Sweet Romance19 min read
The Green-Tea Boyfriend and the Little Brother Who Stayed
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I remember the first time someone called me "green tea" like it was the sound of a distant bell.
"You green tea?" Colby asked me once, the word laced with genuine confusion. He blinked, entirely innocent, and then added, "Do you think I'm green tea, too?"
"No," I said too loudly, because my mouth always betrayed my heart before my brain could get in line. "Of course not."
He narrowed his eyes at me, mischief softening his face. "Then why are you so sure about me?"
"Because you always do the math for the lab," I replied, and then laughed, which was my usual way of changing the subject.
Colby had been my lab partner after year one. Bright, white-lipped when he smiled, always small kindnesses—folding my napkin, pushing a stray lock of hair behind my ear, sending a quiet text when he knew I had a long day. To everyone else he was "the good little brother." To me he became something else, slowly.
"You think people call me green tea?" he asked that afternoon in the lab as we re-ran datasets until the numbers behaved. He stretched, the tiny pinch of his shoulders visible under his jacket, and then, with an embarrassed chuckle, offered, "Want to get lunch? My treat."
I told myself no. I told myself lunches with him were innocent and convenient. But I said yes anyway.
"You're sure you don't want to eat with Gabriel?" he asked, unable to help the question.
"Gabriel is... complicated," I said.
"Complicated how?"
"Jealous." The word tasted like ash, even as I said it.
"Why jealous?"
"Because he thinks I like you."
Colby blinked. "Me?"
"Yeah." I swirled my tea like someone else might have flicked a match. "Because you're kind and he sees kindness and calls it something else."
Colby laughed, small and embarrassed. "I don't plan to take anyone's boyfriend."
"You sound like you would," I said, and the line between teasing and something more fluttered. He smiled that smile that made my throat dry, because when he smiled he looked surprised by his own warmth.
He insisted on the little things: sliding the coat over my shoulders when I said it wasn't cold, holding my hand at crosswalks until the light changed, tying my hair with a spare hair elastic and then pretending the elastic had been left there all along. Those small things landed like stepping stones in my chest. Once, when the temperature dropped suddenly during a group field day, he slid his gloves over my fingers as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
"You're freezing," he said.
"Not that cold," I lied.
"Take my gloves," he said simply, and I let him. The warmth moved through me and stayed.
Gabriel, though—he was different. Gabriel could be all fire and storm. Handsome in a way that made people look twice, a thick dark head of hair, an easy laugh that masked a temper. Gabriel and I had been together for three years. We had made a life out of little rituals: him dropping off coffee, him remembering the exact wrong way I like my eggs, the way he would squint and read the same article with me at two in the morning. We had argued, too, but we always made up—until the arguments didn't fix the fractures anymore.
"You need to stop talking to Colby so much," Gabriel snapped one night over the phone. "I don't like him."
"I haven't done anything," I said. "We're lab partners."
"Lie less to me," he said, and there it was: the old accusation, wrapped thinly in something else.
That was the beginning of our fracture. He accused me of being warm to other men as if friendliness were betrayal. He called Colby a "green tea boy"—a phrase I'd never heard until then—and laughed as if that explained everything.
Colby, bless him, listened. "I won't do anything," he told me when I tried to explain. "You know me."
"You owe him nothing," I told myself. "He doesn't understand me like Colby does."
Colby never asked me to choose. He only showed up in the spaces where Gabriel did not, and stayed of his own accord.
"I won't stand in the middle," he said to me one evening, handing me a napkin with his thumbprint on it. "If you need to go, go. If you need to stay, stay. But don't let someone else decide your heart."
"You said that like you think I'd cause trouble."
"You make trouble sometimes," he said, smiling. "But it's the good kind."
That smile became the pulse beneath my days.
The fights with Gabriel escalated until one evening he did the thing that split us: he deleted me on social media, then called and bragged, "There. You won't see me now."
"Gabriel, what the hell?" I cried into my pillow.
"What? I told you not to talk to Colby." He said it casually, like it was a law he'd enforced. "You weren't listening."
"That's insane," I said.
"Fine. If you want to test me, test me," he said, and hung up.
I rang him back and he ignored the calls. He finally video-called and I watched his handsome face scowl on my small screen.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"At home."
