Sweet Romance12 min read
Peach-Scented Evening: The Thread I Cut
ButterPicks10 views
I was cutting fish when my phone buzzed.
"Who is it?" my brain asked before my fingers did. The knife went on, rhythm steady, until the vibration sounded again, sharp and insistent.
The screen lit up. A selfie of a girl in a dim KTV, holding a sparkling drink. She smiled like the room belonged to her. Her lips were cherry red. At the corner of the photo, shadowed and half-hidden, was him—my him—leaning with his head down, a white shirt catching colored lights. A pale wrist, a silver cufflink, a collar open to reveal a red mark on the skin.
I saw the kiss mark before my fingers felt the paper. I saw it and the room tilted.
"Brad?" I whispered to the silent kitchen.
My left index finger had a neat cut. I hadn't felt it yet; the world had gone oddly distant. Blood soaked through tissue, red on white, as ordinary and brutal as the truth.
I pressed the phone flat on the table. The KTV name at the corner—"Spring Garden"—and an address. The girl's caption was smug and simple. The photo sent itself twice before my brain could process whether to reply.
"Who sent it?" my mother might ask later. For the moment I only heard my heartbeat and the faint wetness of the fish on the board.
I went there.
The door opened because Brad wanted it to open.
He stood in the doorway, a smear of white ointment on his knuckle, eyes magnified by the thin rim of his glasses. He blinked when he saw me.
"Mariah," he said, voice soft as always. He didn't say my name like a call to arms; he said it like a petition.
"Who is she?" I held the photo up. The plastic from my bag crinkled. I could smell antiseptic on his hands.
"She's just sick. I went to help." He tilted his head, guilty and masterful at the same time.
From the couch a thinner shadow lifted. She wore a loose tank and a short skirt, sunlight catching the faint fuzz on her cheeks. A messy bun had a cherry hairtie swinging at the knot. The hairtie.
"Give it back," I said.
"That hairtie?" she asked, pretending innocence. "I just borrowed it."
"Borrowed?" I laughed, and it sounded like something small and dangerous. The laugh bounced off the walls.
"You're not my sister," she called me gently wrong. "Call me Manon, it's fine."
Brad set his mouth in the shape of dismissal. "Mariah, stop. She was allergic. I was just taking care—"
"You're my boyfriend," I said, the words falling like small stones. "Not hers."
"Shut up." He snapped. The room went quiet like a dropped cup.
She made a face that was all practiced fragility and then she leaned into him. He wrapped an arm around her. His fingers left the faintest trace of ointment on the top of her shoulder. The sight sat in my chest like a cold stone.
I didn't think. My hands moved before my head could protest. I lunged, I grabbed her bun, the cherry hairtie, a handful of hair. She hit the floor. The world narrowed to the smell of hair and the taste of copper on the back of my tongue.
"You're a coward," I told him. "I don't want you."
He said, low and slick, "You don't know what he does for me, Mariah. You don't know—"
"Don't. Use. Her."
I walked out with a box of adhesive bandages and a ridiculous smallness in my chest. I didn't cry then. I felt like someone who had just observed a small animal being taken from its nest and decided, calmly, to leave.
On the bus later someone tried to put his hand where it shouldn't be.
"Hey, kid—" I called. My voice was thin; I sounded like a parent. Heads turned. The man's hand withdrew.
"You alright?" a voice asked, calm and warm.
"Same," I said. The passerby who had shoved the hand away had a light freckle on one cheek when he smiled. He gave me a plain, classic kindness until the bus stop. "I'm Cairo," he said. "If you ever need a friend, call me."
We spoke in fragments. "Why were you there?" he asked about my visit to Brad's. "He looks a mess."
"Because I thought I was in a story that had me as the hero," I admitted. "Turns out I was the fool."
"Then stop reading the wrong script," Cairo said. "Write your own."
It was the sort of line older books used. It kept my heart from collapsing. He walked me to the police station while I reported the groper. Dean Bruno, uniform crisp, had an easy expression and took a report without eye-rolling. In the shaking aftermath, Cairo was the steady hand that held my elbow when the world felt like a glass waiting to shatter.
He had a way of looking at me that made ordinary moments small and safe. When he said, "Don't let him have the last word," I wanted to keep his voice as a talisman.
