Sweet Romance16 min read
The Swing, the Tea, and the Promise
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I first saw him and I liked him right away. He looked like the person I had held in my heart for years.
"I want this," I told him, and I meant it.
He smiled like he never smiled at anyone else. I kept that smile in a photo. I kept it under a private setting where only I could see it.
"You and I together for three months," he said once with a smirk. "No one I keep around lasts that long."
"Then I'm a challenge," I answered, and I meant it.
"Don't be ridiculous." He shrugged. "That's not my style."
"Try me."
He had a laugh that day, lazy and bright. It fit him like a sweater. He let me take his picture. He let me touch the small mole near his eye, the little wet pearl everyone else called a tear mole.
"Say cheese," I urged, and he did. For a second his face softened. For a second I was there.
"Juliana, break up with me," Draven Huber said, standing in a shadow under the boardwalk rail, his voice flat as the lake below.
"Why?" I asked. Sweat ran down my temple. My chest went cold as if someone had poured winter into my ribs.
"You know my rule," he said. "No one stays longer than three months."
"You said you'd think about it if I bought you bubble tea within half an hour," I reminded him.
"Think, not promise," he answered. The amusement that usually lived at his mouth was gone. He looked older for a breath, the laugh erased by a line between his brows. For an instant he was someone else entirely.
"Fine," I said, and handed him the taro boba. "I asked them to pack it with extra ice because you like it cold."
He looked at me, an odd stiffness flickered across his face, then guilt arrived like a soft shadow. "Juliana," he said, "one more picture?"
"Yes," I said. "One more." I traced the mole by his eye with my finger. "Forever, just like that."
"Okay," he agreed, and allowed himself a small, private smile.
I put that image on my phone where no one else could see. I slept with the picture for three months. I made him my warmth.
"You really are bringing him home?" a small, anxious voice asked that afternoon in the hallway.
Dyer Jackson stood beside me, cheeks pink from the sun, biting at the corner of his lip in a way that made his face glow younger than the campus allowed.
"You don't like him?" I teased, pinching his soft cheek.
He stiffened like an embarrassed sparrow. "I— I do," he said in a thin voice, head nearly bowed. "I like him."
We walked toward the gate together, hands clasped, small and safe in each other's grip.
"Juliana." A voice I knew too well cut across the quad. Draven watched us from under a maple, his expression suddenly hard.
"Who is he?" Draven asked when he stepped between us. He sized Dyer in one look like a keeper weighing a stone.
"My boyfriend," I answered plainly, eyes flicking to the girl standing beside Dyer. She looked like me—at least close enough to pull a glance of recognition from Draven.
"Still like me?" he mocked suddenly. A shadow slid behind his joke, and I felt a cold memory flick by—someone else with a voice like his, the same cadence.
"Don't be jealous." I tried to step past him and he gripped my arm.
"Juliana, don't play games. I can play. You can't," he said, voice low and dangerous.
His anger matched the warmth of that other man's voice. The memory made me laugh inwardly and ache outwardly in the same beat.
"Would you get back together with me?" I blurted before I could stop myself.
He sneered and released my wrist. "I find him. You didn't."
"I didn't come back for him," I said, breathless. "Let's go."
I held out my hand to Dyer. He ran into my palm without thinking. Someone's gaze burned on us like iron; I chose not to look.
Late that night I walked the lights near the family house with Dyer asleep against my shoulder. The mansion glowed like a borrowed moon. I stepped across the threshold and there he was on the sofa with a book, the light haloing his jaw and the mole by his eye glittering.
"You're back late," Calhoun Baumann said as he closed the book, voice even, a practiced calm hiding everything else.
"Late?" I said, stretching against Dyer. "I wanted to be out."
"My nephew shouldn't stay out all night," he said. The lecturing tone slid over me like a glove too tight. When he looked at me his eyes were still measured; only the muscles under his jaw were working.
"Go upstairs. Dyer, you go too. I want to talk to him," Calhoun said, and there it was: the old hush that used to force me into being smaller.
"Not today," I said and kissed Dyer to spite him.
"Juliana!" Calhoun barked my name as if that single word could unravel the moment.
I felt electric excitement that someone, somewhere, was finally jealous. I could not help myself.
The next morning Dyer had vanished like a dream. The house felt too big. The dinner crowd at the hotel where Draven took me felt loud enough to be a stadium.
He had arranged something flashy. He wanted me to wear white and he wanted to show me off.
