Sweet Romance15 min read
You Kissed the Wrong Boy — and I Liked It
ButterPicks15 views
I never meant to be the center of attention.
"I told you, if they put us on the big screen, you have to kiss him," Laura said, voice high with the kind of dare that lives on weekends and cell phone records.
"I said no," I whispered, because the idea of kissing Hassan Moller on a stadium stage had lived in my head for three years like a saved song: replay, pause, replay. "What if he refuses?"
"Then you play along," Kendall said. "It's five seconds. Smile and take it."
The camera found us sooner than my courage did. Suddenly the lights were a star-bath and the whole crowd was a single living thing that turned to us. The rules were silly: two people on-screen get a kiss. The crowd always loved it.
"Hassan," I mouthed, because all my words were stolen by the lights. He did not smile. He did not move.
"Go on," a dozen voices around me urged.
I lowered my chin, imagining what it would be like. "Just this once," I told myself. "Just this once and three years fold into one fast silver moment."
Hassan's face was a calm wall. He looked at me with a softness I had mistaken for reciprocity until he said, "Janiyah, I think of you like my sister."
My chest broke. "Sister?" It sounded like someone out loud had stamped 'impossible' on the three years I'd been collecting small, private treasures — his laugh, the way he fixed my lab reports, the morning texts I pretended were accidental.
I blinked. The lights hummed. My cheeks were hot and wet. Now every shout from the stands turned into a small, cruel bell.
Then I did a thing I had never practiced in my head.
I turned to the guy beside me — the school bully, the rumor-king, the one everyone pretended to fear — and I kissed him.
It was not planned. It was not pretty. It was adrenaline and the sound of my own heartbeat. The stadium roared. People yelled. My whole body went fizz.
Diego Clark’s mouth was warm and rough. He tasted like cigarettes and some strong spice. He pushed me away before I could decide whether to be mortified or thrilled.
"Get up," he snapped. "Or do you want to sleep on the stadium floor?"
I fumbled to stand. He scooped me like I weighed two pounds and set me back down as if he had set a rare thing on a shelf.
"Your seat," he said, annoyance flaring. "And that seat is busted now, so we'll call it even."
He walked away like someone who walked through small storms for sport.
*
The next morning, my face was plastered all over the school's online confession board. Whoever posted it claimed to be Diego's girlfriend and used that to crucify me for being "the loud kind who kisses for show."
Hassan sent me screenshots.
"Why would you do that?" he texted.
"Because you wouldn't kiss me," I typed back, hands shaking.
He answered with an ellipsis. An ellipsis that felt like a judge's gavel.
"I didn't know you liked him," Laura said when I slunk back into our dorm.
"I liked him," I snapped. "I still like him, obviously."
Kendall laughed and then, with more softness than I expected, said, "You were brave."
Brave was not how I'd describe it later. Embarrassed, reckless, heartbroken — yes. Brave was reserved for people who chose to be brave every day, not me, who chose to act when my back was already against glass.
Letters appeared in the online threads. Rumors. Snickers.
Diego's "girlfriend" — an anonymous account — announced she had broken up with him because "that kiss was a betrayal." I stared at the words and felt a slow, cold thread wind through me. He had used me; for what? A petty divorce notice on a gossip wall?
"Come to 208," Diego said later, plugging a plastic hotel key into my hair like some absurd feather. "We'll talk proper. Bring the tissue."
I took the card like I was accepting a dare I had no right to refuse.
*
When I arrived at 208, the door opened to a dim room that smelled faintly of alcohol and cologne. Four boys were playing something that looked like poker. Diego was on the couch, half-asleep, a towel over his shoulders like a discarded hero's cape.
He looked at me with eyes that never seemed to sleep. "You came."
"I thought you'd want your stuff back," I said, stupidly. "The T-shirt. You threw it at me."
He blinked. "I didn't throw it. I offered it."
"I know," I said, because the truth was already sharp and bleeding. "Sorry I... caused trouble."
"You did," he said simply. "But trouble is entertaining. Sit."
They made me sit. The boys left the room in turns, leaving Diego and me with a stack of cheap cards and a radio that was too loud in the far hallway.