"Who are you with?"
"Nobody."
"Are you lying to me?" His voice was clipped.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said, and of course I lied.
"Come down. I'll take you out," he demanded.
"I'm not going to be bossed around."
He insisted. I refused. He waited. I went. There was something stupid and comfortable in the ritual of it, and maybe that's why I stayed as long as I did. He would sometimes hold my hand and slip it into his coat; once he warmed my fingers and I liked the way his palm felt, a memory that kept me awake in the quiet hours.
But there were times—too many—when he chose someone else.
"They're friends," Gabriel always said whenever I brought up Brielle. "She's just a friend."
"She touches you in front of me," I said, the night we sat at a party with awkward lights and louder voices. Brielle laughed, eyes glittering—she was one of those women who had the grace of a peel-and-reveal: bright and glossy on the outside, slippery in the places that needed steadiness.
"I don't care what you think," Gabriel said.
When he said that, I felt small. "If you keep choosing her, then what am I?" I asked, quiet.
"You'll be me when you get over it." He smiled like a person who thought he had given me a gift.
After arguments like that I would lie awake and re-listen to the way he had laughed at me the way you might study a bruise. I thought of leaving for a long time before I did. The line came not from a single act but from a slow pile of small wounds.
Colby, meanwhile, watched me with an expression that didn't hide his affection. "You deserve someone who has your back," he would say. "Not someone who chooses performance over you."
"Performance?"
"He performs for others to feel good about himself," Colby said, blunt and kind. "Not for you."
"What would you do if I asked you to leave your girlfriend for me?" I asked him once, absurdly, because it's the kind of question drunk girls ask and then regret.
He looked at me plainly. "I wouldn't do that," he said. "But I would wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For you to choose yourself," he said.
He waited. I broke up with Gabriel in a place that was quiet enough for both our words to land like stones.
"We should take a breather," I said in the darkness of a park where the lake was still and the air smelled like late winter.
"You mean break up?" Gabriel asked, incredulous.
"Yes."
"No." He made a face that folded in on itself. "You're joking."
"I'm not."
"Can't we talk about this? Can't we—"
"No," I said. "I choose me."
He looked as if someone had pushed him under water. He pleaded in ways that made my chest ache for a second—his voice like a child who had been given the wrong answer on a test—but this time I didn't cave.
"Fine," he said finally. "Fine. If that is what you want."
There was a moment of silence and then the old Gabriel returned in a tiny way, the one that begged and promised and then promised again. "I'll prove it. I'll do anything."
"You always say that."
"Then give me the chance to show you."
"I tried," I told him. "I tried for three years."
He leaned in like people do when they want to fix something by force. I put my hand on his arm and pushed him away gently. "We are done," I said.
After we split, Gabriel's presence at campus increased, as if removing me had given him more freedom to stalk the edges of my life. He "happened" to be in the lab more often than necessary; he "coincidentally" sat near the table where I ate; he "accidentally" bumped into me by the lake. I pretended not to see him. That strategy held for a while.
"Why are you avoiding him?" Harper asked one afternoon as we walked back from class.
"Because I don't want him back in my life," I said.
"Then don't engage," she said, as practical as ever. "Act like you're not bothered."
So I did. For three days I pretended, and then a week, and then a month. Colby sat with me more often. He brought me a hot drink once when the wind went cruel.
"You're warming my fingers again," I told him.
"Serves you right for stealing my scarf last winter," he said.
We grew into a rhythm that felt less like hiding and more like building. He called me "sister" at first, then "Mercedes," then a pet name that stuck only between us. He learned what made me laugh, and how I liked the salt on my chocolate, and could read when I was building up the courage to say something important.
Still, the scar of Gabriel wasn't gone. There were days when I would spot him on campus with Brielle laughing like they had rehearsed the moment and my chest would crack. Once I saw them in the hospital corridor: Gabriel pale as paper and moaning about how he had "overdone" the drinks. Brielle clutched his hand like a prop.
"Drive him home," she told me with a voice tined in sweetness and accusation. "You should help."
"I don't have to," I said.
"You're mean," Brielle said, and there was a layer in her voice that wanted me to bite back.
But I had moved past the reflex. Colby squeezed my fingers under the hospital bench and whispered, "Ignore them. He did this." He didn't need to say more; his eyes read like a promise.
