Sweet Romance13 min read
Rain, Red Strings, and a Bed I Couldn't Explain
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I woke up and my first thought was: this is impossible.
I blinked against a strip of light filtering through blackout curtains and counted my breaths like a child checking whether monsters had left the room. The room smelled faintly of wild cedar and something floral I couldn't name. It was not my hotel room. The bed was too big, the sheets too crisp, the headboard too tasteful.
I turned my head.
"Duke?" The name came out as a whisper I didn't expect to know. He lay beside me like a sculpture—jawline calm, lashes shuttered. The world tilted.
My hand went to my cheek and came away with a small sting. I pinched myself again. Nothing changed.
A knock on the bedroom door: "Duke, get up. Hair and makeup will be here soon." A voice I didn't know carried through.
Duke stirred, frowning in the slow manner of someone used to being woken professionally, not alarmed. When our eyes met, my heart did something traitorous.
"Shh." I silenced him with a finger pressed to his lips because the alternative—him yelling, them breaking down the door—seemed worse. He waited, then nodded like someone who'd learned how to keep a secret.
"Duke?" the assistant outside called again.
He sat up, wrapped an arm across his chest, and said, "I'm awake."
I crawled between the sheets and, instinctively, performed what I still somehow believed would be the right thing in a scandal: the most theatrical bow I had left. "I'm sorry," I said, voice trembling. "I honestly don't know how this happened. I'm Hazel Andersen. I'm an actress. I have an invitation to the festival."
Duke's brows creased, then he narrowed his eyes like someone measuring whether a story would be interesting. "We will check the cameras. My staff will look at the suite. Stay put until we know."
"Please don't call security," I begged. "Please."
He rubbed his temples, the way tired people rub away knots. "There are a lot of impossibilities in that sentence."
"I know." I flinched. "But I really have no idea. I went to sleep in my room and woke up in yours. I—"
A knock cut through us again. Duke shrugged an apologetic half-smile and tossed me a black hoodie. "Put this on. Keep it. Return it when you can."
I crawled into the hoodie and swallowed the scent of him. "You're a saint."
He rolled his eyes, soft but firm. "Don't tell anyone this happened. My team will check the footage. If it gets out, it becomes your problem and my problem."
"I won't tell. I swear."
Outside, the corridor was starting its day. A wave of cameras would later make my name and his a two-line headline overnight. I left the suite feeling like a thief of sleep and dignity, and I understood, with a quiet dread, that I had just stepped into someone else's orbit.
"Did you find the red string?" a voice asked me later that afternoon as I sat with Janet Laurent and hid behind a bowl of room-service soup.
"What red—" I started.
"Never mind," Janet cut me off, using her tone-of-office that had scalpel-precision. "Hazel, focus. You have the festival tonight. Smile, post the festival tag, and let them make a fuss. This kind of heat helps a small name. And stop sleeping in random beds."
"I didn't—" I tried. "I really didn't."
Janet's frank stare made me feel sixteen again. She'd managed my messes before, but not this kind: mysterious bathroom-intrusions by supernatural forces were not in her contract.
The festival was loud, sandy, and full of people who wore success like armor. Duke moved through the festival like a king crossing his sea of people. Wherever he went, cameras leaned; people leaned in kind. My unintended cameo by his side—black hoodie, half-alert, then snapped into a red carpet photo—sent my account up by tens of thousands by morning.
"You're getting good press," Janet said later, not unkindly, and I believed her. But the press had jaws, and jaws chew stories into shapes that are too sharp to be comfortable.
That night, at the hotel, I dreamed of a long translucent red thread tied to my wrist. I followed it through winding corridors until it stopped at the gates of a small, candle-lit place carved into the cliffs—someone's spiritual home, full of incense and the hush of people who believe in petitions. A figure stood at the gate, and when he looked at me he said one thing, calm and perfectly certain: "You came."
"Who are you?" I asked in the dream, but when I woke, all I could that was left in me was the image of the string and the word "You came."
A week later, I was back on set for a big production—Nelson Johansson's adaptation of a beloved novel. I was small in the credits, but the project was grand, and being near it felt like being near a lighthouse: dangerous and bright.
On the second day of rehearsals, it rained.
I woke up in Duke's bed again.