"Put this on," Draven said, tossing a pale dress at me in the dressing room. "You're the perfect twin."
"You mean perfect substitute," I shot back.
"Call it what you like," he smirked. "Just wear it."
He wore black. Calhoun favored black, so it was fitting enough. The four of us—two in black, two in white—sat like pale mirrors across the candlelit table.
"Small talk first," I said in a whisper, steady enough.
"Would you excuse me?" I stood and left to the washroom. When I came back, Draven was gone and the person next to Calhoun looked like a story I'd heard: an elegant lady with soft hands. I watched Calhoun accept the food she offered him and refuse mine, the way she slid him dishes with an ease that made me small.
"You're my family. You should sit down," Calhoun said when the room drifted and I excused myself.
"I'll be right back," I said and fled like a thief who had been caught.
In the corridor I bumped into Draven and my foot caught between the elevator doors. A sharp, tearing pain screamed up my ankle. The elevator's metal closed and opened like a trap.
"You're dramatic," he said, throat amused until he saw my face.
"Help me," I hissed.
He crouched. His hand found the buckle, and for a moment he was gentle and deliberate, and I tasted the oddness of it all.
"Ow—" I hissed when the shoe pulled sharp against my skin. "Stop, it hurts."
"Sorry," he said, and wrapped my bleeding palm with his handkerchief like it was nothing. He rolled his eyes then, but kept his hands steady. "You're ridiculous."
"Thanks," I muttered, and he stood like a prince for someone he despised.
"Back in the car."
He carried me to the waiting driver though he pretended to be annoyed. The car smelled of leather, and Dyer's absence was a hole I couldn't plug.
"You should go to the hospital," he said, voice suddenly more serious than his usual slither.
"I won't," I said, stubborn like the child I had been.
He grunted and barked orders to the driver. The ride was quiet, a brittle thing that held too many small weapons inside.
At the hospital I slipped into faintness while trying to run away. His hands were everywhere and nowhere. He held me down with a soft voice.
"Juliana, please." His voice was quiet like a confession. "Stop."
When I woke I was in my own bed. The night was still and the lamps smelled like cedar. The scent was calming.
"You're awake," Calhoun said, appearing in the doorway with a glass of water. He crossed the room and sat without asking.
He pressed the water to my lips. "Drink."
"Why didn't you come when I called?" I croaked.
He sat for a long moment and then said, "I had something to settle. I'm sorry."
"You left me," I whispered. The old hurt creased like a fold in a map.
"I left to do what I thought would protect you," he answered simply. "I told my people to keep away. I agreed to something to make a way—because I couldn't bear to lose you otherwise."
"You agreed to?" I repeated, half afraid to know.
He held my gaze in a way that left no room for my mischief. "People thought a political match would secure our family. I—" He stopped like a man catching his breath. "I said I would entertain it, but it meant nothing."
"You promised a marriage?" I asked. Reality snapped like a twig.
"Not as you think," he said. He watched me searching me like a careful man picks at a wound to see if it will bleed. "I said I would talk. I did not promise. I could not promise the wrong life."
"But then why did you leave?" The question wasn't entirely about the night at the restaurant. It was about the ache of discarded moments.
"Because I had to decide whether I would stay as the man you needed," he said. "What I decided is this: I can't hand you over to anyone."
When the servants whispered that he would marry someone else, when the rumor grew like mold, my chest closed. I sat on the swing in the garden and smashed a stone with my cane, hurling anger at anything but the truth.
"Are you leaving me?" I asked that evening, voice raw with hurt.
"No. I'm staying," he said. He took my hand and his fingers were warm and sure. He led me away from the swing he once had made for me.
"Then tell me now," I said. "Do you like her?"
He looked winded. The answer came slow. "She once loved a man who is gone. I thought marriage might be the end of a contract and not a step into a life. But nothing in me inclined me to her."
"Then why was she feeding you first at dinner?" I asked, stupid with jealousy.
He took both my hands. "She offered kindness to a tired man. I accepted because I wanted the quiet of it that night. All it ever was—was an ease I didn't want to trust."
We walked the cemetery at dawn, the wind like whispers around our ankles. He stopped at a gravestone and touched the name like a relic.
"Do you want to know why I ran away?" he asked, voice small as if the world might crack.
"Tell me," I said.
"In that time I had to make a promise," he said. "A promise that if I wanted you, I would be someone you could be proud of. That involved steps you wouldn't see—things you shouldn't have to bear."
The fact he had been planning things without me made me angry. The fact they were for me softened that anger.