"What are you doing here?" Gabriel croaked, as if I had materialized to perform penance.
"Watching," I said. "Watching you make your own choices."
He flailed for sympathy, "I need you."
"You needed booze," I said.
"I was sad," he spat. "I was lonely."
"That was your choice," I said. "Not mine."
Brielle, who had been leaning into Gabriel as if they were two halves of one well-polished joke, took offense. "You have no idea," she said sharply. "You were cruel."
"To be fair," I said quietly, "I chose to end things when I knew the pattern. I learned the hard way."
Brielle's face changed. People in the corridor turned their heads. Some students sitting nearby leaned forward, sensing the crackle. Brielle had always liked being admired. To be questioned was a small public wound.
"You're being dramatic," she said, in a voice meant to slice.
Colby stood then. "You know what the worst part is?" he said, quiet enough for only the three of us to hear. "That you think the world owes you other people's happiness."
"Colby," I started.
"No," he said. "Listen."
I looked up. The hospital corridor held the sound of distant beeping and soft shoes. People were watching now, curiosity like a small crowd.
Brielle's smile flickered. "It isn't like that," she insisted.
"Because if it were, why would you walk into his bed while he was still mine?" Colby asked. "Why would you make a show of it?"
"My show?" Brielle asked.
"Yes," Colby said with a coldness that shocked me, because the little brother could be cold like this. "You made a show out of being the better choice."
The corridor went silent in the way halls do when everyone expects a performance.
"You're overreacting," Brielle said, but her voice lacked conviction. The color had left her cheeks.
"People who build their life on other people's ruins are always the last to realize the smell," Colby said. "You can smile at him, but it's all paper-thin."
A group of students had gathered at the far end of the hall like gulls. A nurse paused to watch. The dean's assistant, a woman who never looked away from her phone, set the phone down for a second.
"Colby," I said, alarmed. "Please don't."
He took my hand and said simply, "You deserve someone better."
Then Brielle snapped. "You little—"
"Don't," Gabriel warned, but his voice had no anchor.
"I don't want this drama," I said, and I turned away, because the last thing I wanted was to be the center of a spectacle. But I felt something else then: the warm, steady pressure of Colby's hand, and the quiet knowledge that if the world decided to watch us, the world would see the truth.
That scene in the hospital corridor was the beginning of the small public unmaskings. People are more attuned to stories than facts, and once the idea took hold—that Gabriel's "kindness" had strings and Brielle's interest was opportunistic—rumors collected like sparkles. Yet it wasn't enough for me that whispers shifted. The rules say: when someone treats you badly, sometimes you have to take back the stage.
So I did.
Months later, at the university's research symposium—an event where we presented posters and where faculty and students would walk by in a slow, appreciative flow—I decided to speak.
"Mercedes!" someone said as I wheeled my poster into place. Colby was beside me, carrying two cups of coffee like a champion.
"Don't spill," I whispered.
"Never," he answered, with a grin.
The hall smelled of markers and old coffee. Everyone had dressed up; the department's upper table was full of stiff smiles. Gabriel and Brielle were there, glossy as ever, positioned near a frame that announced their collaboration. They had a poster next to ours; the world loves symmetry.
I glanced at Colby. "If it gets ugly—"
"It won't," he said. "If it does, I have your back."
I set my jaw. This wasn't going to be revenge. It was going to be truth. The difference matters.
The crowd flowed. Questions came and went. Students stopped at our poster. Then, as if someone had tossed a stone in a calm pool, a voice called out from near the dean's table.
"Is that Gabriel?" the voice asked. A circle of people turned. Someone with a sharp camera started walking toward the couple's poster. A student who'd heard the hospital story nudged another.
"Mercedes," Brielle said, approaching with a smile like a knife folded in gauze. "What a coincidence."
"Yes," I said. "A large one." My voice was steady.
"Want to talk about our work?" Gabriel asked, smiling as if our relationship had never been a pile of glass.
"Not about your poster," I answered. "I thought we could talk about something else."
People paused. The dean's eyes flicked. Colby moved to stand so his shoulders nearly touched mine; it felt safe.
"What do you mean?" Brielle asked.
