Sweet Romance11 min read
You and the Passing Wind
ButterPicks11 views
"I tracked him for five years and failed. Five years later I found him in a KTV room full of hired models."
"I can't believe this," I said, staring at the man who had lived in my head for half a decade.
"It's Grayson Hawkins," Jewel said behind me, voice small and fierce. "You mean, the Grayson?"
"He is," I said. "He always was."
I had money now. Not by luck, not by a lottery. "My family has hidden savings," my father Ernst told me weeks before, shrugging like it was nothing. "I guess we were too private."
"Too private," I echoed, counting the stack of property titles he dumped on the kitchen table. "You mean rich."
"You were always a good student," my mother Esther had added. "We wanted you to find your own way."
I found my way to a small café. I opened it because I liked the smell of coffee and quiet mornings and because having something my own steadied me. People came. The café became a soft place in the city.
That night at the KTV was supposed to be Jewel's birthday. Melissa, Susanne, and I drank too much and did something silly—we ordered male models for company. I did not expect to see him.
"He still likes white shirts," I whispered, frozen beside the row of models. Grayson stood there like someone who had never needed permission to be beautiful.
"You'll fight us for him?" Melissa nudged me.
"Let me," I said. I pushed through, paid for an hour alone with him out of my own stubbornness and the new money in my hand.
I sat beside him, my chest tight, and then the bravest dumbest thing I ever did: I shoved a wad of bills into his coat and said, "Grayson, will you kiss me?"
He looked at the bills. He looked at me. He smiled in a way I had never earned. "Kiss me more, then," he said, and the music blurred.
He kissed me like someone being careful, like someone who had learned to keep his heart folded away. I clung to the edge of his shirt until my fingers ached. He tasted like mint and the quiet of a boy who did not belong to anyone.
After, when our mouths still remembered, I pressed him gently. "Come home with me."
He blinked, slow, like he had been trying to hold a thought inside. "I need a lot," he said matter-of-fact.
"That's fine," I said. "I can give."
"Well, then," he smiled a little, "day rate. One day at a time."
"One day is a start," I said, and I meant it.
The first morning at my café, he stood by the counter and customers stared. He did not need to do anything. He just stood in a white shirt and people's phones found him. He was quiet and good at small things: making tea, sweeping, tying aprons. But he kept away from real pushing, from the part of me that wanted everything. He would hold my hand but not sleep with me fully. He would cook and then step outside when it was time. He would kiss softly and then fold himself back into that hold of reserve.
One night, after a week of this strange gentle rhythm, he answered a call that froze the room.
"It is not good," he said into the phone, and then he left the apartment in a rush. He and I took a taxi to the hospital. I followed because I could not not follow him.
At the emergency room we waited. The fluorescent light stung. A doctor came out. "We did our best," he said softly.
Grayson ran. He pounded the corridor, then stopped by a door and turned, like a boy who had been taught to keep everything tidy. A woman came out on a stretcher. I saw her face and everything clicked—old gossip, whispered rumors. She was the woman people once pointed to and whispered, the woman who had been blamed for the formation of cruel stories. Grayson followed her into a room. I stood by the doorway and watched him lean over and hold her hand.
"Is she—?" I started.
Grayson did not answer me. The nurse said, "We need time here."
I did not leave.
Afterwards, when they covered her and the room felt empty, he stepped out like someone had taken a part of him away. He walked home with me in silence and that night said, "Will you still pay me one day?"
"Yes," I said, and meant it. I had been foolish to think money fixed everything. I gave him what I could without asking too many questions.
Weeks passed. He told me stories in a voice that seemed to crack only when he tried to hide. "She was my second mother," he said one night, lighting a cigarette for the first time. "She loved in a way that nobody could understand."
"Why did people hate her?" I asked.
"They did not hear how she loved," he said. "She did what she could. She saved me when I had no one."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I did not want you to be hurt by my life. I am a knot of things that could spill over and hurt you."
When he laughed, it sounded like a small apology. When he smiled, I could not count the times my heart stopped.
He taught me how to be small and brave at the same time.
"You should not work at KTV," I told him bluntly. "You are too beautiful for that."
He shrugged, like that explained everything. "Beauty does not pay for medicine," he said.
One morning he did not wake. I found him pale on the floor. "Grayson!" I shouted. I called an ambulance. The doctor looked grave and then the words fell like stones into my chest: "He has advanced stomach cancer."
He had known for a while.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I said when he opened his eyes. "Why didn't you ask for help?"
"Because I did not want to take your bright life," he said, smiling as if we were discussing the weather. "I thought I could spare you the falling."
"Do you love me?" I asked, because I needed the truth.
He reached and smoothed my hair. "I love you," he said simply. "You asked me to stay. I stayed."
He refused treatment at first because the doctors said it was too late. I sold small things to pay for whatever tests were left. I tried to buy time with numbers and doctors. The numbers did not bring him back.
