Sweet Romance13 min read
The Peach Lollipop and the Samoyed Smile
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The graduation dinner had the usual noise: clinking glasses, laughter, a dozen phones lit like small moons. Ephraim Martin had his arm around Svetlana Barlow, the campus beauty everyone knew, and he let his friends egg him on to introduce someone for me.
He glanced toward the corner where I sat, half-hidden in shadow. He smiled at his friends and said, loud enough for the table to hear, "That tall one? She looks like somebody owes her money. Who'd want her?"
I made myself smaller, pressing my hands into my skirt so no one would see my eyes sting.
"Don't cry, Kaylin," he had told me once when we were children. "Uglies don't get to cry, did you know that?"
I covered my mouth to stop the breath from hitching.
1
I met Ephraim when I was nine. My family had just moved next door to his. My mother introduced us and I stood behind her like a small shadow, staring at this outrageously pretty boy who seemed a little too full of himself.
I wanted to step forward. I wanted to be brave.
I offered him the peach-lollipop I hadn't finished.
He swatted it away, yelling to his mother, "I don't want to play with that big-awkward girl!"
"Big-awkward" became the first of many labels. He rarely used my name. He gave me teasing nicknames—every one of them a scrape on the skin of my dignity—and then would, in the next breath, pretend to be mad and order me around until I did whatever he wanted. I always did.
I grew tall like my father. While the other girls were small and birdlike, I was the awkward owl among sparrows. I remember being blocked in a school bathroom one day, drenched with cola and shoved around. My lungs closed with panic until Ephraim burst in like an animal.
He punched and shoved and fought anyone in his way, and in the hallway afterward he told me, scolding like a parent, "Don't cry. Uglies don't have the right to cry."
That rescue dug a hollow in me where loyalty took root. I didn't know "like" or "love" then, but I clung to him like a fledgling to a tree branch. For years I did things for him: reserved restaurants, bought tickets, paid deposits when he flirted with another girl. When people asked about me he'd wrap an arm around my shoulders and say, "This is my friend Kaylin."
"Ten years and counting," he'd announce.
I would smile and say, "Yes. Ten years," and my chest would ache.
2
We both stayed in the same city for university. On registration day I helped him pack his bags and returned to my dorm to organize my sewing kit. The dorm door opened and in walked his new girlfriend—Svetlana.
Ephraim had never told me Svetlana would be at our school. He'd never told me much about his girlfriends. I had assumed they'd be passing storms, like those before—beautiful, intense, then gone.
Her phone rang. He spoke in a voice I had almost never heard from him—soft, warm, a little flirtatious. "Want to go have dinner?" he asked. He laughed quietly.
I froze in the doorway like an observer trapped in time.
I had never heard him say anything like that to anyone before. His past girlfriends either needed his indulgence or they exploded and left. This voice—this careful, attentive voice—felt different.
"He means it," I told myself, and the truth hit me like an electric current. My chest constricted so hard I bent double and hid my face in my knees.
3
Svetlana smiled and greeted me when she saw me. She had a gentle way. I was so used to either being ignored or watched with suspicion by his girlfriends that a warm "hello" made my whole body dizzy.
She tied her hair up into a bun and for an instant I thought of someone else—someone from years before who had refused Ephraim. The way she twisted her hair reminded me of that girl's hair. I couldn't help a small smile. It wasn't only me who had wanted him; other people had, too.
4
We ended up in the same class: Fashion Design 01. A senior in student council saw my sketches and asked me to design the host's gown for the welcome gala. I was cutting patterns when Svetlana drifted over.
"It's beautiful," she said of my sketch. "Is that your design, Kaylin?"
I nodded.
"Could you make something for me?" she asked shyly. "Nothing complicated. You're so talented."
Ephraim glanced over at us. Svetlana looped her arm through his. "You want to see me in it, right?" she teased.
Ephraim barely looked up from his paper. He said, offhand, "If you have time, help her."
I looked at the fabric in my hands and said, "I'm sorry. I promised a senior I'd do her dress. I don't have the time."
Ephraim blinked. He looked surprised. That small flicker on his face—surprised that I refused—made something inside me steady.
5
On the night of the gala, the senior's gown went missing. I had left it backstage, in the public wardrobe. Now Svetlana was on stage in a pearl fishtail gown that fit her like a second skin.
The audience whistled. I watched from the wings as the gown I had painstakingly made for the senior glittered under the lights on Svetlana. My blood went cold.
Backstage, the senior demanded answers. Svetlana came in and hugged my hand, "Thank you so much, Kaylin. You made the show tonight."
"It's not mine," I said, truthfully and quietly. "It's the senior's dress."
