Sweet Romance13 min read
The Class Captain, the Viral Video, and the Wrong Name
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"I didn't expect to go viral for a breakup," I said into my phone like I was confessing a crime.
"You posted a breakup video?" my roommate laughed over the quiet of our dorm. "Do you want me to play it?"
"No," I said. "Don't."
"I already saw it. It's everywhere." She shrugged, but she was smiling. "You said something funny — everyone loves it."
"I said, 'New boyfriend? Start lining up in Paris.' How is that funny?" I pulled the blanket up to my chin.
"It was sharp," she said. "It was honest. People like honesty."
I stared at the dozens of messages blinking on my screen. The one name that pulled my breath out of my chest was a username with a pale gray avatar and a quiet, single note: "Wenx." My fingers hovered and then tapped.
"Who is he?" my roommate asked, peering.
"High school class captain," I said. "Nicholas." I almost swallowed my tongue. "Nicholas Martin."
"He added you?"
"He did." My thumb moved to type and froze. I remembered the old days — silent class meetings, stacks of perfect test scores, an unreadable face. He had been so serious, so far away that even the air around him felt formal.
"Text him back," she pushed.
My reply was childish and cheap: "Can you send 5000?" I sent it like a dare and hit delete right after. He did not reply. He deleted me.
"Real smooth," my roommate said.
"I know he deleted me on purpose," I lied. "He would."
I closed the phone and told myself I was done thinking. I had just escaped someone who timed my life — my kisses, my bathroom breaks — as though they were parts of a timetable. Jason Carney had a stopwatch in his head. He had said, "You drag, you lose," and then, in a tone as cold as a whiteboard, told me to pack.
"It was five minutes," I told anyone who would listen. "Five minutes in the bathroom." I had laughed at the time, and then I had cried later. When he left without me chasing after him, the relief was immediate and complicated.
"Come over, get ice cream," Antonella said. "You need a girlfriend night."
"Can we go to the reunion? He will be there with his new fiancée."
"Then let's go," Antonella said. "Bring your fury."
The reunion had miles of past between everyone and me. I watched from the shadows as Jason posed, laughing with a woman who looked everything he'd ever wanted: orderly, efficient, small enough to fit his rules. They were announcing their engagement like a press release.
I felt my face heat, then I ran — I left, dumb and raw. He found me at home.
"Coraline Guerrero, how long do you plan to run?" His voice was low and insolent.
"You left me," I said. "You broke up with me."
"You waste time," he said. "You will waste your life."
"Fine," I said. "Then watch me go."
I moved out of the building, then into the hallway to wait for a bus. I packed a bag like a stage actress leaving a small-town play. I sat on the stairs outside until he found me and said, "You can't hide forever." The way he said my full name made me feel like a school record.
The truth was, I had been a puppet to his rules. He timed kisses and laughs, planned my meals and even regulated my sleep. The worst part was how small the rules made me feel. "I can't breathe," I had told a friend once. She had laughed — a nervous, sad laugh.
"Film your freedom," Antonella had said. "Make them envy it."
So I did. I recorded one short video: "I got broken up with. Applicants for boyfriend positions can start lining up at Paris. Transfer window open." It was snarky and raw and somehow it turned into a wildfire overnight.
"Do you know who messaged you?" Antonella whispered, like it was gossip. "Nicholas."
"Nicholas Martin?" I sounded more hopeful than I intended.
"Yeah. In the class group he pinged you. He suggested you should consider a program. He said, 'There's a major you might like.'"
I froze. We had not spoken in years. He had been the kind of student teachers loved. Silent. Cold. Brilliant. A boy whose eyes looked like they measured everything and offered nothing.
I typed a one-line joke: "Can you send 5000?" and hit send, because I couldn't resist the ridiculousness.
He deleted me.
That was the end of things — until the reunion, when he walked in with a stranger and half the room fell quiet.
"Hey," Cael — my childhood friend — waved me over. "Go say congratulations."
"Why?" I asked. "To be polite? To give money?"
"Just… go."
I walked over and met Nicholas across the room. His face looked sharper than it used to. He caught my eye and nodded like a proper captain.
"You look well," he said. His voice was dry like a library book.
"Thanks," I muttered. The irony of being complimented by the one person who'd been most exacting on courtesy stung.
He didn't smile. Instead he said, "You looked different in the reunion photos."
"Was that a compliment?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He took a breath and said, "I saw your video."
"You did?"
"It was… honest."
"Of course it was honest. It was naked."
He looked at me as if measuring gravity. "You remember we were desk partners."
"That was the only time you ever spoke to me," I said.
