Sweet Romance14 min read
"Sister, are you avoiding me?" — A Pearwood Rail and Two Brothers
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"Sister, are you avoiding me?" he closed in, step by step.
I pressed my lower back against the pearwood rail of the corridor, breath caught like a bird. Below us the engagement party hummed with music and polite laughter; anyone who looked up could see us through the mezzanine balustrade.
"You did that on purpose," I snapped.
Galileo Horn smiled, not a warm smile. "Don't look at me like that, Ava. Don't you hate me?"
"Or," he lifted one brow and let the corner of his mouth tilt in a teasing, dangerous arc, "are you mad because I didn't call you 'sister-in-law' earlier?"
I couldn't bear to look at him. I turned my face and my eyes hit Wade Kristensen across the room—calm, a flute of champagne in his hand—watching like a man cataloguing puzzle pieces.
"Oh-ho, my brother sees us." Galileo's grin went sour and mean. "My brother saw us."
I shoved him away.
He didn’t flinch. He straightened his jacket, reporting cheerfully, "He's coming up."
My throat went dry. This was the last thing I needed one night before my formal engagement. "You did this on purpose," I told him.
"Maybe," Galileo said. "Or maybe I just wanted to see you squirm."
Wade intercepted us halfway down the stairs and took my hand like it was the most normal thing in the world. "Are you avoiding him?" he asked me, softly, as if the world around us were a private room.
"No," I lied.
"Then don't," Wade said, and the words held no accusation—only a quiet command. He let go of my hand and folded his fingers around the rim of his glass. "Come meet some guests."
This had been my life for years: being a child's promise turned awkward grown-up contract. My parents—Hector Karim and Marjorie Collins—had brokered my betrothal to the Kristensen family when I was little. They thought a stable, respectable alliance would secure my future. It was a family arrangement that felt dusty, a relic, but now it edged closer to reality as Wade returned to our city to take a managing post at Kristensen Enterprises.
I had always thought I could handle this. I had always thought I could bring someone better if my father dared to insist. But time had a way of making threats feel very real. At twenty-one, I wasn't the naive toddler from those old days anymore; and yet I had to drum up a fake romance so my father could stop worrying about his business lines.
I met Galileo in high school, faintly in the background of my life—there at a campus festival, biting a silver chain necklace during a guitar solo, a young man who made girls squeal. He was magnetic, chaotic, and infuriating. When I asked him to fake-dates me to keep my father quiet, he accepted—with conditions. I would take one of his philosophy classes, and he would let me fill in for his civics recitation. I agreed, and the bargain was sealed like a childish pact.
"Deal," he had said, throat low and mischief bright. "But you have to help with my homework when I beg."
When he ghosted me the first time he said he'd come to meet my family, I was furious. He messaged, apologized, said his brother was returning. "Brother?" I asked then, surprised. "You have a brother?"
"Don't ask," Galileo said. "We don't get along."
And so it began: two men circling me in different orbits. Wade—steady, considerate, an older man with a quiet authority—and Galileo—a flame that burned quick and near, sometimes reckless and sometimes tender. My life slid between them like sheet music between fingers.
Days blurred into lessons and rehearsals. Wade secured for me lessons with his aunt, Beth Horn, a retired pianist of international reputation. She was strict and cutting in critique, but she made me better. My hands learned to speak the things my mouth did not.
Galileo, meanwhile, kept showing up: at my classes, at a small bar where his band played, on a starlit hill where he once spread a blanket and made me look up at the night sky. He could be childish—he could also be heartbreakingly sincere.
"I hate that he sees you like that," he had said once, in the grass under the stars. "He'll use you to make himself look whole."
"Use me?" I had laughed too loudly. "He's being decent to a fault."
"Don't let him make you small," he muttered. "I won't let him."
"You can't tell me what to feel," I said, and he looked at me like I had said something braver than I'd meant.
One night, after a lesson, I let fatigue pull me toward the university practice room. No one would be there—I thought I'd run scales for an hour, then go home. The door clicked shut as I walked in. The hall lights were dim. My fingers found the keys and the chords fell out like a secret. I stayed late, in the hush of the practice hall, and practiced until the notes felt less like effort and more like breath.
When I switched off the lights and reached for the door, someone came up behind me.
"Miss Ava," a voice whispered. Hands closed around my throat like iron.
I fought. I clawed and screamed against the hand that pinned me. The light switch clattered, and the corridor swallowed the noise. He had me on my knees in the stairwell, the breath knocked from me, when the world cracked open with the sound of a body and a man's voice: "Let her go."
Wade.
He slammed the other man against the wall, a clean, sudden motion. The attacker crumpled, and Wade stood between me and him like a shield.
