Sweet Romance14 min read
Callie Oliver, Be Unharmed
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I never expected a night that started with snow and a cat to change everything.
"You are telling me to give up the scholarship?" I ask, my voice flat, because my palms are steady and my hips are ready. Seven guys close the alley into a small ring; the lead one smokes like he owns the dark.
"Just call the counselor and say you withdraw," the leader spits. "Tatiana likes what she wants. You don't get to take it."
"Why?" I lift my eyes. The streetlight only sketches their faces. Somehow, when the world wants to be cruel, it does it loudly.
Beckett Alexander's cigarette goes out. He steps forward to grab my collar.
"Try it," I say. "Try."
His hand never touches me.
"Who—" someone starts, but a man in a black suit steps into the mouth of the alley at the same time I plant a heel into Beckett's chest. My toe finds bone; the others lunge; I move, and it is simple physics—momentum and angles, the way my feet learned when I ran for my life years ago.
"Get him—" Beckett snarls.
"Stop," the man in the suit says, and the sound makes the alley quiet like a blade. He looks like he steps out of a photograph—sharp collar, even posture.
"I warned you," I say. I have never used my full force in front of people like this. I have reasons they don't know, things I don't speak. The seven end up on the cold brick in under a minute, breathing hard, stunned.
"Don't appear in front of me again," I tell Beckett. "Once, I warn. Twice, I'll break you."
"Who—who are you?" he asks.
I step away, and the man in the black suit watches me leave. From the fourth floor across the street a window throws out a rectangle of light. The silhouette at its edge turns, and gray-blue eyes find mine for a moment. They are cold as winter water.
"Callie Oliver, be unharmed," he says without moving his lips. I do not hear it. I feel it, like a promise. I walk away into the snow.
Later three black Bentleys block the alley. Men spill out with perfect shoes and perfect posture. The same man who watched me down the street steps into the wind like he owns the night.
"Who are you?" Beckett murmurs, breath steaming white.
"Don't move," the stranger says simply. He walks through the toppled bodies with a slow, certain step. "Burn everything."
"Yes, sir," a bodyguard says. He lifts his phone like a soldier obeys.
I wait in a taxi while the snow drifts. At home there is a clumsy warm smell of pet food and cheap detergent. I find four kittens in a dry grass pile and a wild mother with a broken leg.
"I won't hurt you," I whisper, and I put out my coat to tuck them in.
"Call the vet," a voice older and cotton-soft says over the line. "I'll be here."
Frida Hughes is a retired vet who runs a shelter; she takes the worst cases. She meets me at nine by the clinic with a lamp and hands that remember how to stitch. She says, "We can try. We must try."
"We must," I echo.
I spend the night watching stunted breaths on a monitor and I hold a shaking mother cat while the world outside folds under snow. I move like someone who remembers how to stay alive.
The next morning Jana Fontana, my roommate, is painting her nails when I walk in. Tatiana Sanders smiles from across the room, all foreign-featured beauty and poison. The world invents villains.
"Callie, did you hear?" Tatiana says, voice sugary. "Who do you think will get the national scholarship?"
"I don't know," I say. I don't look up.
"You should be careful. People who take what others want—" she purrs.
"There's no point in your threats," I say quietly.
She laughs like a bell. "Oh, honey, don't make me laugh."
Later, I put on a jacket and go to pick up the cats. A slow phone vibration on the other side is Lennox Inoue, checking in as if he has no idea the city is half-frozen.
"Callie," he says in that breathy, careless way, "you coming tonight? Out for my birthday."
"I won't," I tell him. "I have work."
"Work?" He pouts like it's a thing I should be ashamed of. "Come out for an hour. Let me buy you something."
I hang up and, impulsive, I press the message to accept. I always say no and always they come anyway.
The night is messy with neon. I watch the lights and taste cold.
