Sweet Romance14 min read
The Pink Fingertips and the Sugar-Coated War
ButterPicks13 views
I saw the comment thread light up and I thought, "This is nothing." Then I saw his username.
"You kissed me differently back then," the blogger wrote under a hand close-up photo.
"..." I typed a reply with a smiley and a shrug.
The screen refreshed. A new message popped up into my DMs.
"Recognize my handwriting?" the message said, and there was a photo of my own comment history.
My heart fell to my stomach like a stone into a pond. The stone made noise.
"Are you the blogger?" I typed, fingers trembling.
"Try to choke me and see if you can," the reply came, playful and sharp: "Can't you recognize my hands?"
My breath stopped. The notifications blurred into one another. He was here: Emilio Marino — or rather, the name that used to be the echo in my pockets and the heat in my chest.
"You're posting my comments?" I wrote back, trying to sound casual.
"Why would I hide them?" he replied. "Come down now. Right now."
I laughed out loud at my screen like a crazy person. "If I knew it was you I wouldn't have commented," I typed.
A moment later, my living room window curtains fluttered. Someone below looked up. My mother waved and smiled too widely.
"Mom!" I hissed, the sentence dying before it reached the air.
"He looks exactly the same," she beamed as she opened the door and ushered him in. Emilio had his hands tucked into his jacket pockets, his posture the same blend of soft menace and easy charm I remembered.
"Stay high and mighty," he said to me as if we were teenagers again. "Or come down the stairs like a brave girl."
"Don't be ridiculous," I pushed, and he only smiled, the kind that fits in the corner of your mouth and makes you forget your plans.
"Are you scared?" he teased.
"Am I? Please." I tried to swagger but the elevator dinged closed and he was still there, grinning, cool as late autumn.
"I'll take the stairs with you," he told my mother. "Young people should exercise."
"Yes, yes," my mother clacked her hands. "Come on then, go downstairs with him, Estefania."
I wanted the floor to split open and devour me.
Outside, he preened like a boy showing you his new watch. "You seem easily spooked," he murmured, leaning in, pupils all lightning rods.
"This is public—" I started.
"I know," he said. "That's why I'll be responsible in public."
"Don't twist it." I was furious and silly at the same time. He closed the distance with a look that said he remembered the shape of me.
"You'd really kick me?" he asked.
"Maybe." I did the only reasonable thing I could and kicked him.
He yelped.
"Ow!" he said, rubbing his shin with mock hurt. "You really grew a spine."
I ran. I ran like lab reports were on fire and I wanted to save nothing but myself. I shouted to my friends, "Bring the sisters—I'll handle him!"
"Don't do anything dramatic," they replied in chorus. "Just—"
"Okay, I'll block him!" I declared, defiant.
But blocking didn't work. He appeared in my feed, tagged me with a photograph of the very comments he'd stolen. My pulse registered another trademark silly beat I knew too well: addicted, stupid, impossible.
"Delete it!" I messaged when I saw he was left a little heart emoji on a photo of my comment. "Delete it now!"
"I can't, I am blacklisted," he wrote with a playful sigh. "I'm not even on your block list."
He sent me photos—close-ups of himself holding a plush toy, a silly pout, a sad face. "You're terrible," he added playfully.
I wanted to throw the phone. I threw the phone into a pillow and then it vibrated so I answered. The voice on the other end was mine and his at once. "You're acting like a child."
"I was a child when we were together," he said softly. "Maybe you're the grown-up."
"You said you wanted a baby," I remembered, a line from the past like a song that lurked in the corners. His pinky fingers had been the thing I used to notice: small, warm, chipped nail polish sometimes, and those fingertips looked like cotton candy.
"You wanted what?" I asked aloud, to the ceiling.
"You told me 'Can I have a baby?'" I heard myself repeat like a recorded line that got stuck. He had asked in a low voice, cheeks reddened, "Sister—could you? Could we…"
I had laughed and gone anyway. I had left months later and slotted the memory in a box labeled "youthful mistakes."
Now he was back. The world loved hands—my hands, his hands—and the internet had eaten the pieces of us and spat out chatter.