"Who the hell are you?" Wade asked, cold as ice.
The man spat. "You Kristensens—always the angels. She ruined me." His fingers lurched for his phone.
"Don't," Wade said, and his voice was quieter, but it came with the same weight as a falling hammer.
The attacker—Edmund Gibson—was a student from the computer lab, the one who had once been reported for trying to take a photo under a skirt at the library. He'd claimed his scholarship was ruined, that I had ruined him, that the world owed him compensation. He'd cornered me to force a bargain. He thought he could threaten me into silence. He was wrong.
Wade didn't just detain him. He took my phone, called campus security, and then, seeing me tremble, he made a choice that changed everything.
"Stay," he said, and he guided me out into the corridor where fluorescent light poured and, by miracle, a night janitor lingered by the vending machines. Wade kept the man there till campus security arrived. Edmund thrashed and cursed, and Wade let him spit out his bile, but Wade's jaw was as steady as a machine.
The next morning, everything changed.
There was a disciplinary hearing called in the student union. I was told to come. Wade accompanied me. Galileo called me a dozen times and finally cornered me in the corridor to ask if I was all right. I told him I would be there—if only because Edmund had threatened to post photos and I dreaded any public smear.
They opened the hearing to witnesses. It was held in the union hall, a long room with rows of folding chairs and a platform. Students came. Professors filed in. A few reporters from the campus paper were there. Word spreads fast on a college campus—especially about scandal.
"Edmund Gibson," the dean began. "You are accused of sexual harassment, attempted assault, and blackmail. How do you plead?"
Edmund's face was pale. He had tried to play the role of the wronged man, and now the façade had to hold. "I—it's a misunderstanding," he said.
"Stand up," the dean ordered.
Edmund stood, and the hall watched him as if he were an exhibit. He was younger than he had looked in the dim stairwell, thinner, his bravado ragged at the edges.
I sat at the witness table. My hands were steady because Wade's were around them, unseen; he had gently placed his hand over mine on the table like an anchor.
"Miss Ava Willis," the dean said. "Please tell us what happened."
I told them. I told them about the late practice, the hands at my throat, the tearing of my blouse, the way that male voice had promised to publish photos. I told them about the scent of someone else's anger, about the panic I had felt in a hallway meant for music, not violence. I told them how Wade had arrived and how he had stopped Edmund.
Galileo sat in the second row. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, jaw clenched. When I glanced at him, his eyes were like flint.
The dean called witnesses. The janitor came forward; he had seen a shadow, the commotion at the practice hall, the pair going to the vending machine where Wade waited. Campus security produced CCTV footage—grainy, but revealing—showing Edmund outside the practice doors before me and the struggle that followed.
Then Wade spoke.
"In my experience," he said, "men like Edmund try to make themselves victims to justify their actions. He weaponized shame, threatened Ms. Willis, and attempted to blackmail her. That is not justice; that is cowardice."
He told the hall what he had done—how he had kept me out of sight, had stopped Edmund from destroying my future, how Edmund's claim to having lost a scholarship because of me was a fabrication to rationalize his attempt to control me.
Edmund began to plead. At first, his voice was furious and barked. Then it slid into disbelief. The camera angle in the footage showed his face, haggard and unmasked: there was no dignity left.
"You're going to publish photos?" a student called from the back.
"My lawyer will..." Edmund stammered.
The dean paused, and then asked the campus reporter to show Edmund's online posts, if any. Students with phones had already started filming—willing participants in the public unmasking.
The punishment the campus handed down was strict and public. Edmund was expelled. The administration organized a restorative meeting in which he would publicly apologize; in addition, the campus posted a notice on its forum detailing the outcome and the reasons for Edmund's expulsion. The student union also organized an open conversation about consent and harassment, with Edmund's behavior used—without naming other victims—as a case study for why those systems matter.
But the real punishment unfolded in the hall itself.
Edmund had expected pity. He had hoped that in the small-room justice of rumor and private messages, he could find redemption. Instead, he found an audience.
"How does it feel to have your life played on a loop, so others can watch you choke on your lies?" a senior student asked, voice cold. Phones were held aloft; the event was live-streamed by someone supportive of survivors. I watched as his face changed across the minutes: first defiance, then confusion, then the slow, animal realization of what he'd done.
"This isn't about me," he raged at one point, lunging with words that had no weapon. "I have been ruined."
"By your own choices," Wade said, deadly calm. "You cornered a woman in a dark hallway and threatened her. You wanted silence. The only ruin here is the ruin you chose."
Edmund's eyes flicked from Wade to me and back again. There was a man who had imagined himself in control, and now the hall of witnesses reflected his smallness.