At TIME Center an escalator sparks and a red run of rain-slick steps catches a man in a wheelchair. He sits straight, like a blade. His hair is the sort of dark that needs an excuse and his eyes are an arresting gray-blue.
"Are you all right?" I ask.
He looks at me for a long moment. "Will you help me down?" he says. His voice is mild, a string pulled taught.
"It's nothing," I say, again.
He studies my hands as I push. "Thank you," he murmurs softly when we reach ground level. His fingers are warm when he straightens the light towel on his lap. "My name is Isaiah Gordon."
"I... Callie," I say.
"I prefer Callie." He smiles like someone who has known luxuries of attention. His hands are almost too polite when he brushes a splintered edge of tile to fix my shoe.
York Vitale appears holding an umbrella, sharp in the rain and verbal. "Are you well?" he asks Isaiah, and his tone says this is curious to him, like a social puzzle.
"Nothing," Isaiah answers softly. He looks at me with that half-smile that leaves a residue on my skin. "Do you need this umbrella?"
I take it, and we walk. The world seems to shorten around Isaiah as if gravity loves him.
"We'll be fine," he says when a man brushes my arm and grins, "but come with me for a minute." He seems to command the air.
We stop at a pharmacy. He kneels to wrap a bandage on a paper-thin cut on my wrist. He is gentle. His hand is hot. We are dangerously close.
"Don't move," he says in a tone that is small but absolute. "Are you cold?"
"A little." I inhale. The smell of disinfectant mixes with his cologne and I feel a small, dizzy slot of a thing open inside me.
"Let me," he insists. "May I?"
"Yes," I say. That two-syllable yes is a fault line. He smiles as if he has just won an argument that matters to him.
We eat at a quiet side club and he orders fruit I like. His eyes find mine across a dark table like a beacon. "What happened in the alley?" he asks later, as if the city didn't already know by the sound of our wounds.
"It was nothing," I say, chewing, and then I stop because things are not nothing. Names like Beckett and Tatiana and the smell of alcohol smell like history.
"I will come by tomorrow," Isaiah says. "I will see how your wrist is."
"Don't," I warn, but my tone is soft, and my heart makes small leaps the way it did when I was a child and believed a stranger was a friend.
"My watch is here," he says. "Take it if you want. And don't go to that cliquish bar by yourself."
"Thank you," I say. "But I have to pick up something from time to time."
We leave. Outside, a red Bentley idles and a young man in a pink suit leans over it with a grin the shape of trouble. Lennox Inoue's car is loud enough that it seems to have its own demand.
"You're soaked," he scolds in a way he thinks is teasing. "You gave me a fright."
"You left me waiting," I answer. My voice is tired.
He scuffly laughs. "I can buy your forgiveness." He never asks anything serious. He never understands the way things can be fatal.
At the club, men are expensive and loud. A drunk man makes a crude dare at my table.
"She wants to drink with us," he slurs. "Come on, schoolgirl—"
"He touched her," Lennox says, and his hand is on the man's collar before the rest of the world can draw breath. The man goes down. It is a quick, brutal lesson.
"Leave them," I say, because I don't want anyone to become a spectacle. But Lennox is pleased on my behalf in a way that looks like ownership.
"You okay?" he asks.
"Yes." My thumb rubs the bandage on my wrist.
A week later the university forum burns. Someone writes things like "Callie, how much for a night?" and "Which car did she leave?" Screenshots spread like wildfire. The photographs show me beside a Bentley and a red Rolls, and the voices online create new truths.
I tell myself the truth: the man in the Bentley is my childhood friend coming to celebrate; the car with the old man photographed is a manager's car, not a lover; the red Rolls belongs to a friend I grew up with. Lies are easier to believe than nuance.
"Who did this?" I whisper into Lennox's shoulder.
"Someone who doesn't like you," he says. He calls men in suits, and the rumor thread gets noisy. Then it gets quiet.