In the quiet of the nights he would hold my hand and whisper, "Do not cry for me later."
"I will," I said.
"You will not let me go badly?" he asked.
"I will," I promised, though I did not know what that promise cost.
We had a day of ordinary light. He wanted it to be ordinary. He walked me to a supermarket and pushed the cart with his thin hands. "Buy something bright," he said, nodding at a jar of small blue flowers. "It will look like us in the sun."
We cooked dinner together. I spilled tears into the rice and pretended they were onion juices. "Stop that," he laughed, and we drank beer and soaked in the idea that this was enough.
At night he grew thin and his eyes hollowed. "Will you be all right?" he asked as if asking me the pattern of my future.
"I will be," I lied.
A week later, he left a letter on the table. "I will be back soon," I whispered at the empty white shirt on the chair.
The police called.
"Grayson is gone," the voice on the other end said. "We found him in a park. He took pills."
I ran to the station like a person who had split and scattered themselves down alleys. They gave me a bag with a folded shirt and a letter with his handwriting. "This is his last note," an officer said gently.
I remember the hospital's cold light and the way his face looked when they let me see him—so still, so neat.
I read the letter at night. He had written the truth in blunt strokes and gentle apologies. "You were my brightest thing," he told me. "I was cowardly. I did not want to steal your future. I wanted you to remember me as a warm day. Please don't let me steal your life."
I did not cry the letter open; I laughed at first. I remember that odd sound: the laugh of someone breaking.
Three years later, I dated a man who looked like Grayson at first glance. His name was Chance Conrad. He smiled the way Grayson had smiled in photos. I wanted to believe he would be kind. He was kind in small performative ways. He was the sort of man who could say everything and mean nothing.
I knew he was a player from the start. He was expert at smiling too much. He liked the right songs and the right jackets. He called me at odd hours with soft compliments. My friends warned me. "He is trouble," Jewel said.
"I like him," I said.
"Because he is like Grayson?" Melissa asked. "You are setting yourself up to get hurt."
I thought I was safe because I held the memory of Grayson like a lantern. But memory does not stop a heart from reaching out when someone kind appears in your path.
When I realized Chance had been seeing other women while he held my hand, I planned a birthday. I invited everyone I cared for. I made it simple: candles, my café closed for an evening, plates of the food Grayson used to cook for me. I wanted to be honest to myself and to feel safe.
On the night of my birthday, the café was lit like a warm chest. "You look beautiful," Chance said in that practiced voice.
He thought he had charm to spare. He made small jokes and leaned on me.
At the center of the night I stood, glass of tea in my hand. "I have something to say," I told the room. Chairs shuffled. "I want honesty here. No lies. Chance, come up."
He laughed nervously and came.
"Chance," I said, and I had rehearsed nothing. "Did you think I would not find out? Did you think the women you saw on weekday afternoons and late nights would not know your real name?"
He blinked. "What are you talking about?"
"Do you remember Jewel's friend Naomi?" I asked. "She took photos, Chance. She texted me a week ago. 'He left at midnight with the red scarf,' she wrote. 'His car is yours,' she added. She had screenshots. She had names. She had receipts."
The room exhaled. "What receipts?" Chance's voice trembled. He tried to redirect his eyes to mine like catching a coin mid-air.
"They are here," I said. I clicked my phone and projected images—screenshots of messages, dates, receipts from restaurants with his card. "Here is a message that says, 'See you at eleven, bring flowers.' Here is another woman, Ana, with the scarf you gave her last month."
He stammered. "Those are misunderstandings."
"Sit down and explain," I said.
He laughed, trying to recover, and in that laugh his mask dropped. "You're being dramatic," he said. "Do you really think—"
"Don't you dare," Jewel snapped from the back. "Don't you call her dramatic in front of these women."
"Let's talk outside," Chance muttered. He tried to take me by the wrist.
"No," I said clearly. "You will stand here and answer. This is public."
The café hummed. I had asked my staff to bring tea for everyone. They had phones out. The explanation had to be made before witnesses.
"Why are you doing this?" he demanded. "I thought—"
"You thought I wouldn't look?" I said. "You thought I was the kind of woman who would ignore what I saw?"
"I like you," he lied.
"Then why lie to me and her and the others?" I asked. "Do you think I don't know what it is to be loved honestly?"
He went through a lever of reactions all too fast: a flash of anger, a split-second denial, then the ugly peel of desperation. "I didn't mean—" he began, but the café had become a small courtroom, the air thick with phones and expectations.
A young barista, Susanne, stood and said, "He's the same with the influencer girls. They wait outside, he plays nice, but he always leaves in a different car."
"A confession," Jewel said, walking to the front. "Confess."
He tried to cover it with jokes, to flirt his way out, "It's all just—"
"No," I said softly. "This is the moment. We are all watching."
