Sweet Romance12 min read
The Shot, the Sunflowers, and the Temporary Girlfriend
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I still remember how embarrassed I felt the moment my ball ricocheted and found him.
"Are you okay?" I asked, voice small.
He crouched on the asphalt, hands clamped to his groin, and there was a sound in his throat that made the world tilt for a second. "It's... probably ruined," he said, quiet as if admitting defeat.
"Ruined?" I echoed, and my stomach dropped. "You mean—"
He didn't finish. He stayed hunched over like that while the afternoon heat soaked through my tee shirt and made the back of my neck stick to my hair. I should have felt furious with myself for being clumsy, for letting a stupid ball do this to a stranger. Instead, standing there, I felt the exact opposite: shame so hot it made me gag.
"I'm sorry," I blurted, and before I could think, I bent to help him up.
"You don't have to," he mumbled, but he let me support him as he wobbled to a bench. "My name's Vicente."
"Valeria." My mouth hardly moved.
He put his hands on his knees and took a long breath. "Valeria, I think... this might mean I'm out of the dating game for a bit."
That made my cheeks heat again for a different reason.
"Then you should—" I started, but the words sounded thin.
"I need you to make it up to me," he said suddenly, surprising me with how direct he was. "Until I know everything's okay, can you be my girlfriend? Temporary. Until the doctors say I'm fine."
I stared. I wanted to protest that being a bystander didn't create debts like that. I also wanted to protest the ridiculousness of being talked into a fake relationship on an afternoon when the sun felt like it might melt the world. And yet when he looked at me—steady, not dramatic but somehow earnest—my throat closed.
"Okay," I heard myself say.
He blinked. A small, incredulous smile trembled at the corner of his mouth. "You said yes."
"I said... okay." I corrected. "Temporary girlfriend."
"Temporary boyfriend," he countered, and then, as if remembering a detail, he laughed. "I don't even know your full name."
"Valeria Freeman."
"Vicente Vasseur," he replied. "Nice to meet you, temporary Valeria."
I laughed, because that was what the moment needed: a little laugh, thin as a leaf. "Nice to meet you, temporary Vicente."
We walked to the clinic together. I sat in the corridor while he went in for a check. The doctor peeked out once, scribbled on a clipboard, and then called Vicente back in. I sat with my knees pulled close and my hands sticky with sunscreen.
After what felt like forever, Vicente came back out. He looked pale but he smiled in a way that made me feel better and worse all at once.
"The doctor says it might not be as bad as—" He trailed off, then shrugged. "He says I need time, but... he said I probably won't be completely ruined."
"Good," I said, the softest relief.
"Right." Vicente reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper. "I have to take medicine. You can't watch me take it, because it's weird," he added with a little grin.
"Why would it be weird?" I wanted to scoff, but instead I felt my face go hot.
"Because it's very... manly medicine," he said with a mock-serious tone. "Too manly for a girl to watch."
"You're ridiculous," I said, and he laughed.
That night, I found myself changing the contact name in my phone. "Temporary boyfriend," I typed under Vicente's number, and then, right before I hit save, my fingers hesitated. It felt silly, like writing a short-lived chapter title in an unread book. But I pressed save.
"You didn't tell me your last name," he said in a light voice when I added him in person later.
"Freeman," I answered.
"Valeria Freeman," he repeated, as if tasting the syllables. "It fits."
We started the strange rhythm of "temporaries." He walked me to class; he sat beside me in the cafeteria and told awful jokes that made me snort; he practiced basketball with me in the evenings. I practiced because I had to pass the makeup exams. He stayed because—he told me eventually—he had made a plan.
"You planned to get hurt?" I asked one night when we sat on the bleachers, the sun peeling off the metal and making everything smell tinny.
"I wanted a reason to talk to you," he said bluntly. "Don't laugh."
I laughed anyway. "That's the dumbest plan."
"Are you joking?" He looked at me like I had told a secret. "It worked, didn't it?"
"That doesn't explain why you said half the things you did about your so-called 'ex.'"
He glanced away, and his jaw tightened. "Okay, I might have made up the whole 'ex' story."
"You lied," I said flatly.
