Sweet Romance14 min read
Don't Laugh at Me (But Please Keep Looking)
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I remember the exact way the room went quiet when the bottle pointed at him.
"Truth," Hugo said, as if the word itself were a cool drink.
I spat my drink onto the carpet like a volcano. "What did you say?" I croaked, and immediately wished I could dig a hole large enough to swallow me.
"Been in a relationship?" someone else asked, half a dare.
Hugo looked at me very slowly, like he was scanning a page he'd read many times before. "Yes."
"Do you still—" a bearded guy started, then stopped as the room seemed to hold its breath.
Hugo's eyes flicked across to me, calm and clear and not unkind. "I have been. I was left."
I choked on a laugh that turned to a cough and then to a catastrophic spray of drink across the carpet.
Gracie hissed, "Isabela! Are you okay?"
"I'm fine!" I lied and wanted to hide my face in my elbow forever.
I couldn't have predicted anything from that evening except embarrassment. I had pressed a voice message into his phone like a blunderous confession and then blamed a game and blamed late-night bravado and blamed the cheap neon lights. I didn't expect him to actually answer.
"Okay," he had typed. "Fine."
I had begged and begged in a string of messages like a fool. "I'm sorry. Joke. Mistake. Please forgive."
"Don't worry," he wrote back.
And I had thought: that was it. That would be the end of the ridiculous moment. He would be Hugo Henderson—too cool to be trapped by an accident—and I would be remembered as the girl who sprayed wine at a table. Nothing more. Nothing less.
"What happened next?" Gracie asked, giggling into the hush of the KTV room.
"Don't make me tell the whole world," I muttered.
"It was dramatic," Cassandra said. "You screamed and—"
"Yes, I screamed. That's the point," I said, and tried to laugh instead of cry.
The game continued. The bottle spun and the night blurred. Hugo drank, utterly composed. The whisper of his throat as he swallowed made a heat rush up my chest like someone had turned the lights down. He looked lost for a second, and that second was an invitation I didn't know how to refuse.
The first time I saw him properly, my face was in my palm. He had the kind of profile that made people slow down in hallways. A straight nose, a soft line from temple to jaw, and always—always—eyes that were an interesting shade between storm and coal. He didn't smile much. He didn't need to. People made circles around him like he was a small island of calm.
"Do you want to continue?" Hugo asked that night, voice level and tiny amused.
"No!" I shrieked, because I had no other options. I felt ridiculous and brave and ashamed all at once.
"Then truth." He looked at the friends in the room and said it like a verdict. "Have you ever been in love?"
I blinked at him, but his eyes slid sideways and landed on me with a softness that would become dangerous later. "Yes," he said, the word a whisper that nudged me and scared me and thrilled me.
"I have been," he continued, "and I was left." His mouth was calm as a placid pond. "I was left in the middle of something that mattered."
"Isabela." Gracie's voice was urgent in my ear. "Stop staring."
"I wasn't staring," I said, heat rising.
"Yes you were," Cassandra supplied, merciless and laughing.
The memory of that night stuck like a burr. I pretended not to think about it, but the world rearranged itself around that memory. People expected me to be discrete, to behave like normal. I pretended to be normal, which is to say I lied.
Weeks later, destiny—or a poor sense of timing—put me in his apartment to tutor his little brother.
I pressed the doorbell, rehearsed a smile, and readied the script in my head about professional boundaries. The door opened and a small boy blinked at me with serious eyes.
"You're early," he said.
"I'm on time," I replied. He led me down a hallway and pointed at a closed door.
"Brother inside," he announced, as if that explained everything.
I had been prepared to meet a mild, matronly mother. I had not been prepared for the sight of Hugo wrapped in a towel, hair wet and clinging, a little mole at the base of his finger which I noticed even as my cheeks went bright.
"Hi," he said, as if he didn't know he had rendered me speechless.
I think Jalen—the boy—smiled wickedly. "Don't run and tell, okay? I have dirt."
"You'd never tell," Hugo said dryly, and yet he closed the door on Jalen with a click.
Everything after that should have been ordinary. I was there to help with fractions and times tables. I was also very adult about not being flustered by the incident.
