Sweet Romance16 min read
The Orange Scent Between Us
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I woke to the smell of hotel soap and a stranger's breathing against my collarbone.
"Morning," a husky voice said, and the word sounded like a small confession.
I blinked at the ceiling, slow and careful, as if the room itself might be a trick. My mind crawled through the fog until it found a shape: Ismael curled against my chest, lashes heavy, his face softer than the last time I had let myself look at him properly.
"You're still here," I said. My voice came out flat, as if I were naming a fact in a science book.
He pushed up his chin and peered at me with sleepy mischief. "Did you want me to leave?"
"I wanted a shower." I tried to sit up; he tightened like a vine and made a small protesting sound.
"Can I?" he asked, voice rough. "Can I go with you?"
I stared at him. He had asked like a child asking permission to stay up late. The last night's wildness had wilted into a sheepish worry sitting in his eyes, and it made the anger I had woken with turn into something else—uncertain and soft.
"Fine," I said, more out of habit than surrender. "You can carry me to the bathroom."
He brightened like someone who'd just been handed a small kingdom and then, with one quick, practiced movement, he lifted me across his arms.
"You're heavy." He pretended to struggle, his grin twin to a sunrise.
"I am a grown woman." I said it like a charm to ward off foolishness, but he only laughed.
In the bathroom he held me the whole time. He scrubbed my back with a towel like a ritual, his fingertips trailing long and reverent across skin that was suddenly very private and very public. When his head found the hollow of my neck, he inhaled like he might catalog me.
"Don't," I said, half pleading, half commanding.
He murmured against my ear. "Are you mad?"
"A little."
He hummed and kissed the line of my jaw. "I don't like it when you're mad."
Three hours later, we left the hotel smelling faintly of orange-scented body wash and each other. The shower had not been a quick solution. It became a slow mapping—one kiss became two, two became a dozen, and at some point we fell back into the old rhythm that never fit into simple time.
When we crossed the doorway of my house, the real world slammed like a door into a room where we'd been careless.
"Madam?" Housekeeper Barbara was poised with a duster, rubs of sunlight sketching lines across the floor. Her eyes did not search me; they took in the small disorder of a woman returning from the night.
"You didn't come home last night?" Barbara asked, voice braised gentle and small-scolding like a mother.
Ismael's answer was casual as a coat. "We slept out."
It was the simplest fabrication. I felt my grip on reality tremble. Last night had been a private storm—stark, violent, indiscreet. Returning home made every gust sound louder and brought guilt like seawater rising.
"Madam," Barbara said again, softer. "Your neck—"
My fingers went to my throat. The skin was a map of last night: whispers of teeth, crescent moons of kisses, bruises like little badges. For a moment the sight of them was an accusation. For a moment I wanted to hide.
Ismael slid a shoulder against my arm. "I'm not going to work today," he said lazily, like it was a weather report.
"You won't?" I snapped, suddenly small and furious.
He leaned in and rested his chin against my shoulder. "I'll stay home with you. All day."
"Go to work." I pushed him with my hip.
He cocked his head. "Are you afraid people will see us?"
I said, flat: "Yes. It can't be public."
He blinked, a brief confusion lining his brows. "Why?"
"Because it isn't right to announce something like this. We have to protect people. We have to think—"
"Think about what?" he asked. For a breath he looked vulnerable, like the boy who had once gotten into a fight on my behalf in a school office, face swollen and proud. "Why are you protecting anyone but yourself?"
I held his stare. "Because some things, once said out loud, can't be taken back."
He studied the marks on my throat the way a man might study treasure and then deliberately made his face a grave of charm. He leaned forward and offered his own neck, sliding it under my chin.
"Leave me some. Make your mark here too."
My mouth twitched between anger and something much less tidy. I couldn't decide whether to be outraged or to play. I bit down; it was a reflex. When my teeth met his skin, his breath hitched. The small sound he made nudged at a pulse in me that liked to win. I kept biting harder on principle, on pride, until his hands circled my waist and his eyes were flame-bright.
"Go to work," I repeated, then shoved him out of the room like I was putting order back into the world.
Barbara watched us with a quiet, knowing patience. From then on I found myself checking my collar in the mirror more than usual. Each time Barbara passed by the doorway, I could feel my chest tighten.