I moved out. I sold the things that reminded me—suit jackets, neatly folded shirts that smelled faintly of his cologne—and turned the money into pockets of fresh air. Cairo lent me his attic for my boxes and wouldn't take rent.
"Rent's not the point," he said once when I tried to insist. "Debt and gratitude get messy. Consider me a friend who refuses to be bought."
"You're not cheap then," I teased.
He grinned. "No."
Cairo taught me small unimportant things that felt like building a new life. He taught me how to take the top off a stubborn jar with the heel of my hand. "Use your whole weight," he said. His fingers brushed mine in the demonstration. The contact made my lungs forget how to inhale.
He was gentle in pockets. He blushed when I leaned on him and hummed terrible songs while he cooked. He could wrestle a phone from my fingers when I wanted to check Brad's latest message and give me a look that read: "You don't have to know everything right now."
Once, while we walked under the city lights, he said, "Peach-scented evening breeze," like a secret, and I realized he remembered my favorite things: peach soda, lazy summer nights, songs that smelled like orange peel.
Days blurred and I learned small courtesies of being a woman who hadn't been on guard every second. I still had nights where the KTV photo pricked like a splinter, but Cairo sat with me, no applause, no speeches—just a steady shoulder and his warmth.
But I could not pretend that Brad's betrayal would vanish with time. The anger in me had a practical edge. I collected. Screenshots, messages, the KTV photo, old receipts, dates and times. I organized everything into folders and gave the folders names that were small ironies: "Tender," "October," "Red Cup."
I had spent years forgiving and pretending. This time I chose transparency.
One night I uploaded everything to the campus forum—every edited photo archived, every flippant text, and a timeline that started simple and ended with a crushing truth. I made a post under a clearly marked title and hit send with hands that trembled.
"Who sent this?" Brad whispered in my head. I didn't answer. I went to sleep with a calm that tasted like cold metal.
The storm started online. Threads multiplied. Someone anonymous repackaged it with captions. Rumors, which once were random missiles, now assembled into a focused artillery. The university's forum was a furnace: people took sides, poured gasoline, and watched a long ember explode.
Then began the public part. The school scheduled a celebration that weekend: a campus gala with students and faculty. I had thought to leave everything online and let it burn quietly, but something in the way he had looked at me—like a man who had treated decades of my softness as entertainment—demanded the final scene unfold in front of the crowd that had once watched our "possible future" play out.
I told Cairo. He said, "You don't have to, but if you want to, I will be at the front row and I will hold your hand."
He didn't need to say more.
On the day of the gala, the quad was full. Lanterns hung like small moons. Students clustered in clusters of glossy dresses and rented suits. The headline acts took the stage. Someone popped rosé and laughter spilled easy.
Brad walked in like a prince who had misplaced his map. He wore the suit I once loved, the same neat cufflinks, hair carefully styled. He looked like a man who wanted to reclaim an image.
"He's going to keep pretending," I told myself quietly.
I took the microphone.
"What?" his friend hissed. "You can't—"
I smiled at the thought of him thinking I would be polite. The forum had already done its work; the campus press had copies; my post had gone viral enough that local bloggers were in the crowd. But a digital rumor dies in minutes. Public shame sustained me like fuel and I had decided on more than mere humiliation: I wanted a reckoning with witnesses, with eyes that would not look away.
I started with the facts.
"Good evening," I said into the mic. "This isn't planned. I didn't come to ruin anyone's night. I came to tell the truth, because truth doesn't need a stage, but it is kinder to speak it where people can see us both."
"Why are you doing this?" someone called. A laugh off in the crowd.
"Because," I said, and I clicked a thumb drive into the speaker. The big screen on the stage flickered.
A slideshow began. Photos, messages, timestamps. The KTV selfie bloomed giant as the soundtrack in the speakers altered from music to the recorded ding of received messages.
"This man presented himself to me as my partner," I said, pointing. "This man traded my trust for other people's entertainment. For years I forgave him. For reasons I don't have to defend, I thought our future was certain. I was wrong. I forgive no more."
Brad's face didn't register at first. The crowd murmured. I watched him as the pictures rolled: late-night messages erased, the dates, the receipts from hotels. His features went through colors like weather.
"Is this true?" a woman shouted, and the faculty who had once smiled at us exchanged looks. Someone in the crowd whispered, "That's him with the campus president's daughter."
