Sweet Romance12 min read
The Painted Cards and the Night I Came Home
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1
I found him first by the echo. The cave swallowed the group’s chatter and left just two breathing bodies and a steady heartbeat.
"I thought I lost you," I said, voice shaking.
He paused, fingers on my hair, then rubbed my head like it was the most natural thing. "You wandered off. I went to the bathroom and—poof—gone."
"Bathroom?" I blinked. "You left me."
He smiled that half-annoyed half-soft smile. "Yeah, I left you."
I sat on the cold stone thinking the world was unfair. He waited, then asked, "Do you want to keep walking now, or sit?"
"Sit," I said. "Let me cry for a minute. I don't want those people to see me cry."
He laughed, a sound I would memorize. Then he sat close, just close enough.
"Tell me," he said. "Am I mean to you?"
"You don't have to ask." My voice went thin.
"Do you think I'm the type to break up on a whim?" He looked straight at me. "I do things straight. If you can take that, we keep going. If you can't—"
"Then what?" I whispered. "Will you leave like your exes?"
He stopped. His face went quiet. "I don't know."
I told him about the stupid, foolish parts of my heart. "I once liked someone for three years and never told. I thought if I confessed I'd lose even that small thing. I thought if I told, he'd stop being my friend."
He looked away. For a long minute he was gone, and then he walked back and said, "You liked someone? For three years?"
"Yes," I said.
He scoffed softly, then said a sentence that felt like a blade and a blanket at once. "If you're going to be like that, don't be surprised when you get hurt."
He left. A few steps later he came back, slammed his hand on the stone, and said, "Who else are you seeing? Who's playing who?"
"I wasn't playing you," I said. "I wanted to be with you. But your ways—"
He grabbed me. I went quiet because his mouth took mine. It was a sharp, terrible, gentle sort of seizure.
"Are you angry?" he muttered between kisses.
"Stop," I said.
He tightened his hold. "Shut up." Then slower, softer: "Tell me. Am I horrible?"
"I'm not sure," I mumbled.
He rested my head on his chest. I listened to the loud thud. It felt like shelter. "Listen to my heart," he said, absurd and tender.
That night the cave had only our breath and his heartbeat. I forgot embarrassment. I forgot everything but that chest against my ear.
After that, he became my map. He guided me where stairs were steep. He made a snarky joke when my knee bled. He wasn't extravagant with chivalry, but he was steady. He was never quite how novels write a man, and yet my childish heart kept warming like a kettle.
2
At dinner his friends teased us. "What were you doing in there for half an hour?" someone shouted.
"Studying." He pulled a baseball cap over my head and scowled at the crowd, then shrugged. The teasing kept going, and I blushed until I thought I would melt.
Before night he asked me to wait while he ran out. "I have to grab something," he told me. "Don't come."
"Why not?" I tried to hide that the room was full of people who ate my shame for dessert.
"Because it's better if you stay." He looked at me sharply. "Just don't come."
I followed him anyway to a supermarket. He claimed he was buying snacks. He stood in front of little boxes at the cash register like a kid in a candy shop and asked which flavor I liked. I fled the snack aisle like a fool, and when I came out he had already paid and was waiting.
"You don't have to talk to them," he said when his friends started to clap. "We can go."
Later, small fights began. "I can't sleep in the same room with you yet," I pleaded.
"Two rooms? We're broke." He made a face.
By the time we got to his room he was half-laughing, half-angry. "Give me a kiss." He pushed me onto the bed and kissed me like everything was urgent.
"Can we be careful?" I asked. "We just started."
He caught my hands and squeezed. "You and I, we try. I won't break you."
3
We were a small odd couple. I read at the library. He lurked in bars. He always found a way to show up at my library table and make the room fold around him.
"Study or distract me?" he whispered once and took my hand under the desk. I squeezed back like a secret.
We argued about England. "I want to study there," I said. "Can you come?"
He threw my study guides on the table. "You go. Find someone smarter. I can't be the reason you throw away your future."
"You said you'd stick around," I protested.
"Not forever," he said. "Listen, I'm a mess. I drink. I fight. I'm not the guy on postcards."