"Are you okay?" Hugo asked later when I had spilled a page of worksheets.
"Yes," I said loudly and then sobbed silently into a bag of papers when he wasn't looking.
He was so annoyingly present without trying. He brought me milk, fixed the fan that rattled noisily in the room, and one afternoon—when rain soaked the city and thunder rolled—he draped a towel over my shoulders and said, "Close your eyes."
"Close my eyes?" I said like a child being asked to take candy.
"Trust me." He smelled clean; there was soap and citrus and something I would later learn was the brand of shampoo he used. He leaned in and wiped my wet hair with steady, patient hands. He handed me chocolate and said, "Slow down."
"Why are you so gentle?" I muttered. It came out almost like an accusation.
He looked at me like I had asked the most obvious question in the world. "Because you were embarrassed."
There is a point in every ridiculous story where the ridiculous becomes real. The movie ticket in my hand—"We'll go to the cinema this weekend"—was that point.
"Are you sure about the movie?" I asked, fidgeting with the ticket.
"Yes," he said. "Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" I said, preparing an excuse. "I might have plans. I might—"
"I can come earlier," he offered simply.
"Why would you do that?" I said honestly.
He shrugged like a man pondering rain patterns. "I want to."
That was the first of many things he did without being asked: noticed a loose button, fixed a stubborn zipper, held an umbrella like it was a promise. He made small acts of care that, taken together, formed a strange, irreversible architecture.
I told myself many times that I would keep things professional. I taught Jalen how to divide. He told me, "You like my brother."
"Kids shouldn't meddle in adult affairs," I scolded him, but my thump of a heart said something else entirely.
"What if I told you he's sad sometimes?" Jalen said as he drew on his math book. "He paints people. He paints girls."
"Who does he paint?" I asked, trying to keep a lid on my own pulse.
"You," Jalen said, with the surety only a child could own. "He drew you before."
I remember the moment I saw the paper for the first time: a face I recognized without having been taught to. The lines of the cheek, the tilt of the eyes. A pencil sketch of me, though I hadn't known he had even looked at me that long, that often.
"Is he—" I started.
He said, "He likes you."
I laughed then, because what else could I do? Laughter is a good shield against truth.
"You're lying," I told Jalen.
He shouted, "Not lying! I saw it. The picture."
When Hugo finished his shift at the hospital (he was not a doctor; he had his own quiet pursuits), he would meet me in the small, half-forgotten places of the city—an old bench under a plane tree, a stall that sold too-sweet pastries, a cinema that smelled of butter. He would bring small things: a pressed paper crane, a chocolate he said he'd made, a spare pen. The pen became an emblem. Once, when he put his pen down and left the café, a wind took it. I retrieved it and later, by dumb luck, I stood before him with the broken pen in hand, ready to confess.
"I broke your pen," I said, abashed. "I'm so sorry."
"It's okay," he said. "I wanted to lend it to you."
I had been teaching numbers, not how to read people. Numbers are clean. People are messy and fold into themselves.
"I had a pen like this," I said one night, lying awake in an empty dorm room, the city a smudge beyond the window. "But it broke."
"Now you have mine," he had answered simply, mouth a soft curve I still could not reconcile with the memory of him in that towel.
We had been careful. The world is always watching. Teachers murmured, friends took bets, and my inbox was full of "Are you two dating?" texts I ignored until my fingers trembled.
People think love is a crescendo—an operatic swell. Ours felt quieter. A smoothing of small corners. A collection of "call me when you get home" and "I baked too much" and "cover me, it's cold." We kissed awkwardly and then smoothly. He taught me to navigate public spaces as a pair, and I taught him the way to make a terrible chin-up look heroic.
"Sometimes I think you're mean on purpose," I told him, and he smiled like someone who had found a fun secret.
"Sometimes I am," he replied.
"Why?" I say this even now and hear the echo of that question in my chest.
"Because you look better mad," he said.
"That's a very poor reason," I shot back.
"Then I will do it for other reasons," he promised, which was worse because he wasn't joking.