A week later, I was at the bar I ran, feeling the luxurious lightness of being a woman who had workers fuss over her. Nicholas, one of the bartenders, smiled as he polished a glass.
"Boss, you're glowing," he said in that soft reverence employees reserve for women who carry authority like jewelry.
"Drink?" another young man, Patrick, offered, eyes practically lit with the shipshape devotion of young staff.
"Just water," I answered, and I meant it—until a hand slid across the counter and stole my glass.
Ismael, in a suit that said "grown" and "careful," downed the last of my drink and took the seat beside me like he'd been invited all along. He smiled as if he owned the room.
"I came to find you," he said. "You were late."
The circle of boys scattered like birds. The space between us became private again.
"Ismael is someone important to me," I said to the pair who had been hovering nearest.
"Someone important?" one of them teased.
"Yes." I felt both brave and ridiculous.
Ismael's hand found mine on the bar and he looked at me as if I were his most precious rare object. "How important?" he asked, his tone suddenly edged.
I signaled for quiet. "Important enough."
He smirked and said the thing that had been sitting between us, small and hungry. "I want a name."
I laughed, a short bark. "A title?"
"A name. A public thing. I want people to know you are mine."
"Are you serious?" I asked, alarmed and a little flattered.
He pointed at the young staff. "They're circling you. They'll try. They think you are fun. I don't like it."
"You're jealous," I said, and there it was—like lighting a tinderbox.
"I am," he admitted. "I want you to be only mine."
I remembered him, ten years younger, fists and teeth and a face swollen from being brave on someone else's account. I remembered carrying him home, his hand squeezed into mine like a vow. Ten years had made his features sharper, his suits less rumpled. He still held my hand like a child holding a parent’s finger.
"When you first went to school, you defended me once," I told him in a low voice, and I saw him go still.
"You told me..." He hesitated. "You told me, 'No one can make fun of you.'"
"Yes." My voice was distant and soft. "You were always loyal."
"I am now," he said simply. "I want to be more than just—"
"Don't say it." I cut him off. He dodged like a man who had practiced the moment.
I tried to be rational. "Ismael, our relationship can't be a spectacle. It has to be quiet. For many reasons."
He studied my face, and the carefulness in his glance made my cheeks warm. "Why are you scared?" he asked.
"I'm scared of being judged. I'm scared of hurting people. I'm scared of the past."
"Is the past coming back?" he whispered.
"Sometimes." I took a breath. "Worse than that—sometimes it grows teeth."
We walked home in the thin glow of late hours. The city softened and the air smelled faintly of oranges. He fitted his hand with mine, as if fitting pieces, and I thought for a second we were the clean edges of a new picture.
At home, news waited like an audience. Kendall, my oldest friend, had called, which always meant trouble and gossip squared with concern.
"I went to your place," she reported when she saw me, more stern than surprised. "I went because I thought you were acting weird."
"You called Barbara?" I asked.
"I came myself." She swallowed and added, "I did what I thought right."
"You told Ismael everything?" I couldn't keep the accusation quiet.
"Yes." She lifted her chin. "Because someone needed to. Because you were being reckless."
"You did what?" I was aghast. "Why would you ruin anything?"
"I told Ismael because I thought he deserved to know what you were playing with." She said it like a verdict but also like a worry.
"You had no right." My voice broke a little.
She rolled her eyes and then softened. "I did it because I love you. You should not hide your life. You should not lie."
The argument folded into silence. Later, when she had left, I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my hands. Somewhere behind my ribs something kept picking at a scab.
Days passed with small rebellions of normalcy—me at the bar, him showing up in a suit with a single orange, me pretending not to notice. When I finally said the words, they were clumsy.
"Ismael, do you want children?" I asked once, to steer us away from everything else.
He was quiet for a long time, like someone parsing a calculus problem.
"No," he said at last. "I don't want kids."
"Why not?" My voice was more curious than it should have been.
"Because if you had a child," he said, "you would spend all your time on that child. I would be second. I can't have anyone before me."
I stared at him in a mix of hurt and disbelief. "You would put yourself before a child?"
"I would put you before a child," he said. "I can't share you."
It was a love that wanted to be all-consuming. It scared me because it wanted to erase natural bounds. My own history felt like a grenade between my fingers. I thought of Forrest.
One evening I came home and there he was: Forrest sitting like a quiet claim on my sofa. The house folded around him as if it had expected him all along.
