Sweet Romance14 min read
"Call Me Husband" — A Campus Promise That Changed Everything
ButterPicks14 views
I spilled soup on the wrong person on my first full day of real trouble.
"My fault," I said, panic hot on my tongue as the bowl slipped from my hands and bright broth painted the front of his white tee. The oil made a thin yellow map across his chest and a drip landed on his new shoe.
"You okay?" I begged, hands trembling.
He didn't smile. He looked down, then up at me, eyes like dark glass with a thin scar on one lid. "Do I look okay?" he said.
He was beautiful in a way that demanded attention and respect and then refused both. He stepped around me and left before I could explain, leaving his friends to laugh.
"Now that's a move," one of them said. "New girls, weird pickup lines."
"You're the one who walked into her," I heard someone mutter from my left.
I wanted to apologize again. I wanted to explain that I wasn't flirting, that I didn't even know him, but a junior with more bravado than sense handed him a napkin. He ignored it, walked straight past, and left me with a messy tray and a racing heart.
"Hilary," I gasped later when Hilary Buckner found me picking up shattered dignity along with spilled noodles, "who is he?"
"You don't know?" Hilary's mouth made a little O. "Travis Young. You should know who Travis Young is."
"I should?"
"He's trouble you don't want," she said. "Big trouble. The kind people whisper about."
After that I learned his name meant avoided space. I also learned that trouble wore a scar on his eyelid and that he used his silence like armor.
That evening my phone lit up. "T-shirt three thousand five, shoes six thousand. You want Alipay or WeChat?" It was him. My fingers almost froze.
"Cash?" I typed back, stupid enough to expect reason.
"Cash works," his reply blinked.
"Have you considered other options?" I tried humor. "I have no money."
A second of silence, then: "Then you'll pay in person."
"Pay how?" I typed, throat dry.
"Deliver it to Room 302 before eight," he wrote.
He was not serious, I told myself. He was being dramatic, or cruel, or both. So I waited at the classroom door at 7:50. Nothing. At 12:00 he texted, "Where are you?" I texted back, "Lying down." He wrote back, "Pay me back."
We ended up in a dance of texts and taunts. Then, because I am not patient and because my pride and stubbornness have always been loud, I answered his barbs with mine.
He sent two hundred dollars. I slept the night with a mix of shame and the odd spark of curiosity. Who else would be so blunt about money and still confident enough to walk away?
"You're the only one who'd send money to pay for a ruined shirt," Hilary teased when I told her. "You should at least get a dramatic apology."
He gave me worse.
At breakfast the next morning there he was, standing as if he belonged at dawn. He had a way of occupying space—big shoulders, narrow waist, and eyes that made people stop their chatter.
"Go to me," he said to the girl who had been blocking my way to the food line.
She faltered. "What do you mean?"
"Go to him now," he said, and when I hesitated, he nudged. "Come here."
I found shelter behind him. Some part of me felt like ducking, hiding, the other part thrilled. He leaned close, the scent of warm sunlight and something like a new shirt on him. "Say 'call me brother' and I'll protect you," he whispered.
"Brother is boring," I said, heels digging into the concrete.
"Say 'husband,'" I teased.
His face changed. "Husband?" he echoed, breath hitching.
"Yes," I said, on impulse. "Say 'husband.'"
He flushed, a color that crept to his ears, clipped and sudden. He shoved his chin up like a man refusing to concede, but his voice came lower. "Say it yourself, Amelia."
"Old man," I said instead—"old man" meaning "trouble." He reddened more.
Once, in the cafeteria, some girl had accused me of chasing him. That was not my plan. I ran because the situation escalated—people make mistakes—so when the girl and her friends tried to block me, the chaos became physical. She pulled my hair. I fell back, then regained balance and used my taekwondo reflexes—that black belt does more for pride than street defense—and ticked off a couple of her teeth with a feint of self-defense.