The summer thinned and then the horizon widened. College took me north and him elsewhere. We made plans like brittle paper, folded small, hoping they would not tear. I left with a pocket of letters he wrote on random receipts, with my breath hitching at every station.
"Keep the pen," he told me at the train platform, pressing the repaired thing into my palm. "So you don't forget me."
"Don't be dramatic," I said. But I cried like it was dramatic.
He did one more thing he had not told me he would. He took a photograph, not of me, but of the little place behind the station where we had once watched the rain gather. "I will always find this place," he said, "and I will remember you here."
I kept the photo folded into a book. I kept the pen in a pencil case. I kept the way he said my name like it warmed his mouth.
We tried long distance like delicate instruments. We wrote letters with small margin notes. He sent photos of soup he made in a hospital kitchen for his grandmother. I would eat it over and over until the spoon felt like company.
Then life, which is not evil but is very busy, gestured its immense flick of responsibility our way. Hospitals need hands, schools need lessons, families need time. He had obligations—his grandmother's being one. I had a scholarship and distant classmates mooning over exams. The city we had shared in small ways grew into two maps.
I lied the night before I was meant to leave. "Maybe we should not see each other," I told him, a coward dressed as a savior. "So it's less painful."
"Why would you say that?" He looked baffled and for once not inscrutably calm. He looked startled like he had been slapped by a cold spring.
"Because you deserve better," I said. "You deserve someone not me—"
He laughed, a small, incredulous sound. "Don't be ridiculous," he said.
"Yes, be ridiculous," I told him. "Be smart. Be free."
And then, he did the thing he had done when I locked my eyes on a boy who went too fast for me in school corridors: he made himself a shelter.
"I will come to your window tonight," he said on the phone.
I pressed my palm to the glass because I thought he'd never appear. He did, standing under the lamplight like a promise. He lit a sparkler and asked me what color candies I liked and if I liked sunsets or sunrises more. "You look at sunrises," he said, and I felt the world tilt.
"I do not," I argued, and he laughed.
"Then let's watch tomorrow's sunrise," he said. "From a place that is ours."
The night pressed like honey between us until I couldn't bear it. "I like you," I told him, the words simple and slapdash.
"I like you," he replied back when I needed proof.
We kissed. It was not a news headline. It was a folding of two small things into a stack. It was all the little kind things that became the big things. He kissed my forehead and said, "Don't forget—practice."
"Practice what?" I asked, breathless.
"Practice liking yourself more," he said. "Because I like you. It's a very selfish reason, but it's true."
We kept everything small and large at once. We held secret dates in storefronts and went to the movies where I pretended the film was the important thing. He, with all his quiet, let me be ridiculous. He listened. He drew me and handed me sketches like a man offering a secret.
When I left for college, his mother—Miriam Durand—had reached out earlier, paying for a last bit of money I had not needed. She was a bright, firm woman with a laugh like machine whirr, useful and clear and warm. I lied and told her I would be fine, but she sent me fresh clothes and a parcel that smelled of lavender and told me to "be careful."
"You are a good teacher," she said once when I had tried to refuse payment. "And a quiet woman who needs pushing. I thanked her in a voice that was too small for the words.
Here are the things that mattered: he gave me anchoring, and I gave him truth even when it hurt. Once, in a rain-soaked alley, he looked at me and said, "You make me soft in the places that need it."
"You make me brave enough to be myself," I said, thinking of that sketchbook and the broken pen and the times he had held me so that I would not fall.
There were moments that sharpened and made the rest of the world recede.
"You're smiling," a friend observed one afternoon as we sat in a campus courtyard.
"Which one?" I asked, as if I had been practicing smiles.
"The one Hugo gets when he sees you," Gracie said. "That expression is only for you."
"I don't want special," I lied, because the word scared me into being practical.
"He's not for taking," Cassandra said. "He's for keeping."
"Who said he wanted to be kept?" I asked.
"He said he would like to be with you," Cassandra said plainly. "People say things when they mean them."
On the day he learned I would have to move for a practicum, he came to my dorm on a midnight bus. He had a thermos of milky tea and a face that had not slept.
"How did you get here?" I asked, clutching a blanket like a talisman.
"I came when you couldn't sleep," he said. "I had to be sure."
