Sweet Romance14 min read
Blue Cap, Butterfly Ribbon, and Two Loud Voices
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I have been in love with a voice for most of my life.
"I'll be at 10:30," he texted, "Room 2709."
I planned like a soldier and dressed like a secret. When the elevator dinged, I stepped into 2710 instead.
He was closer than I expected and farther than I wanted.
Nicolas Brown and I had grown up on the same street. Our parents were friends, our afternoons were shared, our arguments were small. He was light when I needed light and stone when he wanted to be admired. He was famous now—posters the size of a city block, a face on the ad trucks, a voice that made crowds breathe in and out together. Girls staked out his every morning. Men took notes. He belonged to headlines.
"You're a sight," he said when I walked into his rehearsal room with a paper cup of bubble drink. He didn't look pleased. He never looked pleased when I showed up holding things for him.
I tried to hand the cup across the room like it was a small offering. "I queued at KG for forty minutes."
He shrugged. "Throw it."
A model in a glossy dress—someone else's Sunday—caught it and smiled like she'd won a small war. "You won't drink it?" she asked, triumphant.
"Throw it," Nicolas said, again, like that was the line.
She laughed as if a crowd had applauded. I stood in the doorway and watched my cup disappear into someone's manicured hands.
It tasted good anyway.
Right then the rehearsal room window shivered with a wave of screams. Felix Cowan was on the big screen across the street. The baritone that had always unsettled Nicolas, the writer-songwriter with a voice carved in ice and fire, the man who never had a rumor clinging to his name—Felix—had a new release and two floors of billboards. He was a tall billboard breathing cold air into the room.
Felix and Nicolas never spoke for more than two sentences when they had to. They were enough alike to feud, enough different to be strangers.
"Do you talk to him?" I asked because I am honest and had been honest with Nicolas for too long.
"Don't be stupid," Nicolas said.
I became practice for being slighted. I had been the one who sat with him through midnight lyric edits, the one who handed him coffee in dressing rooms, the one who printed flyers and wiped his guitar. When he wrote a song at sixteen and I filled in the words, we both rose. I had eaten applause in his shadow, and still I wanted the warmth of being seen.
"You look cold," Felix said to me in the hallway when our paths crossed later that night.
"Cold?" I blinked. "I'm fine."
He hooked my ribbon at my waist and, with a small, precise motion, tugged it.
"What—"
"Sorry," he said and let go like a knife that decided to be soft. He walked away with his head bent like a man who carries storms in his lungs. His agent passed me a glance and the night moved on.
There was a strange thing I had to admit to myself: being seen by Felix felt different from being owned by Nicolas. Felix's eyes were practical, not worshipful. He made me feel like an unfinished sentence that could be finished, not like a trophy on a shelf.
"Say hello next time," he said from the elevator, and I realized he'd left his presence like a footprint in my chest.
Days became a tangle. Nicolas called me at two in the morning to ask me to buy drinks. He wrote the melody and I wrote the words for a song that made two teenagers famous. He slept across my lap and I rubbed his forehead and pretended to be nothing more than a caretaker.
"Do you ever—" I stopped myself. The word was dangerous.
"Do I love anyone?" Nicolas asked, mouth open, eyes on the ceiling. He could nap on demand like a child; he could flirt like a professional.
"Do you?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I don't do things like that."
He was close enough to smell like shampoo and cheap whiskey. "You mean you don't love the person who has been carrying your guitar by your side for a decade?"
He blinked slowly, then grabbed a chip from my bowl and held it to my lips. "Milk chocolate, right?"
I ate it because we had always eaten from the same bowl.
Felix changed the rules without telling anyone. At a party, he sat down opposite me and said, "What kind of girl do you think I like?"
"Big hair, white skin, narrow waist," he said without hesitation and pointed at me like a man fitting a missing piece into a jigsaw puzzle.