But he did come to the library more and more. He read comic books as I read essays. Then, the week before a big exam, he pulled an all-nighter with me, trying to learn words he never used.
"You're actually trying," I said, in wonder.
"Don't make me soft," he grunted. "I have a plan B."
"Plan B?" I grinned.
He looked at me like a boy and said, "Yeah."
4
Then the world split.
One night, I called the bar. A woman answered and told me Jensen was there and too drunk. I went. The bar smelled like music and perfume and regret. I found him surrounded by friends and a woman I had only seen from a distance before—Bianca McCormick.
"Why are you here?" I asked him.
He looked at me like I surprised him. "You came to save me?"
"Why is she here? Who is she to you?"
He smirked. I grabbed his drink and downed it in one motion—stupid, fool move. He didn't stop me.
"You don't belong here," I said. "You and me—two different worlds."
"Maybe," he said, cool as ice. The room watched.
He took me outside and forced me into a taxi. He said we'd go to a hotel to talk. We ended up there. He argued. He kissed. He promised.
Then, a phone call came. He picked up and didn't speak. Later, he told me he needed to go. I waited at his door like an idiot while he left.
The second after he left, my phone buzzed with a picture. Bianca's social feed lit up with a photo of Jensen and her, smiling. It was stamped with a public "We're together" that felt like salt in my mouth.
5
I ran to his dorm and waited. He came down with a new haircut and a grey suit like someone who had already closed a chapter. "You came back?"
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Why did you leave me like trash?"
He shrugged. "You said you were going to England. I thought it better—"
"Better for who? You?"
He rolled a cigarette while I said the words I had rehearsed and never wanted to say. "If you want me to apologize, I will. But I can't promise England or forever. I can't be half of what others need."
"You left me," I sobbed. "For someone else."
He put his hand on my head, the same move that had once soothed me. "You were good to me," he said. "But life—"
He walked away. He deleted my number. He told me to go. He told me "goodbye."
6
I fell. I broke like a cheap glass. My friends tried to fix me. Berkley Taylor, my roommate, paced and fussed and told me not to become a ghost.
"He's a jerk," she said.
"I don't think so," I whispered. "He saved me sometimes."
"Then why did he do that?" she asked.
I had no answer. I packed, and two months later I was on a plane to England. I applied to school there and a friend, Rohan Tucker, came with me. I needed a clean ocean.
7
On a cold fogged afternoon I wandered a small seaside town because Jensen had put something in my head—his mother's name and a house he said she had lived in. I thought his mother would be an idea, maybe a closed file.
A little girl with wide eyes and a small white dog found me first.
"Are you Chinese?" she asked, in a perfect accent.
"Yes," I answered, stunned.
Her father came out then, taller, gentle. "She misses her mother," he said. "Her mother was half Chinese, you know. She liked speaking Chinese to her daughter."
My heart knocked. He told me things I didn't expect: the woman's name, the accident that took her life, the child's yearning. The father hesitated and then said, "She—my wife—drew these pictures before she died. She said she remembered a boy in China. She wanted to find him."
My hands closed on a handful of crude cards, children's drawings of a boy with label-like names. "Her son," I whispered.
"She had memory problems," he said. "Sometimes she remembered things. She wanted to go home. She left, but the car—"
It didn't take me long. The next day I flew home.
8
I searched. I climbed stairs while feeling the world tilt. I learned Jensen had been missing an important exam because he had flown to get his mother's ashes. He had gone to England to claim her bones and to face the impossible.
When I found him at the corporate building where he had started an internship, he stood in the lobby like a man half-grown.
"I was stupid," I blurted out. "I should have stayed. I should have listened."
He looked at me with an odd calm. "You're back."
We talked badly at first, then better. One night he said quietly, "She tried to come home. She wanted to find me. She died on the way."
"I have cards," I said. "She drew your face."
He was silent so long I thought he would crack. He didn't. He picked up the stack and tossed them like a ledger—then stopped and read one.
"She drew me as a boy with a kite," he said. His voice was small. "I never knew."
"She remembered," I whispered.
He looked at me, and the wall he had built for the world trembled. "Why did you come back?"
"I couldn't leave you with that not known," I said. "You deserved to know."