"You said you'd punish yourself for me," I muttered, remembering rumors of a family rite, a wild and brutal thing they whispered about.
He nodded. "I was asked to make a very public sacrifice," he said. He looked away. "There are things I refused."
I felt a quick rush of relief and fear and the world righted a little.
"I want to be the one you tell," I said. "Don't decide my fate for me."
He held me for a long time and then kissed me gently like he had measured every inch of my patience.
Months moved like a slow film. I healed. He returned to long days and harder nights, but he found me in the evening when the world folded.
Then the gossip turned teeth. "I heard the Bauman heir will marry into the Ricci fortune," one servant hissed as I passed the kitchen.
"Chloe Ricci? The girl everyone says looks like Juliana?" another murmured.
I froze. The house that had promised me shelter felt like it was closing in.
I confronted Calhoun one night. "Are you doing this?" I demanded, fingers white with anger.
"I am not," he said simply. "But the corridors are full of talk."
"Then what were those calls?" I asked, remembering the odd silence when I called him.
"Those were arrangements," he admitted. "Arrangements made to shield me so I could make a choice."
"You're making choices without me," I said, my voice on a knife.
"I make them so I can come back," he said, "and so I will not bring you compromise."
I wanted him to storm the ballroom, to declare me the only one for him like a king snatching his crown. Instead he planned in hushed rooms and signed papers with a weary look. He planned quietly.
Then, the night of the city gala where the Ricci family would be introducing Chloe as the bride-to-be, Draven pulled me into a scheme without much of a plan.
"Go as my date," he said. "Be my perfect twin. Then I will make them see."
"Make them see what?" I asked.
"That you're a rival," he said. "That you can be what he wants. It will be a stunt, and he'll react, and you will win."
I agreed because I was tired of waiting and clever with revenge. The plan was thin. The stakes were not.
At the gala Chloe Ricci sat with a dignified smile that made the room lean toward her table. The flashbulbs shivered like a flock of startled birds. Calhoun sat across from her with measured courtesy. Draven came in late as if to demand notice. I sat quietly, all white and quiet like a breath held.
"Draven," I said softly as he took my hand like a prize. "Remember your rule."
"Don't be foolish," he whispered back, fingers tight. "Just let me play this."
He did play—like a violinist who loved the instrument more than the music. He leaned in, he laughed, he fed the conversation.
"I don't like him," he hissed later when I posed a question that cut close. "He uses women."
"Then why are you so angry about him?" I shot back.
"Because he matters," he said crushingly. "Because he shows me a thing I can't have."
His tone had a sudden viciousness that made my skin crawl. It was different from the careless Draven I had known. It hinted that his cruelty was a shield for something deeper.
The man's world—Calhoun—was calm in storms. He watched everything like a captain reading the sea.
"Juliana," he said later, under the chandeliers. His hand brushed mine like a hidden anchor. "Stop this."
"Stop what?" I asked. My voice sounded small.
"Using others to make a point," he said. "It hurts people."
I thought he meant Draven. But he meant me.
The next morning, rumors began to bloom ugly and loud. Someone circulated a picture that claimed I had staged things. Servants whispered that Draven had used me for sport. The tabloids smelled blood.
The bad ones—the ones who hurt with sharp-tongued gossip and the woman who offered herself as a place-holder—got bold. Chloe's mother pushed her forward, smiling like a banner.
I could have crumpled, but I had learned the medicine of survival. I found Draven in the courtyard where the campus green held a protest of its own.
"Draven," I called out, and he looked up like a startled fox.
"You caused that?" I asked. My voice did not tremble.
He laughed, a thin sound. "You think I did all this? They sell scandal for a living."
"You're lying," I said.
"Prove it," he said, leaning in with that dangerous smile. "Or stop pretending to be hurt."
I decided I would stop pretending. Instead, I planned something he couldn't walk out of.
The next week a city charity ball—grand and velvet—unrolled like a theater at the center of town. Chloe would be honored in the press-release, Calhoun would be there to consent in silence and I would take my seat like a good ghost. So I did—and I invited every whisper in town to watch.
When Draven strutted in with his crowd I let the cameras click. He waved at reporters who shouted his name like a schoolyard chant. I walked into the bright center and sat at a table across from Chloe.
"Ms. Ricci," I said loudly, smiling like honey. "What a lovely gown."
She turned, hands poised. "Thank you," she murmured.
"Do you love Calhoun?" I asked, loud enough for the microphones to find us.