He named me—my height, my habits, the fact that I sneezed when nervous. He smiled with an amusement that could have been flirt or observation.
Nicolas's face hardened. The room scraped to silence. A thousand eyes stewed a thousand questions.
"You like him?" Nicolas said later, voice low as TNT.
"I like where it takes me," I said. "I like the music."
"You sure?" he asked, like a man afraid of a truth he owned.
"I am sure of my breath," I said. "That will be enough."
When Felix walked into a rain-soaked night near my building, he wore a blue baseball cap low on his head. He carried an umbrella that might as well be a statement. The rain was polite, a summer stir. He stood with the simple confidence of someone who knows how to wait.
"You came," I said like a question mark.
"I waited," he said, and it wasn't the same thing.
He picked me up when the pavement turned slick, and the smell of his raincoat was cedar and something electric. He held me like he knew the right compress to stop the tremor.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Anywhere with warmth," he said, and I realized "anywhere" could mean as much as "nowhere" and still be true.
We talked in his car, in low tones. The city moved outside like a film. My phone buzzed. Nicolas's name glared on the screen.
"Go," Felix said slowly.
"He's my past," I said. "He's my habit."
Felix's hand found mine. "Then don't ask him to be a future."
Later, at home, I confessed to my mother, Henley Battle—a manager who smelled of contracts and tea.
"Don't marry him," she said with the bluntness of a woman who had lived in basements of record companies. "Don't marry his fame."
"He isn't asking me to marry him," I said. "He isn't asking me to be anything but available."
"You deserve to be a desire, not a doormat," Henley said. She had watched my songs, my drafts, my small triumphs. She had clipped my lines and given them, sometimes, to others. But she was mine.
Felix and I kept crossing paths.
"Sing the chorus," he told me one night, holding an old cassette he'd found in a drawer. It had our live recording on the label. "Show me how you feel it."
I sang quietly. He listened like someone translating a language that had become his own. He left me with a promise in the shape of a word: "Come."
I came. I always came.
There were small combustions—kisses in cars, hands in the dark, a storm's hush. Felix moved like he measured the world with a metronome, and every time he leaned into me I felt the music inside me equalize. He made room for my willingness rather than claiming it as ownership.
Nicolas watched in a way that was worse than anger: he watched like a man counting something he thought belonged to him.
"You always run after trouble," he said one night when rain struck the windows of my apartment and the house smelled like steaming noodles.
"I run after music," I said.
"Music can't tuck you into bed," he said, which was both true and painfully narrow.
"Neither can you," I replied.
His jaw worked. "Then why bother saying anything? Keep yourself busy writing and stop playing with fire."
"Thanks for the advice," I said. "From someone who sets the matches."
We kept each other at a distance even when we were near. I began to realize that love had become a currency Nicolas hoarded, bargaining it when convenient and spending it when public.
I used to believe my life would be cocoa and warm light because I had waited for him. I grew tired of waiting.
The moment of exposure came in a place I had walked into thousands of times—our company's annual gathering, a night built for toasts and deals and unkind jokes.
"See the woman beside him?" a junior made the mistake of asking loud.
Nicolas shrugged. "No, I haven't."
Felix, who'd been sitting three seats away, leaned forward and said calmly, "The woman beside him should probably keep a closer eye on his hands."
It wasn't a revelation. It was a ribbed comment that pulled the thread of an entire garment.
Then I did something that surprised myself. I rose from my chair, walked to the center of all those small lamps and sparkles, and I spoke.
"Do I deserve applause because I've served him coffee?" I asked the room.
There was a ripple. Forks paused mid-air.
"You have seen me hand him sheets and paint his mood with songs," I said, and my voice was steady as a metronome. "He has taken the familiar and called it new. He has given me the illusion of care and kept the deed of desire in his pocket."
The room shifted. Someone laughed nervously.
Nicolas's face was smooth at first, amusement stretched over muscle. He made as if to stand.
"Sit," I said. "You know why you always sit."