"Forrest," I said because there wasn't another greeting that fit.
He turned to me and smiled in a way that could be soft or sharp depending on which corner of it you looked at.
"Wanda—" I corrected myself midname. "Iris. You look well."
"Forrest," I said again, slower. "Why are you here?"
He shrugged in a gentleman's way. "I came to see how our child is doing. You are doing well. You look... taken care of."
"You're not real," I said, to frame the moment, because sometimes naming a thing keeps it from swallowing you.
"Am I not?" He folded his hands. "You have always been good at pretending, Iris."
He spoke with an intimacy that made my skin cool. For a while he talked about care—how he'd arranged for our son to be looked after. His voice walked with a weight that was both pity and accusation.
"You remember how you died?" he asked softly, face losing warmth.
"Because of me," I admitted. The words were slow and heavy. "It was my fault."
"You knew," he said simply. "You knew a road would take you."
"I wanted to stay," I whispered, and the sentence tore like thread.
"Forrest's smile turned half-sorrow, half-iron. "You can't change the day you lost me," he said. "It wasn't a single day. Life has more ways to kill you than one."
"Stop," I said. "Why are you being cruel? You loved me."
He made a face that might have been anger or grief. "Love is not a shield from consequences."
"You're saying my life is worthless," I said, the air going thin.
"Not worthless." He tapped his fingers together. "Fragile. Wrong in how it is held. You have made choices—surrendered to what pleases you at the expense of others. You think you can be happy and hide it. That won't last."
I wanted to tell him that everything had a cost, that some costs were paid in sleepless nights and soft apologies.
He leaned forward. His voice was a blade. "You are not allowed to forget. You are not allowed to be forgiven without facing what you did."
He said it as if reciting a law. The room shrank. The house seemed to listen. For a terrible second the ghost of my past was a judge in a courthouse I'd never wanted to stand in.
"You could have been honest," Forrest said. "You could have protected him from falling. You let him fall."
"You're twisting it," I said. "I didn't plan any of this. He grew of his own desires. He is not a victim."
"Forrest's mouth pursed. "He is a child who loved the wrong person. You had the power to set him straight."
The conversation pulled on the thread of my guilt until it frayed.
"Why are you here?" I asked again, voice small.
"Because your conscience won't leave you alone," he said. "Because you need someone to tell you that what you're building will be broken."
He disappeared the way shadows do when you move from one room to another—no flourish, just absence. I stood with my hand on the back of the sofa. The silence pressed.
That night I dreamt of our son—not a real face but a child's shape, asking me why I had chosen this. "Mom," he said, his voice trembling, "why did you make me sad?"
I woke with the taste of copper and an old, old ache. Grief folded into the cracks of a life I was still trying to construct.
Ismael found me curled on the sofa and settled in like a warm argument. He smelled of oranges and complicated loyalty.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No. Forrest was here. He told me I am a terrible woman."
He drew me close as if closeness could stitch a wound. "He can't touch you anymore."
"You're not real either," I said, because we were both fragments trying to answer a bigger problem.
"I am very real," he replied, kissing my temple. "I love you."
"I know." The words were small and brittle. "But what if loving you hurts other people? What if it's wrong?"
He was quiet, thinking like a man planning a house. "If it hurts them," he said slowly, "we must be careful and kind. But I won't stop. I want to be with you."
"Forever?" I asked, bitterly.
"No," he said, honest and immediate. "No, I don't have that right. But I want to try."
A week later, the bar was full of laughter and easy music. I sat at the end of the counter with a glass of nothing in my hand, watching my employees move like pieces I had set in motion. The door opened and Kendal came in with a determined gait.
"Iris," she said, cutting the small chatter. "We need to talk."
She pointedly sat across from me. "How serious is he?"
"As serious as a child in love," I said.
She laughed short and sharp. "There is a difference between childlike devotion and persistent danger. You must guard your heart."
"Are you warning me, or telling me you're on my side?"
"Both," she said. "Because we all get tired and you deserve not to be alone in making a mess."
"Thank you."
Weeks rolled into a rhythm. He surprised me with small things—orange segments wrapped like confetti, a jacket draped over my shoulders when I forgot my scarf. He told me he wanted a name, and I suggested something small that would not overturn us: a quiet public dinner with a few friends, nothing broadcast.
"Will you call me yours?" he asked one night when the city lay like a duvet below our windows.
