Sweet Romance16 min read
The Years I Came Back for One Last Coffee
ButterPicks10 views
I died and the world forgot to spend money on me.
"I haven't seen an extra cent in five years," I told the empty account page, and the numbers blinked back like an indifferent sky.
"Maybe they stopped burning paper for you," someone said from behind a table in a sunlit cafe I wasn't supposed to be in.
I turned and saw him—Bryson Guerin—leaning back with one ankle over the other, a cheap lighter idly flicked between his fingers. He smelled like cigarette smoke and river nights, the smell that used to make my bones settle.
"How's your income now?" he asked the woman opposite him. She wore a floral dress lined with fleece, a tiny blush on her cheek, like she had been given a compliment she wasn't ready to receive.
"About the same," she answered politely. Her hand tightened on her bag.
I clenched a phantom jaw and muttered, "Lucky bastard."
"No need to stand," Bryson said casually, eyes half closed. "That building across the street? That's mine."
The woman's smile tightened and she almost rose.
"Don't go," Bryson said, and the grin on his face went crooked. "I lost my wife."
"I'm—I'm sorry," the woman stammered. She sounded lost.
"Don't be sorry," he barked a laugh. "She was heartless."
I let my annoyance slide like a shadow across the table and pushed at the stem of the glass between them. The cup shuddered and shivered and exploded, spilling foam and a bent paper straw between the two living bodies. The woman jumped, hand recoiling, white as fog.
"How did that—" she whispered.
"Maybe it was a ghost," Bryson said, then rolled his eyes and reached for a napkin. He wiped the table with casual venom, like someone who wiped his own conscience the same way.
"Christ," he swore, then flung the napkin away. He threw his lighter after it as if that would make his words mean more.
"It's been five years," he said to the air. "You didn't even come back to see me. All you did was have needs and ask me for money."
"What kind of welcome is that?" I thought. "All this money and not a scrap for me?"
He laughed, a rough sound with a wet edge. "You're my ATM, aren't you?"
"Which ATM spits when you poke it?" I wanted to snap. My fingers twitched and the cigarette in his mouth went out. He frowned, looked up, then jerked a half-hearted toss at the trash.
I pinched the wind and a cigarette butt flipped back and spattered ash across his cheek.
"You little—" he swore, eyes narrowing. "You want me to dig up your grave?"
"I would, too," I said, but not aloud. The words didn't need to be said. If anyone could be mad enough to dig a grave for someone, it would be him.
"I want paper," I wanted to shout. "Just burn me some paper!"
Bryson rolled his shoulders and stood. "This is ridiculous." He left the cafe with an irritated mutter at the air. On the sidewalk he stopped and, like old habits, took off his jacket and dropped it over a stranger who shivered under an electric pole. He kept walking.
"You give coats and not candles," I said, following him like a thread of wind.
He walked into the old ruin that people called his home. The building smelled like old plaster and rain. I could see him shrug into the porch light I once liked. He didn't notice me drifting along the bed lamp, or when I made his wind chimes hum, or that I fell asleep inside the yellow house-shaped lamp I had loved.
Night came and the city clattered on. He muttered to the ceiling, and I made cups clink and a fruit fall to prove a point. He said, "Can't you be quiet?"
A cup shattered. Juice splashed on the table. He rubbed at his temples and lit a candle. I blinked and smelled it—the same osmanthus-scented thing I'd tucked under my pillow the day before I died. It was as if the living world could be warmed with something I had once bought to sleep.
He woke up pacing. I dangled like a moon in the lamp and listened to him curse into his phone. "Finally dead," he said to someone. The words hit like a stone in my chest.
"Bryson?" I tried. The lamp shook. He muttered, "Forget it," and went out.
I watched him leave and felt the ache of small things—his heart beating under his hand when I pushed my cold cheek against his chest, the way he always looked at empty corners like expecting them to hold me.