9
We slept for the first time that night with no questions like knives. The next morning he made noodles in a style that was almost a joke, but he laughed and gave them to me like a peace offering.
Then the phone rang. It was Bianca.
"Don't pick it up," I said.
He answered. There was a public event happening at our university the next week, an alumni talk. Bianca was on the speakers list, and she had tweeted about being Jensen's partner. People would be there.
"Let it go," I said.
He put his head in his hands. "No. I want her to see who I am."
10
The punishment had to be real. I didn't want revenge. I wanted truth. I wanted the world to see what she had chosen.
The auditorium that afternoon smelled like coffee and metal. Students filled the rows. The lights were warm. Bianca walked on stage in a sharp red dress, a smile like a knife. Jensen sat in the front row, precise, sleeves rolled, back straight.
She began with a practiced tone, "I want to tell you about someone who changed my life."
She smiled toward him. A screen behind her lit up with glossy photos of her with a man who looked like Jensen. The audience applauded dutifully. I felt sick.
Then a student in the third row stood up. "Excuse me," she said. "Wasn't there a girl crying outside the bar last semester? The one who came from another country?"
Murmurs started. Bianca’s smile flickered. "Is this a joke?"
"Not a joke," the student said. "I remember a screenshot someone posted that day. It was—" The student fished up his phone. He projected a video onto the screen: Bianca, moments before, sending a triumphant message. In the video she typed, "Got him. Public now. Bye." The auditorium gasped.
Bianca's face changed, a palette from calm to flush to anger. "That's a private message," she snapped. "It's edited."
"Is it mine to be private?" someone asked. "You went public with someone else's heartbreak."
She tried to laugh it off. "People make drama out of thin air."
"Did you know he flew to claim bones for his mother?" a quiet voice called. "Do you know what that looks like when someone goes to hold their mother and you make a show?"
Another slideshow appeared, curated by a student who had dug up flight logs and a hospital notice. The audience watched: Jensen in an airport, Jensen at a snowy grave, Jensen later with an empty chair in a small house. You could hear the rustle of pages.
Bianca cried out, "You are lying!" Her voice cracked. The camera on stage homed in on her face; she went through the stages everyone in the punishment guidebook warns against. She blinked, then she tried to cover her mouth. She lunged to grab the microphone and tried to steer the narrative back to her "charity" work and "career growth," but the stories kept coming.
A cluster of students—some who had seen Jensen's collapse earlier—stood and told the auditorium how Bianca had reacted in private, how she had posted a victory photo, how she had erased the call history like it was a wine stain.
Her expression slid from fury into pleading. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she said, voice thin, eyes bright with tears not quite sincere. "Please, I—"
"Why announce so fast?" a student demanded. "Why? When someone is grieving, why throw yourself like a parade?"
Bianca's hands trembled. She tried to assert, "You don't know everything. It's personal."
"No," Jensen stood up slowly, and the room stilled. "You made a choice to go public. You used a private moment as a trophy. You told people that I had 'moved on' when I was trying to bring something home." The words he spoke were calm, but each one landed like a weight.
"You left. You announced while I was with my mother's ashes. And you—" His jaw worked. He could have broken, but he didn't. "—you made me look like a liar."
"Jensen, please," Bianca begged.
"This isn't only about me." Jensen turned and faced the crowd. "This is about how quickly people decide someone's story is entertainment."
An old professor in the back rose. "This woman exploited someone’s pain for clout," he said. "That doesn't belong in our hall."
Phones lifted. The auditorium hummed with outrage. Bianca tried to walk off stage. Students swarmed the mics—some to ask for her resignation from campus projects, some to demand she clarify the timeline publicly. A student from the student paper took the mic and said, "We'll run the full timeline. We'll show that she posted photos and captions at 14:02 while Jensen was calling his family at 13:58. We'll publish the receipts."
Bianca's face registered real, naked humiliation. She had lived in announcement culture. Now the auditorium glared back like a mirror that refused to flatter. "Please," she said, voice small, "you don’t know me."
"Then tell us," a grad student shouted. "Tell us now, with evidence, how you think this was okay."
She stammered, pleading, then faltered into denial. "It's not what it looks like."
A girl in the second row stood up with a steady voice. "I was the one who posted that screenshot because I couldn't stand it. I thought it was cruel. I never thought it would become like this. But people deserve to know."
