Sweet Romance10 min read
The Cilantro, the Golden Eyes, and the Boy Who Wouldn't Let Go
ButterPicks12 views
I still remember the first time someone called me "wife" in the middle of the dining hall.
"I found you, wife!" he shouted, and before I could think a polite refusal, he lept and hugged me like I belonged to him. I froze, then spat out the first word that came to mind. "What the—!"
Without thinking, muscle memory from a lifetime of wild farm chores took over. I heaved and flipped him over my shoulder. He landed on the linoleum with a miserable little cry on his face.
Around us, voices rose. People pointed. My old enemy, Juliana English, smiled like she'd won the lottery. "You broke him," she sang. "The principal's son! If he's hurt, your family's going to owe big time. You better hope your fields can pay."
I stared. The boy on the floor blinked up at me with big, wet eyes, red-rimmed from holding in tears. "Wife," he sniffed. "You said I could hug you when I see you."
"Excuse me?" I hobbled forward because the toe I had nicked last week felt like someone was stabbing it with a fork. As I lurched, he didn't even complain. Without a second thought he grabbed me, hoisted me onto his back, and started sprinting for the nurse's office.
"Are you all right, wife? Does it hurt?" he asked like I had just been robbed of a toy.
My foot screamed. My voice screamed back. "I am not your wife," I said between hops. "You have the wrong person."
He pouted like a small, offended puppy. "But you told me to call you that. You said—"
"Nope," I said. "I don't even know you."
He looked hurt enough for my heart to drop an inch. "You don't like me? You only like my money!" He said it like a line from a soap opera and then hiccuped into tears.
I blinked. "What?"
"You're a liar!" he sobbed, and then, like a small sprite from the novels Juliana read, he ran away with the dignity of someone whose feelings had been betrayed.
I sat on the folding chair in the nurse's office, one foot wrapped in gauze, and tried to sort the mess out. A few days later he cornered me in the dining hall again, phone thrust at my face.
"Big liar, pay me back!" he shouted.
I stared at the screen. There were screenshots: a transfer history of four separate 5,000-yuan deposits, a photo of my face, and a chat where the woman on the other end complained he was gouging her bank account. He had collected proof that I had told someone to call me "wife" and to transfer money.
"Who sent you this?" I demanded.
"I met her online," he said like he had been stabbed. "She said she was you. She said she was poor and needed money—"
"You mean someone used my photos to scam you?" I cut in. "Why would you think I'd do that?"
His eyes were pure blue pools of confusion and pain. This boy—Finn Smith—was the principal's son: clean-cut, soft-voiced, and gullible in the way of people with more kindness than sense. He blubbered and blinked and then did something that made my chest unclench: he took me by the hand and said, "Let's go to the police."
We spent the afternoon sitting in the station. The officer, patient and practical, took our statements and ran the numbers. Finn's face went from crushed to pale to furious as the officer explained. "We found the account. We traced the IP. The person is on campus."
I felt someone glance at me. Juliana's little clique had followed us. The world suddenly felt close and sharp and loud.
The police found her: Stefanie Amin, one of Juliana's friends, mean in the way quiet people can be—small, resentful, always mocking. She sat in the interrogation room, hands cuffed to the table, and the metal clicked like a verdict.
When we entered, Stefanie lunged forward with crocodile panic. "Please, don't! Don't tell them to take me! I won't go to jail!" she begged.
Finn put his hand in mine and squeezed.
"She used my photos to chat with me and get my money," Finn said. It came out quiet, but clean. "But she doesn't deserve—" His voice broke. "People like that should be taught a lesson."
The room smelled like old coffee and bleaching fluid. Stefanie's eyes were wet, but not from fear. She kept repeating, "It wasn't me, it wasn't me," though somewhere inside she knew how wrong she was.
It was at the station that the first big public scene happened. The officer told us they had enough to hold her. But we, the victims, weren't done. Finn and I walked out into the lobby under the bright fluorescent lights. Word spreads fast on campus, and by the time we stepped outside, a small crowd of students had gathered—phones out, whispers sharp and hungry.
We led Stefanie, escorted by two officers, up the steps of the station. I could see Juliana under the crowd, face pale like soap. The students lined both sides of the steps. Someone hissed, "Scammer!" Someone else held up a phone, livestreaming like vultures casting a net.
Stefanie saw the crowd and tried to put on a brave show. "It wasn't me," she said in a shaky voice that wanted to be a scream. "I only used a picture. She—she should have warned me!"
"Warned you?" someone shouted. "Warned you how to steal?"
I watched her face with a calmness that felt new. She had always been someone who mocked other people's families. Now she was the one exposed.
