Sweet Romance14 min read
Rain, Lies, and the Boy I Called Family
ButterPicks11 views
I was ten years behind him and finally gave up in the tenth year.
"You deleted me last night," I said to the empty room, fingers hovering over the phone like a child afraid to touch a hot stove.
The rain was loud. The lightning felt personal. I typed and deleted the same desperate line until my thumbs were numb.
"I’m scared. Please don't leave me," I wrote, and then I erased it. Again.
At dawn, Christopher Compton accepted my friend request at eight on the dot — the exact time he always began work. His green check mark lit my screen like a verdict.
"Have you learned your lesson?" he wrote, three cold words.
I closed the chat. For the first time in ten years, I didn't want to answer him.
I turned off my phone and buried my head under the blanket. Sleep swallowed me whole. Afternoon came as guiltless as a thief, and the doorbell stole my rest.
I opened the door and his silhouette filled my frame — tall, suit pressed, eyebrows drawn like a question mark. For a moment I was fifteen again, when he had forced the door and dragged me out of that dark apartment into a better light. For a moment I wanted to bow. For a moment I didn't care how I looked.
"What are you doing here?" I yawned, as if manners could armor me.
"Why aren’t you at work?" His voice came low and cold. "Phone's off."
"I quit," I said plainly.
"You begged for that job," he snapped. "Now you quit? Gloria, you are so reckless."
"Have I ever been any different?" I asked, and the truth tasted like iron. "Maybe I was only good at pretending to be something for you."
He looked away, like my unmade bed offended him. That was Christopher: control in a tailored suit, affection measured like an accounting ledger. I had worshiped him like a light for ten years. Now the bulb flickered and I felt nothing but empty. I had loved, and then one rain-washed night he deleted me, and somehow that one small erasure burned down the temple.
Fiona Fontaine burst in half an hour later in a red dress and lipstick like a dare. She fussed and fussed. "Why did you quit? You never quit."
"I don't like him," I said. "I don't love him."
Fiona snorted, "About time. He’s a nightmare."
I laughed at that. Laughed because it was easier than the hollow ache. "I just want to be messy for a while. Can you make my hair big and wild?"
"You look like a lost kitten when you clean up for him," she said, flicking the curling iron like she was launching a tiny missile.
We went to that old bar we used to haunt, sat in a booth like two banked fires. And then the past ambushed me — a memory of a bottle smashed over the head of a man who tried to hurt a girl. After that fight, I had stopped going to bars. Christopher found out. He ignored me for a month because of it.
That was the pattern: I chased; he refrained; I rearranged myself until I fit his small box. I never thought he'd throw me out the window at a storm.
He did. He deleted me in the night while thunder ate the sky.
Weeks later I met him again, in that same bar. He appeared like a cold draft, with the bar owner on one arm and two bodyguards in tow. He looked at Fiona and then at me like a man cataloging belongings.
"You look awful," he said.
"Thanks," I said. "I don't belong to you."
He reached for my arm. "Gloria—"
"Don't," I said. "Don't touch me."
When he left, I let the feeling that had been building up for ten years settle. It was relief. It was rage. It was the knowledge that ten years of being small didn't have to define me.
I met Yahir Dean on a rainy night under a bridge, the night I curled against the cold and felt foolish for wanting someone to stay. He came in carrying a battered duffel and a face that looked like it barely belonged to the city. He was shy, polite in a way that made him seem younger than he was, and he told me simple truths with a stubbornness that made me want to protect him.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Yahir," he said. "Yahir Dean."
"Your parents?"
"I was in an orphanage," he said softly. "I have a place I'm heading to. I don't want to be alone anymore."
"Stay then," I said without thinking. "I’ll give you a home."
He accepted, clumsy and grateful. He tucked into our small, dusted apartment like a second breath. He made porridge in the morning. He bought me flowers without ceremony. He learned to cook and left his clean socks beside the hamper. By the time he left for Kyoto to study, I had already taught him how to call me when the sky looked like it might break.
