Sweet Romance13 min read
You Were My Starry Sea
ButterPicks13 views
I never meant to see them that night.
"I told you I'd be back," I murmured to myself as I pushed open the door to the KTV room, the music a thick wall I had to step through.
The room smelled like cheap perfume and cola. My steps faltered when I saw Giovanni Baker pressed to Martina Christiansen in the corner, their faces close, the world around them blurred by music and light. Giovanni's hand cupped Martina's cheek. Martina's eyes were half-closed, cheeks warm with a color I hid for years.
"I—" I stopped. My confession, rehearsed so many times, evaporated.
Giovanni and I had grown up on the same street, the house across from mine. He had been my brother in everything but name. I had planned my confession for after the college entrance exam, a single line to give shape to the years of quietness in my chest. Instead, I walked into a scene that rewrote everything.
I closed the door and left.
01
That night, after checking the lab one last time, I locked the door and my phone buzzed.
"Beth? What are you doing?" Martina's voice sounded thin through the line. We had been desk mates in high school and had stayed close, the kind of friends who knew each other's tea orders and dark circles.
"I'm just leaving the lab," I told her, tucking my book to my chest as I walked toward the stairwell. The building felt hollow at ten p.m.
"I feel like you all are so busy. It's like I'm the only one with time to waste," she sighed.
"Soft princess, you chose physics for a reason," I teased, and she laughed, the sound soft and bright. We fell into our easy rhythm.
"Who are you talking to?" a voice interjected from behind me, and my chest tightened. Giovanni's voice at the end of the line—
"Giovanni?" Martina's tone lifted with the warmth that made my stomach hollow.
"He just got off late," she said. "He has to go to something after, sorry. We'll talk later, okay?"
The line went dead in my hand. I froze. Four months of silence had stretched between us and I hadn't noticed until that phone call.
04
I lay awake that night with the phone warm under my palm. Giovanni and I had been friends since the sandbox days, passing notes and bothering each other until we learned to read each other's faces without words. He had been always there, except now he wasn't.
I opened our chat and stared at the last message I had sent him two months ago.
"Congrats on the scholarship," I had typed and then hesitated before sending. His silence since then felt like a sudden cold room.
I dragged my thumb over his contact and imagined the way his mouth had moved on that cold afternoon when he talked about which school he planned to attend. I had thought I meant more to him than a childhood habit. That night at the KTV had proven otherwise.
02
The next morning my card was missing at the lab door. I searched like a distracted animal and nearly missed the hand that slid in to open the door for me.
"Thanks, senior," I said, cheeks hot.
He smiled in reply and his face fit into my memory like a new photograph. He was tall and lean, the kind of look that made people assume he lived in other people's stories. He handed me the card I had dropped.
"This has your name on it," he said, voice low. "You should be more careful."
"I... I must have dropped it last night."
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Bethany Chaney."
"Valentino Aguilar," he answered, and the name seemed to fall into the stairwell like a note. "I'll add you on WeChat. You owe me a milk tea."
I laughed at the awkwardness and left the lab with my card and a small, confusing warmth.
05
Valentino wasn't a senior at all. He was the substitute instructor for our lab course, hired temporarily while Professor Crew Petrov was on a research exchange. That afternoon, I watched him stand at the front of the lecture hall, the room pin-drop quiet when he began to speak.
"Hello, I'm Valentino," he said. "We'll take this course through to the end of the term together."
"You're the one who found my card?" I whispered that night, embarrassed to have misread his role.
"Yes," he answered, not unkind. "You can call me Val."
He stepped down from the podium after class and for a moment his eyes caught mine with a small, rare smile that set something light and new in me.
"I brought you something to recover," he said once, later, when I had caught a cold and tried to play it off. "Some medicine. It's at the dorm desk."
"What? Why?" I asked, because he did not owe me anything at all.
"Because you sneezed in class and looked miserable," he said simply. "I don't like it when people are miserable."
"You have no right to be this kind," I murmured. It was, in the smallest, truest way, the first time anyone had called me out of my own defenses just because they could.
06
Valentino's presence came like sunlight after a gray rain. He taught like he breathed—clear and steady—and his tone quietly demanded attention without loudness. He was thirty or something; younger than you'd expect a teacher to be, old enough to be careful with people's feelings.