He didn't move. "You're making a scene," he said, a classic line that meant: I expected this pain to be mine alone.
"Are you surprised?" I asked. "You've been allowing women to be trophies on your arm and treating me like a room service."
Someone started to clap—one thin clap, then another. The claps multiplied not into a cheer but into attention, the kind that reveals more than it congratulates.
I told the story: the night he made a spectacle of me in a rehearsal room by tossing my drink, the way he had laughed at my nervous sneezes in front of a stranger. I told the truth about the songs: how I had given him lines and how the world had applauded when his voice wore them like a second skin.
He looked at me as if he'd been told a new piece of trivia about himself. The amusement was still there—then a crack of puzzlement. He hadn't expected witnesses who were not his fans.
"You're angry," he said, small and brittle.
"Yes," I said. "And tired."
Nicolas shifted like a man answering to himself and then trying to select a defense. He chose the oldest one: "You're delusional. I never asked you to—"
"You never asked me to stop either," I said. "That's the point."
At that moment Felix stood. He did not come forward to fight. He came to hold a point of order.
"Enough," he said softly. "This isn't about music awards or gossip. Eleanor—" he used my name like it was a lyric, "—you deserve truth."
"Thank you," I said, and I looked at Nicolas. "Do you want to tell the truth, or would you prefer to be exposed?"
He laughed then, a sound like someone releasing air to avoid admitting a wound. "Exposed?"
"Yes," I said. "Stay, or I say what else you have done."
He tightened. "You wouldn't—"
"I would," I said. "I have patience, and patience has teeth."
There were cameras blinking. An agent clicked their phone to record. People shifted in their chairs so their bodies faced the scandal. My words were no longer mine; they were carrying.
I spoke for ten minutes, which in public is a lifetime. I named moments, small and true: the times I had sat with him on cold nights cleaning song lyrics like they were small eggs; the nights he had left me to find fun elsewhere; the nights he had accepted my care as currency and paid me in silence. I did not call him cruel. I called him human, and that was worse: it meant he'd been capable of choosing.
His expression moved like a reel. First, surprise—his fingers lifted as if to touch his chest. Next, a flicker of vindication, as if he hoped the crowd would take his side. Then denial, "You're making this up." Then a small, cracking panic.
"You can't just—" he began, then stopped because the room didn't belong to him anymore.
People turned their cameras—thumbs busy with social media. Someone whispered, "Record this." A dozen phones lifted. People who had once laughed at my eagerness now watched me as an author they didn't know they needed.
Nicolas's assistant stepped forward. "Nico, let's go," she said like a gentle drag.
"No," he said, and his voice lost volume. He tried a different tack: "Eleanor, you make things up for attention."
"Isn't that what you did when you made out with some fan in an alley to prove you were alive?" I asked. It was a sharp blade. It went deeper than his laugh.
He didn't expect witnesses to know the alley story. He didn't expect me to pull at the seam.
"Is this true?" somebody shouted.
Nicolas's face finally showed the sequence I had watched behind closed doors: amusement, then disbelief, then the dissolution of control. He had always been practiced at being royally disinterested. Now he looked like someone learning a new, hurtful technique: that people could turn and look.
He blundered through denials until a voice from the crowd cut him:
"Stop lying," Bowen Vogel said, voice sharp. Bowen had been there—he had the receipts. "You took Eleanor's lyrics and gave them to another band for a week-long pre-release. You asked her to fetch your shoes and then didn't credit her when the chorus took off."
The air vibrated. Nicolas's mouth opened. Color drained from his neck.
"I—" he stammered. The corporation's executive to my left murmured, "This is messy."
An assistant recorded a longer video and posted it. The room's energy changed from sleepy gossip to public verdict.
Nicolas turned from me to the crowd as if searching for a prod. "I've never—"
"Then why did you tell the interviewer last year you wrote that bridge alone?" I asked. "Why have I been told to sit quietly?"