Christopher noticed him. He noticed everything that moved near me. He hated that a small boy with too-big hands could make me laugh with my entire mouth.
"He's not your type," Christopher told me once, as if pity could be swung like a club. "He's beneath you. He's not from our world."
"He's my family," I said.
"He's disposable," Christopher said. "He'll run."
I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to shield Yahir from his small cruelty. So I bought him a phone, clothes, stupid things that said he mattered. I built him a little runway out of receipts and affection.
He left for a semester. I stayed. Christopher tried to pull me back; he wanted to own the idea of me rather than the messy reality. He stole gestures back from me, late-night calls, kisses he called apologies. He tried to make me the woman who would fit into his life like a missing cufflink.
"I like you," he said in a bar one night, breath smelling of wine and something blue.
"You told me you like me," I replied. "At twenty-four, you delete me. At twenty-five you say you like me. Are you serious?"
"I won't stand others around you," he whispered, as if the world could be starched into order by his will. "Don't be with him. Don't own anything but me."
"I don't belong to you," I said and pushed him away.
Then my world rearranged. Yahir returned as someone else — not because he wanted to be, but because the world had changed him. He had changed his name when he got found, when a family with heavy name and velvet influence offered him a lineage and a house. He rose like steam becoming a tower: Yahir Dean, the face behind HM, the man with a park project that would sit where our old apartment stood.
He walked into our company’s conference room and sat like he was born to that leather chair. He was calm and efficient and had the old shy smile tucked into pockets of steel.
"Good to see you, Gloria," he said politely.
He didn't look at me like he once had — not the small boy who asked if he could have my home. He was an equal now, and I felt my chest tighten.
"Yahir," I said. "You stunned everyone at the meeting."
He smiled without sweetness. "We found a lot to do."
I felt foolish for tearing at nagging threads inside my chest. I had helped build him up, and now he had a safety net I couldn't reach.
I kept my head down. I learned business. I learned how to hold a wall of people with my presence. I learned how to be useful. Christopher taught me. He taught me leverage and angles and how to make an entrance. I accepted it in small bites and tasted nothing but ash.
But life is messy and long, and people keep making mistakes. Christopher's need to control was a dangerous fuel. When he found out Yahir was the new boss of HM — the company that planned to build an amusement park across from our old apartment — he lost his cool. He tightened his grip on me, smoothed down his hair, whispered that Yahir was dangerous and not to be trusted.
"You used to buy me clothes," he accused one night at a gala. "You bought a shirt from Brioni for him."
"It wasn’t for you," I said sharply. "It was for him."
"Didn't you ever listen?" he asked, and his tone was a blade. "You belong by my side."
"You never made me belong," I said.
He kissed me drunkenly then, using that kiss like leverage. I slapped his face harder than I meant to. The slap echoed through the blacked-out back of the car and into the loneliness of everything I had tolerated.
Then I did something terrible: I put Yahir on the blacklist. I sent a cruel message telling him never to try to find me, to stay away. I wanted to protect him by pushing him away. Or maybe I wanted to punish myself in a language I thought I understood. The message found its way into air and hurt his heart. He left. He left because I told him to and because he believed me.
Time did what time always does: it made men into projects and women into professionals. I rose, using every tutoring Christopher gave, but the wind had a quiet cost. I built walls in white marble above a foundation that had once been dirt and cheap carpet.
Years passed. Yahir returned to Spring City not as the shy boy but as the entrepreneur with a grandmother who had wrapped him into a family. He built HM like a palace. He acted like business was the only language left. I tried to act like I wasn't still choking on old promises.
One morning we were forced into a long meeting at the new HM site near our old apartment. The construction boots made my ankles ache. Yahir glanced at me in boardroom lighting and called me 'small Hu' — he had precise names for everything now. He kept his distance.