"You never annoyed me. You made things easier." He added it like a fact. "You left."
"I had to."
We drifted away again. People kept talking. There was a hush for a moment when he mentioned his acceptance. "He went to Tsinghua," someone said later, nodding at a photo on a phone.
"Who's the woman in the photo?" I asked.
"Chen Yuanyuan," Cael laughed. "Another Chen — different character."
We all laughed. The class had always loved tidy jokes.
"By the way," he said quietly to the group, "I'm engaged."
The room clapped. I felt like a ghost. I wanted to apologize to myself for feeling lesser. I wanted to get up and say, "That isn't the only story," but I held my tongue.
Later, at a small street stall, Cael and I bumped into Nicholas again. He was with his friend, and for a beat, everything else became thin air.
"Don’t let him snoop you," Cael said, wagging a finger at me.
Nicholas tilted his head. "You shouldn't call yourself small." He said it to me as if it were proof.
"Why are you suddenly taking my side?" I asked.
"Because " — he paused — "you once completed my homework. I remember that." He smiled, and it lightened him.
I felt something thaw.
"Is that all?" I said.
"That's more than I expected," he said, and the night folded like paper.
Days passed. I found myself stalking his social updates like a guilty bird. He rarely posted; even his comments were tightly measured. When he did speak, it was like hearing a lock click into place. One night, my fingers trembled. I texted him. "I'm going to take the test for Suzhou University. I'm tired of being only where they expect me."
"Good," he replied. "I'll help."
"Help how?"
"In small ways." He said the words like an offered hand.
That hand turned into messages, then practice lists, then a quiet call one night when I could not sleep.
"Are you awake?" he whispered at 1:13 a.m.
"I am," I whispered back. I felt foolish and raw. "I don't want to talk about anything big."
"Then tell me why you are scared."
I told him about my mother’s plans, how she had archived my days and tried to fold me into them. I told him about the days my father had stood behind a teacher and told me I must follow the correct path. He listened. He didn't offer platitudes. He said, "Breathe. Plans change. People sometimes need the courage to make those changes."
"I can't make them," I said.
"Maybe you don't have to make them alone."
There was something in his voice that fixed me. It was not a hero’s roar. It was steady, like a hand on the back of your chair during an exam. He stayed online until I fell asleep.
Weeks later, we traveled with Antonella and Cael to Suzhou for a competition. I still thought he would be far and unattainable. But in the hotel lobby, he walked up and said, "You came."
"You weren't here?" I asked.
"I left my flight to be closer," he said simply.
"What?"
"I had a ticket for another plan, but I changed it."
"Why?" I asked too loudly.
"Because I wanted to."
We stayed up late in a tiny coffee shop and he ordered "things you liked." He remembered, without ceremony, that I liked sugar-cured ribs. He had packed a small bottle of a perfume that smelled like pepper and orange — the label read "Bombshell." He said it was silly but effective. "It keeps mosquitos away," he said, which made me grin.
"You buy me perfume to keep mosquitos away?" I teased.
"Maybe there’s another reason," he said.
"Like?"
"Because you deserve to smell like you want to smell."
That simple sentence made me forget I had been taught to aim for the nearest exit. I felt foolish and dizzy.
We joined the friends for a mountain hike — Emei Mountain had a hush about it, all ancient stone and wind through pine. The three of us climbed, and at the top, everything quieted. The sun rose like a coin.
"Take a picture," Nicho — I almost called him by the old nickname — said.
"Okay," I whispered.
He stepped back and took the perfect photograph: Cael grinning, Antonella poised with her hands clasped, me in the middle with an embarrassed smile. When he walked past, his hand pressed the lower part of my back for a fraction of a second. That little touch was like a credit to my heart.
"You two look good," Cael said, nudging us. "It's like a play."
I watched Nicholas as if he were moonlight. He had lines of tiredness under his eyes, but when he smiled my name, the world tilted.
"Why do you look at me like that?" he teased once, once our group dispersed. He was tired — the kind of sleep-tired you have after writing essays all night. He said, "You remind me to be human."
"Do I?" I asked.
"You remind me that perfection is a story, not a life."
That was one of the moments I kept in my pocket: him telling me I was human enough to be loved, messy and earnest. I practiced the phrase in my head for days.
Antonella liked Nicholas. That was obvious and quiet and made my chest twist with complicated joy. She would call him "Wenx" and rub her hands in front of her like a child catching a kite in the wind.
One evening, in a hotel corridor lit with warm bulbs, Antonella stood outside Nicholas’s door with a small charm in her hand.