Outside the auditorium, a line formed as staff escorted Bianca. Students filmed as she left, some whispering "clout hunter" and "public bully." The video of her exit spread. The student newspaper uploaded the timeline with receipts. Her sponsors and campus partners texted and called. The university put out a short statement: "We are reviewing conduct." The comments were sharp and merciless.
Bianca's reaction had moved like stages: arrogance, panic, denial, begging, collapse. People recorded her collapsing into a chair in an administrative office while her PR team called numbers she couldn't answer.
When she was escorted through the campus quad, she passed groups who turned away or stared with cold faces. A small boy who once praised her on a newsletter gave her a whispering look of "what did you do" before stepping away. A woman who worked at a campus coffee stand pointed at a group and said, "That was cruelty." Someone photographed and put the image on the campus board: Bianca's hot red dress, smudged makeup, mouth open in a plea. The comments were public condemnation.
It was not violence. It was exposure. It was her being held up and shown the reflection of what her choice had accomplished. It was the world responding in the way the world sometimes does—raw and loud.
I watched Jensen stand a while after she left. He folded his hands in front of his chest like he had aged a decade in half an hour. "You did not deserve that," he told me. "I didn't ask for it."
"It was necessary," I said. "Not for revenge, but for accountability. People should know."
He smiled, small and crooked. "That's all right. I won't let that be the chapter that defines me."
11
A week later the campus paper released the full timeline. Bianca's projects were suspended. Her name became the shorthand for "performative empathy" in message boards. Some people cheered; others worried the punishment was too public. She lost a few contracts. Sponsors distanced themselves. At a charity event weeks later, her speech was met with polite claps and thin smiles. She begged for privacy in interviews. Those were met with a cool, collected detachment.
At the coffee shop, a young woman told another, "Good. Maybe she'll think before posting others' pain again."
Bianca's breakdown had the kinds of details everyone then passed around: the moment she stopped smiling, the way her voice shook, how people who once cheered turned into onlookers offering nothing. Her collapse was public; her recovery would be quieter, if it came at all.
12
After the dust settled, Jensen and I spoke every day. He had been messy, yes, but he had reasons—none of them clean. He had flown to England to fetch the last thing from his mother's hands. He had been raw. He had been unable to navigate how to be both a man with a pain and a man who loved well.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked one night.
"I forgave the man who'd go to airports and stand in front of graves," I said. "I can't forgive someone who will hide behind a liar's smile."
He took my hand. "I was wrong. I should have told you. I should have trusted you."
We tried again. This time we were clumsy, honest, and open. I gave him the cards she had drawn. He read them and cried once, not for show but for what he had missed, for what he had never known.
13
The rest of the semester was a slow ladder. Jensen worked at a company; his hair was short, and he stopped fighting as much. He came to my classes and sat in the back. We studied together on nights when the city was quiet and everyone else slept. He helped me with practice tests. He sometimes lost focus and would stare at a page and smile, and I would ask, "What are you thinking?" He would say, "Kite, or your face, or her handwriting." I would laugh.
At the end of it, on a rainy morning, he looked at me and said, "Let's do the paper."
"The paper?"
"Marriage papers," he said. "We go tomorrow to the office. You want it?"
"You're serious," I said, and I felt a thump in my chest that was not panic but soft home.
"I'm ridiculous," he said. "But I don't want to leave you to the world before we try."
We went the next morning. I slid the small painted card into my pocket, the crooked line of a child's drawing a secret seal. When we signed our names, every word hummed like the cave, like a heartbeat that finally had a name.
"I love you," I said, and he said, "I love you." We didn't say "always." We said real things: "I will come back. I will try. I will tell you."
Outside, the sky had a damp, ordinary light. We stepped into it, fingers locked. I felt his pulse against my palm and remembered the boy who had run to the plane for his mother's bones and the man who stood in an auditorium and let the room decide what justice looked like.
I kept the painted cards in my pocket. When the wind pushed through the street, I took one out and smoothed it. Jensen laughed.
"Keep it," he said. "So you'll never think I'm gone."
I slid the card back into my pocket and let him hold my hand.
The End
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