I kept my dignity, until the truth of everything squeezed out of me like a pressed lemon. I had to tell him what I had done: the message; the blacklisting; the abandonment. I had to confess what cowardice had done to the kindest man I ever knew.
He didn't forgive me right away. He didn't have to. He had grown hard as polished stone. He had a team and a name and the bones of someone who had been found. But those polished bones hid a heart that had not stopped hoping.
"Why did you send that message?" he asked with a voice that was not as cold as it sounded.
"Because I thought I was protecting you," I said. "Because I was afraid Christopher would hurt you."
He laughed, not a happy sound. "Hurt me? Gloria, he wanted you. I was never just the boy you saved. I was the boy you made a promise to."
That night everything changed. Yahir began to visit me more, and his softness returned — not the puppy softness but a heavier warmth, like sun touching a wall built thick. He brought flowers and soup and a patient insistence that I come back to the table of life.
"I want you," he said one rain-damp afternoon, clumsy and direct. "Not your money, not your family name. I want you."
I wanted to say yes and felt my throat thicken with the history of ten years of wanting the wrong man. I wanted to tell him I had loved Christopher for ten years and that now I couldn't stand the man who traded tenderness like a receipt.
Christopher couldn't stand me either. When he realized I had not chosen him, he started to move differently in public. He wanted me to look like his, to parade me when it suited him and pinch me when it did not. That hunger for the final word made him dangerous.
The world is small, rumors grow teeth, and Yahir was setting a stage of his own. HM's opening gala was arranged for a bright autumn evening. It was to be a show of power: a theme park unveiled, music and lights and dignitaries. Christopher announced he would attend. He came to claim, not to celebrate.
I stood beside him at the reception. He leaned in and whispered, "Don't make trouble. Be mine tonight."
I smiled, not because I wanted to be his, but because I had finally learned how to play a different game.
The hall was gilded in light. Cameras were there, and reporters, and the city's who-who. People had come to see Yahir's vision and the man who had once been an orphan now standing like a king of daylight. I carried myself like someone who had learned how to get through doors without knocking on knees. I had my company title now. I knew how to make faces and hold them.
Christopher liked to humiliate privately. I decided to humiliate him publicly.
We were near the stage when Yahir took the microphone. "Thank you," he said in his measured voice. He nodded at the crowd. The lights leaned on him. Andrew Drake — a journalist — pointed a camera.
Then he turned to the audience and then to me. "This park stands on a promise," he said. "A promise of safety, of family, of giving children a place to grow. It stands on the memory of people who lost much and kept building all the same."
The applause tapered like water sliding down a glass. "There is someone I owe a debt to," Yahir continued, eyes finding mine. He didn't speak like a theater star. He spoke like someone who had been quiet too long.
"Gloria Lange," he said. "Thank you for giving me a home when I had nothing. Thank you for showing me warmth. Thank you for believing I could be something more."
The hall softened. There was a rustle. Cameras angled in like gulls dropping on a harbor. People who built reputations on saving face on the daily leaned forward.
Christopher's jaw tightened. He moved to stand beside me with a kind of ceremonial possession. "Gloria is mine," he murmured, the words meant for me, meant for Yahir, meant for the cameras. It was a claim. It was an offer wrapped in venom.
I felt the heat of the room, and then a coolness in the marrow of my bones. It was time to stop being the woman who let other people narrate her life.
I smiled at the audience, then turned and walked to the front of the stage. I took the microphone from Yahir's hand, who blinked in surprise.
"Christopher," I said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
He looked at me like a dog surprised by a sudden storm.
"You once told me to be 'good,'" I said, fingers curled around the microphone until the joints were white. "You once told me, 'Be mine and don't talk to others.' You made rules like walls."
The lights found my face. My voice didn't tremble because I had rehearsed this speech every lonely night for a year.
"I obeyed you for ten years," I said. "I molded myself to fit a small place in your life. I gave you worship and quiet and patience, and you traded that for a delete."
The room went still. People put down champagne flutes to listen. The mayor, seated in the front row, looked uncomfortable. A cluster of reporters leaned forward.
