Sweet Romance11 min read
The White Shirt, the Mole, and the Promise
ButterPicks12 views
The summer my brother graduated, he brought five boys home. They crowded my hallway like a small commotion, hot and loud and careless, and their chorus of "Sister!" still makes me smile when I remember it.
"Hey, sister!" they shouted as they piled into the living room.
"Hello," I answered, smiling too easily.
"Dean said it's okay, right? We're celebrating." Wolfgang Bernard grinned like he'd stolen something.
"Of course," I lied. "It's hot. Come in. I'll order food."
"You're the best, sister!" Damon Schwarz cheered.
They went upstairs to play games and eat pizza. I watched the door close and was about to go pull Dean's ear for bringing a pack of boys home when I spotted someone standing quietly in the hallway.
He was wearing a baseball cap low over his eyes, a black T-shirt that made his neck look pale, and a mole precisely on his collarbone. For two seconds I only noticed the cap and the clean line of his jaw.
"Jasper, why are you standing there? Come in," Dean called him.
"Mm," he answered, and he walked inside like he belonged to the place already.
My head swam. The mole under his collarbone slid into my memory like a film strip snapping back into place.
"Jasper," I whispered to myself.
One month ago I thought I had erased a certain night. I hadn't. I had only folded it into a drawer and piled work on top. I was careful; I'm the sister who makes rules. I wrote a promise for my brother when he was small: "I will introduce my brother's most handsome friends to me,"—a girl's whimsical wish. Dean always laughed at that piece of paper. He never believed I'd take it seriously, but I had meant it as a joke and somehow the universe had a sense of humor.
I kept still long enough to sound normal when I asked Dean, "Are these friends all freshly out of college? High school kids?"
Dean blinked. "Not all. Jasper's older by a year."
I let out a breath that tasted like relief and fear. "Oh."
Jasper was a stranger who'd sat beneath club lights the night I drank too much and pretended to be a different version of myself. A stranger who had caught the corner of my heart with a cold hand, then given it back with a small, steady smile.
That night in the bar was a mess of neon, loud music, and my own stubborn loneliness. I bought bottles for a table full of people because it felt like a clean way to spend money: pay to make other people laugh and disappear. A man slid into the booth beside me and smiled like he was offering me the moon. I stepped away. Then I saw a boy—drunk, eyelashes wet, and small hands trembling around a glass.
He had a white skin-tone that caught the light wrong and a single mole on his collarbone that looked like a punctuation mark. Two women tried to pull him into another conversation. I couldn't let them. "Hey," I said, soberer than I felt. "Do you want to come with me?"
"You're my sister?" he asked, slurring, and the word hit me like an admission.
"No, never mind that. Let me help you." I carried him to a small hotel I knew of. He was heavy and warm and surprisingly calm.
"You're making things worse," he murmured when I fussed with the covers.
"That's my specialty," I said, and left three hundred in cash on the nightstand—my clumsy apology, my silent attempt to be responsible. I thought the night was a closed file.
Now, in my kitchen, Jasper's voice woke that file.
"I am nineteen," he said when I accidentally asked his age.
Nineteen. The world tilted.
I scrambled to patch my face into something less guilty. "You look older."
He smiled the slightest smile. "Not much older."
I pretended to be casual. "I ordered the food. Go on up. Dean, tell them to be quiet."
They ran upstairs like a caravan of youth. I sat at the kitchen table and tried not to replay everything.
Blythe Abe texted me before midnight. "Any hotties?" she typed without warning.
"There is one," I admitted.
"Put on the silk nightgown and bring fruit up," Blythe said. "You're not a saint. Use your advantages."
"He's nineteen," I protested, then took the silk slip out of my closet and closed the door on my better judgment.
At two in the morning I opened the kitchen light and found Jasper washing a glass, the moonlight drawing cold lines across his face.
"You're here," I said.
He turned and his eyes found mine, clear as winter water. "You aren't trying to pretend you don't remember me, are you?"