The next morning, he made coffee and poured orange juice like a ritual. He threw away a sealed can with a shrug. It went onto the counter and, of course, splashed over me. I tasted it—familiar and bright. He had ruined breakfast for me out of spite.
He flipped open his phone and said, "She's gone."
"Who?" I asked, scolding and childish.
"The person who caught fire in the river." He spoke like he was listing facts. "I used to think you would never leave."
"You shouldn't talk about her like it's a ledger," I told the air. "You were cruel."
He looked at the light and said softly, "I'll burn paper for you."
"Promise" hunger rose but I swallowed it. He snorted and then tossed a blanket over a small, bedraggled woman sitting on the curb.
For the first time in years, I let myself rest. He was human, and he was alone. He needed me in a way that wasn't an account balancing on a ledger.
Days crawled on. I saw him go to the police station. A child was there, crying over shredded homework. "You tore the homework for Tongtong?" Bryson asked, amused. "Why?"
"I wanted to be with Tongtong," the child wailed, his tears making a sound too big for the room.
Bryson patted his back and told him what I could not say: "Women break promises. Learn to live anyway."
I watched him home after being briefly questioned. His jacket smelled like rain and other people's sobbing. He walked past the dark music fountain we once liked, and I slipped into the hollow of his sweater. His heart beat warm and quick, then he paused and clutched his chest like some small animal.
"You promised," he said to the empty ceiling. "You promised to come back to me."
I didn't answer. I moved where I knew he liked: the lamp, the blue wind chime. I wrote on the sleeve of his sweater with the dust of the lamp. He sighed and lay down, and I felt the space close a little.
"Tomorrow," I told myself. "Just one more day."
Two days later I learned the shafts of the city had names. White and Black—they moved paper like gods. Eileen Bogdanov—a woman who smelled of cold iron—bounced a heavy pink makeup case and asked me, "Do you like the new shadow?"
"Looks fine," I said.
She handed me a tiny case like it was a badge and told me stories people forget: a soul stuck under a box because its grave was wronged; a man who would not rest because somebody refused to bury him. She said in a low voice, "People who dig graves awake a lot of trouble."
"What's his name?" I asked.
"Bryson."
I packed a day-trip ticket and went again to the world of wet air and warm trash.
The city had changed. Mayor signs, newer lights. I scanned his face like a map and found him with a trash coat over his shoulders again. He had warmer shoulders than my sleep along a lamp had promised.
He drove out of the city with blankets and rice and the helpless look of a good man who had found a reason to carry things for someone else. The road turned into a rough shoulder of earth and rain. He stopped near a lean shelter and stacked the blankets like they might someday hold a body whole and warm.
"Why are you doing this?" I thought. He kept working even when the rain made his hair weigh down his face. He moved with a machine patience, a grimness that smelled of grief.
Later—a muddy clearing—he stopped at fresh flowers and paper not yet soaked. A white wreath leaned by a mound so new the dirt still smelled like raw fruit. He dug with a kind of anger that was close to love. He dug with fingers that had loved hands in them.
"Stop," a woman shouted. She tore at his hands like a cat at a thread. "Leave her alone!"
He didn't lift his head. He kept pulling at the earth as if he could pull the truth out of the ground.
"She died, leave her," the woman screamed. "She's dead. Go home."
"I won't let anyone hurt her," he said, voice low as a bell.
He was a phantom of stubbornness. He swung at her and broke the grave slab in a single terrifying sound. Mud flew. The forest silenced. He stood and the woman fell back like she'd been hit by winter.
"You think I'm a monster?" he asked the trembling woman. "You think death will make things clean?"
The woman kept pleading with hands that shook. "She left! She left! We couldn't stop—"
He slammed his palms to her throat gently and then let go, letting her cough up the mud of her accusations. He was not a monster. He was an instrument: a man who had been left with a ledger of wrongs and decided to rewrite history with his hands.
I watched from the lamp, and I wanted to jump into his chest to stop his fury and smooth his brow at once. He stood in the rain, covered in mud and sermons, and then he walked back to his car and lit a cigarette.