A student in the front row tapped their phone and the feed went live. People raised their phones like torches.
Brad's reaction went fast, furious, and human. First he pretended not to understand. "Mariah, stop this," he said, voice thick with practiced hurt. "You're making a scene."
"Yes," I answered. "A scene that is overdue."
He was confident at the start. He smoothed his jacket, a reflex. Then someone from the audience—a girl who'd been tutored by him—stood up and said, "I know she isn't lying. He gave me messages, too, once." Murmurs multiplied into a chorus.
"You're lying," Brad snapped.
"No," said a voice behind him. "I was your 'mistress.' I collected proofs so you wouldn't do this to anyone else."
It was Manon. She stepped forward, and the room inhaled. She was not delicate now. She was a small, painted thing whose bravado had collapsed. "I wanted to be the center," she admitted, voice raw. "But I didn't want to hurt Mariah like this."
The crowd turned to Brad. The tide rolled in.
He tried to reclaim the narrative. "You are all—" His mouth opened as if to attack. "I never—"
"Then explain," I said. "Explain the timestamps. Explain the messages saved in your cloud. Explain the hotel receipts with your name. Explain the photos from last month."
He turned the color of ash. "You can't—"
Someone pushed a camera toward him. "Explain to us now," the campus reporter said, microphone extended.
His composure cracked. First he blinked, a slow shark of denial. Then he laughed, a small brittle sound that made people uneasy.
"Look at him," a woman hissed nearby. "He thinks he's performing."
He tried to charm. He tried the old scripts: "We were apart," "it's complicated," "she misunderstood." The crowd's ears tuned to the words as if to an instrument they had heard too often. The more he spoke, the smaller he became. People who'd once nodded at him in hallways now frowned, mouths pressed.
"It's true. He's done this before," Dean Bruno muttered to someone. He was an ex-colleague who had once admired Brad's methodical mind. The line in Dean's voice was flat: disappointed, betrayed.
Cameras swiveled. Someone shouted, "He posted my private messages too." A cluster of faces formed, each confession like another stone in his shoes.
The change in Brad was not instantaneous; it was a slow unspooling. First, his posture drooped. Then the laugh fell away, replaced by a string of frantic denials. Then he looked around, and saw faces he had once believed were his—friends, tutors, faculty, neighbors—turn like weather vanes toward the wind that exposed him.
"You're all being manipulated by her!" he cried at one point, the desperation raw enough to be ugly.
"No," I said. "I documented the truth. You chose whom to be. You made a life of small cruelties, and now we see the shape of it."
He tried to attack me physically—an old reflex when cornered—but a red shirt student blocked him. "Don't touch her," Cairo called, stepping into the space between us. The crowd parted like water around a rock. He stood there, hands clenching at his sides, eyes hard.
Brad's face moved through stages: stunned arrogance, then anger, then disbelief, then a small, juvenile whine. He begged in a voice that had once wrapped me in comfort: "Mariah, please. I can explain. I can fix this. Don't—"
"Fix what?" a voice from the crowd asked. "You want us to let you keep both your reputation and your lies?"
He faltered. Someone started to clap—just one hand. Then two. It was not applauding; it was the sound of dismissal. Fingers flicked cameras. Someone called security. People stepped back. Teachers' faces were flat, the look of colleagues seeing the private collapse of a practiced mask.
Brad's final performance was a begging, a small, sallow thing. "I'll resign. I'll leave campus. I'll—"
"You will," a professor said quietly. "And you'll answer for this."
He sank into himself, shoulders folding. He looked at the horizon of faces like an actor seeing their curtain fall. He reached for me as if the old script still held—an apology, an embrace—and found nothing but the air between us.
At the center of it, hands raised and phones pointed like witnesses holding keys, people responded. Students whispered, cameras filmed, teachers took notes. Someone began to hum an old activist chant light and sly. It rose. People cheered not for the spectacle but for the act of refusing to be fooled.
Brad tried to recover. He stood, throat working. "Please," he said to no one in particular. "I'm not—"
"You're not," I said. "You're human and you made choices. They were not mine to fix. They were yours to own."
His face crumpled. He left after that, small, shuffling, shoulders wrapped around himself like a coat hood pulled up against frost. He tried one last time to speak to faculty, but the conversation was clipped. "We will process this according to policy," the dean told him. "You will not teach until investigation."
