Sweet Romance14 min read
Seven Piercings, One Promise
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I had delayed going home for the Lunar New Year until my father twisted my arm. I bought a ticket with my fingers shaking and thought I could rehearse how to be brave on the plane.
When I arrived, Dylan Daniels was there to meet me at the airport.
It was the first time we had seen each other since we broke up six months before.
He had changed.
"You look different," I said before I could stop myself.
He wore a black suit — sharp lines, dark fabric — and he carried himself like someone who had decided the world could keep its distance. He looked cold in a way that made everyone step back, but I saw him first as he was: tall, careful, dangerous in his quiet.
"Call me Dylan," he said, in that flat voice that could have been a salve or a blade.
"I..." I tried, then faltered. "Dylan," I managed.
He let a small half-smile cross his face when he leaned in to tuck the stray hairs behind my ear. He glanced at the row of silver studs along my lobe and said, "Seven piercings. You must really like pain."
I tried to laugh and ended up coughing into my drink, the smoke and nerves making my eyes water. Dylan watched me like he could hold my mess so I wouldn't fall apart. It made me feel exposed and, absurdly, seen.
At dinner that night my father and Valentina Casey, my stepmother, joined us. The rice sat in the middle of the table like an accusation. I learned fast how to answer Valentina's questions: short, polite, defensive. Dylan and I ate in silence most of the night, but when she leaned across the table to inspect me like a strange artifact, Dylan moved to shield me with a gesture so casual I thought it was habit.
"You're not my brother, call me Dylan," he said, not for the first time.
The words felt like a private map for us both.
Later, alone in my room, Dylan knocked. His face was a storm I had once known how to calm.
"You're doing okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I lied. I had learned to lie with the practiced calm of someone who had been abandoned and needed to look like nothing ever broke.
He wasn't fooled. "You look like you have been reading your worst thoughts for entertainment."
"Maybe I have," I admitted.
He put something on the nightstand: a hot water bottle covered in bright fabric — ridiculous and soft, like a child's talisman. "You said you liked this kind of silly thing," he said. "Take it."
I remember thinking, then and later, that he had always been made of small mercies.
I had a history of needing to hurt myself to feel whole. In college, when a relationship collapsed in ten days and humiliation came with a midnight call, I had woken Dylan up, angry and thirsty for comfort. He had been there without questions, bringing me back to me with the simple fact of his presence.
We had tried dating. For two years he did everything tenderly — morning texts, quiet attention, the kinds of things that build a life. He asked me not to tell my family because he feared their judgment. "But tell your friends," he had said, and would walk with a tiny proudness when people knew and nodded at us.
I had always held myself at arm's length, afraid to look too happy, afraid to be seen as the kind of woman who could be loved enough to be changed. When I found out he had been confided to by a colleague — a woman with the tidy life, the pleasant manners — my cowardice surfaced. I ended things brusquely, feeling safer in the dryness of loss than bullheaded in the risk of love.
That night I walked along the river and decided to end what could have been. I told myself I was sparing him — and maybe I was sparing myself.
Dylan and I lived in the space of unfinished sentences for months. The gap felt like a broken bone that refused to knit. He kept coming back to where I wanted him to stay. He protected me, bought me small ridiculous things, and learned to read my silences.
When I returned that year, things escalated quickly. My stepmother's curiosity bled into control. "We have a candidate for Dylan to meet," she told me one afternoon, fingers worrying a pot of soil. "A well-mannered, educated woman. Perfect match."
"I have a boyfriend," I said without thinking. The truth felt safer to hide than a piece of fragile glass.
Dylan stepped in and said, "If she meets him and it matters, I'll tell her."
He was blunt and honest, and something in his tone made Valentina go still.
"Bring her home," she said to me, like it was an order and not a question.
When my phone buzzed with a familiar voice that night, I answered because I couldn't not answer. Ezra Boehm called, a friend who listened and made jokes we could both laugh at in a way that stitched the edges of feeling back together.
"Do you want to come over?" he asked.
"No," I said, but he insisted.
At a barbecue, with smoke and cheap music clinging to the air, I stumbled leaving the restrooms. Dylan was there, steady as a lighthouse. He held me like I was both an answer and a question. I cried. He did not flinch. He let me be fragile in his arms.
We tried living as a unit again. He told me he had been planning things — a small apartment, a life that might not ask me to be unbroken before I stepped across the threshold. One evening before we had properly agreed, he reached across the steering wheel and asked, "Will you marry me?"
Not in a ring-and-rose way. He said it like a promise already in his chest.
