Sweet Romance13 min read
The Neighbor Who Wouldn't Leave (and the Vanity Table)
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I woke up with a hand where my phone should have been.
"Annika? What are you doing?" a sleepy voice said, muffled by the pillow.
I bolted upright. Opposite me, under a blanket, a boy was sprawled on the other side of the bed—familiar, too familiar. "Chase?" I croaked.
"You're so loud," he mumbled, eyes still closed. "Sister, don't wake me."
"Sister?" My voice cracked. "Chase, what on earth—"
He groped blindly and pouted. "I'm tired. Let me sleep, Annika."
My scalp went cold. This was my apartment, my bed, my life—until I looked around and realized the room wasn't mine.
"Why are you in my bed?" I demanded, hopping off and clattering to the floor with more force than grace.
He blinked slowly, then reached for me with one hand. "Why are you so dramatic? You're home, aren't you?"
"Whose idea was it that this was my home?" I said, rubbing the spot where I'd hit the floor. "When did you get back?"
"Yesterday," he said, matter-of-fact as if he'd been gone a day, not years. "Remember? You told me the apartment door was unlocked."
My memory stopped at the elevator. I had drunk too much the night before at dinner with a friend; after that I remembered nothing. But the red marks on his neck, the fact that he was half-naked on my mattress—those were not in any ordinary morning's plan.
"Annika," he said softly, and for the first time his voice carried something I couldn't quite name. "You look angry."
"Don't you start," I snapped, heat rising to my face. "How long were you planning to be in my house, exactly?"
He sat up and pointed at a framed photo on my nightstand like it solved everything. "This is my home too, remember? We are neighbors."
Not my home, but I couldn't deny the truth when I looked around: it wasn't my room. The wallpaper was wrong; the bookshelf was different. Panic receded a little and embarrassment surged in.
"Yesterday I drank," I admitted, voice small. "If anything happened, it was an accident."
He stared at me, then touched his neck and feigned surprise. "Those? Mosquito bites. You worry too much, sister."
Heat burned my face. "Mosquito bites—right."
He smiled in a way that used to disarm me when he was six and sticky with cake. Now he was older, but he still had the same small tooth that peeked out when he laughed. "Don't be mad."
"Mad? Chase, you were sleeping in my bed." I held up my hands like that explained everything.
"You're so dramatic," he said, then added with a strange gravity, "You always leave, but I always come back."
When he finally stood, he was all boy still—easy, tidy hair, a shirt half-buttoned, the kind of unpolished handsomeness that made neighbors' mothers coo. "You going to tell Mom?" he asked with a grin.
At the word Mom my body stiffened. The next thing I knew we were both in the adjoining hallway. His mother wasn't here; she had died years ago. My own mother, Carolyn Riley, shuffled into the scene like a sunbeam of domestic certainty.
"Look who decided to show up!" she said, clapping her hands. "Chase, you are back? Come in, dear—Annika, why are you still in your pajamas?"
"Mom!" I hissed, age suddenly irrelevant.
Chase bowed theatrically. "Good morning, Auntie Carolyn."
"You've grown," my mother gushed. "You must stay for breakfast."
"Please," Chase said to me with ridiculous puppy eyes. He had me laughing before my defenses returned. "Eat, eat, Auntie makes the best soy milk."
"Don't you dare," I warned. "Don't you make him more than breakfast."
He winked. "I can't help being charming."
As the day moved, I tried to anchor myself. Jaden Ludwig, my friend, called just when I was wrestling with whether to tell my parents the entire truth. I told her a safe half-truth.
"Did you sleep at Chase's?" she asked.
"No," I lied without thinking.
"You're terrible at lying," Jaden said. "Annika, he came to my office to ask about you. Are you okay? Because you sounded... off."
"It was nothing," I said. "I'll be fine."
But I wasn't. Hearing Chase's smallness, the way he would tug the corner of my sleeve when he was anxious, all those bits from childhood rose up wrapped around a dull ache. He was younger by four years, a tiny fact my heart kept reminding me of like a warning label. He was my little brother-figure, my neighbor, the kid who had once handed my love letters to my parents as punishment. He was small and brilliant and maddening. How had I let a cushion of time and polite distance form between us? How had I allowed the world to make us adults in different casts?
"You're really avoiding him," Jaden said on the phone. "He texted me. He said he misses you."
"He said a lot," I said, curling a strand of my hair in agitation. "He said he missed me. He said—"
"He said he loved you?" Jaden cut in, half teasing, half hopeful.
"What? No. That's absurd." I flinched away from the notion. Still, the memory of his mouth near my ear, the way he had whispered "I missed you" in the dark—this was not entirely born of imagination.