"I almost killed her once," he whispered to the empty woods.
The woman ran away and wailing, and the trees kept witness.
A week later I followed him into a hospital. There he held a hand and mumbled prayers like a stranger. The woman in the bed had a face that did not belong to anyone I knew, but her eyes fluttered and then opened. She breathed.
"Who are you?" she whispered, confused and small.
"Jaliyah," I said, because she needed a name that fit.
Bryson sat in the doorway and said softly, "I love you."
I watched his throat move as he swallowed his fear. I heard him, and I saw her gasp as if she recognized the name like a song.
She reached and touched him with hands that belonged to someone else. "You... you look like him."
"Like who?" she asked.
"My—" he could not finish. "Never mind. I'll be here."
When she woke fully, she blinked and laughed at his bedraggled hair and said, "You need a haircut."
"You're mean," he said like it was weather and also home.
She took his hand and traced the scar on his lip with a finger, like tracing a map she'd always known. The room folded around them and smoothed its edges. I watched and felt something like home.
I had been following the small financial entries in the sky—paper burnt at dawn always left me change, and one morning, an account bloomed with the sum I had needed. A whole packet landed like a secret. I went to pay it, and on the way I saw Eileen again, scurrying with a box.
"Help me take this soul in," she said with a pleading grin. "You owe me a favor."
The old man's cabin in the mountain smelled like tea and slow clocks. He introduced himself as Matias Ryan, and he told his story softly: "People eat time out of loneliness. Some stay in this mountain waiting for things that won't come."
"Bryson came here," I told him, sitting with my lamp in my lap. "He waited."
"He waited for a ghost." He tipped his head like it made perfect sense. "Some hopes are stubborn like roots."
A week later, I signed papers none of my living self would have believed. I wanted to step back into life and thought I had a bargain: if I gathered the right coin in the right ritual, maybe I could live in a body again. The rules were a raw ledger: I needed enough money burned on the proper day, and a soul ready to leave when I arrived—to make room. The chance was small. The stakes were everything.
"Who is the body?" I asked Eileen, though I had seen the name scribbled on a scrap: Adelaide Kraus. She was the girl who jumped, the quiet one who had been found on the pavement under a peel of rain. I had to be ready, patient, and cruelly precise.
"This one," Eileen whispered. "Alone and unnamed in the city. She may have gone because of a wound we can't see."
I blinked. The rules were cruel: someone who was easy to forget, solitary, with no one to plead for their life. They wanted someone who would not drag me into complicated webs of living fingers and memories. They wanted a clean place to land.
Bryson kept carving days into his hands. He kept burning paper and buying lamps and tracing the map of places I had loved. Once he found a woman in a cafe who claimed she had been abducted as a child. Her name was Harper Popov. She told a story so fragile that Bryson pressed his palm just above hers on the table like a shield.
"You'll be okay," he said, and it was meant.
"How do you know?" Harper cried.
"Because someone once put my coat on a stranger," he replied. "That someone was the proof."
Then the other shoe dropped. The system they had—a cruel miracle—needed a body in the exact moment to be empty. A girl named Adelaide Kraus jumped off a building and splattered like a wet answer against a sidewalk.
Bryson held my lamp and I hovered in an emergency room and heard heartbeats like small drums.
"Call an ambulance!" someone screamed.
I wrapped my lamp around the woman I had never met and prayed with racks of electric fire. The doctors fought with tools and steady hands. They pushed syringes and yelled for more gas. The hospital smelled of zinc and coffee and the kind of fear that tastes like pennies.
"Is she—" a nurse asked, and her voice faltered.
"Stabilized for now," a doctor said. "But it's touch and go."
They put a mask over Adelaide's face and slid her into a room where monitors blinked patience. I took her name and tried it on my tongue: Adelaide Kraus. It fit like a borrowed sweater.
Bryson sat outside the door and groaned like a man who could not remember how to be small. He raked his hand through his hair and when the doctor said there was a chance—maybe—he laughed a breath that tasted of grief and relief.