But the noise already lives in the world. Students whisper in halls. Tatiana's eyes glitter like a blade when she reads the posts, and she begins to smile like someone who expected the moon to fall in her pocket.
"They'll rot," she tells a girlfriend. "They will see what I can do."
I get a call to the police station.
"Ms. Oliver?" the officer says, and there are ten faces in the room looking like angry birds.
"My son's in ICU," an elegant woman's voice screams. "It is Callie who hit them!"
"I was defending myself," I say.
The security camera clip on the wall plays. The alley where I fought replays like a cruel, polished jewel. My face is small and pale in the light. My punches are necessary. There is no denying the men were hurt.
"This is self-defense," the chief says. He is bored and careful. "We cannot charge you."
The mother sobs. The media flare makes for a small, loud storm. I leave the room because crying in a place that smells of stale coffee feels stupid. Outside there is a car. Isaiah waits in a discreet black one and his eyes are a fortress.
"Are you well?" he asks like a promise. "Do you want to wait?"
"I am fine," I say. But my chest is something like a bell rung out of time. He slides his hand into my coat like a shield and I pretend this is normal.
The posts do not stop. Tatiana clicks like a predator. She calls a small online army, prints rumors, asks for "proof." Someone records a conversation she made, a plan: A fake photographer, a forged message. She arranges to smear me.
"She hides behind a perfect face," Tatiana hisses one afternoon when we cross paths. "We will take her down."
"Why?" I ask. "Why care so much?"
"Because I don't like being ignored," she says simply. "I want the place you have."
That is the simplest truth: she wants me to fall. I don't want to step in a war where the rules are people and silence, but sometimes silence feels like a blade.
The school calls for mediation. The dean calls me to a quiet office and says, "We will handle this."
"Please do," I say. But they call me back two days later. "We removed the posts," they say. "We will investigate." The dean's face is sad like someone who won't sleep all week.
Isaiah's presence is a weather that follows me. He is polite but near. He brings fruit; he sends messages with a rhythm I learn. He is dangerous in a way that is tender.
"Callie," he says softly one morning. "Don't go out at night alone for a while."
"You are dramatic," I tell him. I mean it as a joke, but my heart flips.
He does something he shouldn't do. He steps into the math building doorway without asking permission and speaks to the dean like he owns him. "Keep her safe," he says quietly, and the dean, for reasons that are not my concern, agrees.
Tatiana organizes more. She plants rumors in student groups. She pays a man to spread manipulated pictures. She buys an old journalist and hands him a false lead. She thinks she has a lever and she pulls.
"I will make sure she loses everything," she says to a group of girls in a mall, taking pictures of their shopping like she's collecting trophies. "She will be nothing but a rumor."
I used to think revenge was a romance for pages I never read. But Tatiana's plan is not gentle. She wants ruin. She works with men with cameras and lawyers with empty eyes.
One morning the thread becomes a public spectacle. Tatiana organizes a "reveal" at a student union event, the sort of theater college students love. She invites a handful of reporters, a crew of bored social media types, more than enough people who will record.
She thinks she will break me publicly. She thinks I will crumble.
She picks the day when the campus is crowded and the sun is bright. She stands in front of a microphone, the sort of posture you practice in mirrors.
"I want everyone to see the truth," she says loud, and her voice is high and sure. Her hand shakes a little because showmanship eats the brave.
They give her a slideshow. Images flash of me near cars, at a club, a forged message with my name. She cheers. The students cheer. Some are cruel and some don't know.
"She is a liar," Tatiana says. "She takes money in return for nights. She is a cheat."
A crowd gathers. Phones are out. It looks like a play with me as the villain. It smells like cheap perfume and cheap triumph.
I step forward. I do not scream. I do not cry. I stand with my hands folded like someone unbothered.
"Is this what you want?" I ask.
"Told you," Tatiana crows. "Watch her fall."
"Do you know how you did this?" I ask, looking at the girls around her. "Do you know the cost?"