He sent me messages checking if I had slept, left a small packet of cold medicine at the dorm desk, pulled me out of self-pity and the trap of the KTV memory. Oddly, when I received his texts, my chest would lift. He was neither dramatic nor flashy; he was unexpectedly gentle.
One night, he asked me to dinner. I told him no at first—boundaries, propriety—but my stubbornness melted like frost. "Just milk tea. If I survive, I'll repay you," I told him.
"Deal," he replied. "Make it quick; I have evening research, but I can spare thirty minutes."
He waited in his car, coat unbuttoned, and when I slid into the passenger seat he glanced over with a brightness that made me forget the world for a second.
"Catch up on sleep while I drive," he said, and when he reached for the knob to fasten my seatbelt I realized he always thought of the smallest comforts.
07
The weeks became a quiet miracle. Valentino took me to the city observatory one night. "I want you to see the real stars," he said, like a promise.
He led me through the dark halls, past the sleeping exhibits, to a telescope that swallowed the sky. He adjusted the lens and held my hand so I could steady myself.
"I can see the moon's valleys," I breathed.
"You're looking at the same pieces of sky I grew up with," he said. "Remember that everything you worry about is a speck to the universe. But to me, the fact that you worry matters."
He surprised me then. He was not just a good teacher; he was warm in a way that made my ribs slacken.
"Why me?" I asked later, when we sat side by side and the city's glow looked like a distant nebula.
"Because when I met you in the lab that first night," Valentino said, "you kept working past everyone else. There's a gravity to people like you. I wanted to know where that would pull me."
The words were dangerous and safe all at once.
08
The three of them—Giovanni, Martina, and I—drifted apart like leaves torn from the same branch. Giovanni and Martina made a life together of small rituals. He fed her, he walked with her, he laughed with her in a way I had once thought I shared.
When Martina confessed, months later, the way she had manipulated things to keep Giovanni—that she had used me unknowingly—my world narrowed to a pinprick.
"I only wanted to keep him," she said, in that low voice I knew so well. "I called you that night because I wanted you to leave him alone. I thought if I made you think they were together, you'd go away."
"Why would you do that?" I asked, because the simplest question was a battering ram for the truth.
"Because I was scared you'd take him from me," she admitted. "I couldn't let go."
That moment in the café, the sunlight between us like a revelation, she looked small, truly small. Her confession landed and did not redeem the wound.
I said nothing and left. Forgiveness tasted like something borrowed and thin; I did not offer it.
09
Valentino was not impatient for romance. He never barged into my life demanding belonging. He asked, he waited, he showed up in small, unmistakable ways—bringing a blanket to a lecture on a cold day, tucking a cup of tea into my hands when my throat hurt, teaching me to observe the world like a physicist and live like a person in love with it.
"You're different around me," he admitted one night, fingers tracing the rim of my coffee cup.
"How am I different?" I asked, and his eyes softened.
"You laugh openly," he said. "You look at the world like it's a puzzle that is worth solving, but you also let yourself be undone by beauty. That mix is rare."
I swallowed. "You deserve someone more ordinary."
"Don't be ridiculous," he replied, and for the first time he smiled at me in a way that made my knees forget they existed. "I want you, Beth."
Heart moments came like punctuation in a long sentence of quiet affection. He smiled when I was sulking and made it feel like sunlight breaking a winter day. He pulled his jacket over me when the wind surprised us at the observatory. Once, in a crowded corridor, our fingers brushed and he squeezed, a small anchor.
10
The summer arrived. Valentino's job demanded travel. Professor Crew Petrov called me into his office with a strange gravity.
"Bethany," he said, a smile cracked with pride. "We have an opportunity to recommend you for a research program in America. Three years. It's a big leap."
I heard my chest fill with air and then go thin. Three years away from everything. I thought of Valentino's hand; I thought of Giovanni waiting somewhere with a tired look.
"What do you think?" he asked.
"It's everything," I said.
"Then go," he urged. "We'll all support you. Go see the stars up close."
Valentino, when I told him, did not hide his smile or his fear. "Go," he said. "I'll come see you. I will."
11
Before I left, the fractures stitched themselves into a new pattern. Martina had told me the truth; Giovanni had confessed at the doorstep and then gone quiet; he pleaded with me one morning in front of my dorm.