A panic I couldn't name landed in my chest. "We met at a bar. You might remember wrong."
He smiled, and the memory slid into place like a photo returning from the darkroom. "You left three thousand on the nightstand."
I stilled. "I was being stupid."
"You left more than that," he said. "You left a name."
"Susana," I said before I could be coy. "My name is Susana."
"Susana," he repeated, the syllable like a feather. "Add me. Friend me."
It was a small demand but heavy with meaning. "You already have me on WeChat."
He raised a brow. "You rejected my friend request."
I wanted to say I remembered no such arrogance, but I did remember the bar, the quiet of the hotel room, and the heat of that night's confusion.
"Your sincerity!" I demanded, a defense as silly as it was real. "What are you asking for?"
"Add me," he said, and then softer, "I want to see if the girl who left money and wore lipstick looks the same drunk as in the morning."
I swallowed. "You're a terrible judge of character."
He folded my shoulders into his palms with a casual possessiveness. "I'm only terrible when left alone," he said.
He left my house early but stayed in my messages. His posts were few and nearly always a photo of a guitar, a travel shot, or a cat sleeping in a beam of sun. I stalked the corner of his life like someone hungry for breadcrumbs.
At a shopping mall, I lived through a new kind of embarrassment when I tried to buy new bedding for Dean's dorm. I ended up running into Nash Cervantes—my ex—who, of course, had moved to the city and been given an open invitation back into my orbit by my father who never knew when to stop hosting.
"Nash!" I said, because greetings are better than silence.
"Nash is here to make amends," my father would say later as if the drama were a gift. Nash had been sweet once—until he wasn't. He had asked me to give up a competition so he could have the prize, and I had refused. That was enough reason to break us. Years later, he acted like the injured party.
At the bedding store, Dean bumped in and introduced Jasper without preamble, like this was a normal thing and I was meant to keep up.
"Nice to meet you, Susana," Nash said with the insulation of a practiced smile.
Jasper took my packages without a fuss. "Let me carry these," he said.
Nash watched us in a way that made my spine stiffer. "You two know each other?"
"Just acquaintances," I lied.
The truth kept getting complicated, because Jasper didn't behave like someone who had slept with me at a bar and then forgotten me. He behaved like someone who had kept a file called 'Susana' and reviewed it. He liked my photos with words like "nice" and sent me messages that felt ordinary and also dangerous: "Do you like traveling?" "Have you ever tried playing the guitar?"
One afternoon, a few days later, I overheard the boys at home playing a game with those reckless rules kids invent to test one another. It was truth-or-dare. Young pride and tribal laughter filled the room.
"Who did you mean by that 'someone likes'?" one of them demanded from Jasper. "You posted that picture and wrote 'someone likes'—who's the someone?"
Jasper's face barely moved. "That's two questions," he said.
"Tell us," said Imogen Tucker, the girl from Dean's class who had the kind of face that made crowds quieter. She had liked him for months.
"This is unfair," I whispered to myself. "We are all guilty of unfairness sometimes."
He said only one word after that. "Here."
The room exploded.
"Who!" The boys started to cry like gulls fighting over bread.
"Is it you?" Imogen asked, voice small and brave.
He looked over and finally at me, and his answer landed with the weight of an anchor.
"Here," he said again. "She's here."
Imogen's face fell like a curtain. The other boys were either delighted or shocked. I wanted to be invisible, to shrink to the size of the mole on his collarbone, to be a blink in someone's memory.
After the boys left, there was a moment—just the two of us. He leaned close enough that I could smell the faint woodsy scent at the nape of his neck.
"What happened between you and Nash?" he asked.
I told him the story in the way you tell a wound: the edges described, not the burning center. He listened and squeezed my hand, his touch both steady and claiming.
"Don't let him come back," Jasper said.
"I never wanted him to," I admitted.
Nash didn't leave it at that. He came back to town the week Dean got his acceptance letter to the capital. He came to our house for what he called a visit, but what it really was became a public attempt to shame me into nostalgia.
