Sweet Romance11 min read
Room for Two (and One Secret)
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I never thought I would stand in my ex’s doorway and ask for one room.
“Two standard rooms?” Ismael Lehmann asked, cigarette half-rolled between his fingers, looking over my shoulder at the young man behind me.
“One double bed, please,” I said, keeping my voice steady.
He glanced at Ezra Saito and then at me. “Room enough.”
“You heard me wrong,” I said. “Money’s short.”
Ismael’s face went dark. He slammed the door so hard the glass jarred. For a moment I felt the old sting—the same sting from the last time he shut out my life.
That night, when I was back in the rented house with Ezra asleep on the sofa, someone slipped a thick envelope across my palm. Ismael had left it under the door. In the morning he stormed in, breathless and furious.
“I gave you money, so why are you sharing a room with him?” he demanded.
A hand landed on my waist. Ezra’s stepfather’s son—my stepbrother—laughed easily. “Saving is a virtue. Come on, Ismael, you work hard. Let them economize.”
1
My name is Indigo Guo. I’m twenty-five, I earn three thousand a month, and my life runs on calendars and slow, careful plans. Ezra Saito is seventeen, a top celebrity who used to be untouchable, and then everything collapsed online. His early romance with a famous actress blew up into a public scandal that left him raw and fragile.
“You find her,” my stepfather, Karl Gonzalez, told me over dinner, slamming a bowl on the table. “Get her out of his life. Do it and I’ll give you ten thousand a month.”
“Two,” he corrected a minute later, eyes on me. “Make it two.”
I made the choice. “Done.” My voice was thin, but I already scrolled my payment app.
For a week I followed Ezra every place he went, pretending to be the reliable older sister Karl wanted me to be. I learned his routines. I learned his habits. I learned that the woman he loved was Blakely Roux, an actress ten years older, and she had been cheating on him. Worse, Ezra had paid her a fortune every month.
I found the proof on her social circle, private messages, a small file of receipts. I could have kept walking. Instead I went straight to Ezra’s father with the evidence.
“You want the truth?” I told his father in a cooling lobby. “Then here. Take it.”
Good news: Ezra finally broke up. Bad news: Blakely posted an announcement the next morning—another man, an official relationship. Ezra was crushed. He fell into a deep, ugly depression. His family split beneath the strain. My mother and Karl argued daily. They pushed me out the door and said, “Take him away. Make him better.”
2
We argued all the way to the mountains. Ezra and I fought, then we fought more. The inn I reserved turned out to be Ismael’s. He ran the place now, older and more quiet, but still the same man who once held my heart like a small, breakable thing.
“How many rooms?” he asked again when I checked in.
“One room,” I said with a crooked smile.
“Room enough,” he said, and tossed me a look.
“Money’s short,” I repeated.
Ismael laughed once. “You’re still dating poor men, Indigo? Need spare change?”
My skin flared. “He’s young and strong, and sometimes strong is what I need. Besides, he’s my responsibility while he’s ill.”
Ismael threw his ID at the receptionist. “You fill it out. Register her.”
He left with a curse. The old pain flared, but I walked away with my chin up.
Inside, Ezra eyed me like a thundercloud. “You aren’t my sister, are you?” he said flatly.
“For now,” I answered.
“You’re always… something.”
“I can be whatever you need. For now, sister works.”
“That a promise?” he asked with that small, haunted laugh.
I didn’t promise more than I could keep.
3
We lived on the edge of his moods. He was unstable, sometimes violent with himself; sometimes he was a boy who chewed his lower lip until it ached. Once I caught him online, reading the comments he shouldn’t. “You can’t look at that,” I told him.
He shrugged, “You want him to take me back?”
“Ismael? He’s moved on.”
I pictured Ismael, older, easier, the man my mother had once loved. He’d come back to stand in my life like a mirror. It made me weak in ways I didn’t like.
“You want to sleep in a different room?” Ezra asked one evening, voice a challenge.
“Sometimes,” I said. “When you need less, I’ll be less in your face.”