"You're turning your life into an exhibit," my manager Beatrice Moretti said when I hurried into the car with her. "This is not good. Investors might come, production people might inspect—this is a theater of gossip."
"Relax," I told her. "I won't flirt publicly."
"You say that like you can control every future move of a man who learned to read your face." She rolled her eyes and we laughed, which sounded like fake leaves.
At the studio, my stomach did flips. Emilio was there, of course. Lean in the elevator like a statue. He caught my reflection in the mirrored steel and raised an eyebrow. People who watched us felt like watching a silent movie.
I changed my strategy. Act like nothing. Do the job. Be the grown woman I pretended to be.
"Do you want to avoid him?" Beatrice asked in a low voice.
"No." I said it aloud and meant it.
Someone else touched my hand—someone new, a young actor stammering to ask for my WeChat. He was blushing like a kid who'd been handed a secret prize.
"Keep your phone out," a voice behind me said.
Emilio's eyes had carved out the room, found me, then softened like bread in hot soup. He had the old skill of singeing the right nerves.
Later, in the quiet of the makeup room, he kissed the inside of my wrist, an old territory claim.
"You're popular," he said. "Even now."
"Is that a question?" I replied. "Don't be stupid."
He acted contrite but then grabbed my face and kissed me like he still believed kisses could repair everything.
A camera clicked.
We were caught by someone who had no patience for nuance. The headline the next morning read: "Actress in Romantic Scandal? Lipstick Smear and Late-Night Rendezvous." The world turned to whispers; whispers turned to a rumor machine.
"Go hide," Beatrice urged, as paparazzi circled like hawks. We fled into a hotel room, which was less a refuge than a glass cage.
"Are we hiding or staging?" Emilio asked, delighted.
"Hiding," I said too fast.
"For now," he smiled and kissed my palm. "I am so patient with my sister."
I tried to be furious; I tried to be a woman who didn't need rescuing. Then he pressed a hand to my hair, and I melted.
One wrong call later—an unknown teenage fan called with a voice that sounded like mine used to sound—and he misread me and stormed out. I made a mistake, and the gales that had been stoked between us blew up into a storm.
Later, he drank until he was sick and ended up in the hospital. His mother, a gentle woman who wailed quietly into her handkerchief, asked questions like stitches. "Does she love him?" she asked me with eyes soft as rain clouds.
"I don't know," I said, half-true and half-not. She mistook me for friend, for enemy, for daughter-in-law. Her tenderness made my conscience ache.
We stood in a corridor with a cracked cup of tea between us.
"You never sent a proper goodbye," he muttered to me in the hospital, and I put my hand over my heart though it had no power to stop the truth.
"I said goodbye as clearly as a person can," I told him. "You left me feelings like a hole in a sweater. You put me on a shelf and then visited like a collectible."
He flinched like I had slapped him. "You made me a museum piece," he said.
I was a coward and hurried away, but not before the cup crashed to the floor and the sound echoed down the hall. He left with a slam; the door locked the moment he was gone. I felt the echo.
I pretended my career was intact. I pretended the headlines were like rain, easy to shrug off. But then I learned the truth: his brother, Camden Beard, had shifted my script. Camden's power was not silent; it clicked like a safe and spilled my scenes into the lap of another woman.
"Who?" I demanded.
"Camden," Beatrice said. "He pressured the producers. He gave orders and money. He put his girlfriend into the spotlight."
"Who is she?" I asked.
"Alyssa Yamamoto," Beatrice said. "A pretty face with a portfolio."
My blood turned to a slow alarm. Camden Beard was the kind of man who used muscle wrapped in charm. He was a chess player and liked sacrifices.
We plotted to reclaim what was taken from me. We watched schedules, found patterns. But the more I dug, the more I understood how small I could be in a studio where names and bank accounts decide scenes.
One night I dressed in plain clothes and shadowed a fix—the small girlfriend and Camden moving like bad weather. I crept close and held my breath like a diver. Joel Stein, the assistant, mentioned the rewrite with his mouth soft: "It was Camden, definitely."