"I will tell a handful of people," I said. "Not the world."
"You mean it?"
"I mean it." I kissed him, and this time our mouths moved with the calm of two people making a pact.
But the past kept whispering. Forrest came to visit my dreams, sometimes cruel, sometimes pleading. He told me that what I had done—taking a lover who was almost like a son to the man who had been kind to me—would never be forgiven. He offered a temptation: a red dress, a quiet day, a way to stop the pain without letting it age me.
"Go," he would say. "Stop. Make it a ceremony."
I woke from those visits with my hands empty and a hunger that was not for food. The darkness had teeth and it mouthed accusations in my ear.
One night, when the world slept like a cautious animal, I found Ismael awake beside me. He smelled of citrus and a little of cigarettes—evidence of the hours he had stood outside pacing.
"You look like you saw a ghost," he said softly.
"I did," I answered. "He told me to die."
His hand clasped mine as if to stop me falling. "I told you," he said, "you don't have to listen."
"Why do you love me so ferociously?" I asked. The question wasn't just about him. It was about the thin seam of feeling that had moved from tenderness into obsession.
"Because you were always kind to me," he said simply. "Because you made a place for me in your life when no one else did. Because I want to give back that safety ten times over."
"But I'm older," I said. "One day you'll resent that. You'll meet someone younger, someone fresher. You will get bored."
He shook his head like a person banishing a lie. "I don't think like that. I will fight things that make us not us. I will grow with you. I will work."
I looked at him with something like wonder. His promise was not grand or poetic. It was a small, furious vow to hold steady. It soothed and terrified me.
There were tender moments—three in particular that wedged themselves like bright coins into the day-to-day.
"Can I borrow your jacket?" he asked once, and for the first time in months I saw him smile when he thought I couldn't see.
"Take the whole wardrobe," I said.
He wrapped my scarf around his neck and laughed, and I felt my chest loosen because he had done something small that only a lover would understand.
Another time, the bar had closed and we were sweeping up together.
"Your hands are cold," he said, and took off his coat without ceremony.
"Not cold enough," I muttered, but he slipped the coat around my shoulders like it was meant for me.
Finally, the third moment was when he said, "I love you" unassumingly, like someone reciting a favorite line. I had to choke on it because it meant reckoning.
"Do you love me or the idea of me?" I asked.
"I love the real you," he answered immediately. "The one who is brave enough to be flawed."
Those moments kept me going through nights full of Forrest's voice and my own rattling guilt.
One evening, the bar hosted a small charity event. I wore a dress that made me feel older but comfortable. During a lull, I stepped outside and found Ismael at the curb waiting. He looked at me and then took me in his arms like a small man who feared the world might take me.
"You look like a prize," he said.
"You look like you belong at a different table," I teased.
We laughed, and the sound rebalanced us. A few guests saw us and smiled, mistaking a kind glance for ordinary attraction. I felt something like ease.
Later, after the event, a woman named Barbara, who had been my housekeeper for years and whose hands had folded my shirts and mended my life in small ways, told me something I did not expect.
"Madam," she said quietly, "people wonder."
"Wonder what?" I asked.
"About what is between you and him." She spoke in a careful whisper that was not cruel. "But I keep my mouth closed because it is not my place."
Her discretion made me want to weep. "Thank you."
There were days when courage felt like renting a sturdy coat. I rented it often. I decided to have a private dinner—just a few friends. I told Kendall and a couple of trusted staff. It would be a small, honest step.
The night came, and Ismael arrived with a single orange blossom tucked into his boutonniere. I accepted it like a relic.
"If anyone asks," he said, leaning close, "tell them you are my woman."
"I will," I said, and the words felt like a brick being laid.
We sat at a table that smelled of citrus and old wood. Kendall raised her glass in a dramatic mock-toast.
"To Iris and Ismael," she said, smiling. "May your secrets be sensible and your truths be kind."
The tiny circle laughed, the way tiny circles do when they want to create safety.
But even as the laughter pealed, a tremor passed through me. Forrest's voice lingered like an echo in the bones. That night, when the dishes were cleared and the last guest left, I stood on the balcony with Ismael beside me.
"I don't know how long this will last," I said honestly.
"Then let's make it good while it does," he said, his thumb tracing the back of my hand.
His optimism was not naïve. It was a commitment to the present, because neither of us could promise the future. We held onto that.