"This is happening again," I blurted, and my voice was a mixture of sheepish and terrified. "I swear I didn't mean to—"
Duke sat up, water-slick hair sticking to his forehead. He wasn't angry. He wasn't surprised. He only looked at me like a man holding a broken map.
"Did you go to a temple?" he asked.
I blinked. "How would you—"
"Purple-sun temple," he said quietly. "You told my assistant you were taking shelter there. He checked."
My mouth opened and closed on air. "I did go there. We were caught in a storm and ducked into a hall to avoid getting soaked. I prayed for luck for my career. I certainly didn't pray to be vaulted into your—"
"—bed," he finished.
We stared at each other for a beat that stretched like an elastic band.
"So what?" I asked finally. "Are you suggesting some supernatural matchmaking? Like a red-string-tying deity with a taste for irony?"
"If so," Duke said with a small twitch of humor, "they have a strange sense of timing."
Over the next months, the rain became the unwitting stage manager of our story.
Sometimes I would fall asleep exhausted in the crew's small rooms or in the car between locations. When the sky grew heavy and the first drops fell, somehow the world would rearrange itself and I would wake with Duke's breath warm near my ear, or with my head in the crook of his arm, or with both of us blinking at a ceiling that used to be mine, but wasn't.
"You're a ridiculous person," he said once when the cameras had stopped and we were alone in his trailer, me wrapped in one of his crew hoodies.
"Red-strings are ridiculous," I countered.
"You keep using 'ridiculous' like it's evidence, but your sleeping patterns are less ridiculous," he replied. "You sleep through alarms, through craft services, through cues—and yet somehow you appear where it's inconvenient for both of us."
He was one of the most reserved people I had ever met. When he laughed, it was careful. When he was kind, it had the stiffness of someone who didn't expect to let kindness in.
But there were small things—tiny, impossible gestures—that chipped at my defenses like gentle frost. One night, when the crew was late and we were the last to leave, it began to rain. Before I could protest, Duke offered me his jacket, then—when he saw I was shivering—took off his scarf and draped it over my head.
"Keep this," he said. "It smells like my mother calls it 'safety.'"
That night, my dreams were warmer.
We worked together, bickered like two people who had been neighbors a lifetime, and fell into silences that tasted like trust. He taught me how to mark my hitting points for a scene; I showed him how to take the long view of the script's emotional arc. The world of cameras and PR spins continued to orbit us, but between takes and flights, we created a small gravity of our own.
And, of course, there were people who wanted to tilt that gravity to their advantage.
Martina Myers arrived like a weather front. Her father was a producer—well-connected, loud at the right dinners—and Martina made sure everyone saw who she was meant to be: brilliant, entitled, and gifted at making rivals look clumsy.
She pushed for house rooms she didn't need, demanded separate makeup teams, and once—after a minor collision on a hallway set—she demanded that the assistant who cared for the props be fired because "he let the actress who bumped me wear the same shoes."
When she learned I had spent time in Duke's trailer with him—when a gossipy account ran a grainy photo of our figures leaving a building—her smile sharpened.
"Careful," she crooned one afternoon in front of a roomful of extras. "Not everyone who comes from a small place deserves the spotlight."
The extras laughed nervously. A few of the junior crew looked away. I felt my face go hot.
That night, Janet—my manager—called me.
"You're not the kind to fight," she said. "But take notes. We will protect what's yours."
Protect? I felt more exposed than shielded. Katherine—sorry, Martina—pushed where she could. She started things: a fake rumor, a set-up photo, a petty email to production that suggested I was late and unprofessional when in reality I'd been waiting in makeup.
The thing about small industries is that gossip moves like electricity. One spark and everything else lights up. I tried to keep quiet. Duke's fans circled and roared, Janet did damage control, and Nelson Johansson—stern, exacting—kept pointing the cameras until the noise turned into schedule delays.
Then came the Press Day.
Nelson had arranged a group interview with the cast in the main ballroom: slick microphones, a circle of chairs, and a gaggle of reporters hungry for anything juicy. Martina arrived radiant and calm, and she sat with a practiced smile that could have convinced anyone she'd taken no airs at all.
"Quiet on set," the stage manager said. "Begin."
Martina made a small joke about the weather that got a laugh. Then a reporter asked a pointed question about casting favoritism. Martina's expression stilled like someone had switched to slow motion.
"Favoritism?" she repeated. "I think our director picks who fits the role."