He shot me a fast look. “Then be less.”
I laughed and went to wash my face. When I came out, Ezra had gone. His phone was under the covers, ringing futilely. He’d slipped out with a hat and sunglasses, gone like a storm.
4
I searched. The staff didn’t see him. “He had a hat, sunglasses, a cap,” one clerk told me, shrugging. Then, as if heaven timed these things, Ismael—calm and crushing—stood up from a poker table and said, “I’ll come.”
“You’re supposed to be at a date,” the clerk said, surprised.
“Later,” Ismael replied. He looked tired in a way I hadn’t seen before. “Let’s go.”
We followed mountain roads, arguing in the back seat. Ismael walked beside me like he still owned the world, and I hated every inch of how he could make a room his without a fight. He scolded me gently. “You haven’t grown up since you were seventeen.”
“You started leaving without telling me seven years ago,” I snapped.
He looked at me in a way that was too old for both of us. “Don’t throw your life away,” he said. “Not on someone like me.”
I kept my mouth shut the rest of the drive.
5
Back at the inn, Ezra had come back with tea and a scowl. “She’s at the tea shop next door,” he said, deadpan. “With the owner’s daughter.”
“Which owner?” I asked.
Ismael had come through the door with a first aid kit in his hand. The men who worked for him hovered like nervous children. “He’s here,” Ismael said, deadpan.
I told them I wouldn’t be seeing Ismael, and Ismael’s quiet fury made the room shrink.
“Careful,” he said, pulling a first-aid box closer like a shield. “You’re walking into gossip.”
I felt the gossip like a current. The staff clustered and chattered, eating our minor drama like bread.
6
There was a night in the campground that changed everything. Ezra and I had been arguing; he left me alone with my anger and the lake. I slipped on the boat and fell into cold water. The world turned upside down; my lungs screamed.
“Indigo!” Ezra’s voice cut through the water like a rope. He threw himself into the lake to catch me. We both ended up soaked and ridiculous, clinging to a boat that drifted farther and farther from the shore.
He hauled me up. “Don’t ever do that again,” he told me, voice sharp and softer at once.
“You risk your neck for me,” I said, toes numb.
“You would too. I don’t want you to disappear.”
We sat in an odd silence as the sky thinned to cold blue. That night we slept awkwardly close; when I woke, his hand was on mine. I jerked it away and he let me, looking almost pained.
7
The scandal that had wrecked Ezra’s life was larger than the two of us, and not everyone had been punished. Blakely Roux—her name sounded like a perfume—kept winning. She had left Ezra for someone richer, and the public had cheered her escape. I had thought I’d handed the evidence to Ezra’s father and that would be that, but truth has a habit of exploding.
At a film festival in the city, the rotten fruit of Blakely’s choices came to hang over her head like rotten smoke. I did not plan it, but I was there with a ticket, watching her walk the red carpet. Ezra had planned nothing; he had refused to. But the story—my small secret—caught in the right winds.
“Blakely,” a journalist asked, “are the reports true about you and a married producer?”
She smiled as if none of it mattered. “I love my life,” she said. “My choices are mine.”
They cheered her. Cameras zoomed in. Then a voice from the crowd cut like glass.
“Where’s the woman you left alone?” the voice demanded.
The reporter stepped back. People turned. Whispers spread like spilled water.
I pushed forward before I thought. I had nothing to gain and everything to lose, but I had a truth that needed oxygen.
“You left a seventeen-year-old,” I said, my voice trembling but loud. “You left him for money. You took more than you gave. You used him.”
Her smile froze first. The glitter of cameras caught her like a net. “What are you talking about?” she asked, tone sliding into false shock.
“Don’t play dumb,” I said. “Messages, payments, your private brunches with other men—paid for by him. He was a child in everything but age.”
That set off a cascade. A blogger in the crowd pushed a phone into my face. “Do you want to go on camera?” he hissed.
I said the things I had kept like stones. “You left him. You let him take the cost of your fame. You moved on publicly without saying sorry. He is not a wallet. He is a person.”