"I'm going to give him a good-luck charm," she whispered. "He looks tired."
He refused it with a calm straightness. "I don't accept charms."
"Why?"
"Because there are things you have to earn," he said.
"Like what?" Antonella asked.
"Trust," he said. "Respect. The honest sort of attention that doesn't ask for anything in return."
It felt like he said that for me. I listened from the shadow of a potted plant and felt somehow guilty.
The worst voice in the story is Jason Carney's. He reappeared in a way I did not expect. He confronted me on campus during a small lecture and he tried to make a spectacle. His plan was simple: ruin me with humiliation, publicly. He would show the world I was weak. I wasn't going to let him get away with it.
The punishment had to be public, brutal in its clarity. It needed to measure him in front of witnesses — friends, professors, parents — and make him feel the reversal of power he had used so often.
It happened on the day of a campus open forum on student conduct. Jason appeared as if he belonged on stage — crisp shirt, smug grin. He got up during the Q&A and moved toward me, as if he had the right to the space I occupied.
"Coraline," he called. His voice rippled like a bell. "You always liked to be late. Even in bathroom lines you managed to be the queen of delay."
A few students giggled. Antonella's grip on my arm tightened.
Jason began to list, in a precise cadence, my flaws. "She wastes time. She missed deadlines. She is irresponsible."
He made facts into a performance. He wanted the room to watch me shrink.
Nicholas stood. "Jason," he said, his voice quiet but full of a slow force. "If you want to judge someone, let's go through the facts."
"Because you care?" Jason sneered.
"I care because you're lying," Nicholas said.
"Explain."
Nicholas pulled out his phone, and with the same economy of motion he used on his footnotes in essays, displayed messages, schedules, screenshots of the exact moments Jason had monitored and timed. The room leaned forward. Professors stopped, folding their arms. Jason's carefully crafted grin began to crack.
"Look at this," Nicholas said. "He demanded records. He timed her. He ordered her movements. This is not discipline. This is control."
"Where did you get that?" Jason barked.
"From a copy he left on a desk," Nicholas said. He looked at me. I was trembling. He kept speaking gently, "When you tell someone the length of a kiss, you are practicing ownership."
The crowd around us shifted. The professor at the podium sighed. "This is serious," she said. "These are allegations of emotional abuse."
"Allegations?" Jason snapped. "You have no proof."
"A pattern of a harassing nature," Nicholas said, "is now documented. He deleted messages to cover them, but the copies remain."
There were murmurs. Someone pulled out a phone and started recording. My stomach dropped into my shoes as the evidence crawled across the projector screen: messages, timestamps, the invoice of her time. Jason's face changed color. He tried to laugh it off. "You can't present private conversations!" he said. "That's illegal."
"You made it public," Nicholas replied. "You made her life into a timetable."
"Stop," I said, and my voice, small and raw, cut through the room. "I don't want his cruelty to become anyone's entertainment."
"You already entertained him," Jason said coldly. "You asked for money online, you played the victim for likes."
"That was my post," I said. "It was my truth. I was trying to be honest."
The professor turned to the student assembly. "We will hear this thing in a formal hearing, but from what I'm seeing, there are university policies against stalking, harassment, and misusing another student's privacy."
"You're a liar," Jason snapped at me.
"No," Nicholas said. "You're a liar."
The room changed. People who had laughed at my video now listened. Parents in the crowd began to whisper. One mother shook her head and took pictures. A few students stood up. "He controlled the girl's life," one said. "We didn't know."
Jason's face went from smug to shocked to desperate. He reached for the moderator. "This is unfair! I will sue! I will make them pay!"
"Sit down," the professor said. "We will initiate a review. In the meantime, we ask all parties to remain off social media."
"You're ruining me!" Jason shouted. He scanned the crowd as if looking for allies. Instead he found the opposite. His boss, who had come as a guest speaker, looked at him and slowly removed his name badge and handed it to an assistant. "I… I can't be associated with this," he said. "We have a reputation to protect."
The assistant pushed him away. Jason's confident posture crumpled. Students started to record as a security guard escorted him out of the hall.
"It’s not done until it's done," Jason cried, pounding his fists on the door. "It was private!"
"Nobody gave you the right," the moderator said calmly.
The assembly was with us by the end. People who had once nodded at his authority now turned toward me and said, "Are you okay?" Professors who had respected him as a performer of cold order now looked away. The parents whispered. Recordings of his remark — the timing, the trademark "you waste time" line — spread through the courtyard like confetti. His boss called HR the moment the video hit the Internet.