Dinner was set outside under strings of lights. The group was rowdy and cheerful. I had told myself I would be careful. I would be kind. Nash had always been good at playing the hurt party.
"Susana," he said loudly as if the night was his theatre, "remember when we were going to be famous together? Remember when you promised to support me?"
My chest tightened. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"She's mine," Nash declared, voice high. "We were—"
Jasper's face cooled.
"You're not hers," Jasper said softly at first, but when Nash wouldn't shut up the murmur turned into a blade. "You were the person who asked for her to lose her chance at the prize. You wanted her to kneel for your gain. Who does that?"
Nash laughed, too theatrical. "You think you can lecture me? She left me for her stupid pride."
Jasper stood up slowly. "He asked her to step away from something she built because he wanted the prize for himself," Jasper called over the clinking of glasses. "He smiled and used her. He's been lying to you all. He wanted to keep an advantage and used her like a stepping stool."
Nash's face hardened. "You're spreading nothing but gossip. I came here to ask her to—" He gestured vaguely, as if the sentence itself were a costume he had forgotten how to wear.
"Ask her to be honest?" Jasper said. "Ask her to accept less because you asked her to? No." He lowered his voice so that everyone nearby leaned forward to hear. "Ask yourself, Nash. How many times did you hide your true intentions behind 'we'? How many times did you ask her to give up for you? How many times did you make her choose you over her honest self?"
People around the table were looking now, their laughter gone. The lights made small moons in their glasses.
Nash's mouth opened, then closed. He tried to smile and failed. "You're a—" he began.
"You're a man who can't measure what he's lost, and now you want a second chance by trying to steal someone else's peace," Jasper cut in. "How brave." He looked at me. "I don't know why she would ever pick a coward over someone who tells the truth."
"Who are you calling a coward?" Nash spat, getting angrier.
"You are," Jasper said quietly. "And cowards always need witnesses."
This was the moment. Jasper didn't shout. He didn't push. He simply took my hand and drew my side of the story into the light with a voice that kept its calm.
"You asked her to step aside from a contest because you wanted the prize. You made a choice. It was selfish. You should be ashamed. Not because one person left you, but because you used someone to benefit yourself."
A woman at the table—one of Dean's mother's friends—leaned forward. "Is this true?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, and for the first time I spoke more clearly than I ever had. "He asked me to give up my shot once. I refused. We broke up. I didn't fall from grace. I stood up for myself."
"That's not the whole story," Nash said quickly, his eyes darting like an animal.
"It is for me," I answered. "And it's enough."
There was a silence that felt like a held breath. Someone snapped a photo. Someone whispered. The room's gossip veins lit up with the electricity of scandal under warm lights. People started to murmur; some head-shook, some nodded. A man near the bar shook his head and muttered, "What a piece of work."
Nash's arrogance cracked. His face lost color as friends I had thought were on his side looked at him sideways. "I—" he tried.
"You want to make me your old trophy," I said. "You want to treat memories like property. That's not love. That's inventory."
A friend of Nash, embarrassed, laughed too loud. "Come on, man. Let's go."
Someone else pulled out their phone and started recording. "Unbelievable," a voice said. "He tried to—"
Nash realized he had lost the room. He tried to salvage dignity by making a joke, but it landed flat. People rolled their eyes. A woman I hadn't met before said, "No one likes a manipulator."
Nash's face shifted from anger to denial to panic. He started to protest, voice rising, accusations and half-sentences spilling. "You're all on her side because—"
"Because we're not on the side of someone whose love is a leash," Jasper said. "You used her vulnerability as a tool. People who love properly don't ask for trophies at the cost of the other's integrity."
The crowd's mood changed into something colder. Someone clapped slowly, not in praise but in a kind of disgusted theater. A few people stood, walked away, whispering.
