Sweet Romance10 min read
The iPad, the Comments, and the Little Box
ButterPicks14 views
I never imagined my private, silly comments could rearrange the whole furniture of my life.
"Tatum," I whispered, because his name felt like a warm stone in my mouth. "Please—don't tell my mom."
He read another line off my old comment thread without looking up. "’Brother, the rain over here is so heavy, is it raining by you?’" His voice had the calm of someone reading weather, but the end of the sentence tilted and hung in the air like a question mark that hurt.
I shrank into the corner of the sofa and tried not to meet his eyes. "I—it's stupid. It was just a joke on that site. I wasn't serious."
He tapped the iPad with a thumb and opened the fitness video. The muscles on the screen made my ears buzz. "Do you like this kind of body?" he asked without moving his mouth much.
"No. You have a better body." I tried to be clever. I shouldn't have been trying to be clever. "You do, definitely."
"Have you—ever seen me without my shirt?" He raised an eyebrow like it was a simple geography question.
"...No." I admitted it. My cheeks warmed. The noise my heart made was embarrassingly loud.
He closed the iPad slowly. "When we started dating, you were my safe city, Jaden. Your mother said you were the kind of girl who grew up quiet. You didn't date before college. I thought I had a gentle, reliable girlfriend."
"I only wrote things online," I said. My fingers twisted in the hem of my sweater. "It was months ago, and I've stopped."
"After I met you, you just looked, didn't you?" He said it like a verdict.
I wanted to snatch the iPad, but I didn't. My hands were small, and the truth felt even smaller.
He stood, and the flat thunk of his feet on the floor made the air feel colder. "Don't tell my mom about this." He left the apartment holding my iPad like it was evidence.
I stared at the empty door. He had taken the spare key too. Of all things to take.
The next morning I stumbled to work with under-eye shadows that made me look older than twenty-three. Someone offered coffee as if pity were a warm drink.
"You look awful," Estelle said, handing me the cup like she could spoon up my life and fix it. "Are you okay, Jaden?"
"I broke up with Tatum," I said, because honesty sounded better than fibbing through another coffee.
Estelle clicked her tongue. "Not surprised. He never seemed steady."
By lunch half my office knew. People dropped sympathetic looks into my lap like coins. It annoyed me.
Later, when I saw him walking toward the office parking lot, he looked like a movie star who'd misread the script. He wore a crisp shirt and jeans and something like patience in his face. "Hi," he said, casual as a radio host.
"You—" I started. "What are you doing here?"
"Want to grab something to eat?" He smiled like it was the simplest invitation.
My coworkers' eyes lit up. Clearly, they preferred him intact to seeing me whole again.
He didn't comfort me the way he had before. He was leaner, somehow sharper.
"Hot?" I complained. "It's hot."
"Take off your jacket," he said, like he was giving directions.
I swallowed. He used to lower the air conditioning for me. "I thought—" I started and stopped.
At the restaurant he didn't speak much. He ate like he was measuring himself against something. When he suggested a movie I thought it would be a melancholy thing. He chose a Thai horror flick to punish me, or so I suspected.
"Let's watch this," he said with a secret smile.
I didn't buy his "not scary" line. Of course I didn't. I closed my eyes at the jump-scares and felt a breath across my cheek. "Okay, it's fine," he murmured. "You can look."
Then a terrifying face popped up on screen and I shrieked involuntarily.
He laughed softly. "You were so small for me that night."
On the drive home, he drove like the world was a map we were late for. "Do you want me to come in?" he asked when we pulled up outside my building.
"Just bring the spare key," I said, because somehow asking him to stay felt like bargaining when he had already won.
He came in anyway, scanned my living room, and then left when his phone rang. I watched him go. He had called Daria—her voice was like honey on the other end. He walked away smiling.
"At least he told me," I said to myself like a charm. "He told me everything."
That night he texted, "Sleep?"
I didn't answer.
Three days passed. No messages. The rumor mill made him into a distant sun. People whispered that Daria had run off with drama in her life—an affair, a crisis—and he was involved.
My mother called me the next day and fussed. "You need to be steady for him, Jaden. Don't be foolish."
"I'm not the one being foolish," I muttered.
He asked to see me for dinner because of my mother's insistence. I wore sweatpants and no makeup, testing his reaction.
He took me to an expensive restaurant. Candlelight made everything look older and more serious. Daria sat across the room, serene and perfect.
"She looks the way she moves," I told Brielle later. Brielle rolled her eyes like she could arrange gravity.