I spat at the silliness of the thing. "You have to ask properly."
He stayed determined, stubborn and soft. He said, "I'll buy seven gold earrings and put them in your ears."
I laughed and said, "Why seven?"
"Because you cried and said it hurt, but you liked it enough to keep them," he said. "Because it's yours."
It was one of those small things that felt like a sun breaking through a long winter.
But there was trouble: my family's house was a battlefield. Valentina made it her mission to dismantle us — not with grand crimes, but with a cold, practical cruelty. She collected my missteps like proof the world was tidy, and she used them to shape our fate.
When our resolution to marry fronted the family, she struck. She called me negligent, unstable, a burden. She unfurled private medical papers in the living room — a medical history of my mother's depression and then, in a voice shaking, declared I must be the same.
"You're dragging my son down," she said, stacked with the casual certainty of someone sifting through inventory. "He deserves better."
My father, Quincy Burks, broke into something like a speech I had never expected.
"She's my daughter," he said, standing up for the first true honor I had received in years. "I am her father. She's not a thing you can trade or trash."
The house pitched and swayed. We stormed out. Dylan clutched me like he would keep me from the wind.
We tried to protect ourselves. We moved. He gave me an old scrapbook filled with pictures that proved he had loved me across ages. He put his future papers on the table in front of my father and said, "She is the one I choose."
My father, against Valentina's outrage, said, "If this is what your son wants, we will not make war."
Valentina did not accept this quietly. Instead, she made an act of cruelty that spread like a stain. She locked Dylan in the old storage room — a cramped, dark place where he could not stand comfortably — because she thought fear would teach him to be reasonable. She wanted to scare him out of what he called "a mistake."
She thought she would win by fear.
I found out he had been trapped when I climbed to the roof and swung along a narrow ledge to reach the storage window, because I had to get him out with my own hands. He sat curled in the dark, a small animal folded into itself. Holding him felt like holding a secret on fire.
After we left the house, Valentina's tactics escalated. She dug through drawers, exposed private documents, and when she could not dismantle us quietly, she replaced subtlety with spectacle. She took our story to neighbors and family friends, paint-brushing details and adding color where none had been. For a while, it seemed she had the power of gossip on her side.
We hit back the only way we knew how: with truth, with presence, with refusal to be erased.
Then, one afternoon during the spring festival, a large community meeting was held in the square — neighbors, family friends, people who had heard parts of the story like popcorn kernels of rumor. I had agreed to go because hiding felt like betrayal.
Valentina arrived early, flawless and fierce, and took a front-row seat. She sat like a woman holding the remote to other people's calm.
The neighbors sat in folding chairs; the mayor of the neighborhood cleared a breath and started the talk about community resilience. The crowd was thick enough that the air tasted like spilled tea.
Valentina could not resist. When the mayor opened the floor for comments, she stood — composed, practiced — and began to speak. She recited the version of the story that had been polished in her own head: the girl with a past, the unstable family, the unsuitable match. People nodded with the small cruelty of those who prefer easy stories.
Dylan listened without moving. He held my hand in his own, a simple anchor.
Then Ezra, the friend who had been listening and gathering, stood up. He is the kind of man who keeps notes because he believes in facts. He walked to the small stage and cleared his throat. "There are things you do not know," he said, and held up a phone.
It was a device with a cracked corner and a tired light. He set it on the podium and hit play. A recorded conversation filled the square like a sudden rain.
The audio had Valentina's voice — the voice I had heard in the kitchen, the voice that told me to be ashamed — instructing a neighbor to spread rumors, laying out plans to hide Dylan in the store room to "teach him a lesson," and laughing about how it would undermine our relationship. The recording was precise, cruel, pragmatic.
The crowd listened as if someone had opened a window to let truth through. People stopped folding their arms; some put hands to their mouths.
Valentina froze.
Her mouth opened — first an odd little lip tremble, then a full bloom of denial. "That's not true," she said, voice hardening like stone. "I'm being slandered."
A woman in the third row stood and said, "We heard you. I heard you tell Jane to lie. I recorded it for my husband's lawsuit."
On the phone play, Valentina's own laugh echoed back at her. She grasped the podium as if it could hold her up. "You're manipulating audio," she said, then, "How dare you."
The mood in the square changed from curiosity to accusation. People began to murmur, then to speak in chorus. Ezra produced documents: timestamps, messages, receipts that matched the times she had been seen around our house.
Valentina's face shifted through stages. At first there was triumph — a quick, practiced smile as if she had one more card. Then confusion — she had not expected the recording. After that came the canned denial, and finally the breakdown: a hot, slow crumble into panic.