Then they ganged up. I ran, breath burning. I ran back to my dorm room and banged on the door like an alarmed animal. Hilary let me in with a chair, nodding, "You're involved with Travis Young now? The forum's full of it."
They had posted a video and an invented story: I'd confessed and been rejected and then flung the plate at him. The internet has no patience for truth. I typed my defense: "Single. Not after Travis. Stop the rumor." I hit post. It felt inadequate.
When I slept, my phone buzzed. "Travis replied." I opened it and saw, "T-shirt three thousand five, shoes six thousand. Alipay or WeChat?"
I wanted to scream-laugh. "You serious?" I tapped.
Then the reply came, colder: "Cash is fine."
"You ask for meat repayment," I wrote, daring, "what do you mean by 'meat'?"
"Come to room 302 before eight a.m. tomorrow." His messages were curt, decisive. "That's the list."
I looked at it like someone reading a dare to a stranger. Then I saw another ping. He had added me on WeChat. I accepted, because curiosity had teeth.
"Travis," I typed once we were connected in that small digital square, "Do you always make people pay cash?"
"Only when they make me hungry," he wrote. There was an emoji—a smug one.
I went to the classroom early the next morning. Dawn air was cold, but there was a warmth to being out early, a peculiar bravery attached to waking up because someone expected you. I waited. He never came. He sent a message at 7:50: "Where are you?"
"Lying down," I typed back. "Breakfast's in me."
"Then you owe me a hundred silver needles," he teased in return.
I pressed my face into my hands and laughed. It wasn't the laugh of relief; it was the laugh of the person who didn't want to be caught by a joke anymore. The truth is, being chased and being wanted and being threatened all at the same time is dizzying.
A week of back-and-forth breakfasts—him demanding payment, me teasing—morphed into protection.
At the food line, the same big girl, Fernanda Graf, tried to stop me from picking up a tray. She ringed around me like a shark. She had an iron mouth and friends with teeth to match. "You chasing Travis?" she asked like the owner of the school.
"I'm not," I said.
She laughed and flicked her cigarette in a way that made me flinch. "You're a liar," she said. "If you get with him, you can't claim you didn't know him."
"Back off," I said. Her hand snapped and grabbed my braid. I should have responded the old way—taekwondo—but something in the air told me to test another tactic. I heard a voice step up behind me.
"Freeze."
I turned. Travis stood there, like a statue that had learned to move. He didn't smile. He had that look—danger and patience braided together.
"Move," he said to Fernanda.
"Mind your own business," she said. Her voice broke in the middle, like a string unstrung.
"She's mine," he said, and then, softer, to me: "Get behind me."
That was when he did something I didn't expect. He slid his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. The world went quiet around us. "She's mine," he repeated, and the bravado in his voice wasn't for the girl in front of us. It was for anyone who might be listening.
"Try touching her again," he said to Fernanda, "and I won't be so gentle."
Fernanda blinked. Her blaze of bravado cooled fast. She threw a final look at him, at me, and stalked away. She wasn't gone for good, but the thunder had passed.
That night my hands shook when I said, "You could have let me handle it."
He huffed a sound that could have been amusement or annoyance. "You could have gotten hurt."
"Same difference," I said.
He was stubbornly not the kind of man who offered much praise. But little things crept through. Once, in class when I shivered, he took his jacket off and draped it around my shoulders without a word. It smelled faintly of laundry and sun. At that moment, I noticed things: how his hands moved when he was careful, how his voice went low when he was annoyed, how he would stare off and then, like a switch, snap back to sharpness.
"You're ridiculous," he said once when I teased him for being so exacting.
"You throw soup on strangers," I shot back.
"I do not 'throw,'" he said strictly. "I create opportunities."
"We call that 'accidents,'" I said.
He did a small smile—once. It was the first time I saw his mouth relax, and it was like a window opening. I may have nearly fainted.
Our relationship? It oscillated between teasing and a tether I couldn't name. He teased me, dared me, shoved me into pockets of safety and then left me to find myself again. He had rules and he kept them; he was a map with a missing corner that I wanted to find.