The next days folded into a rhythm. Chase was always there in the doorway, at the table, sitting with my parents, asking too many questions. He pressed little kindnesses into the ordinary hours—making coffee, wiping a spill, handing me the salt when I burned the fish.
"You're too old to be timid," he teased once. "You should stand up for yourself."
"Who are you to tell me what to do?" I snapped, and then felt the ridiculousness of the fight wash over me. He was my neighbor and my childhood charge and now something else, and everything I said could be a bruise.
He only smiled. "Because I like to boss you."
He was moody in the way of someone who loved with the bluntness of a child and the patience of a friend. Then there were the moments—small, disarming—that made my chest seize.
One night, returning from a hurried company project, I spotted him with a young woman on the sidewalk. They were laughing, and she rested her hand on his arm the way people who trusted each other do without thinking.
"He has a girlfriend already?" panic hit like cold water.
Chase saw me, and his expression shifted—immediately, unmistakably. "You're back," he said, like a greeting and an accusation all at once.
"Is she—" I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Do I look like I'm that kind of liar?" He laughed, but it didn't reach his eyes. "I don't have a girlfriend."
A week later, though, he brought a vanity table home. I saw the box through the peephole and assumed the worst. "He's moving in," I thought.
"It was for you," he said when I confronted him. "You said you couldn't find a place to check your hair."
"You're ridiculous." I wanted to be offended, but the image of him choosing curtains and drawers softened something brittle in me.
Then the knock came—chaotic and loud, like the world pushing right through our fragile shell.
We had gone with colleagues to a karaoke place. I had tried to avoid the chaos but failed—luckily, I slipped away to the restroom when things turned loud. I came out to a man blocking the corridor, too close, smelling of cheap aftershave and too much liquor.
"Come sit in my room," he slurred, hand out.
"Back off," I said. My foot found his shin by accident—or perhaps intentionally—and he toppled like a drunk tower. I wobbled, hit my head on the wall, and stars burst behind my eyes.
"Annika!" someone shouted. Chase barreled into the fray like he'd been shot from a cannon.
"Who pushed her?" he demanded, voice suddenly cold.
The drunk man tried to make it a joke. "She hit me first," he slurred. "Little lady shouldn't fight."
Chase's jaw locked. He moved like a child who had learned to be angry and careful at the same time. "You touch her again, I won't be polite."
"Who are you?" the drunk man barked, regaining his swagger.
Chase didn't answer. He hit him. The punch was a clean, decisive thing that flattened the man into stunned silence. People around the corridor felt it—an intake of breath, the shutter of camera phones coming up.
Someone shouted for the manager. "You can't just hit a customer!"
"Not when he gropes a woman," Chase said, shaking like he had a fever. His face was an unfamiliar mixture of wrath and protectiveness.
The manager arrived—Court Castle—looking like a man ready to solve an incident in whatever way would make him least blamed. "What's going on?" he asked, glancing between the two men.
"That man grabbed her," I said, voice thin. "He chased me. I hit him for my own defense, and he fell. Then he threatened me."
"Show the footage," the manager said. "If your CCTV shows he provoked, we handle him."
Someone had already called the police. People gathered—faces around the doorway, some pointing phones, some whispering. The drunk man, Guy Cordova, started to regain his swagger and, importantly, tried to weaponize his social ties.
"Do you know who I am?" he barked. "You think you can mess with me? I'll drag you—"
A woman in the crowd, eyes hard, turned and snapped a photo. "You harass women all the time," she said. "You come here and make a scene. We all know you."
At that, his bravado flickered. "What? No—"
"Check the logs," a barback said, and another employee came forward with a staff notebook lined with complaints.
People's faces changed from curiosity to judgement. Murmurs swelled. Another voice announced, "He's been causing trouble for weeks. Can't they refuse him service?"
"You're scum," someone else hissed.
Guy's face drained from red to a sick, blotchy white. His tone shifted—smugness gone, replaced by a rapidly forming panic. "Stop recording—delete that!"
"I have it," someone said. "It's all over my feed."
"You're fired," a quiet voice said. Behind Guy, a man in suit stepped forward—someone who had been there for another meeting. "You're out of our business network after this."
Guy's eyes bulged. First he tried to deny. "No—this is a mistake. She said—"
"You attacked her," a witness said, voice shaking. "You touched her."
"She provoked me," Guy said weakly, as if the words themselves could change the angle of a hundred phone recordings.
"Shut up," Chase said. There was no bravado anymore—only the raw truth: he had hit a man who had no right to touch me. The crowd around him shifted, protective like a small tide.