"Play," he said. "If you lose, you stay longer."
I tried to refuse but other boys had already left me in the game. My hands shook. He sat so close I could see the freckles at the bridge of his nose.
At one moment, to make me stop complaining, he leaned in until his lips were an inch from mine. Smoke puffed between us. "You look cheap when you try too hard," he murmured and then, when I flinched, he only smiled and pushed a cigarette toward me.
"You could have been more honest," I said after, while we were the only two in the room and the others had disappeared into the night like props.
"Honest?" He blew smoke out slowly. "You kissed me because you wanted to move Hassan off his high horse."
"Was that so obvious?" I asked, surprised to hear disappointment catch in my voice.
"Maybe." He shrugged. "Maybe you should have asked for what you wanted instead."
I looked at him. "And what did you want?"
He tossed the cigarette away. "Someone who doesn't cry on my watch. Someone who does something dumb and keeps doing it. Someone who can handle my bad jokes."
"I didn't think you wanted a 'girlfriend' at all," I said. "I thought you were the kind of story girls told to warn each other away."
Diego gave a short bark of a laugh. "Then why did you kiss me?"
"Because I was tired of being plain," I said, shock at my own honesty. "Because I wanted to make one thing happen. Because Hassan refuses to see me."
Diego's eyes softened for a heartbeat. "Fine. You owe me a girlfriend."
"Excuse me?" I pulled back. "You said that?"
"Yeah. You kissed me. Someone had to pay. You could be the payment."
"No." I snapped. "I won't be anyone's payment."
He grinned. "No, not like that. You and I — practice. You learn to be someone who can take up space. I learn to not ruin people. We'll be... companions."
"Companions?" The word sat oddly but also dangerously safe.
"Room card 208," he said, tapping the cheap plastic. "Come by. I'll teach you how to fight a little. How to say no in a way that makes people hear you. How to not crumble when Hassan decides he likes someone else."
It sounded like a joke. Or a challenge. Or an offer.
"I won't be your toy," I told him.
"You won't," he promised. "You will be my practice."
*
A lot of small things became big things.
There were three moments that made my chest go thin and electric in a way I learned to call "heart." The first was when he ignored me at a party and then, at the end of the night, walked back through a noisy room and pressed a towel to my head when I banged it on a doorframe.
"Are you okay?" he asked, the crowd a roar around us.
"I'm fine," I said, and he didn't believe me. He didn't smile. He looked like someone who saved what he cared for in pockets.
The second moment came on a rainy afternoon. I had a cold I didn't tell anyone about. I forgot a textbook in the common room and ran back in my wet shoes. Diego handed me his jacket without a word and when I wrapped it around myself it smelled like denim and evening. He didn't look at me like everyone else looked at me. He looked at me as if I already belonged somewhere in the shadows beside him.
The third was the first time he smiled at me for no reason at all. We were in the student lounge; a group of boys joked loudly and a girl hit one on the arm and he laughed. Then he turned and saw me watching. He grinned, a rose of mischief and something else that made my stomach do a little flip.
"You're ridiculous," he said softly, so only I could hear.
"I know," I said.
"Good," he said. "Keep being ridiculous."
Those were small, private moments scattered like breadcrumbs through days that still held stings. Hassan was distant and careful. He answered my messages in a way that always felt like a closed door with a polite note pinned to it.
"Janiyah," he said sometimes. "I like you. I just don't like you like that."
"That kills people," I'd reply. "You're allowed to be honest."
"I'm honest." He would always say that. And the silence would say more.
*
Beatrice Kato noticed me when things got loud.
She was everything everyone envied: grace, beauty, the kind of smile that had an audience. She had been Hassan's golden distant object for years, the reason he stayed up late working and the reason other girls lowered their voices at parties. When she looked at me, the eyes were flat, like someone checking a display window.
"You think you can be his rival?" she asked once, when she and I ended up at the book return at the same time.
"I was never his rival," I said.
"You weren't?" She laughed a laugh that cut glass. "You kissed Diego Clark. You made a show about love and humiliation. You think that makes you interesting? You think that makes you worthy of him?"
"You don't get to decide who is worthy," I said.