Her face went pale. The room shifted. “Security,” her manager snapped, but people were already filming. A dozen phones swung in elegant arcs, capturing the slow unpeeling of her smile.
She tried to deflect. “This is harassment,” she said. “I did nothing wrong.”
“No,” I said. “You turned him into a project. You made a child pay for your lifestyle.”
The crowd erupted—some with anger, some with disbelief. Fans who had adored her turned confused as if their love had been a fog.
“Shame,” someone chanted. “Shame. Shame.”
Her eyes flashed hard, then wet. She reached for the microphone, but her voice failed. “You’re lying,” she said to me, then to the crowd. “You’re trying to ruin me.”
“Look at her,” a woman said from the edge of the crowd. “She left a boy broken.”
Phones recorded, cameras rolled. An older actress who had once shared a set with Blakely stepped forward, voice steady. “You think you’re untouchable,” she said. “You used people. You polished your image with other people’s heartbreaks. Not tonight.”
I watched the change like weather. Blakely went from queen to accused in a matter of breaths. Her manager moved to shield her; a few people in the crowd began to clap and then sneer. Someone shoved a piece of paper onto a podium—a list of messages, dates, photos. A few news outlets live-streamed the scene. Her PR team flailed; lawyers mouthed legalese. The crowd was no longer hers.
She started to cry, but the sobs sounded small in the press scrum. Her face twisted from anger to denial to panic. “You can’t do this! This is slander!” she screamed.
People around us recorded everything, some sneering, some appalled, others whispering the same word: “Hypocrite.”
Security tried to steer her away but the barrier held. A celebrity always has a buffer, but now that buffer turned to glass. Ismael, who had watched quietly from the back, stepped forward without his cigarette for the first time. “People should answer for what they do,” he said, voice low and controlled.
Blakely’s manager made a call. Within minutes, lawyers arrived. But the damage was done. The next morning, the story that mattered was not the award nominations but the video clips of Blakely’s collapse on the carpet, the messages exposed, her sponsor pulling their ads. Fans who once screamed her name now rewrote her legacy in real time.
She crumbled in front of cameras. At first she denied everything—then she begged, then she blamed the press, then she tried to buy silence. None of it worked. A public apology was drafted, torn, and posted. The comments were merciless. Brands quietly deleted her tags. People who stained their hands in her path turned away. A producer who was considering her left the country schedule without her.
By midday, her carefully built life had scattered. Reporters trailed her as she left the festival, and the crowd’s applause had been replaced with a hollow quiet. Her face, so polished under lights, now looked small and raw.
She walked past me once, eyes red, and for a second I saw fear. “You ruined me,” she mouthed.
I didn’t answer. How do you unmake a person who used you as a ladder? You watch as they fall.
8
The fallout changed our world. Ezra was no longer alone in his sadness; he had a small group of people who would not let him drown. He stopped reading comments. He went to therapy more regularly. He slept a little more. He would glare at me sometimes, a small fierce look that meant things he could not yet say.
“Why did you do it?” he asked one night as we sat on the roof, the stars like pins of light.
“Because I couldn’t watch you be used,” I said. “And because I was tired of watching people take and take and never be asked to explain.”
He reached for my hand. “You could have been my enemy.”
“I would never be your enemy,” I said. “I wanted you safe.”
He laughed—soft, incredulous. “You tell me that while calling me a child.”
“I told you the truth,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I don’t care.”
9
Ismael kept giving me small, impossible gifts of normalcy. Once he walked in with a dented metal first-aid kit and sat quietly while Ezra and I argued about nothing. He’d been the one to shove the envelope under my door, the one who stood in the red-carpeted shame that night and didn’t clap.
“I don’t want your thanks,” he told me once as we walked under the stars. “I want you to stop letting people steal your quiet.”
“You left,” I said. “Seven years.”
“I know.” He stopped, looked at me, and for a moment he was the man I had loved when I was young, the man who had kissed me once and then left. “I’m sorry.”