"Do you ever laugh?" I asked once.
"Not often enough," he said, and then, slower, "But I do for you."
That sentence felt too big when he said it in the stairwell with dust motes drifting through the light. My heart did a clumsy flip that I hate to admit. It was one of those small, ridiculous moments—him for me, like an inside joke with the world's volume turned up.
The trouble came in waves. Rumors, a fake engagement photo posted online. Someone had photoshopped him in a white suit while a girl in a white dress stood at his side. The caption screamed congratulations. It was a cruel joke and a clever one. People believe pictures.
"Is this true?" Fernanda asked when she found me in the hall. Her tone mixed malice and something like calculation. "Are you worried you can't compare?"
"I didn't ask for your comparison," I said.
"You're not good enough," she said to me like an accusation. "You know your place."
At that moment I wanted to vanish or to rip the posted photo down with my own bare hands. Instead, I walked to the event she had invited me to—the 'engagement'—because I wanted the truth to stand where everyone could see it. I wanted him to stand with me in front of them.
The party hall smelled of cheap flowers. A photo of him and a girl hung on the stage. She had pink hair—a friend of Fernanda's—and she smiled like she didn't know how to stop. I watched him in a white suit on a screen, and then I watched him step down from the platform in a real black coat, walk across the room, and stop right in front of me.
"Why are you here?" he asked soft enough for only me to hear.
"Because they put you in a wedding photo and I didn't buy a ticket to my own life," I muttered.
He took my hand and said, loud enough for half the room to hear, "I never said I'd marry her."
A man—older, thin with hold of a cane—stormed the stage and tried to strike Travis with it. It was his father.
"Don't touch me," Travis said, and in the blink of an eye he whipped the cane out of the man's hand like it weighed nothing and pushed him away. "This is my life," he said. "This is her life."
His father, Leonardo Baldwin, was spitting rage, all red face and furious breath. I watched the way his hands shook when he tried to regain dominance. The man had a history that didn't cleanly fit being a father.
"It's for the family's sake," Leonardo barked. "You will marry who benefits the Baldwin name."
"Name," Travis said slowly, eyes cold. "A name that hits its own."
There was a hush. People looked from the cane to the son and back again. The old man's face went flint-hard. Then, like someone watching the curtains close on the last act of a long play, he stormed away, leaving Travis and me at the center of a crowd that was finally unsure what it wanted to think.
After that, everything escalated. Leonardo used power and money in ways that had been hidden to the world. He put pressure on shareholders, on social circles, on every thread he could find, trying to make his will right. He called me into an empty office and offered money to leave Travis, with a number that sounded like a small nation's GDP to me.
"How much," he asked, stern and clinical.
"Five million," I said before thinking.
He laughed—low, surprised. "Not enough?"
"Then it isn't about the money," I said. "It's about whether you let your son live."
He slammed his cane on the floor. "You don't understand. This family builds empires. You are a pebble."
"Then let me be the pebble that breaks something," I said. "I can't give you money. I can give you a choice: stop hurting him, or see what happens when people you rely on stop trusting you."
He didn't like that. He never had to be challenged before.
The punishment came the way punishment for men with too many allies usually does: exposure. A shareholder meeting was called. I didn't plan for it. I didn't even want it. But at the meeting, documents were revealed—emails, payment lists, legal files—that tied Leonardo's maneuvers to schemes that lied to shareholders and to employees.
"I have one question," a voice announced from the crowd as cameras rolled.
Travis stood up and walked to the podium. "How much did you buy?" he asked, eyes like a blade.
"You're our founder," someone hissed. "You can answer him."
Leonardo's face emptied. He was used to control. He was used to people nodding. He was not used to being stared at with a mixture of pity and rage.
The room was packed—board members, investors, employees, and a sea of phones recording like a battalion of little witnesses. There was a hush like a held breath.