Camden's voice was calm when he walked in. "Take pictures," he said in a strange half-joke.
"Why?" the assistant asked.
Camden smiled, the kind of smile that cost a fortune. "Ask Emilio to cut him off, take care of the investors. Those who bully my family deserve... to lose their kindness."
"And what about the actress?" Joel asked.
Camden's eyes were cool. "We can improve the narrative. She can exit gracefully."
That word—gracefully—sounded like a guillotine.
I watched, shaking behind a curtain. He undressed and left the bathroom door locked. For a second I considered knocking. I did not. I left, dead weight of anger in my pockets.
I set my plan in motion: we would capture Camden's manipulations and expose them. I had to be careful. Revenge is a thin rope over a river. We threaded it.
We started with small acts, filming meetings, saving voice notes, gathering evidence. We noted the times he called production heads and when Alyssa's calls popped up. We flagged bank transfers. We had Joel, who had a conscience and a camera, slip a few recordings our way.
On a grey morning, the studio scheduled a press conference for the project's kickoff. It was the perfect stage: lights on, seats full, cameras live, and all three of them—Camden, Alyssa, and Emilio—there under the same roof. I had rehearsed my calm for a week. In my mouth, composure tasted like stale crackers.
When the lights blinked on and the camera's red eye pierced the room, I walked up to the mic with Beatrice at my side and a folder of evidence under my arm. I felt like a soldier leading troops. I was trembling but determined.
"Thank you for coming," I said. My voice sounded small in the room, and then it didn't. "I want to clear the air."
"Miss Osborne," the producer said, trying to stop me with the poor man's kindness, "this is not the time—"
"It is exactly the time," I said. "People in this room deserve the truth."
Cameras clicked like cicadas. Heads turned. The murmurs rippled into a wave.
I opened the folder and let the first recording play. A voice that sounded like Camden's came through, persuasive and casual, "Change the script. Make her look small. Put my girlfriend in the light."
Camden's face paled by degrees. At first, he smiled as if someone had told a joke. "That must be doctored," he said, with a chuckle.
"Play the next clip," Beatrice urged.
A technician fed the second file. It was a ledger. Numbers. Transfers labeled as "consulting fees" to a company listed for Alyssa. The screen blew up to fill the wall.
"You see," I told the room, "this is not organic. This is not art. This is a play with money and favors."
Camden's expression had shifted—pride to irritation to a flush of anger. He tried to say, "This is fabricated."
"Is it?" I asked the crowd. "Ask the studio's accounts."
Phones were out. Tweets went out in seconds. Reporters leaned forward like flowers turning to light.
"You're making this up," Camden snapped now, teeth showing.
"Make me believe you've never used power," I said. "Make me believe these transfers are charity. Make me believe you never called our director at midnight to demand my lines be moved. Make me believe you never turned an audition room into your parlor."
He laughed, but it was empty. The camera caught the tremor in his smile. "You're a showgirl, Estefania. You're trying to take me down."
"Watch," I said, and I played another file. The voice on the tape was unmistakably his. "We will pressure them until the actress goes. She will be grateful. She will thank us later." His confidence had been clipped like wings.
The first things to happen were small and public: whispers. Then faces fell. Producers who thought themselves omnipotent stepped away from Camden. Sponsors who had been flirting with his name quickly lined up to distance themselves. The woman who had been his shield—Alyssa—tried to smile for the cameras and her smile broke like cheap glass.
"You're lying!" Camden shouted. "You paid people to edit my calls. You are on a vendetta because of a boy—"
"No," I said. "I'm on a vendetta because men like you think their money buys narrative. I want my scenes back."
The crowd had gathered like a storm. Reporters started asking direct questions. "Camden Beard, can you comment on these transfers?" one shouted.
"Camden, did you pressure production?" another asked.
An investor rose and said, "We will audit the accounts. If wrongdoing is found, contractual penalties apply."
Emilio stood to the side. His expression was stony, then something like relief softened into it. He had been watching my plan wedge itself into the world, and he looked at me with that old, intimate curiosity.