"I didn't lie to hurt you." He looked at me, and for a second there was an honesty that made me dizzy. "I was scared you'd say no. My roommates told me to make you jealous. It was stupid. I figured if I sounded like some tragic guy with an ex, you'd be intrigued. I did not think you'd be this... straightforward."
"You made me feel guilty," I said, remembering the clinic, the way he had looked like someone who'd lost something big.
"I know." He shut his eyes. "Which was the point."
We had a strange honesty that day: confessions about ridiculous plans, excuses about cowardice, apologies that were half-shyly said and half-demanded. It made a foundation that was shaky and oddly real at once.
"Do you regret it?" I asked finally.
"No," he said without a second's hesitation. "Even if I tricked you in a dumb way, I like being with you. Temporarily or not, I like it."
"Don't call it temporary when you're like this," I snapped, and he grinned back like a kid who'd been caught with his hand in a cookie jar.
"Fine. Not temporary," he agreed. "But let me keep some time to prove it's real."
That was the thing about Vicente: he talked in half-promises and full jokes, and his gestures—small ones, like remembering how I liked my orange drink—landed with a weight that didn't feel pretend.
We trained together. He taught me how to angle my wrist, how to bend my knees the right way. He'd stand behind me and steady my shoulders. His hands were warm; his breath was sometimes close enough that my cheeks flamed.
"Don't stare at me like that," he said once while helping me line up a free throw.
"It's not staring," I protested.
"Yes it is." He smiled. "Because when you look at me, you look like you're trying to memorize me."
"Good," I said. "Memorize me."
"That's a dangerous assignment," he said, and leaned closer. "You should know that."
Those were the small heart-stopping moments: a hand on the small of my back as he steered me through the door; a jacket draped over my shoulders when the wind got sharp; the way he smiled, sudden and real, when I did something small and brave like finally nailing a serve.
But of course, nothing is a straight line. On a humid afternoon, the campus buzzed with students. We were heading to a small chain restaurant after practice when a figure stepped out of a doorway and made my skin go cold.
Brooke Fontaine walked toward us as if she owned the sidewalk. She was beautiful in a way that felt deliberate. Her smile fit her face like costume jewelry—perfectly placed to shine.
"Vicente!" she called. Her voice was sweet as a bell. He stiffened beside me.
I felt it then: an old puzzle piece slid under the door. "Are you two...?" Her tone suggested she expected a neat answer.
He squeezed my hand without breaking eye contact. "Brooke," he said, and the word had a clean edge. "This is Valeria. My girlfriend."
For a beat, Brooke's smile didn't change, but there was a tightening around her eyes. "Oh." She tilted her head. "You never told me you had moved on so quickly."
"Neither did you," Vicente said. He didn't sound angry; he sounded, somehow, protective.
"You're very touchy," Brooke said to me, with a casual glance down at my outfit. "Is that a new swim suit? Cute."
"Thanks," I said, and Vicente's hand tightened around mine.
She stepped closer and smiled that careful smile. "We should grab coffee sometime, catch up."
"Not a chance," Vicente said, voice cool.
I watched her for a moment. It didn't feel like a scene from a soap opera; it felt simpler and meaner: a woman testing a boundary, seeing how it gave. People nearby were watching now—small groups on the sidewalk, a couple getting ice cream. The world had become an audience.
Then something unexpected happened. With a neat, slightly theatrical motion, Vicente unhooked his hand from mine and held his phone up.
"Guys, hold up," he said. "Do you want to hear something stupid?"
Brooke raised an eyebrow, delighted by the attention.
"It turns out," Vicente said, smiling with the composure of someone who had practiced this line at least once, "that my number of exes is exactly zero."
A murmur rippled through the small crowd. Brooke's smile faltered. She blinked. "What—"
Vicente tapped and swiped and then held the phone out like a prize. "This is the chat where my roommates and I worked out how to get my new girlfriend to like me." He made a show of scrolling. "They suggested 'ex stories' and 'knowing her favorites' to make her jealous."
There it was: evidence, plain text on a screen. Someone in the crowd laughed, surprised and sharp. Another student, a mutual friend, recognized the usernames and nodded.
"Wait—" Brooke said. Her voice lost the honey.
Vicente looked at her, and he was all soft and fierce at once. "You told me to come here and pretend to be my ex," he said, his eyes steady. "You wanted to stir the pot, didn't you? Use me as bait to look desirable."