I decided to be decisive that night. "Tatum, we need to talk," I said when he carried me home. "We should break for a little while. It will be good."
He was quiet. When he drove away, the silence tasted like foam.
I tried my plan. For a week, I practiced being absent. No calls. No texts. Trying to make him chase me felt like learning to swim by avoiding the water.
That backfired spectacularly.
One drunk night I called him and we talked till dawn like two halves of an old song. Then in daylight's shame I blocked him.
A week later, I unblocked him just to ask for my iPad and spare key. He told me to come to his place.
"You left a small box on my nightstand," he said when I got there. He seemed as small as a confession.
I opened the box in his bedroom and found something that made my knees go soft and my throat close with a sound like someone tugging a ribbon. There were condoms in a neat little packet.
I stared. "Why—" I couldn't finish.
He watched my face, and the way he looked at me made the room rearrange again. "I bought those for your birthday," he said softly. "I thought we might—" He glanced away. "You said you wanted to break up, so I didn't."
My heart did an embarrassing thing. "So you bought protection in advance?" I couldn't keep the laugh out of my voice.
He lifted the small white packet like it was a delicate instrument. "I was going to... propose clumsy things. Be romantic in a way that scared me."
"You're ridiculous," I said, and then I laughed until I couldn't breathe.
He folded the box back into his drawer. "You cried the night you fainted at work," he said suddenly. "You left your jacket in the office. You left a comment online about a guy and I read it and I was stupid and jealous. But I've been following you because I care."
"You followed me?" I whispered.
He shrugged, like affection could be hidden in a shrug. "I was there at the tea shop with Daria because she had just had a checkup and she was shaken. I sat as a friend. I told her husband where she was. I didn't—"
"Why did you peel oranges for her?" My voice found a sour edge.
He looked at me like I had asked him what the sky felt like. "She had her nails done," he said simply. "I did it because it was easy. I'll peel oranges for you from now on."
"You never peeled me an orange," I said. "Not once."
He smiled and reached to tuck a stray hair behind my ear. "I'll peel you a thousand oranges if you'll let me."
I wanted to be offended and flinch away. Instead I let the corner of my mouth twitch. "You sound like a promise."
"I am making one," he said. "Will you be my person instead of my idea?"
"You were always my person," I said before I could stop myself. The words tasted like confession.
He kissed me then—soft and terrible and right. "Promise me something," he said into my hair.
I froze, because "promise me" is a dangerous little knot.
"Don't write those things online," he said. "If you want to be naughty, say it to me."
"I can't—" I tried to find her courage.
"You already have." He thumbed my phone and found the old comment page. "Say it again."
I made a face. "No."
He grinned. "Say it to me anyway. 'Brother my rain here is heavy.'"
I felt my cheeks flare. "Stop."
That was the moment where everything began to fall into comfortable shapes again. He teased me, and I retaliated. We argued about dumb things—like which movie was less scary—and it was like dust settling after a storm.
After that, he started to send me pictures: a selfie after gym with a half-revealed collarbone. "For you," he wrote.
"Stop," I typed. "You're cruel."
He answered with a voice message. "Will you be my girlfriend who says embarrassing things? I like your courage."
I told him about the day I fainted. He made me breakfast, because he thought holding a fork to my mouth was a way to heal the world.
"Don't skip meals," he ordered, like a colonel giving a silly command.
"I'll try," I said, which, coming from me, meant everything.
We had small victories. He bought a silly cat ear headband because he liked my face in it. I fainted again from shame that he would buy me such a thing and then laugh about it later with Brielle.
"Men," Brielle declared, handing me tissues as if life were a play. "Collect tendencies and keep them like stamps."
They saved up secrets and pies and nights that smelled like coffee and misread intentions.
On my birthday, I planned to put my foot down. The plan was to look calm and detached and watch him scramble—make him miss me and beg me back properly.
Daria came. She smelled like lemon and quiet. She looked like the person he had once admired across the years. Watching them together was like watching a procession where I'd never been the VIP.
"You'll be okay," Brielle said and squeezed my hand. "Do the cliff, Jaden. Step off and see if he leaps."
I told him we should take a break. He listened and did not look shocked. He left me at the curb without a fight.
I walked home thinking I was very brave. For three days I was brave. For four days my bravery wobbled. Then the real world—a blur of deadlines and emails—found me and did what it always does: forced me to be small and efficient and ordinary.
That day he returned my iPad and asked for the gift he had originally given me back. "You promised you'd return it," he said, and I pointed out how petty that sounded.