People started clapping; not polite applause, but the sharp, hard sound of collective rejection. Classmates I had barely known spoke up, naming times when they'd been made uneasy by Edmund's stare, by his jokes. A former friend, who had once sat with him at the library, stood and read a message the police had shown—an apology Edmund had sent to someone else years ago that now served as a pattern.
Edmund shifted. The façade cracked.
"This is harassment," he whimpered. "I didn't mean—"
"You intended to take pictures without consent," the dean interrupted. "You intended to coerce and to profit. You assaulted a student. That is not 'not meaning to.' That is intent."
Among the crowd, a dozen students began to chant, at first quietly, then louder: "Consent. Consent. Consent." The chant filled the hall and made the air thick.
Edmund's mouth worked. He tried to explain that his scholarship loss would ruin him, that his family would—he reached for excuses and found none that held. First came denial; then anger; then bargaining. "Please," he begged; "I'll leave; don't tell anyone—I'll pay you—"
A student laughed, a low, cold sound. "You think everything has a price?"
Someone in the back stood up, took Edmund's phone, and showed the group his previously hidden account where messages revealed his manipulations. The students leaned in; the exposure was like acid on his skin. Edmund's bravado dissolved into pleading, then into petrified silence.
When security escorted him out, it wasn't a private shunning. A hundred pairs of eyes followed him to the door. Phones were recording, and the recordings were already being shared. Names were spoken; details were recounted. There was no anonymity left. Edmund's father called the university; his father's voice, heard later on the news feed, was small and angry, and the man finally had to reckon with the deed his son had done.
Edmund sat in the back of the security vehicle, head bowed. He looked like a man whose scaffolding had been burned away and who had nowhere to fall except the ground. In the days after, messages from peers stopped coming. Campus groups that had once shared memes with him removed him from photos. Those who pretended not to notice now openly condemned him.
It was merciless, but it was right. The punishment wasn't merely expulsion; it was the public recognition that he had violated someone and had to suffer the consequences among peers who would not protect him.
When it was over, I walked out of the hall with Wade and Galileo at my side.
"Are you okay?" Galileo asked. Up close, his hands trembled.
"I'm okay," I said.
Wade's hand was warm in mine. "You were brave," he said. "You told the truth."
Galileo's gaze flicked between us. "I should have been there sooner," he said. "I'm sorry."
"You were," I told him, and the three of us sat on the union steps under the night, held in a hush that felt like a promise.
Things after that moved in strange ways. Wade's care was steady, practical, sometimes infuriatingly calm. He built a piano room in the third floor of his old family house, custom soundproofing and a grand that smelled of lacquer and promises. He paid for lessons with his aunt Beth Horn without my asking. He fixed small details around me—my route to class, the way my tea was the right temperature, how he knew when I needed silence and when I needed a joke. He was not flashy; he was a structure.
Galileo was messy and bright. He sent me messages at dawn with snippets of lyrics. He waited outside my dorm with coffee and a sheepish grin. He wrote me a song in a small practice room with slatted light and an open window; he said it was for me, "Ava-limited," he called it, and I half-punched him and half-melted under the ridiculousness.
"Why don't you just say it?" I asked one night when he sat on the floor of my practice room, guitar across his knees.
"I did," he said simply. "I like you. I meant it."
"You put me in a no-win situation," I said. "You made every glance mean things."
"Can you blame me?" he said. "You look at a piano like someone looks at home."
I couldn't answer that.
The days arranged themselves around lessons and rehearsals. Work and music and dinner invitations. Wade and I kept up the pretense that the engagement was on track; my parents were blissfully certain and insistent. Galileo gave me space while still orbiting close.
At a gala one evening—Wade's company event, with chandeliers and a string quartet—Galileo burst in on his motorcycle, helmet in hand, causing the room to go still. Wade's jaw tightened. Their dynamic flicked like a woven wire between them, old grievances and new emotions sparking.
"You came," Galileo said to me, eyes bright with something like defiance.
"Of course," I said, because I did not want to make waves for Wade's company.
When Wade introduced me to the guests as his fiancée, a murmur passed through the crowd. Galileo, who half-surrenders to mischief, offered a small, mocking bow. Wade's expression didn't change—his mind was a sealed book. But when he later led me away to the balcony, he took my hand like a vow and kept his palm steady over mine.
Weeks later, after Edmund had left and the campus had rallied, a different kind of trouble arrived: a conditionality in my arrangement with Wade. When our piano teacher fainted from exhaustion and left for respite, the one thread holding our buckle of arrangement loosened. My piano lessons stopped; the contract—what it had been—felt brittle. There was a small, panicked part of me that wondered if Wade would leave his offer to make a piano room in the house. Would he withdraw?