"There's chatter that some people receive preferential treatment," the reporter pushed. "That certain actresses have access to the star—"
That was all the needle needed to burst the balloon.
I stood up.
"Excuse me," I said, and my voice cut through the murmur. "I want to add something."
Martina looked at me like a queen spared the courtesy of a bow. "Hazel, darling, this is between adults."
"If someone is lying about me to gain leverage," I said, "I think people should know."
The reporter leaned in. Martina's smile didn't change—at first. Then I did what nobody expected: I opened my bag and took out a small recorder.
"This," I said, "is a copy of a voice memo that was sent to my publicist. In it, a person—Martina—boasts to a PR assistant about planting a story, and about sending a photographer to a certain hotel to snap a photo of two people leaving together."
There was a silence so thick it felt like velvet. Martina's jaw shifted. The reporter asked, "Can you play it?"
I hit play. The room filled with her voice, candid, triumphant, detailing lines that mapped exactly onto the gossip that had shadowed me for weeks.
Martina's expression went from painted charm to chipped enamel. People in the back began to whisper. Someone took out a phone and hit record. The PR person for the production stood up gray-faced.
"Is that a fabrication?" Martina barked. Her voice betrayed the first quiver of panic. "That's—who recorded that?"
"Your assistant," said a clear voice. I turned and saw Finn Fuchs standing with his arms folded—our on-site choreographer and a friend. He gave a small nod. "He was tired of being used."
Martina's manager went pale and opened his mouth.
"You can't—" Martina's composure cracked into splinters. She tried to laugh it off, but the sound was too sharp to be believed.
The producer's face was thunder. "Martina, is this true?"
She reached for an answer like a swimmer reaching for a rope. "No, no, you—this is a setup. I did not—"
The room surged; cameras flashed. People recorded, reposted, flagged. Her words became wind. Her denials fell into holes.
"What do you have to say?" a reporter shouted from the back.
Her mask, finally, jolted free. She went from processed calm to raw panic.
"That assistant is a liar! He—he did it to spite me! He wants to ruin me!"
Around us, those who had admired Martina began to pull back. An older board member of the production cleared his throat and said, "We will conduct an internal review. If these claims are true, we expect reparations. If they are not, we will take appropriate action."
The PR people swarmed. Martina, once glossy and commanding, found herself on the stage of her own undoing. She had the faintest, most human twitch at the corner of her mouth, and then she broke.
She lunged toward the record player on the table and tried to rip the cartridge out, fingers trembling, phone in hand. A dozen phones were already filming; within minutes, the clip of her lunging had circled the room and then the world. Everyone in the ballroom—assistants, reporters, crew, even the caterers—heard her voice transform from booming certainty to a pleading, almost childlike tone.
"Please," she sobbed. "Please don't—"
By the time the producer politely but firmly escorted her outside, large crowds had gathered on the steps of the venue. Cameras and microphones clustered like hornets. The tales of sabotage, of prankish collusion, of petty cruelty that had only been rumors were now accompanied by recorded proof. The hashtags changed tone overnight.
I felt nothing but the heat of adrenaline and a curious emptiness where anxiousness had been. The crowd outside chattered. Fans who had come to cheer now pressed their phones against the glass and watched the most uncomfortable thing they'd seen in the industry: a person, once elevated by wealth and connections, being unmade in public by her own misdeeds.
Martina's reaction was a study in transitions. First she was glare and arrogance; then, when the playback button made her words fossilized evidence, she went through sequences: surprise, denial, anger, false accusations, and finally collapse. She began to sob openly, her manager's attempts at rescue only fuelling further cameras and murmurs.
"She never thought she'd be called out," someone near me whispered.
"Nobody ever does," Finn replied.
The spectators shifted as if seeing the moral of a play acted out. There were people who laughed nasally, people who poked their friends with "I told you so," and—importantly—people who expressed there's satisfaction in seeing truth vindicated. Some filmed on purpose to post; others just watched.
Martina left with her reputation dented in an old-fashioned, irreversible way. Her phone calls fell silent. Offers that were being whispered about behind closed doors were canceled. People who had smiled at her in parties now crossed the room. It felt like watching tectonic plates move.
When the dust settled, I sat on a low wall and Duke came up beside me without a word. He put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed gently.
"You did good," he said.