Christopher's face went through a swift film — indifference, then irritation, then thickening anger. "This is ridiculous," he said, trying to reclaim tone.
"No," I said. "This is truth."
I told the hall about the night he deleted me.
"You deleted me on a night when it thundered," I said. "You left me alone when I was afraid, because you wanted me to learn something. You wanted me to feel shame. You wanted to punish me so you'd teach me obedience."
There was a breathless intake from somewhere at the back. Fiona stood up suddenly, clapping her hands like someone who had been waiting for fireworks for years. She wasn't the only one. People started murmuring.
"Is this show for the cameras?" Christopher spat. "Is this your little performance?"
"I once begged you not to abandon me in a storm," I told the whole room. "I begged you and you deleted me, and then you acted like you were the injured party when I didn't bend back to you."
"That's not true!" Christopher said, louder, voice hollowing. He looked around for allies. The bodyguards shifted with small, practiced movements.
I pulled up the old chat logs on my phone and held it high so cameras could see. Date, time, the neat, cruel words. "You can see. You can judge."
Drake Kelley, who had known Christopher professionally for years, stepped forward with an array of records. "He has a pattern," Drake said. "Private humiliation. Micro-control. Not the kind of leader we should trust."
The audience leaned in. "You hurt her because you were angry at being vulnerable," Yahir said quietly, his voice now a blade sharpened by steadiness. "You thought burying her would let you keep her. It didn't. It taught her to leave."
Christopher's face turned a shade of scandalous red. "You don't get to publicize my private life," he snarled.
"Your private life matters when it affects people," I said. "When a man weaponizes a woman's fear to control her, it's not private."
The crowd started to react. "Shame!" someone shouted. A woman near the stage whispered, "He did it to her." A child asked his father, "Is that the bad man?"
Christopher's expression shifted in a slow, brutal arc. He moved from anger to denial to then a faint, fragile pleading. "Gloria, you don't understand. I did it because I love you."
"Love is not the same as ownership," I said. "Justice is not punishment disguised as care."
People around us started murmuring agreements. Phones raised. Reporters recorded. The live feed caught every tilt of his face, every tremor in his jaw. A dozen social media accounts pinged; live comments spilled over with shock. The mayor, face pale, stepped away from his seat.
"Your company's clients are contacting me," Yahir's voice cut through. "They want to know if the man at the table is the same man we would authorize to run projects with children involved. I don't want our park to be founded on fear."
Christopher's posture broke. He was used to quietly wielding power, not being held up and examined by the crowd. The weight of witnesses shifted the scales.
"Is it true?" someone in the crowd asked softly.
"Yes," Fiona said, voice like a bell. "He made her small."
A group around us turned physically away from Christopher. People clicked photographs, their phones like small judges. A woman near the stage stood and pointed. "You can't treat people like that!"
Christopher looked like a man stripped. He moved through a wave of reactions: initial smugness turning into shock, then to fierce denial as the camera kept rolling, then to a hollowness that seemed to hollow out the man. He tried to speak, to charm the room with practiced lines, to claim misinterpretation. "We are all imperfect," he said, voice shaking. "I made mistakes."
"Apologies only work with consequences," Drake Kelley said. "Public consequences."
The crowd wanted more than just words. They wanted to see a man who had used ugliness laid bare and then held accountable in human sight.
"Christopher," I said, and the microphone's tiny hiss swallowed the silence. "Promise me in front of them all that you'll seek help. That you'll stop trying to own people. Apologize to everyone you hurt."
He hesitated. Pride is a stubborn flame. "I—" His voice broke. Then the cameras captured everything. He walked to the center, swallowed, and looked at the assembled crowd. "I am sorry." It sounded like a man reading a script he could not believe.
"Not good enough," someone shouted. "You need to make an effort."
"Come clean," Yahir said quietly. "Make everything visible."
