now it couldn't be hidden.
That night crushed something in me and set something else free. It made reality simple, cruelly so: some men had the power to hurt, others had the power to choose whether to stand next to the hurt. Sebastian chose to stand hollowly as his father broke him. Standing with him afterward felt like witnessing a storm's damage. And the crowd—students, neighbors, the hotel's staff—had been a jury that didn't need a courtroom. They had the rawness of witness, and when the abuser's name landed in the light, he shrank.
It took the event to teach me a lesson—public truth has a different grammar. It makes one kind of punishment: exposure. Maximiliano’s face showed it—first amusement, then shock, then refusal, then collapse, then begging. People recorded and shared and the sound of his losing power was like a bell.
Over the next days, the school felt different. Sebastian avoided me sometimes and stared at me at other times. Ludwig kept helping me with my physics. Cassandra spoke to me politely but in a way that suggested conflict still curled under her smile. Between the tracks of ordinary school life and the odd, noisy breakthrough of that night, I kept walking forward with small astonishments.
There were more scenes of small tenderness. Sebastian sometimes stole to the edge of where I sat for a class and passed me something—an extra napkin, a lighter, a folded note that said, "Eat." When he smiled at me—rare and full—it looked like a private currency. When he slipped his jacket over my shoulders in the yard, I felt warmth that had nothing to do with winter.
"You're staying," he told me one night when snow had come early, soft and thick.
"Are you?" I whispered.
He grinned. "That's the plan."
Later, training for the school track meet pushed me into physical territory beyond my comfort. "Three kilometers—do you want to try?" I asked, surprising myself.
"You?" he asked.
"Yes."
On the field, on nights when the wind lined our lungs with cold, he would run beside me without a word, tugging me into a better rhythm, dragging me forward. Once he flatly said, "I don't do the long runs. You insane?" and I simply shot him a look. He laughed and then ran with me anyway.
"You need someone to chase the wind with," he said. "I'll be that person."
That still felt impossible, like a child's wish untested. But he kept surprising me: he carried my breakfast bundles into the classroom one morning and arranged them on his desk, leaving a neat note—"Don't forget to eat." Small gestures became a language.
"Why did you do that?" I asked.
"Because you were cold," he said. "And because you stared at my lighter like it was treasure."
I laughed. "It is."
Things shifted quietly—our touches in hallways, the way he watched me solve a problem and then smiled, sitting like a dangerous, glorious question. I started to believe this might be a new life. I started to believe I could stand beside someone who could be both storm and shelter.
But seasons don't stop at wishes. People talk. Faces remember. The crowd kept its new verdict like a living thing. Maximiliano's fall opened a fissure between the clusters of our lives—some drew back, others stepped forward.
I didn't know then that the story would twist more. For now, in the drift of snow and the small, decisive kindnesses, I learned what the warmth of a hand against cold could mean. It is like being issued a secret badge: you belong, suddenly, to someone's orbit. It was dangerous, and it was beautiful.
Later, when I put a half-empty bottle of water on the hexagonal little shelf in my living room—middle tile—like an offering to myself, I smiled at something small and private. I kept that water there so I could see proof: that one night I had a man hand me a cigarette, that another he wrapped his coat around me because my fingers were numb, that someone cared enough to buy me breakfast.
Those things anchored me when other things crashed.
And in the days after Maximiliano's public unmasking, things felt uneven but real. People could not unsee. They could only act.
When it was over, I would stare at the lighter he had given me—the one with embossed patterns—and know that it was heavy with meaning. I would tuck it into my pocket like a secret compass.
"You okay?" Sebastian asked once as he noticed me lost in thought.
"I'm fine," I said. "I have you."
He looked away and the short silence taught me something: love is not always redemptive. Sometimes it's the only warm thing left after an evening of cold truths.
The End
— Thank you for reading —