She sneers. "I gave everyone evidence."
"Who paid for this evidence?" I ask.
Her smugness splits. For a second she looks flustered.
"Who asked you to be my clean-up?" she spits. "You don't matter."
"I do," I say, and I slide my phone out of my pocket. "Everyone, listen."
I start reading. "This audio proves you asked for photos to be staged. This message shows you promised money to the uploader. This call recording proves you told him to 'mosaic the face' if he got scared."
She tries to cackle. "Fake—"
"You told a man to create lies about me," I say. "You sat in a mall and paid him. You told him to 'make the girl's life small.' You said, quote, 'I will make sure she loses everything.'"
Her face changes. I have the messages, the receipts, the voice recording where she agreed. Her smirk collapses into surprise into denial.
"No one believed the posts at first but you helped them," the dean says from the edge of the crowd. "We traced the uploads."
Tatiana's breath comes short. "This is—" she starts.
"—a proof of what you said," I finish. "You planned it. You paid for it."
Her voice breaks. Pupils widen.
People murmur. Phones are raised now, but not to record me; they record her. Small, dangerous lights point back at her.
"What?" she says. "You can't—"
"I can," I say. "And I will tell everything."
She lashes out. "You're jealous!" she screams. "You always were!"
"No," I say, "I am not jealous. I am tired of bullying. I am tired of people thinking women are property. I am tired of seeing a person's career be a rumor."
She starts to cry. It is not a pretty, staged sob. It is the kind that undoes you. The crowd's energy flips. Those who cheered her now look guilty. Her friends edge away like something hot.
A dozen students stand up, faces blank and shocked. "She did what?" they whisper.
"Is this all true?" one of Tatiana's group asks.
They watch the slides again, zoom in, read receipts. The room grows heavy.
"You're going to regret this," Tatiana says, voice small. Her threats fall like brittle leaves. Her allies shrink.
"I already recorded what you said," I say. "You told a man to post lies. You called the journalist and paid him. That is your voice on the tape."
Her denial crumbles into pleading. "Please! Please—"
"Stop," I say. "I didn't want this to be public like this. I wanted the school to investigate. You forced me to show proof."
Someone in the crowd snaps a picture of Tatiana's hands trembling. Someone else posts the clip of her planning the smear. The internet that once devoured me turns like a pack of dogs and bites the guilty instead. Men who once whispered move away.
The worst things happen slowly and then all at once. The dean takes notes, his fingers steady. "There will be an investigation," he says, and his voice is a gavel.
Tatiana's face flushes—first anger, then white-hot shame. "You—" she begins but the words thin.
A student records the moment Tatiana collapses into a chair and begs. "I didn't mean—I'll give up—"
She tries to plead, flail, bargain. She tries the old script: "I was young, I made a mistake," like a ribbon to pull a heart. For a heartbeat it seems to soften some faces.
Then the voice recording plays again and finally the receipts appear—transfers, screenshots, times. Her plan stands like a house of glass. The audience's mood breaks. People hiss and clap and curse. Someone shouts, "How could you?"
Tatiana's reactions move: first feral fury—she had imagined victory—then the shock of being exposed, then raw denial, then collapse into shame. Her friends stand in a ring, faces scalded.
"Get her out," someone says. "Security!"
Security arrives and escorts her away, half sobbing, half furious, and a dozen students follow, leaving a wake of pointed fingers.
I stand there while she is taken away. I do not gloat; there is no satisfaction in watching a human fear. But the crowd changes. They lean toward me, not just to look but to learn what to do when someone lies.
Later, people come up to me with quiet apologies. A thin man who had posted the first photos hangs his head. "I'm sorry," he mutters. "I didn't check."
"It's okay," I say, because I can afford to be generous. I know what it means to be knocked down and to rise.