"You're lying," she cried. She tried to point fingers at me. "She is the one who lies. She is sick. She is unstable."
"Why would you lock my son in there?" Dylan asked, voice flat and full. "Why would you leave a man with claustrophobia in a place that causes him pain? Did you think that would make him reasonable? Is cruelty how you show love?"
Valentina's lips worked. She denied. She refused. Her breath hitched. The neighbors gathered closer like a drift of birds.
One old neighbor, Mrs. Loom, who had watched the house for decades, shook her head and said, "I've watched her, Valentina. I saw her lock him. I saw her laugh about it."
The crowd's reaction hardened. Phones came out. A woman in a blue jacket recorded the moment Valentina's face changed from indignation to pleading. Another man muttered, "Shame on her." Someone whispered, "How long did she think she could do this?"
Valentina began to sob, a wet, loud sound that confessed less than it demanded. "You don't understand," she said, "you all think you know the whole story, but I was trying to—"
"Trying to what?" someone shouted. "Control him? Control a family's choices?"
He couldn't finish.
She sank down on a folding chair like a defeated actor who had lost the audience. Her shoulders shook with a sound like someone pressing grief into a tight box. Her eyes darted toward the edge of the crowd, then to me.
"Please," she said suddenly, and everyone heard the small, raw thing under the loud. "Please don't make me a spectacle."
Too late. The spectacle had already arrived.
People began to react — some with intended charity, others with a sharp desire for accountability. Several neighbors who had once nodded at her now looked away. A few who had been friendly turned to whisper in each other's ears. The mayor asked her to step down from the podium. Someone suggested she apologize. She tried; the words were mechanical and immediate.
"I...I'm sorry," she said. "I am sorry for my actions."
"Sorry isn't enough," said Dylan, voice steady. "We need people to know what you tried to do. We need to know you won't try it again."
Valentina's fingers dug into the chair. "I didn't mean harm. I was trying to protect my son."
"Protect him by hurting him?" Ezra asked.
She turned toward me then, and for the first time I saw not just fury but something like fear — a smaller, sharper pain. The neighbors circled like mild constellations.
She begged, then. She fell into the grammar of repair: "I'll go away. I'll be quiet. Please, don't tell anyone else. Please."
People's faces were hard as winter. A few women crossed their arms. One teenager muttered, "She needs help."
An older man sighed and said, "There are consequences for what you did. You should apologize to them. You should seek help."
Valentina's bravado had cracked; the remaining mask slumped. A woman near the back, whom I had never met, rose and said, "I raised my voice about things like this for years. People call you a stepmother, but you are a parent by choice. Choices have consequences. If she wants to stay with the man she loves, you have to accept that."
The crowd's murmurs shifted from gossip to pity, then to judgment. Some left. Many stayed.
Valentina's face went through the stages I had been taught to look for: arrogance, confusion, denial, collapse, and finally pleading. She reached for us, her voice soft and small: "Please forgive me. I can change. I will be different."
But some things cannot be immediately taken back in public air. Her reputation, so carefully built on the illusion of being the steady matriarch, cracked. The neighbors, who had once waved, now looked concerned and wary. People shared camera footage. The next day, several neighbors refused to invite her to gatherings. Someone else posted the recording online with a careful caption, and soon enough a simple internet coldness arrived: she was a cautionary tale.
The punishment was not a legal sentence. It was social consternation, slow and precise; it was the empty seat at a table when she expected company, the fewer calls, the lowered tones. She had constructed herself like a fortress and then found herself alone inside it while the world moved on without her.
Valentina's reaction changed across the hours and days: at first, she was furious and tried to spin narratives; then she could only explain and deny; then she began to frantically seek allies; finally, when calls went unanswered and neighbors closed ranks around Dylan and me, she surrendered to a small, terrible loneliness. She knocked on our door to beg for reconciliation, but my father walked her to the gate and shut it with a gentleness that was also a judgment. He said, "We will not hold you to the hatred; we will ask you to make repair. We will not let you harm them again."
People who had been witnesses reacted differently. Some whispered sympathetic words to Valentina as she cried on a neighbor's doorstep. Others turned their backs. One neighbor, a woman who had been quiet until then, offered a hand to Dylan and me and said, "You do not deserve to be treated this way."
Valentina tried to regain dignity by crying on the phone to friends, but many had already heard the audio. The recording circulated. "You were cruel in a way that was planned," one woman told her. "That's the part that hurts people most."