Then the manager called emergency contacts and within minutes more people arrived: a security supervisor from a neighboring club, a courier who had witnessed the attempt earlier that night, a woman who said this had happened to her before and had been too ashamed to act. Guy's strength crumbled. He tried to bargain, to insist he had connections, to pull names like talismans.
Someone pushed his face to the CCTV monitor. On playback, his hand slid across my arm, rude and invasive. On another clip, he leaned into the faces of other women and tried the same move. The evidence was a cold, sequential proof: pattern, not accident.
Then the crushing pivot. A man with a firm voice—someone from the company Guy worked for—arrived after seeing the live video circulating. He looked stunned, then furious. "We will not have this in our brand," he said. "Clear his desk. He is suspended."
Guy moved from denial into pleading. He tried wheedling tone: "Please, please, I'm sorry, it won't happen again. I'll apologize. I'll pay for anything." The crowd had watched him change like a play: smugness, arrogance, bafflement, denial, panic, pleading, collapse. Every stage had spectators muttering and aligning themselves.
One woman spat at him. "You should think before you touch a woman," she said.
Another filmed him as he slunk to the exit, umbrella tucked under his arm like contrition in a wrapper.
Chase stayed by me the whole time. He didn't let me look away from the screen of proof. He stood guard like the oldest promise I had not heard. The police asked questions; we gave statements. The manager took a formal report. In the doorway, neighbors whispered and a couple clapped, almost by instinct.
Later, when the crowd thinned, Guy collapsed into seat by the streetlamp and sobbed—not from injury but from humiliation. He had bargained on being untouchable. He had misjudged the room. Watching him lose face, I felt an odd, complicated warmth—and shame, because what Chase had given me was protection and because the public spectacle had a price.
"Are you okay?" he asked me, voice low.
"I'm fine," I lied, then added the truth because he had that right: "Thank you."
He squeezed my hand. "Never again. If anyone messes with you, I will—"
"I know," I said.
That night pushed something over the edge inside me. Chase's anger had a tenderness that made my chest ache in a brand-new way. The next morning, when he set my vanity table on the apartment floor with the deliberate clumsiness of a gift, I didn't see childishness. I saw a plan: he had thought of me, down to where the mirror would catch the light. He was making a place for me in his world, maybe before I had the courage to claim it.
Days blurred between routines and small storms. My mother kept arranging dates—one was with Edison Roy, a polite doctor who talked about long-term stability and full-time domestic plans with an earnestness that made me laugh and cry at once. Another was Eldon Adkins, a slick lawyer who fretted about trust funds like they were romance.
"Why torture yourself?" Jaden asked over late-night beers. "You like him, don't you?"
"No," I said quickly.
"Annika."
I sighed. "He's younger. He is stubborn and fierce and frankly too honest for my liking. He's also exactly what I don't need and maybe exactly what I do."
Then came the day my ex, Maximiliano Cochran, married his fiancée. I went because I couldn't stand the idea of him parading contentment like a judge of my life. He introduced his bride and smiled at me with the old smugness. I left before speeches, sneaking out the back in a storm of cheap confetti.
On the way home, I saw Chase in the lobby with a girl on his arm—Laure Mercier. My heart knotted. They smiled at me like strangers do when they try not to hurt someone they used to know. "They're close," I thought. "They're together."
Chase noticed, of course. "She's a client," he said later, voice clipped. "I asked her to come by my place to look at the vanity table."
"Of course," I said. I tried to be rational. He was building a life. Maybe I should let go.
He did not let go.
That night, he came into my kitchen carrying two cups of tea. "You didn't have to run away," he said.
"I didn't run," I said. "I just needed air."
"You never have to do that," he said, like a command, then softer: "You can tell me things."
We stood under the kitchen light and something between us loosened.
His confessions came like small, dangerous birds. "I used to give your letters to your parents because I thought you'd be safer," he admitted. "I thought if I could keep you from making a mistake, I had done my job."
"You were very dramatic," I said.
"I still am," he said. "I just choose my dramas now."
We fell into the ritual of being neighbors and something else. He would come for dinner often. He would argue with my parents about whether I needed a schedule. He would say, unexpectedly, "I like you," as if it were the simplest piece of fact.
There were three moments that made me feel like I might walk in his direction forever:
- The first time Chase laughed at something meant only for me and, for a second, looked at me with an open, unguarded smile. "You're the only one I want my bad jokes to land on," he told me.
- The night he woke me from a nightmare with his hand covering my hair, soft and sure, and whispered, "I'm here," when I couldn't breathe.