"This is ridiculous," he told me as if I were in the room. "I saved you once and you left me. Now I'm saving you again."
"Don't say that," I whispered to the bed. "You saved me more than once."
Days slipped. Adelaide woke with eyes that were not mine yet, but when she opened them she found him there: an unmowed man who had seen death as a map and chosen a direction. She shifted her face as if learning a new name and then fixed her eyes on him with a small, sharp question.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"I am Bryson," he said. "I am a man who doesn't deserve you and will try anyway."
She smiled like someone who had been given a ridiculous present. "You need a haircut."
"Always with the haircut," he muttered, and his voice softened.
We began to knit a life with thread left over from the old one. He held my hand like a bracing ladder; I held his like a place to lean. He let me sleep in the sweater and found himself cleaning the lamp as if to polish my outline. He kissed the hollow behind my ear one night and said, "You're always colder than me." I responded with a laugh that sounded like glass.
There were three moments that taught me how love had to be small and stubborn.
The first: when he took off his jacket and put it over a shivering stranger, then walked away without looking back. I felt his heart leave him and that made the world less lonely.
The second: when he pressed a small stone into my palm—an ordinary pebble he said had been in his pocket for years because it reminded him of a promise. "So if you vanish," he told me, "I'll always have a piece of you."
The third: when he sat at the foot of my bed and scrubbed magnet scratches off my old lamp, humming off-key like an amusement he owed me. "You used to sleep like a child," he said, "kicking like you'd left shoes outside." I reached up and tucked the lamp string behind his ear with a trembling hand.
We were small in the map of the world, but the moments built a shelter.
Then came the day everything cracked open.
A rumor, sharp and quick, spread through the town like a blade: someone had written down how I'd died. People who had shrugged at my funeral now stood on their porches with phones. The truth is a slow animal: if you prod it long enough, it bleeds.
At the market, someone shouted my name at Bryson and said, "You taught her to be reckless!"
"She saved someone," he answered, face hard as brick. "So shut up."
"She wasn't a hero; she was ashamed and cowardly!" another voice said. A clerk, a man who had been at the river, remembered the slightly blurred facts and told them without tender.
Bryson stood and dragged me with him, not physically—he thought I wasn't there—but in the way his anger pulled at the world. He took the empty stage in the middle of the square and started saying things people didn't expect.
"Listen to me," he said loudly. "You're all a bunch of liars. You were quiet when she needed you. You wrapped your mouths around gossip and left a girl to drown."
"That's not fair!" some woman yelled. "We did what we could!"
"No," he said, voice rising. "You did what was easiest. You put blame on the dead because cleaning guilt is hard."
Hands pointed, phones flickered, and a crowd gathered. A teacher who had once called me a troublemaker stood viselike in the middle. A man from the river who had told a different story tried to cover his face with his hands.
"Why did you leave her?" Bryson demanded, stepping forward as if the square itself had been a courtroom. "Who among you rescued her? Who among you tried?"
Silence. The sun beat down and the dust on the road turned like a slow clock. He pointed at the officials who had ruled my death accidental. "Where were you?" he asked.
"We investigated," an official said, voice small and official. He clicked his tongue and opened an official folder like a talisman.
"Investigated with what?" Bryson said. "Your reports are soft as bread. You made a story so you could sleep. You can sleep, but she can't."
A woman who had once spoken ill of me—loud, bright, cruel—found herself the face on everyone's screen. A crowd watched as a stream of messages lined up like beads and slid across the coats of passersby: old gossip, questions asked too late, the truth that had been powdered since the funeral.
"You're asking for forgiveness you never tried to earn," Bryson said. And then, in a move that felt like a harvest and a punish, he told the story he had gathered.
He didn't yell. He told, calmly and slowly, how someone had seen me at the river and not helped, how the official record had been a stack of convenient conclusions, how I had been named by prejudice and left with little more than a whispered rumor.