She started with denial. "No, no, no—it's not like that!" She paced the tile floor, hands clutched to her chest. Her voice was high and thin. Then came the stage of blame. "They made me do it. Juliana told me to do something. I thought—"
Her voice broke like thin glass. A murmur ran through the crowd. Someone snapped a photo. Another posted it. "Guys, she's the one who used Liesel's photos to catfish Finn!" The post exploded within the hour.
Then the real fall began.
An older woman in the crowd, the mother of someone in our year, stepped forward and said, "My sister teaches online safety. She says these scams ruin lives. You ruined his trust." Her voice was steady, not cruel, but full of public judgment—an order.
Stefanie's face shifted—shock, then pale anger, then a fragile attempt at arrogance. "You have no proof I'm a bad person!" she shouted, voice cracking.
"Proof is in the IP," the officer said. "We've got the record. Your confession is on tape."
Denial faltered. Stefanie's face squeezed into a mask of disbelief. She staggered backwards, bumping into the station's glass wall. A small circle of students fell silent, then someone laughed meanly. The laughter spread like oil.
"Please," she begged. "Please don't put me on the internet. Please—"
Her pleading flipped into fury. "This isn't fair! I had to do it! She's the one who takes the pretty pictures! Everyone told me she does this! I didn't mean—"
People began to shout back. "You did mean!" someone replied. "You didn't stop!"
Her voice rose, then lowered. She tried to keep control, but it slipped, showing the person behind the liar: scared, cornered, ordinary. Her denial gave way to blame, and then to terror as the crowd closed in with questions and phones and hurt.
The most brutal moment came when Juliana stepped forward. Her face was white as a sheet. For months she had been the one leading the jokes, the whispers about my family's land, my clothes, my shoes. Now she looked like a child caught stealing sugar. She tried to play innocent: "I didn't—she did it alone," Juliana lied at first, then President of the Trauma Club, she crumpled.
Juliana's best friend, the one who used to mimic me in class, whispered: "She told us she'd get us more followers if we helped. We thought it was a stunt."
The crowd hissed. One by one, the witnesses we thought were just followers admitted that Stefanie had set it up and that Juliana had cheered her on. The slow, humiliating unmasking was worse than any slap.
Stefanie's face turned from defiant to desperate. "Please! I can't go to jail," she wailed. "My father will kill me!" The fear made her childish, small, brittle.
Then came the hardest part: the internet. A student held up his phone and said, "Watch." He hit replay on a saved audio clip of Stefanie coaching Juliana's friend on how to pull off the fake conversation. The audio had her using my name, my dorm number, the lies about being hungry and poor.
I watched the crowd change. Disgust painted many faces. Some students covered their mouths. Someone started to clap—not in approval of cruelty but like an audience finally seeing the conclusion of a long, ugly play. Calls were made. Someone suggested the school should hold a disciplinary hearing.
The officers read Stefanie her rights and took her away. She shoved and screamed and then collapsed into sobs—real, raw, pained. Around us, witnesses murmured: "I can't believe she did that," "I saw her brag about it," "I didn't know where she got the picture."
At the center of the storm, Finn stood steady. He didn't point. He didn't call for vengeance. He had already been punished by betrayal. Now he watched how truth rewrote loyalty in public, and his cheeks glowed with something that wasn't triumph—it was relief, humility, a quiet sorrow for what we all had borne.
A week later the school put Stephane on public probation. The school assembly became the stage for the second and more ritual punishment. The principal read out the findings in the auditorium with parents and students packed in tight. Stefanie was made to stand and face those she'd hurt. She had to account for every lie, every contact, every moment she used someone else for her own ends. The crowd's reaction was a compass swinging from curiosity to disdain to righteous anger. Stefanie tried all the stages again—denial, fury, bargaining—but each attempt fell flat under the weight of evidence and witness testimony.
When the assembly ended, there was no triumphant music. There was a quiet—a cold, clean pause like a room aired after smoke. People looked at me differently. Not with the whispering smirk Juliana used to spread—but with something else: respect or, at least, a truer understanding. Juliana, on the other hand, had to answer for her part. The school gave her community service and required her to attend empathy training with Stefanie. For both of them, the punishment was public and stinging: they had to apologize, on stage, to Finn and to me. Stefanie's apology cracked on a dozen notes, and Juliana's was too small for what she'd done. They left the podium to the sound of a hundred phones going quiet.
Finn and I walked home together that night, our hands accidentally brushing. He leaned in like the boy he was—gentle, earnest—and whispered, "I'm so sorry you had to go through that."
"Not just me," I said. "You too."