The city listened. Christopher had to stand under that light. He had to see the faces he'd once ordered into his periphery, now looking back in disgust. People whispered. Cameras rolled. And what was worst of all for him was the absence of the private power he had counted on: there was no one to whisper to, no one to shield him.
The night widened into a small public falling of a man who had treated a woman as a playground. He tried to plead, to explain, but each word only made the press sharper. Old acquaintances who had flirted with his influence glanced away. Fiona shouted a piece of history he could not deny. Yahir's polite voice catalogued business choices that had isolated Christopher. The mayor's aide called for a pause. The papers were already warming up their engines.
Christopher's face crumpled. He tried to walk out under two bodyguards' arms, but the exit felt like a small stage where his reputation dissolved into a rumor. People took pictures. Some clapped. Some wept for the girl who had been forced into obedience. Some posted the video with their own scathing captions. The internet moved faster than his excuses. By dawn, the man who had controlled small rooms had been rendered publicly human.
He was left in a lobby full of whispers. The humiliation was not violent. It was a stripping — not only his image but his unearned authority. He flailed: "I love her! She doesn't forgive!" Denial, pleading. The crowd watched. He implored the mayor, his colleagues, me. He looked at Yahir and saw what he could not buy.
Finally, under flickering corporate chandeliers, he sank into the only chair in the room that remained empty and began to cry. It was not the theatrical ruin of a bad man in a screenplay; it was the slow unspooling of a human who had to face his own smallness under bright lights.
"I didn't mean—" he muttered. "I didn't think—"
"You build people up and you tear them down," I said quietly, because anger had curdled into a different kind of mercy. "You chose to hurt." My voice did not tremble. "You will have to live with that, publicly and privately."
He begged for private forgiveness. People in the room did not offer it. "You can seek help," Drake said, practical and cold. "Public apology and counseling. And you will be watched. This is not a private matter anymore."
The crowd's reaction varied. Some people applauded that he was forced to face consequences; others whispered that hate had become cancelled civility. Cameras kept rolling. By the time the night dimmed, Christopher had become a man who had been exposed — and it hurt him in a way that made the city notice.
After the gala, his influence sprouted cracks. Clients who once moved at the lift of his hand called, "We need a pause." Partners erased phone numbers. The man who once layered commands with elegance now faced awkward hallways and side conversations. The social feeds rewrote the story. People said, "There are lines you don't cross." Many in the crowd felt they'd witnessed a reckoning.
I didn't smile in triumph. I had not wanted to watch people flay another human. I only wanted a lesson to be visible — a lesson that the work of controlling someone with fear would not stay hidden in private messages and closed rooms. Christopher's public fall eased something in me. It showed that the person who believed himself immune could be seen and asked to change.
After that night, Christopher's calls stopped.
"Is he done?" Fiona asked. She watched my face.
"I hope so," I said. "For everyone's sake."
Yahir and I walked out into the cool night with people still murmuring about the scandal. He slid his hand into mine without fanfare. "You were brave," he said.
"I was tired of pretending," I replied.
We walked away from that gala into a quiet life. Yahir and I built something small and honest: a home that smelled of garlic and fried shallots, a queue of small rituals. I learned again how to be seen without fear.
Christopher sought help, quietly. He went to therapy. He apologized in interviews that read like press releases. He looked smaller in public. People debated the sincerity of plate-glass apologies. The man who had used control as a currency had to find a new way to live.
As for me, I learned that ten years of worship did not give someone a claim on my life. I learned that being brave did not mean erasing my own fear. I learned that home can come from a person who asks, "Will you stay?" and keeps his promise.
Years later I still keep a small jar of flowers Yahir brings every Thursday. Sometimes a storm rolls in and I worry. I call him and he answers. He comes. "I won't leave you in a storm," he says.
"Promise?" I ask.
"Yes," he says.
And when rain falls, I no longer hide. I watch it and think of the night he held me under a bridge and of the man who thought delete was a weapon. I think of the long, bright mess of being human.
The End
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