"I get to decide a lot of things," she replied. "Including when the show ends."
She walked away, and that should have been it. But Beatrice had a way of arranging people's lives like pieces on a board, and she was very good at chess.
*
At first, Beatrice spread little things: an offhanded text to Hassan that painted me as loud, a rumor whispered to girls in the lab that I dressed badly. Hassan folded into each accusation with the tired look of a man who had rehearsed disappointment.
Then, more was revealed. A message thread leaked, supposedly from me, that suggested I had been using Hassan to get close to Beatrice's circle of friends. I never had such a message, but it changed the shape of things. Hassan's kindness became a brittle thing.
"Why would you do this?" he asked one night, after Beatrice had sat beside him at a campus club. His voice was small.
"I didn't," I said. "Why would I do a thing like that?"
He didn't say it was impossible. He only said, "It matches."
The smell of betrayal made a small iron in my chest go cold. Diego watched all this with a folded expression and did something he had not done before: he put his hand on my knee in a crowded cafeteria and squeezed.
"Don't believe rumors," he said, low enough that only I could hear. "You are ridiculous. Keep it."
His squeeze was not a grand declaration. It was a fistful of steadiness. I clung to it.
*
The punishment came in public.
It was what I never wanted — a confrontation at the spring sports award assembly. The auditorium smelled of cheap polish and too much perfume. The lights were bright like surgery. People in the stands felt like a forest of faces.
Beatrice was there, immaculate, with an army of friends who filmed everything. Hassan stood opposite, palms in his pockets, as if he had stepped into a waiting room and not a life-changing moment.
I stood near the edge of the stage holding a folded sheet of printed messages I had collected in the last two days. They were saved texts, screenshots, time stamps. I was shaking and my hands were cold but my voice didn't break.
"Everyone," I said, stepping into the light when the announcer's attention wandered. "I need five minutes."
"You're making a scene," someone hissed from the crowd.
"I'm making truth," I answered. "If you will hear me."
Diego's friends were at the back, a chorus of quiet encouragements. Hassan's face was unreadable. Beatrice's smile was stable, like a painting.
"I will show you who sent the messages," I said. "I will show you who lied."
I pressed play on a small recorder and the auditorium hummed. I read aloud screenshots where Beatrice had instructed a friend to fabricate a screenshot and then seed it to accounts. I had timestamps. I had witness statements from two pages of people who had seen her do it. When I spoke, I kept my sentences short and the evidence longer.
At first, Beatrice's face was incredulous. "You're lying," she said, voice high and then brittle.
"I would like to see you prove that." My voice steadied. I had practiced breathing for this exact moment; the breathing kept my mouth from trembling.
She lashed out. "You think you can blackmail me? You stole my man. You ruined my reputation."
"You lied," I replied. "Not the other way around."
Then Hassan stood and did something that changed the atmosphere from one of a private quarrel to a public reckoning.
He looked at Beatrice. "Is this true?" he asked.
Her smile cracked. "I—" She turned to her friends as if she could find a script they'd rehearsed for betrayal.
"Beatrice," Hassan said, and his voice had that quality of a verdict. "Is this true?"
She lunged for the lie and knocked over a microphone, a graceless, angry move. The auditorium watched like it was an animal at the edge of a cliff.
At that moment, Diego stood up. His voice carried. "This isn't about who kissed who," he said. "This is about someone who decides other people's feelings for them. This is about a person who uses lies like tools."
The crowd shifted. Phones raised. Murmurs swelled into a loud tide.
I read the final message aloud. It was a recorded confession to fabricating the screenshots and to directing a friend to post them. The room went strangely quiet.
Beatrice's face shifted through stages like weather — surprise, then red-hot anger, then an attempt at denial. "You can't do this," she said. "You— you will make me look awful."
"You already did," Hassan answered softly. Then to the crowd: "I was wrong. I believed her. I didn't ask. I should have."
The auditorium broke into noise. Some students booed. Some students started clapping. Others recorded everything. Those who had whispered behind their fans now had a live piece of scandal to replay.
Beatrice's reaction changed in real time. First, she tried to collect herself. "This is— false. You're lying." The tone shifted into bargaining. "It was a stupid joke. We didn't mean anything. People do things. Why make such a big deal?"