"Beth," he said, voice thick. "I can't stop thinking about you. Please—"
"You have someone else," I answered, and his shoulders curled like a bird crushed by wind.
"I don't want to be selfish," he said. "I'll end it."
"Then end it before you step on anyone else," I replied coldly. "I loved you once, but I will not be the place where you stop being a coward."
He left like someone wrenched from a rope. I don't know if he ever learned to forgive himself.
12
I left for the States with Valentino's hand in mine and with Professor Crew Petrov's recommendation stamped in my file. The plane took the night sky like a secret; I flew toward a future that was mine.
When the work at the lab grew quieter in the evenings, I would call Valentino and listen to his small routines. "I saw a comet tonight," he told me once. "Made me want to be a better person for you."
"I don't need you to fix anything," I said, voice thick.
"You don't know, Beth. I want to try anyway."
He kept his promises. He came to see me on breaks, he stood by my decisions, and when I once dreaded the distance between us, he learned to bridge it.
13
Years passed and things folded themselves into a life I had not drawn on paper but had slowly come to inhabit: research, deadlines, telescopes, late-night talks and the gentle domesticities of a shared life. Valentino proposed in private—no grand gestures, only a small ring he had designed himself, a simple question, and me answering yes between tears and laughter.
He had a way of making the universe feel small enough to hold us both.
We set a date. The day arrived like any other weather shifting its mood—bright and waiting.
14
Martina came to the wedding.
I had expected silence or absence, not the sudden gossip that formed like storm clouds when she stepped into the hall. She wore a dress that was all knife edges and apologies. She approached with hands that trembled.
"Beth," she said, and the room seemed to hush, the wedding music caught mid-breath. "I—"
I felt the gaze of everyone I knew land on her and then on me: school friends, lab mates, a dozen faces I had not seen since the first heartbreak. Giovanni was not in the front row. No, he wasn't brave enough for the story he had written.
The rules of fairness were not on my side. The rule I had been given, written in the marrow of every betrayal I had experienced, was to make truth visible when lies had been the tool. I decided then not to punish in spite, but to show what had been hidden.
"Please," she began, voice small. "I want to speak."
The murmurs grew like ocean waves.
15
The punishment had to be public. It had to have witnesses. I had rehearsed nothing. I had only the cold, clear memory of the night at the KTV, the lies that followed, the ways she'd pushed me into the dark. I also had Valentino, steady and sure at my side, and a room full of people who had once been part of our map.
"Everyone," I said, voice ringing clearer than I expected. "Martina told me something once she thought I should know. She told me then that she had been trying to keep Giovanni away from me—by making me believe he had chosen her."
A rustle. A dozen disbelieving faces.
"I asked her, later, if that was true," I continued. "She said yes."
Martina's hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes darted like a trapped bird.
"I don't want to shame you," I told her quietly. "I want to tell the truth."
"What truth?" she asked, not understanding the blade she had walked into.
I turned and asked Valentino for his phone. He handed it to me without hesitation. Valentino had the long patience for small details that makes for fairness in large things. He had kept records of the last year: messages, exchanges, the ways Martina had tried to spin a tale to protect a love that was never pure.
"I have a few messages," I said. "Not to shame you, but so people here can decide what to think and see by themselves."
She looked like she would topple.
"Why are you doing this?" she whispered. "This is—"
"This is public because your choices were public," I said. "You used my silence as a weapon. You used my friendship as a shield. People trusted you."
I scrolled through the messages that showed manipulation: texts to Giovanni asking him to be distant with me, screenshots where she coached stories to make me leave them alone, a voice note where she confessed to deliberately calling me on the night to confuse.
The crowd leaned in. Faces shifted from polite curiosity to shock to anger. A friend near the back—Elise Bean—covered her mouth. My father, who sat near the front, frowned as if he'd been betrayed by a family member.
"What do you want me to do?" Martina asked, the question small as an apology.
"I want everyone to hear the truth," I said. "I want you to say it in front of them and tell them everything. If you want to be forgiven, you will have to show you can hold the truth."
For a minute, there was silence so thick I could hear my own breath. Then Martina began to tremble.