"You made a career of being charming at other people's expense," I said. "You two make performances, and you've been good at it—shame you didn't practice empathy while you were at it."
There was the inhalation of a crowd. Conversations hush into hearing.
Brielle's face hardened. "This is outrageous," she said.
"Is it?" I asked. "Because there are witnesses. The hospital. The nights he was found where he shouldn't have been. The times he picked her over me when it mattered. The empty promises. The times you smiled when you watched my back break."
Someone whispered "oh" like a wind. The dean's assistant sighed and looked down at her feet. A professor crossed his arms. Gabriel's face changed—first confusion, then defense, then a strain of outrage.
"That's not fair," Gabriel said, stepping forward.
"It's history," Colby said, surprising me with how cold he sounded. "And history belongs to the people who live it."
Gabriel reddened. "You had no right—"
"You both had choices," I said, and I let the room hold that. "I will not be the one who keeps quiet while my life gets footnotes in someone else's story."
Brielle's lips trembled. "You're trying to ruin us," she spat.
"Call it what you like," I said. "But when someone you used to love lies in a bed because he drank himself into a hole, and you stand there making a picture of devotion for strangers—"
"You forget the rest," Colby added, voice like cooled iron. "You forget the lonely people he left behind when he decided his image mattered more than the person who loved him."
The murmurs grew louder. Someone in the crowd—one of the students who had been at the hospital that night—stepped forward. "It happened," she said, voice small. "I saw them there."
Another student nodded. "We all thought it was just gossip." He said, "Turns out it's not."
Brielle's face collapsed into something sharp and raw. "You can't just—"
"Watch me," I said.
Gabriel tried to salvage the scene with a laugh. "This is ridiculous. We're scientists. Let's be professional."
"Be professional," I said, and I looked straight at him. "Then act like it."
For a moment Gabriel looked like a man who had been given an unexpected mirror. The reflection didn't suit him.
Then he lost his composure.
"You're being petty," he said, voice rising. "You're the one being dramatic."
People around us shifted. The dean's face was unreadable. A student took out a phone; the way the world is now, a crowd plus a phone equals proof. The sound of a phone camera clicking spread.
"Are you done?" Brielle demanded.
"No," I said calmly. "Not until the truth is known."
It wasn't an explosive tirade. It was a quiet unpeeling. I spoke of small things: the way he would vanish for hours; the way she would sidle into conversations and leave with his attention like a cloak; the messages I'd read and deleted, because some wounds shouldn't live in the open. I named the nights he chose her over me and the nights she chose being seen over being a friend. I gave exact times, exact corridors, exact reactions.
People listened. They took in the specifics. With each line, their faces changed—first curiosity, then the slow sharpening of sympathy, then something like outrage at the unfairness of it all.
Brielle's expression moved from contrition to anger to stunned silence. Gabriel's cheeks burned. Around us, the crowd hummed. Phones lifted. Some whispering students started to clap—tentative, then louder—because the truth in that hall felt like justice to them.
Brielle stepped backward, her perfume leaving a thin trace. "You liar," she hissed. "You can't—"
"I have receipts," Colby said simply, and turned his phone. He didn't show the screens to the crowd. He didn't need to. The implication was enough. People leaned in, as if proximity could pull truth out.
The scene stretched. Brielle's posture faltered. Her fans—two girls who had previously smirked—now looked uneasy. People started to murmur, then judge, then whisper. The subtle social currency that had supported Brielle and Gabriel cracked.
"I don't believe you," Gabriel said, the old arrogance barely holding.
"Believe what you want," I said. "But if you still want to play at being noble, do it in private. Leave mine alone."
The dean intervened then, taut with exercised authority. "This is not the place," he said. "If you have a grievance—"
"This is the place," a student shouted. "We've been watching it for months."
The dean's jaw tightened. He turned to Brielle and Gabriel as if seeking an explanation. Brielle tried to speak, hands fluttering. Gabriel's mouth opened and closed; he had no script now.
A woman in the crowd—someone with a neutral face—leaned forward. "You two looked like a couple pretending to be something else," she said simply. "We were tired of pretending with you."
At that, the balance tipped. People began to clap, not in support of me, but in support of the idea that false fronts should be exposed. Phones recorded. Voices repeated facts aloud. The public nature of the scene had turned private slights into communal anger.