"You used her," I said to Emilio after the room had erupted, and he flinched. "You used me, too, with your silence."
"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know he would go so far."
"You could have tried," I whispered. For a moment the family history, the power plays, the nights he hadn't defended me—those all stacked like plates. He reached for my hand and I let him, not because I trusted him entirely but because some hearts are sloppy and still return to warmth.
Camden's face shifted from defiant to frightened in a series of blinks. He tried to muster a denial that had life, but his voice came out thin.
"I'm being slandered," he said. "This will ruin me."
The room cheered. Not because they enjoyed ruin, but because they loved the sight of a bully stumbling. People clapped like the applause of a wave hitting a harbor.
Alyssa, the woman who took his unworried calls, stood frozen near the production table. Fans who'd once followed her chatter now turned their backs. An important sponsor's agent took a phone call and the room caught the hiss—she was losing a contract. The assistant swallowed and slid away, face pale as paper.
"Do you have anything to say?" a reporter asked Alyssa.
She tried to smile. The smile was brittle. "I—" she started, then faltered. "I didn't know. I thought it was all... behind-the-scenes."
"Behind-the-scenes?" another reporter amplified. "You took a role that wasn't yours through money."
Alyssa's mouth opened and closed like a fish. Cameras moved in. Phones recorded the stuttering, the attempt at clean denial. She had to squint into the lights and answer while her private guilt became a public thing.
"I'm sorry," she said finally, voice shaking. "I shouldn't have taken it."
It wasn't enough. The crowd's reaction was immediate: whispers, the click of shutters, the rustle of fans stepping back. "Shame," someone hissed. "Payback," another muttered.
Camden's posture broke further. He began to beg, strangely childlike and thin. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "I will make it right. I'll resign my positions. I'll donate the money back. Please—"
A collection of producers and sponsors who had once smiled when he walked in gathered enough courage to turn away. His friends, seeing the cameras and the contracts dangling, became quiet and kept distance. His social circle that once celebrated him in glossy posts started to leave.
The punishment wasn't dramatic in the way movies make it out to be—no dragged-to-the-station scene, no crowning humiliation with chains. Instead it was a slow, public unmaking: contracts dropped, calls stopped, his invitations evaporated. People who'd dined with him now refused his texts. The cameras kept rolling as he scrambled to hold the scene together.
I sat a few rows away, palms sweaty, listening to the crowd's reactions—shock, a few cheers, camera shutters. I watched his expression change in stages: the old confident smirk; the startled flush; the disbelief; the fragile, pleading look; the final hollow acceptance.
"You wanted to protect family," I said quietly, "and now you are learning what happens when family is used like a shield."
"I didn't mean to—" he started, but the words were as useless as soup in a concrete bowl.
By evening, headlines flew. "Power Play Unmasked" and "Producer Scandal: Money and Favours" and variations of the same. The public turned on Camden. Sponsors broke ties with Alyssa. Crew members who once pretended not to see now nodded at me on the street.
Alyssa's punishment took a different shape. That night on set, when filming resumed, cameras and microphones were still on. Her agent called and the brand she worked with told her sponsorships were on hold pending investigation. On live television, a talk-show host played a clip of her accepting the role and asked, pointedly, "How did you feel when you knew the part was taken?" She stammered. The audience's reaction shifted from curiosity to condemnation. Fans posted side-by-side clips showing how she changed her social media to highlight the new role. Brands that once courted her logos scrubbed their tagged photos. A major cosmetics house sent a terse email: "We are suspending collaboration pending clarity."
While Camden crumbled under the slow drip of social exile, Alyssa faced immediate professional collapse: lost endorsements, a tarnished reputation, agents who recommended a break. Some crew members snapped photos and shared them. People in the industry whispered and the whispers became a wet cloth over her prospects.
Yet punishment in public also exposed pity. People filmed Camden when he ran into an old friend who looked away, then filmed Alyssa when she cried near a car. The footage ricocheted across platforms. Some viewers cheered the comeuppance; others felt uneasy at the spectacle of ruin.