"Because it hurt," Hassan said. "It hurt me. It hurt her."
He looked at me and then at Beatrice. "And I am sorry I let it. I'm sorry I judged based on a voice in my ear and not what was real."
That was the sting that made the room tilt in my favor. Applause trickled into a wave. People stood. Phones flashed. Teachers scowled. Beatrice's friends whispered and then stepped away. She went from being the center to being a small, isolated face on many screens. She tried to maintain her composure, but tears — real or calculated — leaked down her cheeks.
Her reaction spiraled. She denied, then accused me of ruining her life. She demanded privacy. "You can't do this to me," she repeated, voice breaking. Then the crowd started to chant, softly at first: "Liar. Liar."
"Stop," a teacher called, but it was too late.
The crowd's mood hardened. People recorded her every expression. Students who had once nodded at her compliments now watched coldly. A girl in the front row stood up and shouted, "You set her up!" Another student took a photo and posted it live. Comments exploded across social media.
Beatrice crumpled, not just verbally but physically. She sank into her chair and covered her face. We could see the change: the carefully kept posture gave way to the raw tremor of someone who had gone from power to exposure. Her friends left, one by one, not making eye contact.
The punishment was public and immediate. Not legal, not institutional — simply the natural justice of a crowd that had watched her wield lies until she was cornered by truth. She tried to bargain, she tried to flip the script again, to say it was all a misunderstanding, but the evidence was iron.
"How could you?" she panted, looking at me. "How could you show this now?"
"Because," I said, "I was done being ashamed when I didn't deserve it."
The audience reaction shifted like weather. Shock turned to whispers of approval. Some people clapped. Some stood. Others recorded Beatrice's collapse, but what they captured was not just her fall — it was her unraveling.
Afterward she called for forgiveness, but in the open-air court of teenagers and their feeds it was too late. People who had admired her now looked through her. They saw the strings she had pulled, the web she'd woven. She tried to salvage face at the podium, but reporters and instant commentators were already lining up in the hallway.
The punishment scene lasted long enough to be consequential. We watched Beatrice's mask fall, then watched her try to put it back on. She moved through the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, shame. Spectators whispered and recorded and judged. Some of them offered her quiet comfort later, but the public humiliation had already done a thing that would not unmake itself overnight.
Hassan walked away from her then with a face that had been altered by truth. Not heroic — just sober and tired. He came to me later, in the quiet after the storm.
"I'm sorry," he said without dramatic flair. "I didn't want it to be like this."
"Neither did I," I said.
He looked at me as if the arc of things was new to him. "I was wrong to assume. I'm sorry I hurt you."
The apology had weight because it was honest and because it came after the shame had widened into a valley. He stayed away for a week. Many people expected fireworks. We both learned that exposure has a cost: for the liar, the cost is reputation; for the exposed, the cost is trust.
Beatrice's public fall changed how the school treated her. People who had said "she's perfect" now adopted a new caution. Teachers took note. Friends who had followed her based on charm now spoke less. She did not disappear, but she was smaller in the social field. Her reaction moved through the expected stages: dramatic denial on social posting, then a quiet withdrawal, then a few attempts to reconcile that foundered on the memory of what had happened.
I understood the rules of punishment then: not all punishments are neat. They don't fix every wrong. But the public unspooling of what she'd done made her consequences real and immediate: people no longer granted her the benefit of the doubt.
*
Diego's punishment, if one could call it that, was different.
He had always been the dangerous one in the hallway. But when Beatrice's plot unspooled, he made himself a quiet sentinel. He stopped flirting as loudly. He stopped playing with people's hearts as trophy games. He walked with a slight slack in his jaw, like someone who had been forced to look at his reflection and didn't like what he saw.
"You should have let me handle it differently," he said one night, sitting on the dorm steps while the campus slept.
"How?" I asked.
"By not letting it get to you so much." He turned his head. "By not giving them the chance."
"You mean, don't feel?" I asked.
"Sometimes, yes." He ran a hand through his hair. "Sometimes not caring is a skill."
"I like that you care," I said.