Svetlana's face hardened. "You promised me you'd make this dress."
I looked at Ephraim waiting in the doorway. He saw the senior's sharp face. He could have stepped in and made it right for me.
"I don't know," he said.
My heart fell, not because of the dress but because I had expected one sentence—one truthful sentence—from him. He knew exactly what was happening. He let her use the dress to show he had the beautiful girlfriend, and he let me be the scapegoat.
6
After the gala, we all went out to celebrate. Ephraim left me out of conversation, barely meeting my eyes. But then when a friend urged me to take a drink, Ephraim held out a hand and said flatly, "She can't. Her stomach can't handle it."
The group laughed and moved on. Svetlana stared at me like I'd been dealt in the wrong hand.
It was always this way. When I tried to walk away, sweet, familiar gestures—just the smallest of concessions—would draw me back like a thirsty insect to a mirage.
7
I tried to step back. I replied slower to his messages, I said I was busy when he called, I began to say no.
He noticed. He grew quieter.
But my body remembered addiction. I could not eat well; my phone buzzed and I jumped, hoping it was him. The urge to explain, to rewrite history, gnawed at me.
8
One day I ran into someone on the dorm stairs—someone I hadn't expected: Hinata Torres.
She was a year ahead, and she asked me, bluntly, "Do you still like him?"
I laughed, because it's easier than crying. "Apparently I'm obvious."
She smiled. "You should stop. It's good to leave it."
She surprised me then. "Would you consider modeling?"
"Modeling?" I asked. I had never thought of myself as anything like that.
She reached out and didn't let go. "Come to my studio."
9
Hinata ran an online boutique with a friend. She and her team worked on original designs and had a growing following. Her makeup artist—Emmalyn Carlier—took one look at me and went to work. Hinata handed me an outfit: black, gothic, clever cuts that flashed bone and waist and clavicle.
When I stepped out, someone clapped.
"You fit my style," Hinata announced. "You're exactly who I needed."
A photographer came in—tall, polite, with friendly, eager eyes. "Hi, I'm Griffin Ikeda," he said, holding a hand out. "I'll be the photographer today."
He looked at me with a softness I wasn't used to. He had a smile like a sunbreak on a cloudy day.
10
Griffin shot me differently. He didn't tell me how to move. He asked what I felt, and then waited. He smiled from behind the camera and it made the room feel safe.
"Imagine something simple," he suggested. "A childhood memory, or the way your favorite tea tastes. Don't force a smile—let one come."
His toppling kindness eased a pressure inside me. For once I didn't feel like I had to perform.
11
After the shoot, Hinata and Emmalyn were happy. Griffin lingered and looked at me. "I love your laugh," he said.
I wanted to argue—my laugh? But his gentle teasing made my face hot.
"You're older than me," I said. "Don't call me that."
He grinned. "Then call me Griffin."
12
I started helping Hinata and Griffin more. Griffin began to bring snacks—little things I liked. Once, on the rooftop during a break, he wiped a rice grain from my lip like it was treasure.
"I want you to be comfortable," he said. "I'll make sure you are."
His words slid into my chest and warmed me like a blanket. I thought of my years around Ephraim and how small kindnesses had been withheld like rare currency.
13
Ephraim rang me one afternoon while I was wrapped in Griffin's blanket and Griffin hovered with a cup of tea. I answered, silent.
"Why aren't you saying anything?" Ephraim asked.
"Why are you calling?" I replied.
He demanded I meet him on the basketball court after class. He would "explain." I went.
14
On the court he was throwing the ball like he was trying to throw away a part of himself. He walked to me, hands damp with sweat.
"Why are you avoiding me?" he asked. "Why won't you answer my calls?"
"I met someone," I said. "His name is Griffin. I'm with him."
Something like anger flickered across Ephraim's face. "You and him? You just met him."
"I have the right to meet new people," I said. "I am not your reserve."
He tried to pull me close like he had when we were children.
I stepped back. "Ephraim, I've liked you for years. I told you. But I won't be the one who only gives. I won't be invisible anymore."
He sputtered, then stepped forward, as if to speak, and suddenly a figure moved between us.
It was Griffin. He had walked onto the court and without a word, swung a fist that landed on Ephraim's jaw, sending him to the ground.
Griffin's face that day was not sunny. It was hard, protectively cold. He crouched over me and said, sharp, "If you want her number, get it yourself. You don't take what you've ignored."
Ephraim was stunned. He wiped blood from his lip. "You—what are you—?"
Griffin pulled me to his chest and stayed there until the night cooled.