He was shrinking behind the armor he'd worn his entire life. His smile, usually so ready, had turned into a paper-thin thing that could not cover the gap where decency used to be.
People watched him fail. He had never failed in public. He was practiced at applause.
I watched him change. He went from self-assured to bewildered. Then his jaw worked. He tried to cross-examine me, "Are you trying to ruin me?"
"I want you to stop pretending," I said, level. "I want you to own the things you used me for. If you want to stay famous, do it without me being invisible."
He took a breath like a man on a diving board. His face convulsed through the classic stages: smugness, shock, denial, collapse. He found words that didn't hold and then tried pleading.
"Please," he said finally, "I didn't mean—"
"Beg people who will listen," I said. "Not me."
And then—because public humiliation prefers an arc—he tried another tactic: blame. "You're making this about me because you want attention," he said, and in that line was the old self: the man who had always preferred being the offender and the martyr.
"People are watching you," some guest hissed. "Live could ruin you."
He looked around, and where there had once been fans, there were faces with phones flashing, mouths open in shock. He reached for a script he had forgotten, tried to smile. The failure was visible like a cracked stage.
A group of interns began to chant my name. "Eleanor! Eleanor!"
Cameras clipped my speech into snippets and the internet fed. Nicolas's sponsor texted him, "We need a statement." His manager whispered, "Apologize." He looked at me like a man whose parachute hadn't opened.
"No apology," he said, finally, but the words sounded without conviction.
I had not wanted this scene to be a spectacle of pain. I wanted truth. But truth had teeth. The teeth bit.
People left in twos and threes to post and to gossip. The applause that once followed him had thinned into murmurs and fingers pointing at a man who had been undone by his own pattern.
He sat down when someone offered a chair. His eyes were huge. He wasn't crying—he didn't know how to. He was learning now the small ways a public can turn.
He tried to come to me afterward in the hall, and when he did, his body was smaller. "Eleanor," he said, voice raw, "I—"
"Don't," I said. "You had years to ask kindly."
He faltered. "Please, can we—"
"People are watching," I said. "Do you want me to show them the rest?"
He swallowed. His face collapsed like paper left in rain. He did not beg in a loud, cinematic way. He tried to bargain. "I'll fix it. I'll say it differently."
"Then say it to everyone," I said. "Not to me in a hallway."
He staggered as if hit. People passed by with sympathetic whispers and not-so-sympathetic recordings. Someone clapped once, a soft regulatory sound. His assistants circled like medics.
The punishment was not a jail or a headline arrest. It was worse for him: a slow, public unmasking. People whom he had used for flattery now kept their distance. Sponsors called him in for talks. A team that had once applauded him asked for explanations.
He fumbled and then, with the kind of humiliating courage some people exhibit in their darkest hours, he stood on a small stage outside the building the next day. Cameras were there. I watched from the crowd as he read a statement that was rehearsed and pale.
"I take responsibility," he said, and his voice broke at "responsibility." It sounded like a trial game. "I misused people's work. I apologize."
But apologies practiced do not stitch deep seams. People in the crowd whispered that an apology was necessary but hollow. His name trended not for a performance but for a betrayal: taking the labor of someone who loved him and pretending authorship.
Felix watched with a look like a man who had planned a quiet revolution. He wasn't gloating; he was just breathing easily. The public had not only seen Nicolas failing; they'd also seen me stand up.
After that scene, life shifted. Nicholas's invitations became fewer. A friend who had once texted him daily now left long silences. A reporter who'd given glowing profiles began asking deeper questions. A sponsor released a statement: "We expect transparency."
Nicolas tried to recover. He sent me messages that were all small and heavy.
"I'm sorry. I was an idiot," one read.
"You should fix it," I wrote back.
"Please," he begged, finally.
I did not kneel. I had been patient long enough. He had to walk through the fallout himself.
Felix and I did what fragile people do: we made music and small mischief. He pushed me to write truth into lines.