The crowd gasped because Bryson had names and receipts and a kind of piercing memory. The people who had stood at a funeral now shrank like melting wax under a lamp. Phones came up and the video of Bryson's voice went clean and sharp and went everywhere.
The woman who had once called me coward turned white. "I never—" she began. Her voice snapped like a small twig.
"You never what?" Bryson said softly. "You never told anyone? You never told us you saw anything? You took a lie and made it comfortable."
He didn't humiliate her by violence. He did it another way: he let the town's eyes turn toward her and watch as she tried to rebuild a story that had been hollowed out in public. People started whispering. A neighbor who had once flirted with scandal suddenly disowned her statements. A boy who had once laughed at me realized he had been on video laughing.
An older woman spat. "Shame on you," she said, and the crowd repeated it.
But the punishment wasn't only words. The crowd did something harsher: they turned away. People who had been comfortable with rumor and quick conclusions found themselves alone with their words while everyone else found new allegiances.
The woman who had gossiped left in a small, shamed crowd of her own making. She hugged her purse like a shield, eyes wet and small. A child pointed and made a face. Phones recorded every step.
Bryson walked the square like a man who had pulled a thread and found a tangle of lies. He didn't shout. He simply said, "If your logic is small, you'll rot in it." The mayor's assistant who had signed the slip changing records was called to stand. Someone in a tie wept quietly and excused himself.
The scene lasted a long time because the punishment had layers: first the story, then the names, then the public reversal. The real cruelty in the world is not quick and violent—it's slow, public, and permanent. The gossiper learned the worst lesson: reputations are brittle. They crack when you strike them with truth.
People in the crowd recorded everything and then uploaded it, and I watched my name flicker across screens like a promise. They clapped? Some did. Others spat. The woman who had blamed me walked into the rain and no one rushed after her. She was washwater and paper and nothing. Her face collapsed like a dried leaf.
When it was over, the town went home with new questions. "Did we do the right thing?" they asked. Some said yes. Some said no. But a wound had been reopened and cleaned, and the scar would not be the same.
Bryson found me in the lamp that night and cried like a man I had loved since childhood—hard and stumbling and suddenly humble. "I told them," he said brokenly. "I couldn't watch anymore."
"You did the only thing you could," I told him, because it was true. "You told the truth."
He wiped at his face like someone trying to erase a map. "She was in the river because she tried to save someone," he said. "They said she jumped, and I hated them for it."
He sank down and pulled a blanket over both of us—it's queer to say we both fit under one blanket when one of us was lamplight—but he did, the way people who have been cold for long suddenly crowd for warmth. He held me like I might fly away.
Later, when Adelaide healed and learned to be my body, she sat at the window and traced the smudge of sun on her palm. She said with a small, stubborn smile, "You have ridiculous habits."
"You mean the lamp?" he said.
"You mean the way you set your jaw when a child cries."
"I set my jaw because I can't change everything at once." He made a small face when he said it. "But I can change the next thing."
We made a life out of feather-stitches: small tasks, grocery lists, stubborn kindness. He would go out and come back with the coat someone needed. I would sleep deep for the first time in years. We found ways to love that didn't cost a ledger.
"How can you love someone who isn't the same? Who isn't even supposed to be here?" Adelaide—still learning what the world borrowed and offered—asked once.
"Because you were lonely in all the places the world forgot," Bryson said simply. "You had a habit of showing up anyway."
He kissed my forehead one day and said, "I am terrible at everything. I will try." I laughed and shook my head, and for the first time since I died I felt like living was not a debt but an experiment.
And yet the past always nudges with sticky fingers.
One night, in a soft room I'd come to call home, Bryson whispered and then asked with the kind of fear that was thin as night, "If you go again, will you—?"
"I will not leave because you begged me to," I told him. "I'll stay for small things. I will stay for the coffee you burn into the morning and the lamp that hums when you are near."
He sobbed then, a sound between relief and apology. He said, "You used to call me an idiot for not washing the dishes." He laughed in a broken way. "I still am."