15
Griffin apologized the next day as if he'd stolen something from me. He sat across a coffee table, eyes wide and gentle like a dog who had seen a thunderstorm.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have hit him. But I couldn't stand by."
I laughed despite myself. "You clumsy man. I liked the hit."
He pretended to be wounded. Then we were both laughing, and I felt a safe place forming.
16
We began to work together more: Hinata's brand, my modeling for the lookbooks, Griffin shooting. I sewed for the shows while Hinata cut and directed and Emmalyn did hair and makeup. We planned for the annual design exhibition.
Hinata used a version of the pearl fishtail that had been taken that gala night, and we turned it black, sharp, and windborne, a gown that walked like wind and angled like a blade. I modeled it.
At the exhibition, people were quiet at first. Then a wave of admiration rose. I walked and felt the hum of attention like a steady current under my feet. For once, the eyes were on me—not with disdain but with wonder.
Svetlana sat in the front row, her face a study in surprise. Ephraim watched with an expression I couldn't read: shock, pride, maybe regret. He knew all the details he had once ignored.
17
After the show I was hugged by Griffin, and then Ephraim appeared.
"Can we talk?" he said.
Before I could answer, a stage manager tugged at Griffin's sleeve. "We're up next for the ceremony."
Griffin stepped out to the podium with his usual calm. He took the microphone and, with a gentleness that felt like a hush across the room, spoke about his path into photography. Then I felt his hand find mine.
He turned to the audience. "There's one person who changed everything I do," he said. "She was a photo in my folder long before I met her in person. She taught me to look at stories, not faces. Kaylin Rinaldi—my partner, my love—will you marry me?"
The lights focused on us. The room stilled, then exploded into cheers. Cameras flashed. I didn't breathe.
Ephraim's face drained of color. For the first time in years, the braggadocio cracked. He stepped forward, a knot of movement in the crowd.
"Wait," he said, voice loud enough to be heard above the applause. "Kaylin—"
And then something happened that I would remember like a slow-motion film.
There was a ripple in the audience. People looked at Ephraim with new scrutiny. Someone nearby—Svetlana's friend—said, "Isn't he that guy who mocked her at graduation dinner?" Her whisper spread.
Phones were already filming. On live feeds, comments scrolled: "Is that Ephraim?" "He dumped her." "Wow, public proposal, holy—"
Ephraim's expression turned from shock to anger and then to a kind of frantic denial. "No, I—" he began.
A man near the front, someone who had known him since high school, stood and said loud enough for everyone to hear, "Ephraim, don't. You hurt her for years."
Another voice, softer, "You made her invisible."
The room's mood shifted. Where there had been warm applause for us, now a chorus of murmurs turned toward Ephraim. His friends looked at him with the sudden distance of people who have discovered a truth that embarrasses them.
Ephraim tried to speak, and the words fell like loose stones. "It wasn't like that," he stammered. "She—I've always—"
A woman recorded him with her phone, voice low and steady. "So you thought you could treat her like a shadow?" she said into her camera. The comment thread under the live feed exploded with people watching, debating, and recording.
Ephraim's posture shifted. His chest heaved. He gripped the railing and swallowed as if to stop the panic.
"Kaylin, listen," he said. "I've changed. I—"
I turned to him and something that was not pity flickered across my face. The room leaned in as if it were watching a play. I had been standing in the wings of my own life for years; now everyone could see that stage.
He took a step forward and then another. His voice rose. "I didn't mean it. I was a mess. I was—"
"Do you remember the gala dress?" I asked, quiet but with enough edge that people heard. "Do you remember what you said in the doorway? You said, 'I don't know.'"
A murmur moved through the crowd. "Ouch," I heard someone say.
Ephraim's face flushed a deep, ugly red. He looked at the floor as if the wood itself were culpable. "I—" he breathed.
Griffin tightened his hold on my hand. "Kaylin doesn't owe you anything," he said. "You've had years to notice. This is too late."
People around us nodded. Someone laughed ruefully. Phones continued to capture the scene. The live feed's comments read: "What a moment," "Public accountability," "Serves him right."
Ephraim's transformation across those minutes was visible as tide marks: from brash to stunned, stunned to disbelieving rage, then to pleading. Tears sprung into his eyes like leaked ink.
"I— please—" He sounded smaller, embarrassingly small.
A former classmate stepped forward and said, "You should have treated her better when you had time. Now, you want the spotlight back? Too late."
A few people clapped, not for him, but at the symmetry. That clap felt like a verdict.
Ephraim fell to his knees in the center of the room—an action that surprised everyone. He looked up at me, eyes hollow. "Kaylin, please. I didn't know what I had. I was wrong. I'm sorry. I'll—I'll change. I can change. Give me another chance."