Time stretches and mends, or it makes new patterns. Ezra and I found small patterns that kept us safe. He learned to sleep with a med kit nearby. I learned to keep my wallet zipped. At night, when insomnia stole him, I lay awake and rubbed his back until the tremor in his shoulders calmed.
10
There were small moments—real, uncut—that made me dizzy with feeling.
“You should smile more,” Ezra said once, ridiculous in his bluntness.
“I do smile.”
“No, not like that. Like you mean it.”
I looked at him. He had cotton in his ears, a cigarette behind his ear, hair mussed. He looked ten times more alive than some men twice his age on glossy covers. “What would make me smile?”
“You,” he said. “If you kissed me, maybe.”
“I’m your sister,” I reminded him.
“For now,” he said, and grinned like a boy.
Another night we sat at the back of a small theater. He’d been invited to a talk—the crowds were smaller now. He took my hand without thinking. “You’re warm,” he said.
“You’re ridiculous,” I told him, but I didn’t move my hand.
Later, once, waking from a dream, I brushed his hair from his face and saw how carefully vulnerable he could be. He sniffed, and his lashes clung with sleep. “Don’t leave me,” he murmured.
“I won’t,” I said, and felt my heartbeat speed in a way that shocked me with its honesty.
11
Ismael kept his distance like a man wounded, but present. He helped in small ways—paid a bill when we had none, registered us under his name at the inn, carried our bags when we left. Once he threw me a look so fierce I almost bent.
“You can do better than me,” he said in a rare moment. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you.”
“You left me,” I said, tired of dancing around the truth. “You chose.”
“I chose survival,” he answered. “I chose cowardice. I paid for it.”
“Why now?” I asked.
He looked at me like he was measuring the weather. “Because I saw you steady him. Because you didn’t let him be lonely. Because you still took the punches for someone else’s mistakes. I thought that deserved at least a word.”
12
In the end, Ezra left the industry for a while. He enrolled in university. He kept a low profile. He studied. He answered texts slower. He grew quieter in the ways that matter, and when he smiled, it felt earned.
We learned how to be ordinary. He would call me at work and ask about photocopy paper and water heaters. He developed a taste for simple things—plain noodles, a well-brewed tea, a bookstore that smelled like dust and ink. He missed fewer appointments. He slept more.
“Do you regret it?” he asked me once while we walked through a campus square, the sun making his hair a halo.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Regret is the shape of all things we thought we wanted. But I don’t regret this, what we are now.”
“I like this,” he said. “I like you like this.”
13
Months passed without being a cliché—no montage of grand declarations, no towering proclamations in front of a crowd. Just small pacings: a med kit always in the car, a text at midnight, the way he leaned into me when a nightmare came. He called me “sister” sometimes like a joke and sometimes like a prayer. I called him “idiot” but my hand would find his.
One evening, after a day of lecture and errands, he told me his phone password. “0823,” he said, and laughed self-consciously. “Remember it.”
I did. I wrote it down on a napkin and folded it into my wallet, tiny like a vow.
14
The world returned to balance slowly. Blakely’s fall had ripple effects—some pitiful, some deserved. But the biggest change was in us. I learned to be kinder to myself. Ezra learned to be kinder to the boy he used to be. Ismael learned to stand a little straighter and hand back what he could not keep: time.
One night, as we stood at the little pier where the lake caught the moon, Ezra slipped his hand into mine without asking. He looked down at our joined fingers, then up at my face.
“Will you stay?” he asked.
“I already did,” I said.
He pressed his forehead to mine like a benediction. “Then be my sister, my guardian, my keeper,” he whispered, and it felt like both a joke and a vow.
I rested my head against his. Above us, a single thin star blinked like a secret.
We were not perfect. We had messy histories and uncertain futures. But in the small hours, with a med kit in the closet and a secret password between us, we found a way to live that fit. He called me sister, but he kissed me when he felt brave enough. I called him idiot, but I learned his name again, in the way people learn music.
Sometimes the truth is a blunt instrument. Sometimes it heals.
The End
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