The months after our small public dinner folded into a new pattern. The bar kept running. The employees fussed and joked. Ismael came and went, present more than absent, protective more than possessive, careful when it mattered.
Forrest's apparitions persisted, less like hauntings and more like wounds that refused to scar.
"You will always hear him," Ismael said to me one rainy evening, holding my face in his palms. "And that is okay."
"Why are you so patient?" I asked. "Why do you let me be flawed?"
He kissed my temple, then smiled that shy, open grin. "Because I love you."
I closed my eyes and let it be enough for a while.
There was one final test—a moment where the past reached for us with both hands and the future balanced on a coin.
A reporter got wind of the small dinner. It was nothing—just a mention in a shallow gossip column—but it seeded fear. People began to ask questions. A man who had once been an ally turned a small curiosity into a rumor. He was not malicious exactly; he was opportunistic, small and hungry.
"Do you want me to confront him?" Ismael asked when I told him.
"No," I said, feeling old and tired. "Let me deal with this."
The next day I went to the bar and faced the whispers. I answered with honesty that was neither brash nor shameful.
"I am seeing someone," I told a cluster of staff who had come with half-formed questions. "He is important to me. He makes me happy."
The rumor smoothed like cloth. People either accepted it or didn't. The world turned.
When I walked into the house that evening, the air felt like it had been scrubbed.
Ismael met me in the doorway, his face open and bright. "We did it," he said, half triumphant, half bewildered.
"You did," I corrected. "You."
He laughed and kissed me like a seal of triumph.
The ghosts did not leave entirely, but they grew quieter. Forrest's voice became less like thunder and more like a memory that was slowly learning its place. He came once more in a dream and said fewer things. He seemed tired.
"Do you regret loving me?" I asked Ismael one night.
He looked at me as if seeing me with unusual clarity. "I regret nothing that made you smile," he said.
I let his words warm me. I allowed myself to be small and content. Love, in his form, was not a demand for perfection. It was a stubborn insistence that we matter to each other.
We celebrated small things—broken coffee machines, a night where the city lights looked like scattered confetti. Three times he did things that made my chest skip:
"You're impossible," I said once when he rearranged all my books.
"Only for you," he answered, kissing the tip of my nose.
"You're ridiculous," I told him another day when he brought soup and a ridiculous grin to my bed.
"You're mine," he said, piling covers over us.
And the third time, in the quiet of an evening after a small storm had passed, he took my face between his hands and said in a low voice, "I love you."
I let the words sit in my chest and I felt them like a small light. I met them with the honesty I had learned to give myself.
"I love you too," I said. It wasn't grand. It wasn't perfect. It was the truth.
He smiled, and in that moment the orange scent of his cologne filled the space between our faces like a promise I could taste.
We walked forward like two people who had survived storms and had chosen each other for reasons that went beyond convenience. We also walked forward knowing that the past might whisper, the world could judge, and pain could sometimes arrive uninvited.
"Can we go on a real date someday?" Ismael asked one afternoon, voice hopeful.
"Yes," I said. "A real one."
"Ferris wheel?" he suggested.
"Ferris wheel," I agreed, and I imagined us holding hands high above the city, the lights sliding beneath us like an audience.
He leaned in, smelling of orange blossoms, and kissed me. Then he laughed softly. "Promise?"
"I promise," I murmured.
His laugh was like music I had once forgotten I loved. He tucked his head against my shoulder and breathed in deep.
"This is my favorite smell," he whispered.
"Which smell?" I asked, smiling.
"Orange," he said. "It reminds me of home."
"Then we'll always have a little home with us," I replied.
He lifted his head and looked at me with a kind of astonished tenderness.
"Do you think the world will be kind to us?" he asked, as if the question had no easy answers.
"It doesn't have to be," I said. "We can be kind to each other."
He closed his eyes, smiling like someone who had been handed an impossible gift.
"I love you," he said again, tender enough to be a lullaby.
"So do I," I said, and this time I meant it with a conviction that had been tempered in the fires of fear and memory.
When I reached to smooth his hair away from his brow, I found my fingertips lingering at the base of his neck where a faint imprint of my teeth still lived.
The orange scent wrapped us like a flag. Outside, the city went on with its small, indifferent life.
Inside, we were careful, flawed, and ferociously alive.
The End
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