The crowd hushed, the kind of silence that pulls breath into bones. A woman near me whispered, "He never gave you chances. Why give him one now?"
Someone booed. It was a single, sharp sound that grew until it filled the hall.
His friends were a study in discomfort. August Arnold—his neighbor who had once cheered him to be brash—turned away, his face white. Kendra Baird, who had always been fond of him, looked down like a woman whose favored vase had been smashed.
Svetlana, who had once smiled brightly as he flattered her, sat frozen and pale. The cameras kept rolling; the feed climbed by thousands of viewers.
Ephraim's behavior shifted again. The pleading became shamed bluster. "I didn't mean to hurt you—" he tried. "Look at me, Kaylin. I—"
"Stop," I said. My voice was soft, but the whole room went still. "No one deserves to be put in debt for another person's attention. You turned me into your punching bag and then wondered why I disappeared."
He reached forward as if to touch me. Griffin's hand tightened so hard around my wrist I felt his fingers anchor me.
"I won't make this public spectacle worse," I told the room, and then I turned to leave.
Ephraim's final state was one of collapse. He slumped to the floor, head in hands, body folding under the weight of everyone watching him—his own friends' faces framed in phones, their thumbs writing away. The live comments were merciless. "Told you," "Karma," "About time."
Somewhere in the back, someone recorded Ephraim's parents—August and Kendra—approach him. The father shook his head in that flop-sad way of adults who had seen their child stumble. The mother looked away, cheeks wet.
When I walked into the hallways afterward, people stopped me and said things. "You were amazing," one stranger said. "He deserved that," someone else whispered. Students I had taught or modeled for smiled openly. The ripple of witnesses felt like an exhale I had been denied for years.
That night, videos of Ephraim's kneeling plea circulated. For weeks, his name was tied to that clip. Where once he had been admired for a face, he became the boy who had hurt someone he had been given.
He tried to apologize later—messages, calls, even a voicemail left on my phone that said, "This is the first time I've been honest with you." I let those things be. I did not answer. He came to the house once, leaving a string of ceremonial beads—the kind I had once mentioned wanting to go to see in Tibet. I thanked him coldly and asked him to leave.
Public humiliation was not the whole of his punishment. Over the coming months, I watched as the circles around him thinned. Friends who had stood with him at parties distanced. The people who had once laughed with him now made excuses when he came around. A few old allies unfollowed him on social media. It was not cruelty; it was consequence.
18
After that day the quiet I had been denied for years returned. I stitched new pieces, sewed confidence into fabric. I kept working with Hinata and Griffin. We started a small line—a studio brand that prided itself on honest design and honest faces.
19
Ephraim sent one last long, rambling letter months later. He wrote about a field of wheat and how his mother once told him he might have passed by the most golden stalk without noticing. He said he had missed his "golden stalk"—me—because he could not see.
I folded that paper and put it in a drawer.
20
Griffin and I lived days that accumulated like soft coins. He made me tea when I worked late. He rearranged the studio to make room for my sewing machine. He teased me when I pretended to be bossy. He called me "Kaylin" because he liked the shape of it. Once in a while he would steal a kiss and grin like a boy who had found a secret.
We dated with a quiet joy that was patient and steady. He proposed properly at a show, with hands and words that felt like shelter.
Years later, at night while I packed for an out-of-town job, Griffin hugged me from behind and said, "Kaylin, you're my light."
I laughed and reached back to nudge him. "You Sunbeam," I said.
He said, "I like Sunbeam," and smiled with the kind of embarrassment that always made my heart do small summersaults.
We kept the peach-lollipop wrapper he had once given me in a glass jar in the studio as a joke: a reminder of a first offering that had been rejected and of how small things can change stories. And sometimes when Griffin's exhibition opened, he'd stand at the side of the room and watch me walk by like a proud dog guarding his human.
When I look back I think of the wound and the rescue, the long years of being someone's invisible friend, and the strange mercy of being found. The Samoyed smile of a man who would wipe rice from my lips without thinking—that simple kindness—was the thing that taught me how to be seen.
The lollipop is in a jar on a shelf; the memory of the fist on the court is in the grain of my hands; the black pearl dress has its own place in our closet. I wear them like badges, like proofs that I am no longer a shadow.
And once, when the stage lights focused on me and a ring was slipped onto my finger, I whispered, for only Griffin to hear, "You were my rescue." He smiled, and his dogged, earnest eyes filled with a quiet triumph.
We kept living—making, sewing, photographing—each one of us working to be the light for the other. When people ask me what changed me, I point to a small, silly peach-lollipop and say, "It started with a stick of candy and a boy who couldn't see me."
The End
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