Brooke's face changed colors like slow fire. "That's not—"
"Stop." The word came from a third person: Francis Barton, one of Vicente's roommates who happened to be passing by. He'd overheard. "She was lying. Brooke, stop this."
People turned. A small knot of students had formed. Someone began to film with a phone. That thin, public electricity crept in the air.
Brooke's composure slicked off. Her mouth opened, then closed. "You can't... you can't embarrass me like this," she said, but the words were weak.
"I can," Vicente replied, but he was no longer triumphant. He seemed tired around the edges. "Because you tried to manipulate people. You tried to make me look bad, use me like a trophy from a past season."
Around us, snatches of commentary: "Is that the Brooke who hangs with the drama club?" "She set him up?" "Gross."
Brooke's face flushed a bright, angry red. "You'd believe a group chat over me? Over everything I've done?" Her voice rose. "All of you, judging me now, we were—"
"We were friends," Francis cut in. "Until you turned it into a game."
She looked to the ground, then back up, and for a glittering second I thought she might apologize. Instead she spun toward the nearest student with a camera. "You can't show that!" she snapped.
"It already has been shown," someone said.
"Vicente, you're being cruel. This is private." Her tone was closer to pleading now, a small child trying to keep a cookie jar full.
"Private?" Vicente repeated. "You invited people to help you manipulate me. That's not private. That's mean. And it's also not honest."
She made a small, desperate laugh. "You think you're the only one who can make scenes? Who can play games?" Her lashes quivered. "You think this proves anything."
"It proves you're willing to string people along to win," Francis said. He had that calm tone of a man who had rehearsed his psychology in his head and was now letting it out slow. "It proves you talk about people like pieces."
A crowd had gathered. Phones pointed. I could feel the heat from the crowd read across my skin: a mix of entertainment and fury. Some students whispered that Brooke had been flirting with several guys, using old relationships like props. More than one person shook their head.
"Look," Brooke said finally, voice thin, "I was just desperate. People come and go. I was tired of being alone on weekends. I thought—"
She stopped, as if realizing her confession didn't make her look better. It made her look like someone who had tried to buy attention.
"What is with people who think manipulation is a shortcut?" someone muttered.
A girl I didn't know stepped forward. "We saw her send those messages," she said. "We thought it was weird then." She pointed at Brooke's phone, which had been taken from her earlier by a bold student and set on a bench. "You can scroll if you want."
Brooke went white. "You can't—" she began.
"Brooke," Vicente said softly. "You could have just talked to me."
She looked at him, then at me, and finally, with a small burst of what looked like grief, she dropped her eyes. The phones still recorded. People whispered. Someone clapped once, sharp as a breaking twig.
The punishment was not legal. No one dragged her to any office. The punishment was the audience and the exposure. She had built a facade; it crumpled. I watched her try to stand taller, to gather a dignity that wasn't there. Students snickered, others shook their heads, and a group of friends walked past mocking a parody of her tone.
Brooke's face changed from anger to shame to a kind of stunned fear. She tried to speak—then she left, running down the path as if the ground itself had become hot. People's phones chimed with quick messages and laughter. The crowd dispersed in murmurs that trailed off like wind.
I felt bad for her. I also felt a fierce, strange relief. The public denouement had been ugly and unsurprising. I gripped Vicente's hand and he squeezed back like an anchor.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"Yeah." He blinked. "I wanted people to see it. I didn't want you to think I'd been dating a ghost."
"You didn't need all that," I said.
"I know," he admitted. "But I was a coward who used theater. I'm learning the better way is to be embarrassing honest."
"It worked," I said, because the truth sat between us like a warm coin.
After that, things calmed down. Brooke didn't show up to the next week's events. People still whispered when she walked by, and sometimes I caught her in the library looking at us, but she kept her distance. The humiliation had been a hard, public lesson: she had imagined herself clever and above consequences, and she found the crowd less forgiving than she had hoped.
Vicente apologized properly the next day. "I staged a scene," he said. "I arranged to look tragic. I lied. I'm sorry."
"You lied again," I said, but it sounded softer now.
"I did." He took my hand with both of his. "And I will work to be better. Not for everyone else, but because I like you."