"All of us were told a story," Travis said. "A story about legacy. But legacy doesn't require lying. Legacy requires doing right."
There were gasps.
The CEO—someone who had been Leonard's ally—stood and presented a stack of ledger pages and an audio clip of a meeting the old man had no idea was being recorded.
"These are your instructions," the CEO said, voice tight. "You told them to move funds in ways that hid debts and undercut shareholders. You weaponized family ties for private gain. We cannot condone this."
Leonardo leaned forward. He fumbled for composure. First there was shock; then denial; then a military parade of excuses. "I built this company!" he barked. "I fed this family with it!"
"You fed your ego, not your family," someone from the floor shouted.
"And you—" Travis's voice cut through, calm and true. "You think you can shame me into choices because you have what you call power? Watch us take it back."
The reactions were a film reel. Phones lifted, mouths opened, someone laughed in disbelief. Leonardo's allies sank like boats with holes. A woman near the front clapped slowly, not kindly, like it was the end of an era that she had predicted. Shareholders argued, legal counsel whispered, someone began to murmur "class action" quietly, tasting the possibility like a new spice.
Leonardo's face, which had always been a map of authority, crumpled in public. He shifted through the phases the rules demanded—surprise, indignation, denial, defiance, and then, finally, a sort of collapse into the stunned silence of a man who had counted on never being questioned.
"You're lying," he said finally, voice thin.
"Am I?" Travis asked. "I have documents, witness statements, recordings. You want your empire? Earn it without stepping on your son's back."
People leaned forward. A security officer walked in and quietly asked Leonardo to stand and follow him outside. He did, barely. The cameras followed. Outside, the crowd was a mix of people recording and people who knew him in a different life—the cleaner who had been paid in hush money, the staffer who had been told to lie about layoffs.
"What do you think?" someone near me whispered.
"He deserves the fall," Hilary murmured. "He made it personal."
There were cheers. There were whispers. There was, most deliciously, an audible ripple of satisfaction as people saw a man who had always stood above them tumble. Leonardo's allies tried to spin it as a misunderstanding. That did not hold.
It took three days for the news to fully settle. The board made emergency decisions. An interim management team was appointed. Investors who had once held his hand like a talisman now demanded answers. His face was everywhere—on the feeds, in the paper, on everyone's phone. He tried to speak to shareholders on live-streams but his anger looked different when it had no room to act on it—smaller, jagged.
A public humiliation in a meeting isn't the only revenge life hands out. The old man retreated to a private hospital with a heart condition—panic at losing everything. But he did not return as the same blustering force. He left an empire stripped, and people who had kept silent for years found voices.
And there was Fernanda.
Her punishment was less legal and more social. She had groomed followers, pushed lies, and relished dominance. She wanted me small. But at the school assembly we uncovered the fakeness—her fake engagement photos, the panel of students who'd been paid to clap, the list of bribes. We put a microphone in her face.
"Why?" I asked, standing up where the light landed. "Why did you think you could control someone else's life?"
She laughed—sharp and brittle. "Because some people are made to know their place."
"Isn't it tiring pretending to be someone's owner?" I asked.
The crowd around us shifted. People recorded and whispered. Her face tightened. Then we played the audio—her own admissions to her clique about the photos, the lies, the harassment she'd orchestrated. You could see her confidence buckle in the light. She tried denial, tried to throw it off as a joke. Her cheeks flushed, then paled, then flared red.
A ring of students who had once followed her began to step back. A few of them expressed regret into phones, and others turned to clap for honesty. Teachers who had watched in silence now stepped in. She was denounced not by one person, but by many. A few people in the crowd made a point of walking away from her as if a line had been drawn that would not be crossed again.
Her reactions followed the script too: swagger, then disbelief, then denial, then humiliation. The difference was the witnesses—parents, teachers, fellow students, and the dozens of phones that would carry the footage. She begged, pleaded, tried to explain, but the assembly had made the verdict in public.
It was satisfying, but not cruel. I didn't enjoy being cruel. I enjoyed that the truth had edges that cut through power.