Brielle's eyes filled. She had been admired so long that to be unadmired felt like a public stripping.
Gabriel finally tried to salvage with denial. "You're hiding things," he said desperately. "You're making this up."
"Make up what?" Colby asked. "The nights he didn't come home? The messages? The people who called him out for disappearing? You had choices."
Gabriel's face crumpled. The bravado left him like water from a burst dam. He seemed to shrink under all the eyes. He began with denial, then moved to anger, then to a jagged echo of betrayal. I watched him cycle—uneasy, ugly, human.
"I'm sorry," he whispered at last, thin as tissue.
The crowd fell silent, but not in the forgiveness I'd wanted. They were silent because they had seen the fall. This is a crucial part of punishment: it's not the words alone, it's the seeing. Gabriel's voice—once commanding—sounded small.
"Apologize doesn't fix three years," I said. "It doesn't fix the nights I waited. It doesn't fix the trust he burned. But it is what it is."
Brielle, who had watched herself lose sheen in real time, now tried to keep control. "This is humiliating," she said. "You're doing this on purpose."
"Yes," I said. "On purpose. Because the truth should have been told earlier."
Then something unexpected happened. A dozen students around us began to clap—not maliciously, but in a way that recognized the moment as a boundary set. A few professors murmured agreement. Someone from the student welfare office stepped in and suggested mediation.
Brielle's eyes widened as people turned away from her. She tried to speak to acquaintances who had been her cheerleaders; a few of them gave her the thin smile of distance. A man who had been her ally suddenly checked his watch and moved away.
Gabriel had the worst fall. He was public in places he'd once dominated—parties, coffeeshop corners, labs—and now those same places felt like arenas. People who had once queued for his attention now glanced past him as if he had invisible grime on him. His friends shuffled in the background. Some looked ashamed; others avoided eye contact.
When the applause ebbed, I felt exhausted. Colby squeezed my fingers and whispered, "Enough."
We walked away together. People talked as we passed, not all of it kind to them but not merciless either. What mattered most was that the pretense had been punctured.
I didn't revel in their public pain. I had no taste for cruelty. But I also knew a necessary truth: bullies and players flourish in darkness and applause. Once the light found them, those who had once followed the spectacle often stepped away.
Afterward, we received messages. Some were short: "You were brave." Others were longer, more intimate: "I saw that happen to my sister. Thank you for saying something." The dean asked for a private meeting. Brielle texted a long, hot message—an apology that smelled of smoke and burnt sugar. Gabriel sent a string of messages that began "I'm sorry" and then dissolved into defensive fragments.
They both paid a price that wasn't legal or even formal. It was social. People called them out. Invitations that used to be automatic became considered. Teachers who had once praised Gabriel for his work now asked pointed questions about partnership choices. Brielle lost some of her shine when the people who had applauded her celebrity stopped performing for her. They were not ruined, but they were chastened.
The punishment—the thing the rules demanded—lasted more than a moment. It was a slow, public correction. Brielle's reaction moved through anger, disbelief, a fragile denial, and then the real cracking: to be watched and to find allies thin. She tried to maintain a front; it failed in the same places arrogance fails—in the eyes of those who had a conscience.
Gabriel's reaction was rawer. He oscillated: first anger, then denial, then a soft scrambling apology. "I didn't mean—" he began in public and then stopped because there was nowhere to put such words that would be believed. He looked smaller than before; he found himself listening more than speaking. That was part of the punishment, too—being forced to hear.
The crowd's reaction was varied: some students shook their heads in disgust, some recorded on their phones, some whispered sympathy for me and admiration for Colby's steadiness. A professor who had once praised Gabriel passed me later and said, "Thank you for calling it out. That was long overdue." The dean arranged a mediation session and put in a request that Gabriel attend counseling. He didn't have to be jailed or publicly shamed beyond the moral consequences, but his social world narrowed.
It helped. Not because I wanted them crushed, but because the world had to align with what had been true. The badness had to have a ripple. People who had been passive now took a stand. The spectacle of Tala and Gabriel's "perfect pairing" unraveled enough for truth to breathe.
After that, life smoothed. Gabriel left town for a semester abroad, a move that felt like an exile and a relief. Brielle took fewer classes in our department; she was seen less at parties. They were not monsters—people who hurt people rarely are. They were just not kind, and the price of that was reputational corrosion.