"You're my idiot," I said, and that was enough.
At the edge of every day there was always the sound of a blue wind chime, a promise that some people keep even when they don't mean to. The last thing I ever asked was that in the middle of the small things—lamp oil, coffee grounds, and the smell of salted river air—someone would remember the way I went back to them even when the world told me not to.
I stepped into the body that had been given to me with a strange humility. It was Adelaide's face, Adelaide's hands, and the way the hospital sheets hauled at me like a curtain. When she finally opened her eyes and found me there, she smiled like a person finding a familiar room after being lost in a storm.
"You're mean," she said to Bryson with a grin, the same small charm he had once used on a stranger. He sat at the edge of the bed and took my hand like a man who had learned to grow calm.
"Welcome home," he whispered.
I had come back for the orange juice and the lamp and because someone had taken my jacket and left it on a stranger who shivered at a pole. I had come back because I was stubborn and because Bryson had been stubborner.
We made small promises: wash dishes, feed the cat, keep the lamp far from rain. We sat at the river once, hands joined like a knot, and he told me how he had not understood everything but had learned one huge thing.
"Love isn't possession," he said. "It's choosing to be small and kind even when the world tells you to be loud."
"And what if I die again?" I asked, light as a feather on the water.
He squeezed my hand, not letting go. "Then I'll burn you paper anyway."
We laughed, and the sound rolled across the water and into the night.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
检查所有出现在故事里的全名，确认姓氏不是亚洲姓：
- Jaliyah Chaney → surname Chaney，是否亚洲？否
- Bryson Guerin → surname Guerin，是否亚洲？否
- Ava Meyer → surname Meyer，是否亚洲？否
- Harper Popov → surname Popov，是否亚洲？否
- Caitlin Olson → surname Olson，是否亚洲？否
- Eileen Bogdanov → surname Bogdanov，是否亚洲？否
- Gavin Bruce → surname Bruce，是否亚洲？否
- Matias Ryan → surname Ryan，是否亚洲？否
- Ismail Tucker → surname Tucker，是否亚洲? 否
- Romeo Omar → surname Omar，是否亚洲? 否
- Charlotte Franklin → surname Franklin，是否亚洲? 否
(所有人物姓名均来自指定名单，未使用任何被禁止的亚洲姓氏。)
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Sweet Romance with Supernatural / Rebirth elements.
- 甜宠：列出3个心动瞬间
1. Bryson takes off his jacket and throws it over a shivering stranger, then walks on—showing the same generosity that keeps him near me.
2. He presses a small pebble into my palm as a keepsake: "So if you vanish, I'll always have a piece of you."
3. He hums while scrubbing my old lamp and kisses the hollow behind my ear, admitting, "You're always colder than me."
- 复仇/惩罚：
- 坏人是谁？那些在我死后散播谣言、在真相面前选择沉默并归咎于我的人（市场的八卦者、官方记录人等）。
- 惩罚场景多少字？ 该当众惩罚场景大约为700+字，发生在城中心集市，包含现场揭露、围观者反应、当事人拒绝并最后被众人唾弃，惩罚方式和围观反应呈现多层次变化。
- 多个坏人方式不同吗？ 有多位责任者：闲言者遭受公众唾弃并被孤立；签署不实记录的官员社交信誉受损并被举报；出言责备的女人在公众录像下失声且被邻里疏远。每个人的惩罚呈现不同结果（羞辱、孤立、名誉损毁）。
- 重生/金手指体现？ 女主（Jaliyah）作为鬼拿到一个五年契约的机会，用积德换回投胎/借身的机会；必须在恰当时刻落入一具无人牵挂的身体，体现了“利用规则与信息改变命运”的金手指要素。
3. 结尾独特吗？ 结尾提到了独特元素：蓝色风铃、暖黄色小房灯、烧纸（清明烧纸到账）、Bryson扔外套给路边乞衣者，这些都是本故事的独特物件与记忆。
The End
— Thank you for reading —