He looked at me then, and something like a star split open in his eyes. For a heartbeat they flashed gold.
I yelped and pulled back. He smiled embarrassedly, rubbing the back of his neck like a puppy caught eating cake. "I get... weird," he said. "It's in my blood. My family's—there's a thing. Sometimes my pupils change and I feel strange. I called it my 'heat' when I was young and dumb."
"Heat?" I snorted.
"It's like—I can't control myself entirely. It makes me clingy, louder. I don't mean to be overbearing. I just—" his words slowed. "I wanted to protect you."
"You're very good at protecting," I told him. "Even when you accidentally flip people."
From then on, Finn became my soft shadow. He queued up food for me, saved seats, and carried my books like an overgrown robin cherishing its treasure. He'd bring milk tea and hot buns, leave them down the corridor, and wave like a dignified monarch when I caught him. He would, in public, blush to the roots and in private try to coax me into silly, tiny confessions. One night, after yet another petty harassment from Juliana's circle, he turned to me and asked in a voice too small for his heart, "Will you try being mine?"
"Try," I said, and his answer was a grin so quick it was almost a sunburn of joy.
We had gentle, clumsy first dates: cinema seats and sticky fingers, the awkwardness when he once vanished and I found him in the men's bathroom, eyes glinting gold like a secret lamp. He excused himself, embarrassed, and promised to explain. He said it was inherited—a "golden flare" that made him lose his calm. I learned that it came once a month or sometimes at random, and he tried, bravely and laughably, to be disciplined.
We had to learn boundaries. He had to learn to step back when that flare came. I had to learn to trust that his clutching wasn't possession but fear that distance would lose me. We made rules: when his eyes went honey-bright, he'd put on sunglasses and give me a five-minute head start out of the room. When I had to run home to help my parents harvest cilantro, he'd help—shoulder-tall and awkward among the green rows, hands learning the twist and the right snap, laughing when he got cilantro in his teeth.
The festival when our families met was half joking, half destiny. My father asked, half teasing and half in the way that decides futures, "If he can't inherit the fields, are we even talking?" Finn, without missing a beat, dropped to both knees—dramatic, sincere—and said, "I'll take the dirt and the rain. If she'll have me, I'll learn to love every row."
My father laughed, my mother cried, and Juliana's mouth turned into a line. The news traveled like a wind. Our campus laughed with us and at us and with us again.
A month later, when the school put up a film about online safety, they used a blurred image of someone like Stefanie, with a narrator's voice warning about easy lies and easier cruelty. Juliana, required to assist, sat next to me and once whispered, "I'm sorry." It wasn't theatrical. It wasn't a play. It was honest, and for the first time she didn't have an audience. She had to face real consequences: community reparation, lost standing in class, a small, humiliating remorse.
Stefanie, meanwhile, served time in the strictest sense the school could impose and faced charges in civil court. The public punishment had shattered her confidence. Her fall was complete—friends left, followers dwindled, opportunities evaporated. She begged, pleaded, and then finally, quieted into the small life of someone who'd been taught what money and lies could do. She could not point fingers; she only had to live with her choices.
In the months after, Finn and I grew into each other's small, private languages: a certain tilt of the head, a soft click of the tongue, a tiny codename for our shared breaks. People who had once mocked me counted on me now. The cilantro fields—my family's thousand acres scattered across counties—mattered less for status and more for the rituals they kept: my father teaching Finn how to drop a plant into the soil, to cut at the right angle, to say "thank you" to the earth.
"Will you marry me?" Finn asked one night under the porch light, his voice a small crack. The world was sleeping. Crickets hummed. His pupils held normal, human blue.
I put cilantro between my fingers like a joke and said, "Only if you promise not to fling me over your shoulder when you get "excited.""
He laughed, then grew sudden and earnest. "I promise—to ask first."
I stuck out my hand like a queen of ridiculous things, and he took it like a prince who had learned the gentle rules of farm life. We stood there, under the porch light, a boy with golden flare and a girl with too many fields, hands joint in the dark.
I had been dragged into embarrassment and into affection, cheated and then defended, laughed at and then respected. The worst had been public and the best had been private. The cilantro smelled like home and like every argument and laugh we'd share.
And when we finally walked down to the edge of the rows, I tucked my fingers into his sleeve. "Okay," I said. "But if you ever call me 'wife' in front of the entire dining hall again without asking, I reserve the right to flip you."
"Deal," he said. His grin was incandescent, almost golden—only for a heartbeat. "And Liesel?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you for making me brave."
I squeezed his fingers and, with a gentle nudge, pulled him toward the fields. The cilantro leaves brushed our legs like applause.
The End
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