- The afternoon he took my hand in the supermarket line and said, "My mother used to make sticky rice like this. I want you to taste it." He then proceeded to embarrassingly buy ingredients and cook for my parents like it was normal.
I surprised myself by saying yes when he asked, half-jokingly and half-honestly, "Come be my girlfriend. Publicly."
"Will you introduce me to your dad?" I asked then, because the only real fear I had left was losing him to his family expectations.
"I will," he said. "Let's mess up together."
Introducing ourselves to his father, Emery Cabrera, felt like threading a cautious needle. Emery had once blamed me for being part of the reason his son wouldn't follow a lined path. But he surprised us both by being warmer than I'd dared hope.
"I was wrong," he said one day, over cups of coffee that tasted like conciliations. "You gave him a home when I couldn't."
And when his official acceptance finally landed like snow on our kitchen table, something in me thinned and softened. We were a pair stitched from history and stubbornness and the smallest, brightest parts of each other.
There was still work to do. My mother still tried to set me up with doctors and lawyers; my father still harrumphed about the wrongness of loving a younger man. But life had shifted. Chase, unafraid, would look at me over the dinner table and say, "Stop being sensible. Let me be ridiculous for you."
One evening, months after that stormy KTV night, my ex Maximiliano walked past our neighborhood shop window with his new wife. He caught sight of me and froze. He'd been grand in his marriage, but in the reflection of the shop window, I saw him look smaller. Chase's hand found mine and squeezed.
Maximiliano made a half-step toward us, nostrils flaring. "Annika," he called, just loud enough for the two of us to hear.
I walked forward. "Maximiliano," I said. "Congratulations on your wedding."
He tried a shrug, then a laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "You look... happy."
"I am," I said.
Behind him, the waiter he used to know coughed and nudged a woman he'd betrayed into a glare. Maximiliano's face lost color as a small group of neighbors started to talk quietly, then louder. He tried to hold on to the image of me as an old convenience, but the crowd's murmur made his charm evaporate.
He begged—"Annika, we can talk"—but my voice was steady. "No, thank you. I'm where I wanted to be."
The crowd watched; his expression shifted from surprise to denial to anger to a kind of stunned regret. He tried to climb back into a narrative where he was adored. The audience was unkind. They had watched him walk out of promises before; they didn't close ranks now. He cursed himself enough in public for a hundred private regrets.
I didn't gloat. I only took Chase's hand and walked away, and that short, simple movement was its own verdict.
He had failed to terrify me. He had failed to be the last word.
We kept small rituals: a dust cover Chase still hadn't removed from his couch because he claimed it was "part of the aesthetic," and the vanity mirror where I practiced expressions I hadn't used in a while. We fought about silly things—where to hang photos, whether the curtains were too cheerful—and kissed like people who had decided to keep trying despite everything.
Our end wasn't an epiphany. It was ordinary. One morning of rain, Chase made coffee and handed me the cup with a smile. "Today," he said, "I own you as my person."
"Don't be dramatic," I told him, and then leaned forward and kissed him, because the world had been difficult and messy and somehow perfect enough.
We didn't need fireworks. We had our small things—soy milk at breakfast, a vanity table, a couch with its dusty cover still on. They were ours, and each time I smoothed that dust cover over the worn cushions, I remembered the night the man who'd tried to touch me had been shown his record in the light, and how the room had turned to protect me.
The life that remained was tender, messy, and honest. Chase and I made space for stubbornness and apologies, for laughter and the occasional ridiculous fight about who used too much toothpaste. We bought a better mirror, took turns cooking, and let the small funerals of old habits pass.
Sometimes I'd look at his sleeping face and wonder why I had ever been afraid. Then I would remember the vanity table, the night we had left the CCTV footage on the manager's counter, and how justice had looked in motion—unapologetic, public, and strangely cleansing.
"Promise?" Chase would ask, and his voice could be a child's plea.
"No," I'd say, smiling. "I won't promise everything. But I promise to stay."
Once, much later, when it snowed and the city's lights blurred into soft gold, I found myself smoothing the dust cover on Chase's couch. He woke and reached for me.
"Are you sleepy?" he asked.
"No," I said, leaning into him. "I was just remembering the vanity table you brought home."
He laughed. "You still keep that dust cover."
"I like that it's proof you didn't throw everything away," I said.
He kissed the top of my forehead. "Not yet."
And in the light of that small, ordinary evening—with the couch's cover in place, the vanity's mirror catching the light, and the memory of that bright, ugly night at the KTV where the man who thought himself untouchable had been made very small—I felt certain that this strange, messy life was exactly where I wanted to be.
The End
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