Tatiana's punishment is real, public, and harsh—exactly as the rules of the kind of story she wrote for me demanded. She is stripped of positions she sought, called to a student conduct hearing with all the recorded evidence and public witnesses. Her wealthy patrons withdraw their endorsements when the recordings circulate. Her image—carefully curated—fractures in front of the entire campus.
She tries to bargain with the parents of boys she slandered. She begs teachers for leniency. She goes from haughty to hollow to pleading, to stalking us at a distance like someone who cannot accept what she became. Cameras catch the slow unraveling at parties and in study areas. Her friends scatter. She loses leadership posts, is put on disciplinary probation, and sees potential internships vanish overnight.
Most crushingly, she tries to stand before a crowd the way she used to, but people film her and laugh. A social circle she used to command becomes a ring of jeers. "She did it to herself," one person says, and the truth is louder than any rumor.
Tatiana's public collapse is not a single spectacle. It is a long, slow unmaking. She moves from arrogance to denial to bargaining to raw pleading. I watch some of it not in triumph but in a hollow way, because I know how delicate this life is. She tries to appeal to the dean, tries to charm teachers, tries to buy silence. None of it works. Her greed for power leaves a record that the school cannot ignore, and her screams for mercy change to a broken, private reflection.
As for the boys she attacked earlier, their family was advised to accept the disciplinary outcome and pursue lawful routes rather than a public spectacle. The billionaires and sponsors who had been whispering in the wings back off, and Tatiana is left to face the quiet of rooms without applause.
That is her judgment: a long, public falling where her smugness is replaced by the smallness she wanted for my life. She learns, in front of the campus and behind closed doors, that cruelty takes a bill.
After the storm there is a soft settling. The dean issues a statement. The posts are scrubbed from the forum. The student council organizes a panel on responsible speech. Frida sends me a photo of the kittens—three thumbnail noses and one sleepy, forged-in-light mouth. Jana brings homemade soup. Svea hugs me like a shield.
Isaiah appears at my door that night with a basket of apples and a ridiculous smile. "Have you eaten?" he asks.
"Yes," I say. "But I'll eat again."
He stays. He listens. When he touches my bandage, his fingers are warm and careful.
"Why did you help?" I ask him bluntly.
"Because it's the only thing to do," he says.
We walk the quiet campus together. He tells me about his work—about things I only half-understand: research projects named after cold machines and bright ideas. He mentions a fragile thing called SN-8, and I nod though it is a mystery.
"Who are you?" I ask again, because even then I am trying to map him.
"I am Isaiah," he says, and then he smiles, and it's like someone has turned a page. He is not loud, nor ferocious. He is simply present.
I learn later that he has power that moves quietly: calls made, an object left at the clinic, a note sent to the dean. I learn he keeps a watch he hides in an old drawer, and that sometimes he smiles like a man who has been waiting a long time.
The rest of the term is not calm, but it is steadier. The project we worked on—the CAD design—gets praise at a conference. Professor Liu claps me on the shoulder like a proud parent. Lennox grins like a schoolboy. Jana giggles and cries on the same day. Svea buys me a small plant.
Isaiah sends me messages like small, bright things—updates on fruit deliveries, questions about my cats. I answer in short, honest sentences. We talk about small things first: "Did you finish your project?" "Yes." "What book are you reading?" "None." "Come to the lab for a coffee." "Okay."
I do not know what will happen next. I only know that messy things can settle. I know that men like Beckett can get a lesson they won't forget. I also know how quickly rumors can turn and how keenly the world watches when someone falls.
On the last night before exams, Isaiah and I stand in front of a black window. The city is a smear of lights. He holds my hand like we both know the threads that bind us are not small.
"Be careful," he says softly.
"I always am," I tell him.
He laughs low and says, "'Callie Oliver, be unharmed'—isn't that a silly thing to say?"
"It was a promise," I say.
"So keep it," he replies. "Keep being you."
And I promise him—not to be brave or quiet, but to be honest.
The End
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