Those were the days we practiced and fought and laughed. He was not perfect; neither was I. We had arguments—silly ones, about whether he really had to eat three breakfasts to be ready for practice; serious ones, about trust and embarrassing theatrics and whether temporary should become permanent.
"Why did you choose me?" I asked him one evening as we walked across campus under a sky that had the color of old coins.
"Because you were you," he said simply. "You were unguarded. You were honest when it mattered. I thought it would be nice to be on the same side as someone like that."
"You sound like you're making a speech," I teased.
"Maybe," he admitted. "But I meant it."
There were softer victories. Passing my makeup exams felt like climbing a small mountain with him as the only sherpa. He waited at the door while I practiced. When the final ball swooshed in, I turned to him and he cheered like I had just saved a world.
"That was all you," he said, then kissed my forehead.
We had small rituals. Sunflowers showed up one afternoon—he'd given me a modest bouquet as I came down the dorm steps, bright and ridiculous. "Reminds me of you," he said, and I rolled my eyes but kept them in a mason jar on my desk.
One of my favorite nights was when we went to see a movie. He cried louder than I did. Then he hugged me all the way back because he was embarrassed. Another time, on a night that smelled of rain, he found a leaf stuck in my hair and brought it back to me like a treasure.
We argued about nothing and everything, and then we made up with terrible jokes and better dinners.
I learned the shape of him: the tilt of his smile, the pressure in his hand when he was anxious, the way his eyes softened when he pretended not to care if I beat him in a game. I felt my heart pull at the edges like a sweater that had been tugged over a head and then left to settle.
One afternoon, as autumn painted the campus in messy gold, Vicente and I sat on the same bleacher where we'd first had the truth about his fake ex revealed. He looked at me, and there was that familiar mixture of humor and earnestness.
"Do you remember what you said the day I proposed being temporary?" he asked.
"I said 'Okay'," I replied.
"And now?"
"And now?" I smiled.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, then showed me a photo he'd taken that morning: a single sunflower petal lying on a bleacher step, sunlit. On the back he had typed: "Not temporary."
I blinked. "Not temporary," I echoed.
"Not temporary," he repeated, and then, in a voice that sounded like a promise, he added, "I want to be the one who stays when the awkward moments happen. The one who catches the stray basketballs—literally and otherwise. The one who learns how to be honest without fancy schemes. Will you keep trying with me?"
I thought about the leaf in his fingers, the sunflower in my jar, the phones that had once recorded Brooke's scheming. I thought about how messy people are and how much I liked Vicente's particular mess.
"Yes," I said. "I will."
He kissed me then, simple and steady, like a ball finally finding the hoop after many throws. I kept my eyes open. The world felt warm, like the glow of a late afternoon sun.
Later, when things were quieter, I found his first, clumsier note to me in his messages. He had written something like: "I made a stupid plan to become someone who could talk to you." I smiled and sent him back three words: "You did."
We kept the sunflower. We kept the leaf. When the ball accidentally clattered against a post or an errant bounce threatened, Vicente would frown and lunge like a makeshift hero. I would roll my eyes and laugh, and sometimes the ball would succeed in betraying him and clip his shoe or bump his leg. He would gasp theatrically, and then wink.
"You okay?" I'd ask.
"Definitely," he would answer, and the day would continue like that: small disasters and greater mercies.
And when I look back, the thing I remember most is not a single gesture or one perfect line. It's the steady, improbable string of ordinary days: a sunflower pushed into a mason jar, a leaf plucked in passing, a basketball that sometimes had its own sense of humor. The moment a ball misbehaved and started us on this ridiculous road was ridiculous and terrible, but also where everything began.
It felt like being aimed—by a ball, by chance, by someone who made mistakes—then being found. Destiny, if it ever existed, felt less like thunder and more like a small, precise shot: the kind that hits something you don't expect and makes the world tilt.
"Valeria," Vicente said once, late and sleepy, "we're a very clumsy destiny."
"We are," I murmured, and kissed the tip of his nose.
He laughed into the comforter and said, softer than he ever had, "You and me. Hit by fate, one sunflower at a time."
I smiled, because the leaf was still in my hair and the mason jar still held a stubborn cheer, and because a stranger's ball had found us and somehow led to something steady and kind.
It was not perfect. But it was ours.
The End
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