Chloe's smile froze like a surprise caught in winter. "I— I—" she began, bought a second, then said, "We are to be connected for our families' sake."
"Connected?" I repeated. "Connected like a contract? Or connected like love?"
Her composure seemed to crack. Cameras panned. Reporters sharpened their pens like cleavers.
"Calhoun," I called. I leaned forward. "Does she love you because she likes you, or because she is told to like you?"
The room inhaled. My grandfather's old ballroom, the city's movers and sellers, anyone who had ever traded a secret for a favor—they watched.
Chloe lifted her chin, dignity clinging to her like lace. "That is none of your concern," she said.
"It is if you pretend it is mine," I answered. "How many people have pretended for a contract? How many bargains have been made behind doors?"
"That is enough," Calhoun said, finally choosing not to be silent. He stood up. The hush around us felt like a string pulled taut.
"Stop pretending everyone," he said, voice steady like a bell. "There are no contracts here but those created to secure us. If anyone here believes a life is bought and sold like a ledger entry, you are wrong."
He walked to Draven and caught his gaze. The cameras found the pair of them and the whispers rose like rain.
"Draven Huber," he said clearly, "what have you said? Have you led people on? What is your intent?"
Draven's mouth went from playful to something small and sharp. "My intent?" he repeated. "To have fun."
"Fun at whose expense?" Calhoun demanded.
At that moment, the city's gossip—those who loved a spectacle—leaned in.
"You used Juliana as a prop," Calhoun continued. "You courted her for days and then tossed her aside. Stand here and explain why."
Draven's grin thinned. He glanced at the crowd, at the reporters who recorded every breath. He tried to back away, but the lights and the noise erased any escape.
"I—" Draven started, then faltered. The crowd's eyes were searing.
Chloe's face fell like a curtain. The woman who had been smiling like a porcelain doll discovered suddenly that the stage preferred other tragedies.
"You hurt people," Calhoun said. "When you choose to hurt someone in public, you accept public consequence."
"You can't," Draven snapped, corners of his mouth twitching. "You can't make a scene."
"I can," Calhoun said. "And I will. If you misused her for sport, answer for it. If you sought to manipulate our family to make yourself feel large, then you face what a community thinks of that."
People murmured and then shouted. Smartphones rose like a forest. A group of students who had heard of Draven's famed mischief began to chant like an organized chorus, their voices a wave.
"Shame on you!" they cried. "Shame!"
The room turned into a theater of judgment. Reporters took notes, the social pages sniffed like hounds. Draven's color went from cocky to raw.
"You're overreacting," he stammered, sweat sparkling at his hairline. The laughter that usually hid discomfort fell away. "It was just—"
"Just a game?" Calhoun asked. "Who makes fun of another's heart as a game?"
The crowd began to boo softly, a wet and building sound. Draven's bravado cracked. He tried to charm his way out with a practiced witticism.
"Look at him," whispered someone near me. "He used her as stage dressing."
Another voice recorded him under the premises of decency. "Isn't he that campus player? Where did his mercy go?"
"You're empty," I said, standing. The lights focused on me because I had said his name enough; the room had learned who I was. "You used me."
A group of young women stood up and recited their own stories—small slivers of hurt—like a chorus of truths. The journalists scribbled and recorded. The crowd's disapproval grew.
Draven's face shifted through stages: amusement, surprise, indignation, then implosion. He denied, then laughed, then tried to walk off.
"Don't," Calhoun said quietly. He was not loud but the tone wrapped around Draven like a hand.
"You're making this about you," Draven snapped, voice brittle.
"No," Calhoun said, eyes steady. "This is about how we choose to treat people. You will apologize here, publicly, and you will explain every rumor you've spread about Juliana. Or you will leave and never darken our door again."
Draven's mouth worked. For a terrifying moment he considered retreat. Then his arrogance cracked. He slumped.
"You used me," I said again, cold as winter. "You used me to draw attention. You pretended you saw me. How could you be that cruel?"
He tried to laugh. "It was never like that."
"Then tell the truth," I said. "Tell them."
He looked at the cameras, at the students holding their phones, at the reporters who waited for a scandalous sentence that would feed the morning.
"Fine," he said. He swallowed hard. "I—" The words came like teeth lowering. "I liked the chase. I like attention. I don't— I wasn't thinking of her as a person."
The sound in the room shifted from shock to a collective intake, like a forest inhaling before a storm.
"You're brushing it off," someone cried. "Apologize!"