She lost social invitations. People avoided leaving children alone in her care. Her name became a story told quietly in kitchens and at markets.
When punishment is public, it is as much about exposure as consequence. Valentina realized she had no buffer anymore. The faces she had assumed would stand with her were turned away. She found herself asking her colleagues for help and receiving polite condolences and distanced offers of therapy. The community's shunning was a slow, steady punishment — she could not explain it away.
In the aftermath, she tried to be contrite in front of a handful of neighbors. "I was wrong," she said. "Can you please give me a chance to be better?"
"Chance," a neighbor repeated. "You need to show it. Actions, not words."
The crowd's reaction varied: the elderly man patted her hand with a sorrowful look. A teenager filmed the scene on her phone. A mother shook her head.
Valentina sat alone that night in her car and cried. She practiced apologies in the glass, tried to call friends, and received brief messages that did not comfort. The punishment had not been an act of cruelty but a demand for accountability. She had to face the consequences of choosing fear and control over kindness.
For me, the public unmasking of her actions was a strange relief. The shock was private no longer. I didn't need to carry the shame, because everyone had seen it and judged it. My father's voice had protected me, but the truth had liberated me more than any defense.
And for Dylan, the punishment was a vindication. People who had once hesitated to side with him now offered coffee and warm smiles. The neighborhood that had been easily swayed by stories learned something about listening to both sides.
The sun dropped low in the square that evening. People drifted away, mobiles flicking like distant stars. Valentina left without a rescue. She was a figure swallowed by the quiet aftermath of gossip turned real.
We went home holding hands. Dylan's fingers were steady, callused, honest. "You were brave," he said.
I whispered, "So were you."
The months after changed us. Valentina withdrew from neighborhood events, replaced loud socializing with visits to therapy, and started a slow attempt at restitution. The social punishment did not break her life, but it did teach a lesson in boundaries and consequences. She sent a letter to my father, short and formal, offering to reimburse expenses and to engage in counseling. He accepted only after months, and only because he wanted the house's peace, not because he forgave.
We married later that year in a small ceremony that felt like a victory rather than an arrival. Dylan put a thin gold hoop in my ear for each of my seven piercings. He laughed and said, "I told you I'd make them real."
"Seven," I said. "They hurt."
"You liked them," he said. Then, soft as a secret: "I liked that you could feel and still stay."
On the day he slipped the last hoop into place, he smiled at me the way he used to: rare, wide, warming. He took off his coat without thinking and draped it over my shoulders when I stepped outside into the wind. At the dinner afterward he squeezed my hand in public, and a cousin leaned over and said, "He's never done that with anyone."
And I knew the story people would tell, the one where a woman with a wounded past finds a man who chooses her, not out of pity but out of desire. I knew I'd keep the worn hot-water bottle he once gave me. I would not forget the way he had held me when the world fractured and how he had returned later with steadiness, with the patience it takes to love someone through the jagged edges.
We built small rituals: coffee cups that fit together at night, the way he always knocked three soft times before coming into my study, the way I would call him "idiot" for buying ridiculous gifts. People noticed the gentleness he reserved only for me, and some of them said, "He looks different around you."
"That's because you are the only one he lets have that look," a friend told me.
I kept my seven piercings. They hurt sometimes and glinted in sunlight other times. At night, when the world quieted, he'd trace each tiny hoop with the tip of his finger. "Promise me," he would whisper, "that you'll tell me when you hurt."
"I will," I'd say. And sometimes I wouldn't. But the promise was less about perfection and more about the attempt.
We were not perfect. We had fights that lasted nights. We had days I could hardly get out of bed. But when I sat with my hand in his, when I looked at the ordinary things we made, I could say I had a life I had chosen and that I had stood up to guard it.
"You ever think about the storage room?" I asked him once, years later, our daughter asleep in the other room.
He barked a laugh. "Not as much as I think about you doing the rooftop walk."
"You nearly gave us both a heart attack," I said.
"Then it's lucky you climbed," he replied. "I would have missed a lot."
He kissed the top of my head. "You are my star," he murmured. "My ridiculous, stubborn, bright star."
I touched my ear where the smallest hoop caught the light and thought of the hot-water bottle, of Ezra's nonsense, of my father's stiff love, and of the day the neighborhood decided to listen.
Sometimes I still felt the old shame slip into my chest like cold water. When it did, Dylan would fold his coat over my shoulders and pull me back to the room. "You are loved," he would say, always as if the words were new.
We had learned something important: love was not the absence of pain, but a willingness to be present anyway.
The End
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