"I—" she stammered. "I did call you. I thought if I made you believe Giovanni and I were together, you'd stop—"
"You lied about my life for your gain," I said. "You read my silence and turned it into an advantage."
The first reaction was a gasp, then two, then a chorus of quiet voices. Someone whispered, "Why would she—?"
She changed expression, from guilt to defiance to fear. "I— I was scared," she said. "I loved him and I didn't want to lose him. I thought if I kept him close, he would never leave."
"At whose expense?" someone called out from the crowd. A few people laughed in disbelief. A girl wiped her eyes.
Martina's voice collapsed into a plea. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
But the apology would not be the end. The punishment was not only about words; it was about shift and witness.
A friend of ours, Jason Beatty, who had been there the night of the confessions years ago, stepped forward.
"She lied to you," Jason said. "She lied to more than one of us. I remember the confusion, the way she manipulated the truth to keep Giovanni where she wanted him. That night it wasn't just a mistake."
Martina's face drained of color. The crowd began to murmur, the gears of gossip grinding loud and hot. Some people took out their phones. Others looked away, uncomfortable with the spectacle they'd been pulled into.
"I did not think it would hurt her this much," Martina sobbed. "I was selfish."
Someone snapped a picture. A few people recorded a short clip. There were murmurs of "shame," murmurs of "unbelievable," and, unexpectedly, murmurs of pity.
"I hope you understand what it feels like," I said softly, looking at her. "Because you used me as a lever. You used my trust."
Her breathing changed. The mask of composure she relied on slipped, revealing the rawness beneath. She bowed her head. "I understand," she whispered.
And then the shift came. "You must apologize to the people you hurt," I told her. "You must explain yourself to Giovanni and to me. You must do it in front of the people who trusted you."
For a long moment she refused. Then she stood and faced the room, her shoulders small, her voice ragged but steady.
"I'm sorry," she said, and the words were more than perfunctory now. "I used my fear to make others suffer. I tried to rewrite your life and my own. I am ashamed."
There was no loud retribution—no shouting, no dramatic ejections. Instead, the punishment lived in the turning of faces, in the way friends looked at her as if seeing a stranger. A few shook their heads; one person—Cora Sommer—stood and walked out, the message plain.
"People can't easily forgive that," I said. "You have to live with the consequence that people will know what you did."
Martina didn't argue. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her expression moved through the stages of ruin: disbelief, denial, confession, collapse. People around us whispered, took sides, photographed, and slowly, carefully, the meeting disintegrated into quiet corners where people processed what they'd seen.
I felt no triumph. Only a fatigue that came from watching someone dismantle herself. That was the punishment I wanted: public truth, honest faces, and the slow, silent consequence of broken trust.
When Martina left the hall, her shoulders hunched and her eyes hollow, some people clapped—not in support but in the odd, human way of affirming endings. Others simply turned away.
Later that night, outside in the cooling air, she approached me once more.
"Can you forgive me?" she asked.
"I forgave you the minute you told the truth," I said. "Forgiveness isn't erasure. You have to live differently now."
She nodded as if I had given her a map stitched with thorns.
16
Giovanni never showed. He declined the invitation, calling from another city with a voice that tried to be level and failed. In my heart the story had dropped its last page on him long ago. Perhaps he was still figuring himself out.
Valentino and I married in a small chapel two months later. The morning felt soft, like sunlight poured through gauze. Valentino's hands shook when he held mine at the altar. He had tears in his eyes and a steady laugh in his throat.
"I will keep learning to be worthy," he said then, and when people whispered, I felt a warmth that is not just the thrill of being loved but the calm of being understood.
17
Years from that night and that KTV door, I taught students about constellations while Valentino wrote grant proposals at the kitchen table. We argued over small things—whether to get a cat, whether to relocate for an opportunity—but solved them with the quiet teamwork that builds a life.
Sometimes, on slow evenings, he would take my hand, point to a distant star, and say, "That was the first one I looked for when I decided to love you." We would both laugh at the foolishness of that literal romance.
I had been broken by someone I trusted once. I had also been chosen by a man who taught me gentleness. Those two stories lived in me together—reminders that love can be both a wound and a remedy.
When I looked up into the sky now, I thought not of losses but of all the ways small, steady hands can bring you home.
The End
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