He didn't. He built the room.
One night, tired and listening to wind against the windows, I sat on the piano bench and touched the lacquer. Wade stood then, near the doorway, and watched me.
"I don't like how you avoid him," he said—Galileo, he meant.
"I don't like being told not to have a life," I answered.
He smiled, a rare flicker. "Then have both," he said. "Let music be yours. Let me be the rest."
He moved closer and, without any fanfare, kissed my forehead. It was a small, startling thing, intimate and protective. My heart stopped for a second—an ordinary, honest kind of shock.
There were three moments that made my ribs ache with their sharp, warm truth.
First: when Wade adjusted the music stand for me during a lesson and his fingers brushed the nape of my neck—so careful, so kind. "You always look better when you're playing," he said, and the compliment landed like a ribbon at my throat.
Second: when Galileo drove me out to a field and made me look up; he pointed out a single star and said, "That's yours tonight," and his hand found mine in the dark. He wasn't asking permission; he was giving a place for me in his sky.
Third: backstage at a late-night performance, Galileo took off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. "It's yours," he whispered. "Keep it." There was a softness then that his stage persona never showed.
These moments—each a different kind of shelter—threaded through days that felt otherwise like negotiation. I did not want a man to protect me by owning me. I wanted someone who stood by me and respected the edges of who I was.
Galileo loved with loud, messy insistence. Wade loved with quiet, steady architecture. Both made me feel seen in different languages.
At the end—on a rare quiet night when the house smelled faintly of old wood and new varnish—I sat on the pearwood rail of the corridor where we had stood months ago. The party below was over. There was a single silver chain on my dresser that Galileo once bit to steady a note. It had been a careless charm, almost like a talisman.
Wade found me there.
"You used to avoid me," he said.
"I didn't know how to be honest," I admitted.
"Then be honest now," he asked, small and patient.
I looked at him and then at the empty corridor. "I don't want to make you small," I said. "I want to be honest."
He sat beside me on the rail, careful, and picked up a thread on my sleeve. "I built a room for your music," he said. "I planned a quiet life that lets you keep playing. I don't want to own you. I want to be the place you return to."
Galileo had never demanded such a thing. He had asked for my attention, my presence, my small stolen confidences. Wade asked for a voice.
I chose nothing rashly. I chose a path that allowed a person to be both steady and wild in different moments. I said to Galileo that I needed time; to Wade, I said I wanted him not to be my jailer but my partner. We navigated apologies, explanations, boundaries.
In the weeks after the public hearing and Edmund's expulsion, publicly he was alone. Privately, he tried to apologize, but the sound of his contrition was hollow. He tried to ask for forgiveness at a student forum and was chased by whispers. People took pictures of him at the cafe and refused him service. He sat at the fringe of groups and found that the fringe was a thin place. His life narrowed to the size of his protest.
One day, months later, the university held a consent workshop in the same hall where Edmund was expelled. They invited students to speak about boundaries and power. I sat in the front row. Galileo sat beside me. Wade stood at the side, his posture an unspoken promise. After the panel, a line formed to give testimony. Edmund did not come.
When the workshop ended, someone pinned a small, handmade sign to the union board—felt letters that read: "Music, Consent, and Care." I walked up and traced the curve of the "M" with my finger. I felt the pearwood rail under my palm, familiar and smooth.
The story is not a neat ribbon. I chose to stay with Wade not because he was the safest option, but because he became the kind of man who made space for my music without asking me to shrink for him. Galileo and I—our song remained; sometimes we'd meet on the hill for coffee and stray chords. He called his latest album "For Ava," and I listened like it was a letter.
When I look back, the moment on the corridor with the pearwood rail is sharp and clear: a nervous laugh, a push, a smile with too many meanings. The rail still holds that night as a memory of being cornered and choosing voice over fear.
"I'm not avoiding you," I told Galileo once, years later, and he laughed. "Good," he said. "Because I don't like empty air between us."
"Don't make me choose only one sky," I warned.
He kissed the top of my head like a brother who wants more and less than that. Wade squeezes my hand from the piano bench when I play; Galileo watches my shows from the crowd, singing along. We constructed a life stitched from care and music and truth.
As for Edmund—he learned that a quick life of small cruelties cannot survive the sunlight of witnesses. He was expelled and shunned; public and institutional consequences reshaped his future. The world can be cruel and slow and sometimes late, but the hall that day reminded us that a crowd of witnesses can tip the balance.
I closed my eyes, fingers resting on the pearwood rail. A faint echo of a silver chain caught on the night breeze from the open window—the same chain Galileo had once bitten on stage. I smiled, and for the first time in a long while, the music felt complete and mine.
The End
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