I wanted to say I hadn't sought this fight, but truthfully a weight lifted off my chest. The industry could be savage, but sometimes it was also scathing enough to set small things right.
"Why did you help?" I asked him, because he'd been the one who had nudged Finn to put the recording into my hand.
He breathed out. "Because I couldn't stand the idea of you being run over. And because, sometimes, people need the mirror."
We stayed quiet until a pair of fans recognized him and waved, and then the world resumed its hum around us, louder and less brittle than before.
After that, things changed. Not because the cameras loved me more, though they did. Not solely because the scandal had cleared me; but because Duke and I had stopped pretending we were walking on different planes.
He began to show small, public markers of care: a message when I had an early flight, a camera-side towel tossed to me when I slid on mud, even—once—a text that read, simple and like a rope steadying me: "Be careful. I'm here."
We kept a private rhythm between us. During long nights when we were inside other people’s stories, we fit small rituals into the edges: a shared coffee cup, the exchange of a playlist, the promise that the person who fell asleep first would wake the other with a kiss. The red thread dream faded into an odd, shared joke.
The months rolled on. We worked and slept and fought small, trivial fights about whose turn it was to choose the film to screen at home. When time allowed, we would slip away together—no cameras, no PR—just to stand in a tiny temple where we both refused to pray but liked the quiet. Once, near a lantern-lit altar, Duke admitted, "I asked for something there, once. I thought I had already asked for all I needed."
"For what?" I asked.
"For courage," he said. "To be better than I was yesterday."
It was the most ordinary, honest thing I had ever heard him say.
When the day came for the festival where Nelson Johansson's work would finally be judged, I was included in the nominees for Best Actress. My phone vibrated like a frightened bird with messages and congratulations. Janet fussed, and Joy made sure I had two spare pairs of shoes.
Duke came with me. He walked me down the red carpet like he was the proudest man in the world.
On stage, when they read my name, the applause was an ocean. My knees felt like puddles. I found Duke’s hand in the crowd and squeezed it until my knuckles went white.
Later, in our hotel room, the world was sudden and very supple. We had champagne and too much smiling and a small number of texts that felt like pebbles of reality. Duke looked at me with a smile that made the night seem less usual: "You accepted a role to follow a director who asks for truth. You did it. I'm proud."
Before I could answer, he lunged toward me with that same steady deliberation that had been the backbone of so many private moments and, to my utter surprise, reached into his pocket. He opened a small box and the room went quieter than the world had the right to be.
"Hazel Andersen," he said, voice steady and a little raw, "I didn't plan for this. I didn't prepare an arena or an announcement. I only know that I want mornings with you. Will you marry me?"
It felt like the culmination of a thousand small things: the hoodie, the scarf, the bowl of soup, the tiny rituals, the way he had stood for me in public. My throat closed with all the right and wrong words.
"Yes," I said. "Yes."
He slipped an ice bright ring onto my finger. The world spilled back in: texts, lights, a knock at the door—Janet screaming congratulations through the corridor—but the center of it all was simple and still.
We had found each other in a storm that had first been ridiculous.
The days that followed weren't perfect. There were negotiations, contracts, and a thousand little practicalities that felt absurd compared to the moment in the hotel. There were fans who said they had always wanted us together, and others who thought we were a PR stunt. There were tabloid photos that insisted on being inconvenient and headlines that wanted more drama. We weathered it as people who'd already survived worse.
One night, a few years later, we returned to the tiny temple where my strange red thread had once anchored me to scenes I would never have predicted. We stood under the same low eaves, the incense stale and comforting.
"I never found out precisely who tied that string," I said.
Duke hummed. "Maybe no one did. Maybe it was a reason to find each other."
I laughed softly. "You made me feel brave."
He sucked in a breath. "You made me feel like staying."
Outside, small bells chimed. I looked at the ring, then at the man beside me, and at the simple stone place that had started us. Rain began again, soft and familiar, and I felt it as if I were wrapped in every warm, small thing we had ever traded.
We stepped into the rain and I touched his hand, and for the rest of my days, I kept one promise to myself: that the red thread—real or imagined—would never frighten me into silence. If chance braided our lives, then I would braid them back with intention.
We called it our chapel of coincidence, and whenever someone asked me how it had all happened, I would point to Duke Hashimoto and say simply, "It rained."
The End
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