He looked at me then and the moon was a thin coin. "Then don't ruin it for me."
He wasn't mean about it. He was careful. We built a small contract out of awkwardness and honesty: I would not pretend to be someone else; he would not make others suffer so he could feel invulnerable. We had no promises for the future. We had small truce lines.
*
After the assembly everything became a little quieter. Hassan and Beatrice did the polite dance of lapse and re-evaluation. He stopped sending me messages with ellipses. We started to breathe a little easier.
Diego and I kept our strange arrangement. It wasn't always comfortable. He still had a temper. He still smoked. He still said things that made me bristle. But he also did small, secret things that I began to treasure.
"You're late," he said one afternoon when I came to the gym because I had promised to try and not be fragile.
"Traffic," I lied.
"Traffic can't explain the lipstick," he muttered, then smiled. "But it's a nice color. Suit you."
He stood close enough that I could smell the faint of smoke and something like cedar. He took my hand casually and helped me up onto a set of bleachers to watch his practice. The easy intimacy did more than any staged kiss. It made my chest a place for new rumors of its own: not the kind that eat you, but the kind that whisper and keep you warm.
One evening, months later, Hassan found me at the library. "Do you want to go get a coffee?" he asked, internal thinking loud in his face.
"Are you asking me out?" I teased, because it was a soft, brave scent.
"No," he said, a little too quickly. "I mean — yes. I mean, if you want."
We walked and talked and said things that were honest and small. "You look different," he told me, once.
"Diego teaches me how to be loud," I said.
"He notices the small things," Hassan said with the look of someone who was learning to read people differently. "He pays attention differently."
He paused. "I didn't understand before. I'm sorry."
"Sorry accepted," I said, and meant it, because the past had been a school of its own lessons.
Diego and I did not go from zero to one hundred. We made messy, honest progress. He surprised me with a sloppy, cake-store cupcake the day I passed a practice exam. He showed up at a friend’s recital and pretended to hate every minute. He held my hand when a rumor rolled back around in the fall and held it as if it was his.
People still talked. But the hot, painful gossip had cooled into something like background noise. When Beatrice returned to classes she was quieter. Her friends were thinner in number. She would sometimes watch me across the quad, and our eyes would lock with no words exchanged. In time, even she stopped looking like a villain and more like someone who had made a mistake that cost her social capital.
Punishment did not remake anyone overnight. It only marked a change in how we all moved through each other. I had been publically humiliated once; now I had publically defended myself. Diego had been a rumor and then a shield. Hassan had been a brother and then a mirror.
And me? I learned to breathe through the big lights.
*
Months after the assembly, in winter when the basketball court lights threw hard diamonds across the snow, Diego and I sat on the bench and he reached into his pocket for something that made my heart beat hard.
"Remember 208?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, because I could still remember the cheap plastic and the way he had leaned against the door.
He grinned and took out the hotel key, now scuffed. "You kept it."
"I didn't throw it out. You told me to wear it like a feather and I did."
He looked at me for a long second, then pushed the key into my palm. "Keep it. For luck. For practice."
I looked at the faded numbers and then at his face. He was no longer the boy who used people for sport. He was a person with small changes.
"Why did you help me?" I asked.
"Because you kissed me," he said simply. "And it annoyed me in the best way. You forced me to care."
We laughed. The court, the cold, the distant hum of other lives — they felt like edges we could stand on together.
"Don't expect grand things," he warned.
"I don't," I said. "But I'll expect honest things."
He leaned forward and kissed me. It wasn't a dramatic stadium kiss. It was the kind of kiss someone gives after they've done the real work: honest, steady, a little impatient.
When we pulled away, I held the scuffed key in my hand like a small promise and a ridiculous souvenir. It was cheap plastic, but it had our story, the night of lights, the assembly, and the thin, brave line of living through things.
"Keep it," he said. "And if anyone asks, tell them 208 is always reserved for ridiculous things."
I laughed. "Ridiculous things," I repeated.
"Like you," he said softly.
"Like me," I agreed, and then added, "Like you who taught me how to be less afraid when the lights find us."
We walked back toward the dorms hand in hand, and the world kept moving — messy, loud, and yet somehow kinder.
The End
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