He left under a rain of cell phone flashes and disdain. Some students recorded the retreat. One boy shouted, "We saw you!" People swapped stories like a knit of witnesses finding warmth in solidarity. Many clapped, a sound like sealing a verdict.
When he staggered away, not even a murmur of sympathy followed. People who had once flattered at corridor corners held their heads down. The student who'd once praised his presentations now avoided his gaze. A few faculty took notes with a professional distance, but their eyes were hard.
Manon, who had been at the lip of the crowd, cried with the release of someone who'd been pressed into a false part. "I'm sorry," she whispered into nothing. "I didn't mean—"
"You were a part of it," I said, not cruel, only factual. "But you can stop."
The punishment was complete in the small public calculus the university used: exposure, social ruin, and immediate administrative consequences. It was not law, but it was a cold medicine for the sickness he'd brewed in shadow. He had been powerful because he hid. In losing that hiding place he lost the small kingdom he'd constructed out of casual deceit.
Later, things escalated in official channels. Complaints were filed. People testified. After a disciplinary board—where he was made to listen to what it felt like being betrayed—Brad was asked to resign. The department released a statement about violating trust and abuse of relationships with students. The campus press published a careful, dry list of offenses. He was escorted out by security one rainy morning, suitcase heavy, head lowered. Students gathered at the gates and watched him leave.
He tried, afterwards, to come to the cafeteria and sit where we once had lunch. People would not sit near him. He stood outside lecture halls, watching. He called and left voicemails. A few weeks later, he tried to make a scene in a public restaurant, but was stopped by students who'd organized; they refused him service with a brutal, humane politeness.
I told myself that revenge tasted mean when I began. Later, it tasted like relief.
Months later he came back once—on a quiet, rainy day—at the edge of graduation. He stood by the wall of the student center, thin and hollow, and watched people pass. I walked by with Cairo and our small crowd. He looked up and our eyes met. For a moment I saw everything I had been and everything I had outgrown. He mouthed "I'm sorry," like a draft through a cracked door.
"Forgiveness doesn't mean returning," I said to Cairo later that night, while peach-scented wind came off the river. "It means I am free to pick the life I want."
Cairo squeezed my hand.
"You are better," he said.
The rest of the story was quieter. I graduated. My posts had become a small scandal and then a lesson for many. The campus moved on the hard way. Brad's name, for a time, was something people murmured like a cautionary tale. Manon went abroad and later messaged me a simple note: "I'm sorry. I learned something. Thank you for surviving me."
Cairo and I learned how two people stand together without needing to tell the world. We had small, sacred things: the way he closed my apartment door so drafts wouldn't chase me in; the way he made me eat soup when my throat felt empty; the way he left the lighter on the table because he knew I liked to watch small flames.
"Do you regret anything?" he asked once, as we walked under lantern light, a place where students tied ribbons for wishes.
"I regret ten years," I said.
He laughed. "That's a lot of peach sodas."
"No," I said. "I regret the time it took me to see the truth. But I would not change the seeing." I touched the little pearl pin he had given me. "And I wouldn't change meeting you."
He bent and kissed the crown of my head. "Then that's something."
The final thing I kept was the hairtie I had thrown away. It was dirty and bent and had chewed edges. It belonged to a version of me that clung to a promise like a life raft. I kept it in a shoebox not because I wanted to remember him but because I wanted to remember how small things could mean so much.
The last page of my college life was the graduation photo: Cairo in the crowd, smiling at me with that freckle on his left cheek, the peach wind in his hair. I wore a tiny hairpin—no crown now, just a tiny bead—and the campus behind us looked like a book I had closed.
When I tell people the story later, sometimes they want revenge details, the exact method that felled a man from esteem. I tell them the truth: it was not vengeance alone, but the decision to stop pretending. It was saying "no" loud enough and to the right people, and it was using the quiet weapons—evidence, witnesses, a community willing to listen—that make accountability possible.
On a summer evening, with the smell of peach from a small stall, I walked with Cairo by the river. A breeze came up, gentle and sweet.
"This breeze," he said, "is the kind I like."
I laughed. "Peach-scented evening," I corrected him.
He smiled, and I leaned on him, and the world felt tidy in a way it had not for a very long time.
The End
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