"You're cruel," she said to me once, when the dust had settled. "This will not end well for you."
"I don't want it to end well or badly for me," I said. "I want it to end fair. For everyone."
The months that followed were messy in a real, human way. Travis had to rebuild relationships. The company board did not simply hand him the keys. They tested him. He learned corporate games that felt slick and foreign. He ran meetings, argued numbers, slept less. But he also smiled more, and that smile was for me in the small, dangerous way he had always reserved.
When he came to my apartment to sleep on my couch after a long day, he would take my hand and rub circles into my palm without thinking. "Don't worry," he'd say. "I'm clumsy, but I'm trying."
Those were heart-flutter moments: him pulling his jacket around me in winter, him laughing a soft laugh that came for me and me alone, the times our fingers brushed when he reached for the same book. Each one lodged like a small secret in my chest.
Later, when he left to help with an overseas opening, the silence was huge. We were separated by time zones and meetings and the hunger of corporate life. He left me a small ring slipped onto my finger at the airport, a promise without a document.
"Call it a placeholder," he said. "A trick to let me keep you."
"Is this a proposal?" I asked, trying to be fierce.
"An anchor," he said. "Don't lose it."
We survived the distance with calls, recorded instructions, and ridiculous checklists he sent me: "Eat greens. No cold drinks. Send photo at meals. Video when you make soup. If you get close to someone else, tell me so he can be jealous." The lists were silly, but they were his way of staying present.
Years later, we married for ourselves in a small hall full of people who loved us for reasons other than power. Leonardo was not there—he was a different, quieter man, nursing ruin and, perhaps, a humbled conscience. Fernanda had left campus and started a life where her claws were clipped by consequences. The public punishments had not destroyed anyone; they had reshaped them.
There were many small fights between us—arguments about money, about stubbornness, about the way his past haunted him. But there were also a thousand tiny stitches of joy. When I said something stupid and hiccuped a confession of being in love, he kissed me in the hallway and the whole world felt less sharp. When I gave birth to our daughter, he cried and held us both like we were fragile sculptures.
"Can I be a good father?" he asked me in the hospital corridor, voice raw.
"You already are," I said.
He told me, sometimes at night as our daughter slept, "I used to think strength was making everyone obey me. Now I think strength is holding you when everything else tries to pull you apart."
I pressed my forehead to his, and in the dimness he whispered, as he had once in the stairwell, "I laugh for you."
We never forgot the clauses of the early days: the "meat repayment" joke, the silver needle threat, the breakfast texts. We kept them like old tickets—funny, a little ridiculous, and entirely ours. They were the markers of how we began: messy, accidental, and sharp.
There was nothing cinematic in our end. We had debts of love and time. We fought for space and made room. We learned to be small together and big together.
When I look at the ring he slipped on my finger in the airport—now worn and warm from years of life—I remember the first time he asked me to call him "husband" like it was a dare. I remember my first real kiss with him, clumsy and surprising, and the many tender moments in between.
We kept a small photo from that fake engagement party—no longer photoshopped, but a simple capture of us laughing in the back seat of an old taxi in a strange town—tucked into a drawer. It reminds us that truth, once allowed the light, tends to outshine the best fakes.
At the end, I don't promise anything grand because we have no vows that fit everyone. We promise meals and quiet mornings, ridiculous to-do lists and unexpected kisses. We promise that if the world attempts to shape our lives again, we'll name the terms together.
In a dusty box on my dresser, wrapped in the paper of an old breakfast napkin, sleeps the list he once sent me as a joke: "T-shirt three thousand five, shoes six thousand." I still laugh when I find it. He smiles, and even when he looks tired, his smile is a small sun.
"Call me husband," he had said in the stairwell once, and I had answered "old man" as a jest.
He still calls me his, and I still call him mine. We do this loudly, quietly, often and always in between. The world, once loud and hungry, learned that we were not theirs to define.
The End
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