He shook, then slid. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
"I told you to say it to their faces," Melissa said. "Own it."
He turned red. I felt a small, terrible relief because he was unraveling in exactly the way a man who had practiced hiding must unravel.
"Was it names?" I asked.
"Yes," he whispered. "Names. Dates."
"Which one?" Jewel asked.
"All of them," he said.
At that confession, a few women gasped. Glasses clinked. A man in a corner of the café muttered, "What a pig."
I felt something in the room tilt. The people I loved were not silent; they were witnesses.
"People in this room," I said, and looked at every face I knew. "Have you seen him with other women?"
Hands lifted. A few nodded. A woman at the window, Emma, said, "He told me he was single. He asked me to the theater and then never called again."
"He said he liked me for my career," another woman said.
"You have proof?" Chance asked, a plea now in his mouth.
"Cheap receipts," I said. "Phone logs. Screenshots. But you don't need proof. You have the way you look at all of us."
"Come on," he sneered. "You're making a scene."
"If by 'scene' you mean showing the truth, then yes. I am making a scene," I said.
He took a step toward the door, his jaw set to run. At the threshold, he stopped. He turned because he saw the phones held up—some were filming, some were ready to call people.
"You think exposing me will fix anything?" he spat.
"It will make it stop," I said. "It will make you have to face what you did."
He tried to strike back with charm again, "Let's just go outside," he whispered. "Let's talk someplace private."
"No," I said, my voice steady. "Not private."
"You're being cruel," he said and for the first time I saw fear, real and thin.
"Maybe I am," I said. "But I would rather be cruel for a night than die soft for years."
He went through denial—"You are crazy"—then bargaining, "I can change," then anger—he raised his voice like a man trying to beat down a window. Finally, the last stage: collapse. He slumped into a chair like someone who had been hit and lost.
Around him, people whispered. Someone clucked their tongue. A mother in the back shook her head. One woman took a photo and uploaded it with the caption: "Not the kind of 'romance' I want in my life."
"Get out of my café," I said quietly, and it was the worst and best ruling I'd delivered.
He tried to stand, staggering, as if the floor had become a trap. "You can't do this to me," he cried. "Who will hire me now?"
"People who deserve you won't hire you," I said. "The rest won't want to look at you in the same way."
He begged, then tried to plead with my friends. "Please, don't ruin my life," he said. "I'll make it up."
Jewel walked up and took his phone. "Your phone has pictures," she said. "You thought you'd hide them. You handed them to the wrong crowd."
He reached for the phone and she snapped it to her chest. "You gave me gifts," she said. "Turns out they were cheap and easily duplicated."
"A woman called Ana just texted," Susanne said loudly. "She wants to know why he didn't call after last Thursday. She forwarded me a screenshot."
The crowd's murmurs turned to small cheers. "Good," someone said. "Tired of men like him."
He started to cry. It was not the kind of apology that mends. It was the ugly show of someone who had lost everything he thought he could hide.
"Leave," I said. "And never come back."
He stumbled out into the night, phone in hand, and the door closed behind him like a verdict. Outside, someone hissed at him from across the street. A neighbor took a picture. A woman called after him, "Don't ever come near her again!"
He did not return.
The public unmasking lasted more than five hundred words of exposure because I wanted every line of his lies to be seen. His face changed from confident to guilty to pleading to hollow. The room watched. They talked. They recorded. People who had idolized charm as a currency turned on him. He was left in the bright street alone, the record of his actions uploaded to the cloud. The future he hoped to buy with charm had been spent.
After the night, I sat with my friends. "Are you okay?" Jewel asked.
"No," I said. "But I'm better than I was."
"Good," Melissa said. "You stood up. That counts."
We drank tea and ate slices of cake Grayson once liked. "He would have liked this," I said, soft.
"You did what Grayson would have done," Susanne said. "He would have wanted you safe."
It felt like that. It felt like I had protected something Grayson had loved: honesty. He had kept his secrets to spare me. I had kept mine to survive. Now the world had turned and given me a sharp, honest edge.
Years pass. I keep the photograph of that sunset kiss with Grayson as my phone wallpaper for a long time, then I change it to a silly picture of cartoon cats on the grass. I go to work. I make coffee. I smile for customers. I remember the way Grayson held my hand and the way he said, "You are special" in a note he left me. I remember how he wanted me to be brave enough to love again.
Sometimes on nights when the wind smells like autumn leaves, I see him in the crowd—someone wearing a white shirt, hair smoothing into place. I look, and I smile, and I let the memory bring warmth, not pain.
One night I dreamed he walked up to me in the dream and said, "Alma, I'm leaving, but it's okay. Live."
"Okay," I answered. "I will."
He walked away smiling. I stayed and kept the café open.
I sold small things and kept the café in the city. I planted a small blue jar of flowers by the window. If anyone asked I said, "They are for the boy who loved white shirts."
The End
— Thank you for reading —