Nash had relied on his charm and social currency, but those had been redeemed by a public scene in which his past pattern was shown for what it was. He tried to salvage it by setting his jaw and declaring he would leave with his dignity intact, but dignity left with him. He stumbled out to the curb, calling my name like he owned an echo.
"Run after him," a voice advised darkly. "He needs a reminder."
We didn't follow. He left while a few lingering guests clicked their tongues; others raised their drinks at something that was not a toast.
The punishment was not a legal verdict or a dramatic arrest. It was ordinary and perfect: exposure in a ring of people who mattered, the rearrangement of social currency, the loss of clout. He had counted on sympathy; instead he was contradicted by witnesses and by his own history. He had tried to make us complicit in a lie—and we refused.
When I turned back to Jasper, he looked tired and oddly gentle.
"You did that for me," I said.
"Yes," he said. "Because I won't let people use you. And because you shouldn't have to explain your boundaries."
"Thank you," I breathed, feeling something in me uncoil.
The next days were quieter. News of Nash's little meltdown scattered like ash and then settled. People either took sides or shrugged. I received messages from acquaintances I hadn't spoken to in years: "I saw what happened. Good for you." "About time." It was sudden comfort.
Jasper stayed. He wasn't proud or showy about it. He simply brought me back to small moments: texting me from the corner café, asking if I liked a certain pastry; filming himself badly playing a song and sending it with the caption "For Susana." He knew how to be soft without asking for payment.
We had mornings where he would leave a folded note on the kitchen table: "Coffee? Window seat?" My heart skipped every time.
There were little heartbeats between us—three details that always rushed me.
"That day when you fixed my eyebrow," I told Blythe once. "When you leaned over and did that tiny thing, I felt like a child looking at something precious."
"He's not like other men," Blythe said. "He actually cares about being near you."
"One morning I was cold," I told Jasper once, standing on the balcony with dawn creeping across the sky. "You took off your jacket and put it around my shoulders without asking."
He smiled. "I hate to see you cold."
"Once, at the river, you told me you were here because Dean promised to introduce the best friend to me," I said.
He looked at the river as we walked. "I kept a promise to myself," he said. "I wanted to meet you."
We learned each other's small languages—the way he smoothed his hair when he was nervous, the way I tucked my foot under my leg when I lied. We steadied like a pair of planks leaning together.
And yet life kept sending tests. People dropped opinions into conversations like small stones. "He's young," someone would say about Jasper. "She had a past," someone else would whisper about me. I learned to answer with simple truth.
"Yes, he's nineteen," I told a woman who seemed offended. "He's honest. That matters."
He laughed at our nervousness the night Dean left for the capital. "He promised you the best friends, didn't he?"
"Yeah," I said. "You were the one who stood there in the hallway and waited."
We walked by the river at night later, a wind that tasted faintly of the city. He wore a white shirt—simple, unadorned, and it fit him like it had been made for mornings.
"You came," I said.
"I came," he repeated.
I reached out and smoothed the collar with my thumb, and my finger brushed the tiny mole just above his clavicle. It was the smallest proof that life kept its promises in odd places.
He smiled at me like a boy and a man at once. "I didn't want to let you go."
"Good," I said. "Neither did I."
We didn't make grand vows. We had dinner and laughter and the odd argument about who left the dishes for the other to wash. We had the simple tender acts: a jacket taken off, a hand given, a song recorded poorly but meaningfully.
Later, when a reporter asked me in a small, late-night interview how it felt to be chosen by someone younger, I answered as I always did:
"I was not chosen because I was old or young. I was chosen because someone paid attention."
At the river, under a white strip of moon and a line of distant lamps, Jasper folded his white shirt around my shoulders like a private ceremony.
"You promised to introduce the best friend," I said with a grin.
"And somehow," he answered, "the best friend was me."
I buttoned one button of the white shirt and felt his pulse just below my thumb, and the mole at his collarbone was a tiny, stubborn star. That small constellation would be our proof: not of fate, but of the strange, human ways promises sometimes arrive.
The End
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