Colby and I—after the unmasking, after the brutal smallness of campus politics settled—found ourselves in a quiet new orbit. He did the small things that mattered: he would fix my zipper when it snagged, or place his hand over mine at a talk and flick his thumb against the back of my knuckles. He said my name in the mornings like it was a blessing.
"Do you regret how public it got?" I asked him one night as we walked the campus paths under a thin moon.
"No," he said. "If we keep quiet when things are wrong, then we teach people to keep doing wrong. And I didn't want you taught that."
"I didn't either," I said.
We had three moments that would always be small bolts of sugar in my memory.
The first: a rainy day when I forgot my umbrella and Colby, who had been nearby, pushed his jacket into my hands and shrugged off his own. "You keep this," he said. He shoved his damp hair off his forehead and mine brushed his sleeve; the contact was small, but when he smiled at me then, something in me folded into place.
The second: the night in the hotel after a symposium where we were both shy with our new status. I had been drunk and clingy and he had carried me to the bed like a blessing. I woke to find him watching me with a funny, fierce adoration.
"You're my person, Mercedes," he whispered.
The third: a quiet afternoon on the lab terrace when I had been nervous about a presentation. He stepped close and kissed the tip of my finger where the band of a hair elastic cut faintly into my skin. "I'm here," he said. "Always."
Those small things were not grand proclamations; they were the kind that make a life.
We didn't live in a cinematic bliss. There were still missteps—jealousy flickers, silly arguments—but they never carried the weight of the old betrayals. Colby wasn't perfect. Colby was honest. That's what I wanted.
By the end of the semester, I had learned something that no romance book had taught me: the biggest betrayal I could have committed was to keep myself last.
At graduation, when the crowd swelled and everyone wore the same hat, we stood with our hands laced. People who had once stood by Gabriel now stood elsewhere. Brielle watched from a distance as if studying a map of a place she'd once thought she owned.
I pulled the small hair elastic from my wrist—the one I had ripped in my frenzy months ago—and I tucked it into Colby's palm. "Keep it," I told him. "I used it once. Now it's yours."
He laughed and looped it on his finger like a small ring. "I will wear it until it falls apart," he promised.
"Promise?" I teased.
He smiled. "I promised," he said, and for the first time in a very long time the word landed not like an argument but like a shelter.
We walked out of the hall together. People who had been silent now offered congratulations. Some of them said, "We're sorry," and meant it. The world was messy; the world had also adjusted.
At night, when it was just him and me and the soft hum of the city, I would sometimes think of the hospital corridor and the symposium. I would think of the exact shift in people's expressions as truth bared its teeth. I would think of how circles of compassion grew only when someone chose to act.
"Do you ever think about him?" I asked Colby once, and he pressed his forehead to mine.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "But only to remind myself I did the right thing."
I tipped my head up. "Do you regret your part?"
"Never," he said. "I waited for you because I knew you would choose yourself one day."
In the end, that was it. I had been the green tea in other people's stories—a label meant to sting rather than recognize tenderness. But I had left the place where labels defined me. I had found someone who did not fear showing care. And I had learned to stop performing for the sake of someone else's applause.
"Do you remember the day you first called me your sister?" Colby asked once.
"I do," I said.
"Do you remember what you said?" He smiled.
"I called you my little brother." I laughed. "And you hated it."
"Now you call me Colby," he said.
"And I mean it," I said.
He kissed my hand, then looked at me and said, "You keep your head high. But if it ever gets heavy, you can rest it here."
I rested. For the first time in years, I didn't apologize for my needs.
Months later, Gabriel sent me one last message—a precise line about regret and learning and "I hope you find happiness." I read it once and then deleted it. No need to give more air to a thing that had already breathed out.
Sometimes I think the most important things are small: a hair elastic, a warmed hand, a promise that isn't performative. Not everyone gets to know those small things. But I did. Colby taught me that kindness can be fierce, and that a little brother can be so much more.
"I love you," he said one autumn evening with leaves like fire around us.
"I love you too," I answered.
We both knew we had been through a storm. The proof of that was the quiet we had grown into, the steady handshake of two lives who had seen the flicker and decided to keep the light on.
The End
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