Draven's face flooded with something like panic. He tried to backtrack with jokes, but there were no laughs left.
"You hurt her," Calhoun said. He stepped forward and did something the headlines never would have predicted. He reached out, grabbed Draven's wrist, and pulled him to face the crowd.
No one expected Calhoun to be the one to demand justice, but he did. With a voice that was not raised, he told Draven that actions have consequences and that the town would not protect anyone who weaponized another heart for sport.
Dyer, who had come quietly to watch, stood at the edge of the hall like a small, brave statue. The students around us cheered. People took photos and recorded the entire scene. The crowd's reaction turned ugly for Draven. They booed. Someone called him out for his past. The woman he had used—Chloe, the Ricci girl—who had once looked like my rival, looked shell-shocked and then pale as sympathy moved across her face. She stepped back.
Draven's vanity ruptured in front of everyone. He tried to explain, to charm, to turn their gaze. It didn't work. "Explain, or leave." Calhoun said, and the town loved him for standing up.
If that's punishment, it was public, raw, and humiliating. It was what he deserved. He changed through the scene like ice melting: the amused actor to the startled boy to the apologetic man to the broken shell.
"I am sorry," he said with a voice that had no grace. He tried to crawl back to dignity, but the town had seen him. People whispered. The press fed the story. He had lost his theatrics.
When the stage cooled off, the city had a new story to tell. Draven left under people’s stares. Chloe's mother collected her like a trophy gone suddenly brittle. The crowd dispersed, satisfied.
"You wanted retribution," Calhoun said later when we were home and the heat had left our world. "You wanted a scene."
"Yes," I said. "But not like that. I wanted him to know."
"He does," he murmured. "And he will carry it."
"You made it public," I said, looking at him. He had no triumph in his eyes, only a tiredness that made me ache for him.
"It was the only way he would learn," Calhoun said. "Sometimes the only language some people understand is the crowd."
In the quiet hours after, he explained that the reason he had been absent was not because he did not care. It was because he had been negotiating a decision that would place both our names beyond gossip.
"I promised my elders I would think about a union that would help stabilize our family," he told me. He looked small saying it. "I said things to buy time because I didn't want to make a promise I could not keep."
"You left me," I said finally, because I could not help it.
"You were never a thing to be left," he said, taking my hand. "I was making a way that would let me be the man you deserved."
We argued into the night about trust and silence and about why people did not tell each other the truth when the truth might bruise. We decided to let the slow work be the work: honesty, time, small tenderness.
Dyer came back into my life as a steady, quiet friend who never asked for more than I could give. He learned to be my friend without expecting me to be anything else.
Calhoun disappeared into the work of reparation with a restraint I admired. He did public things—calls, meetings, small apologies to families hurt by rumors. He spent long nights making sure that the man who had hurt me would feel the consequence of being careless.
I watched him one rainy afternoon in the garden where he had once taught me to swing on the handmade rope. He sat under the bamboo, fingers on the rope he had tied himself years ago for a little girl who used to pull him into play.
"Will you stay?" I asked him that day, voice thin with a fear that had been with me like a companion.
"I'll stay," he said, and his fingers tightened around mine. "I will stay, and I will tell anyone who listens that you are mine in the way I keep."
We married in a quiet ceremony two years later. Samuel Dudley—my grandfather—gave his blessing with a creak of mischief. Calhoun arrived late, because he never liked to be the center of gossip. He came forward, palms rough with work, something like victory on his face.
"I don't want you to be the sort of man who leaves," I whispered as our hands were joined.
"I never was," he said.
At the altar, as our fingers interlocked, my heart found a rhythm that sounded like home. When my father's absence like a ghost hovered, I felt his presence in the pull of the choir and the swing outside in the garden.
"You will be good to her," Samuel Dudley said to Calhoun, voice low.
"I will," he promised.
Later, after vows and flowers, after the crowd had thinned, I found the old swing. The rope hung steady where he had first shown me how it should hold.
"I kept it," he said, watching me test the seat.
"You did," I said. I sat and the swing moved with a small, familiar groan.
He came behind me and put his hands on my waist. The world quieted.
"Promise me you'll always come back when I call," I said, more childlike than the woman I had become.
He leaned forward and kissed the mole by my eye—the small place where I had once traced regret and hope.
"I promised you a long time ago," he said.
I smiled then the way I had in the photo, the way he had smiled at me once when he thought no one could see.
It was not the grand, dramatic victory I had once wanted. It was steadier. It was kept.
The End
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