At the end, both were forced to face consequences in front of witnesses. Camden's board asked for his resignation. Alyssa was escorted from set by security after an angry confrontation with a makeup artist who had been replaced. I watched the whole scene and felt a mix of justice and sorrow. Power had been abused, and the fall, though deserved, left holes that no one wanted.
Emilio stayed close throughout. He didn't grandstand. He didn't declare himself my champion in public. He quietly testified when producers asked for a statement. He called the accountants. He met with the studio heads. When the press attention thinned and the cameras packed up their lights, he took my hand.
"You were brave," he said simply.
"I didn't do it for bravery," I answered. "I did it because I wanted to act."
He smiled, small and earnest. "You are mine," he said like a claim, and the meaning was both possessive and protective. I hated the old me who liked the sensation of being possessed, but the new me liked that he had stood in the light with me.
We rebuilt the project, scene by scene. My role was restored. The lowest parts of me felt like a bruise and the highest parts like a bird learning to trust its wings again. There were quiet, ordinary moments that stitched us back together: him peeling my orange at breakfast, me tucking the blanket around his shoulders when he fell asleep, fingers brushing like the shy contact between lovers learning to speak again.
"Do you remember when you used to beg for a baby?" he asked one night, voice low against pillows.
"I remember," I said, and there was a soft humor in my voice. "You were dramatic."
"You seemed like you could hold a house with those hands," he replied, and he made the gesture like he was holding a bowl.
"You were ridiculous," I whispered. "You still are."
One morning he leaned over and kissed the knuckle of my index finger, which had a small cut from handling clay on set. "Your hand," he said, "is beautiful. Pink at the tips like candy floss."
I laughed. The sound was small and true. "Stop romanticizing my injuries."
"I love your pink fingertips," he said with absolute seriousness, and I believed him because he made them something soft and safe.
We married months later in a small ceremony. My mother cried. Beatrice fussed with my veil. Eloise, my cousin, insisted on dancing like the house would collapse. Jack Oliveira, who'd been at my audition months earlier, gave a small cameo speech—he said something about "the courage to take back a pen."
Years later, when life settled into its gentle daily grooves—simmering soups, shared books, a story told at midnight—I found myself thinking of the press conference and the lights. I did not crave the roar anymore. I craved a hand to hold while small things happened.
"The pink fingertips?" someone teased at a party.
"They remind me of the first time you reached for me," Emilio said, and he kissed my hand like he had at the hospital.
I looked at my hands, at the little crescent of a scar that always stayed pale, and then at him.
"Promise me," he whispered.
"No," I said, and he laughed because he knew I was only teasing.
The world loved the public spectacle, but our life was mostly unremarkable in the best way—folding laundry together, waking early for coffee, stealing kisses between takes. Once, while looking out a window, I imagined my younger self—playing at romancing every face that smiled at her—and I felt a gentle pity.
"You were a wild thing," I told her in my head.
"Now you are a careful thing," the present me answered back.
We never made a show of our happiness. When the cameras pressed in years later for "how did you survive?" I said, "We did what people do: we told the truth and we tended one another."
No universal ending came. Instead, life kept delivering quiet chapters: a baby who liked to grip my finger and then let go, a small person with pink fingertips like sugar, who trusted me with everything.
On the morning I held that small person and felt the pressure of a tiny hand close across my palm, I thought of the press conference, of money crooked like a snake, of men who believed power could smooth over shame. I thought of Camille—no, Camden—and the way the cameras turned away from him. I felt a satisfaction that was not bitter. It was simply that the world had been set, slightly straighter.
"Are you happy?" Emilio asked that night as we folded a onesie together.
"I am," I answered honestly.
He pressed his forehead to mine and said, "Thank you for not letting them write you out."
I smiled. I thought of the pink fingertips, of a hand that could be used to hurt and the same hand that could cup a sleeping face. I closed my eyes and listened to the baby breathing like a slow, steady drum.
We had played with danger and walked out with our dignity. That felt like a miracle quieter than headlines but larger than the camera lenses had ever shown.
The End
— Thank you for reading —