"It's not about the gift," he said, and then he turned to the bedroom and said, "Do you want it back?"
On his nightstand, I found the tiny box. The sight of it made me dizzy. It was not menace; it was a quiet ridiculousness. He had bought the pack like a secret ceremony.
"I was nervous," he admitted when he saw the confusion on my face. "I was going to—" He stopped. "I wanted to prove something that didn't make sense. But I kept it because it felt like getting ready."
"Getting ready for what?" I asked.
"For being more honest," he said. "For the things I didn't have words for."
"Like following me?" I challenged.
"I followed you because you scared me when you said you wanted space," he admitted. "I didn't know if you'd come back. I sat at the tea shop and watched the door, and I felt like an idiot, and then I walked to your place to give you your key like a respectful hero."
"You are a very strange hero," I said.
He smiled. "You'll convince yourself you are in love with my strangeness and then you will be."
I wanted to push him away and hold him at once.
We talked until the sun was thin and pale. He told me how he'd sat in the car the day Daria's husband came to get her, and how he'd been a mediator at a small, tragic scene. He told me he had not been waiting for her the way I feared. He kept his hands on the wheel, saying he had followed me because he liked me.
I covered my mouth with both hands and tried to stop the sudden flood of feeling.
"If you want to test me, ask something hard," he said. "Don't ask me about oranges or silly quizzes."
"Ask me something hard then," I challenged. "Why did you never peel me an orange?"
His face softened. "I thought you liked me for being quiet. I didn't want to ruin that."
"Ruin it?" I laughed too loudly. "I wanted to be peeled."
"Then I'll peel you now." He picked one up from the fruit bowl, sat on the edge of my bed, and peeled it like an apology and a promise.
When I tasted the first slice it tasted like forgiveness. I leaned into him.
"You bought protection, you fool," I said later, teasing, holding the little white packet between my fingers.
"I bought it for us," he said. "For the day we stop being clumsy and start being intentional."
"I can't believe you used a box of condoms as a romantic prop," I said.
"You laughed," he said. "That's romantic to me."
We didn't make grand gestures, except that he peeled me oranges and kept my spare key and read my old comments and chose to stay. He was not perfect. He was messy. He was patient in ways I hadn't believed were possible.
"Will you stop writing nonsense online?" he asked one evening.
"Only if you stop sending workout pictures at three a.m.," I bargained.
"Deal," he said.
In the months that followed we rebuilt little things: the pizza order that used to make us bicker, the silly inside joke about "Brother, is it raining?" that he quoted with a smirk just to see me flush, the way he would hold my hand in the dark like it was a treasure. Each small act was a heartbeat.
One day I found the iPad again, open to my old profile. He had set it as a gallery, with my embarrassing comments and his answers next to them.
"Do you want me to caption them?" he asked.
"Caption mine? No," I said, though the idea made my stomach do summersaults.
"So you'll be more honest with me," he teased.
"I will try," I said. "You will try to be less dramatic about Daria."
He laughed. "I will try to be less reasonable."
We agreed on small things, and then big things, and sometimes nothing at all.
The little box stayed in his drawer for a long time, then disappeared, then reappeared. Once he handed it to me with a scarf and a crooked grin.
"Consider this a ridiculous ceremony," he said.
"I'll keep it," I told him.
"You will keep me? For real?" he asked.
"For real," I said.
He kissed me, then added in a conspiratorial whisper, "You owe me a thousand oranges."
"Deal," I said.
We learned to laugh about what had been embarrassing, to apologize without drama, and to be brave enough to peel one another, whether like fruit or like secrets.
That night, under the hum of my apartment, he curled his long legs around mine on the sofa and pointed at my phone.
"Put back the wallpaper," he said, half serious. "I want that awkward photo there."
I did, and when I woke in the morning his head was on my chest like a living pillow and the iPad was safe on the coffee table.
"Don't ever hide things in drawers again," I muttered, half asleep.
"Are you my girlfriend?" he asked.
"You are my boyfriend," I said, because finally the words fit.
He smiled. "Then be my official partner in stupid public displays and private sillyness."
"Deal," I whispered.
We had all our flaws: old comments and little jealousies and a pile of unasked questions. But we also had an iPad, a tiny white box that used to wreck me, and a habit of peeling oranges for one another like a quiet, domestic promise.
Sometimes love arrives as a small, ridiculous box and a key on the nightstand—and sometimes all you have to do is decide to keep it.
The End
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