"Write for yourself," he said.
So I did.
We gave a song to a small festival. People listened. Felix put me on stage and asked me to sing a chorus I had shelved two summers ago. The microphone felt like a hand.
When my voice rose and the crowd took it in, I saw a face in the audience—Gunner Crawford, a veteran producer—leaning forward. He was the man who had been Felix's uncle's friend, the one who had an ear for truth. He taped my lines and later offered me a studio slot.
"You're good," he said when the session wrapped. "Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
I smiled like a person who'd gotten a much-needed endorsement. That night, when I replayed the old cassette Felix had given me, I cupped it like it was a relic. The blue cap he often wore lay on the bedside table. The silk butterfly ribbon I had tied on my waist was still in my bag.
"You were right," I said to Felix in the glow of the studio monitors. "I only write well when I feel something more than a rehearsal."
He took my hand. "And I only sing when I hear the truth," he answered.
We did small things in private: he taught me to read pauses in a melody, I showed him where words could bloom. We walked through rain-soaked streets and argued about chords. I kept my distance when Nicolas tried to slither back into the cracks of my life. He sent letters that read like draft apologies. He left a pair of his old boots by my door—an offering from someone who thought tangibles could buy absolution.
Once, he tried to speak to me in public again. I chose safety: I turned and left before he could find a moment on my skin. He stood alone, his face a map of guilt.
"Will you forgive him?" my mother asked me, one night when I was tired and the city seemed patient.
"People change," I said. "But I won't be the place he returns to for comfort without change."
"You think Felix will stay?" she asked.
"No," I admitted. "He might not. But he taught me to value myself."
Time frayed awkwardly. The music scene moved. Felix retreated sometimes to write, sometimes to breathe. Nicolas's chart positions dipped. He wrote a song and credited me in the fine print; it was a small thing but it was a public stitch.
"Thank you," he said the next day at rehearsal, trying to keep his voice steady.
"For what?" I asked.
"For calling it out," he said. "People need to be checked."
"Do you understand why I did it?" I asked.
He could not meet my eyes. "I didn't know how else to keep you," he said.
"Then you didn't," I said. "And you must live with that."
He looked smaller than the last time. Maybe humiliation had thinned him. Maybe I shouldn't have been cruel. But cruelty wasn't why I spoke. I wanted to be seen, and in that seeing, to be more than a footnote.
Felix and I kept making music. One morning, after a long night in the studio, he left me a cassette. On the label, in blue ink, were the words "June 24". He handed it to me like a small bridge.
"I found this in a box," he said. "It has you on it."
I placed the cassette in a metal tin and slid it into a small safety box. I left the blue cap on top and the ribbon wound around the tin like a promise.
Years later, when someone asked me what mattered most in all of that commotion, I would point to that tin and the cassette inside.
"I learned how to be heard," I would say.
I never married poverty of spirit or public bullies. I never let someone else's fame make my voice small. I sang on stages and in bathrooms and in cars and at dawn when the city still slept. People called me brave. I called it necessary.
Felix and I found a way of meeting in the middle. Not because one of us surrendered; because both of us learned to ask and to answer honestly. He taught me how to trust sound. I taught him how to trust feeling.
Nicolas learned a lesson the hard way in the middle of a crowded room, with cameras and phones and very public eyes. He tried to stitch his reputation, but people don't forget when the seams are cut by selfishness.
People still call the night of the company party "The Night the Lyrics Spoke." They tell it with the delicious satisfaction of people who needed drama to become moral.
I keep the blue cap on the shelf by my window. I keep the ribbon in the box with the cassette. When I write, I sometimes put the cap on; it makes me feel like a listener, not a trophy.
When the phone rings and a message lights the screen with a concert offer, I listen to the melody in my chest and answer like someone who has been taught by both kindness and consequence.
"I can sing," I say into the line, "but only if the music asks for truth."
The End
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