Two days later, a statement from his company announced an investigation. The press called. The neighborhood group in which he volunteered removed him from the list of speakers. A student-run documentary crew, once enthralled by his grades, offered testimony about his demeanor and his controlling emails. The man who had once timed my kisses with a stopwatch found himself timed by eyes, recorded by cameras, and judged by people who knew the meaning of "consent."
I watched him in the courtyard, surrounded by the kind of public I thought he loved. He stood alone while his reputation drained from him like water from a stone. People stopped him on the path. "How could you do that?" one parent asked.
"Why would you say this?" another demanded.
Jason's voice moved from anger to plea. "I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean–"
"No," someone shouted. "You meant."
Friends who had once accepted him now shook their heads. He flicked a look at me, pleading with his eyes, which were smaller than before. "Please," he said. "I can make this right."
"You made it wrong," a professor told him. "Now you will have to answer."
He slunk away like a boy with a broken kite. He tried to mend his image with a contrite post online, but the truth had teeth, and it bit him hard. Newspaper reporters called him "the timetable boyfriend." The security footage, the witness statements, the professors' notes — everything made a case. In the end he lost more than his pride. He lost public ties and the trust of people unaware that his discipline could become a weapon.
It felt right. Watching him be exposed in public was not joy. It was a review — an audit — of the cruelty he had thought invisible. He had been flourished by the weight of rules; now the rules turned on him.
After the hearing, people came to talk to me. "You were brave," some said. "You were honest." It was hard to accept praise that came with pain. I had been broken and then recognized. I was not the same shy girl who once let others speak for her. Nicholas stood on the edge of the crowd. He didn't speak when people left. He just slid an elbow around me and walked me home.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?" he asked.
"For... seeing me."
"Anyone would," he said, but he didn't sound like he believed it. He looked at me like I had offered him something precious and had simply left it trembling on the table.
We grew closer in ways that were careful and kind. There were small things that made my heart race: the moment he smiled at me for the first time without reserve, the time he quietly wrapped his jacket around my shoulders when a sudden wind arose, the time he sent a text at noon: "I bought extra soup. You hungry?" or "Don't work late. Sleep." In every micro-moment, something real gathered like dew.
One night in the library, I sprawled across a bench and made a joke about my old habits. He laughed, and then, without warning, he leaned in and kissed me.
It was not the timed, enforced kissing of Jason Carney. It was slow and personal, like someone learning to read a new, sacred book page by page.
"Do you remember when you asked me for 5000 as a joke?" he whispered when we separated. I tried not to blush.
"That was mean of me."
"It was funny." He smiled with his eyes, and my knees forgot how to be strong.
"I don't deserve you," I said.
"Don't say that," he said. "You deserve someone who sees your time as your own."
Our life moved, not like a scripted film but like a quiet series of mornings. We argued, softly. He was not perfect. I was stubborn. We made up. We fought exams together. We read through old messages and burned the ones that will not heal us.
Antonella went to study abroad with Nicholas eventually. Her joy did not hurt me; I learned how to be glad for other people's light. She sent postcards and videos from campus parties, while Nicholas wrote me notes about mundane things: "You left your umbrella with me," and "I mailed your favorite tea." He loved smallness as if it were a treasure.
On graduation day, when families cheered and photos spilled like confetti, he took my hand and tugged me into the frame. "Say it," he said.
"Say what?"
He looked straight at me. "Do you want to go with me? Not just to another city, not just to a plane window, but with me."
My throat closed. I thought of the long nights of study, of my mother's old plans, of every time I'd been told to be someone else. I looked at his steady face.
"Yes," I said simply.
He smiled, and that smile told me he had kept his promises.
We walked out of the ceremony to a small crowd. Beneath the bright sun, he took both my hands. "We are neither perfect nor famous," he said. "We are messy and real. That's what I'll choose every day."
"Today?" I asked.
"Every day," he answered.
Later, Antonella married someone kind. Cael settled into a job that made him laugh in the mornings. My parents, after many storms, accepted that my life would not look like the plan they'd written on paper. They learned to listen. It took time. Time is a teacher that does not accept bribes.
I kept a small notebook of the moments that made me breathe: the day he waited in the rain and handed me a taxi; the night we argued about which movie to watch and then fell asleep on the couch; the time he refused a job because it meant leaving me behind. I kept them like talismans against forgetting.
I still carry the charm he gave me in Suzhou — the cheap little plastic triangle the way a promise sometimes comes in simple shapes. It is not superstition that keeps it close; it is the memory of being seen.
We never let someone else dictate the length of our kisses again.
The End
— Thank you for reading —