"Then be sure now." I tried to be stern and failed.
"Isabela," he whispered, using my full name and making it soft as bread.
"I can't be anything but kind to you," I said, because I could not be brave.
He kissed me for a long time and then gently, ridiculous with sincerity, said, "If you ever stop liking me, tell me. But if you do not, remember to keep the pen safe."
We had a thousand small rules. We shared toothbrush brands and pharmacy coupons. He would show up with soup when I had a stupid cold, then stand outside my dorm smoking while I opened the door and waved like an idiot.
"Do you always do this?" I asked once, watching him fold himself like a measurement into my door frame.
"Not always," he said. "But for you."
We were not perfect. We were young and prone to mistakes—like pretending to be indifferent in front of friends, or leaving unspoken slights to simmer. There were nights I'd be furious and nights he'd be gone without explanation and then he'd return with a silly toy he said reminded him of me.
"I bought a small plastic dinosaur because it had your color," he'd explain, very proud of his logic.
"You're absurd," I would say.
"You're honest," he'd answer.
When his grandmother fell on the stairs, he stayed at the hospital for a week. I saw him at the edge of his exhaustion and decided—selfishly—that I could be the shade he needed. I cooked porridge until I thought my hands would ache and he sat beside me and fed me bits like a game. He had been the one to teach me to feed people, to watch them look like they were mending.
"I don't like the hospital," I admitted once.
"Then don't," Hugo said. "Be with me instead."
"But I can't be everywhere," I protested foolishly.
He pinched my ear. "Then come where I am," he said.
And so we stitched ourselves into each other's days until it felt as if our lives were a tapestry. He was my quiet lamp when I burned out, and I was the thing that made him smile that small, hidden way when he read my name in a message.
Weeks passed. We texted, we missed, we made up. Then came a day when things felt too delicate to hold. I said something sharp and cowardly—too worried about the future to let myself be present—and he looked at me with an expression I had rarely seen.
"Isabela," he said. "Stop."
"Stop what?" I snapped.
"Running," he answered.
"I have to be sensible," I told him. "You deserve more than a drifting anchor."
"You're a harbor," he replied. "You're the harbor."
I thought I had built walls. But he had maps. We made a pact to try.
"I will come to your window tonight," he promised again.
He did. He lit a sparkler and asked me the silly questions that change what you believe. He told me he had painted a girl once and that she looked like me. He told me that he would think of me when the wind smelled like laundry detergent, and that I should, when lonely, trace the crack in the sidewalk outside my apartment and count the number of small pebbles.
"I love you accidentally and intentionally," he said then. "Like a habit that is also an art."
I laughed until I couldn't stand and then I told him I liked him back.
He kissed me, a long, steady press of warmth, and in that kiss I unlocked a kind of bravery I never knew I had.
We had a thousand tender moments in the months after—small, fierce, private things. He would, in public, be a model of restraint, but he'd find ways to make room for me: slipping his jacket over my shoulders when I shivered, handing me the last chicken dumpling on purpose, pulling the blanket up after I fell asleep in his arms. He taught me that care could be a thousand tiny mechanics, not all fanfare.
"Promise me something," he said one afternoon, eyes half-closed.
"I'm allergic to promises," I joked.
"Promise you'll keep the pen," he said.
"I will," I said, because I meant it.
The pen—our pen—traveled through dorm rooms and umbrellas and suitcases. It was a witness to simple love: notes tucked into books, nervous signatures, a doodle in the margin when one of us forgot to call.
On the last morning before I left for a long practicum, Hugo rode his bike to the station to see me off. He had a thermos and a small folded paper—another drawing—tucked in his pocket. He handed me the paper and said, "Keep this."
"What is it?" I asked, because I didn't want to be greedy.
"A map of how to get back here," he said.
I remember feeling weirdly brave. I hugged him, and the world seemed to hold its breath. "I'll come back," I promised.
"I'll wait under the same lamplight," he answered.
The train took me north. He waved until the carriage hid him. We learned that distance was a test not of love's death but of love's resourcefulness. We learned to plan visits with the kind of seriousness once reserved for exams.
When I returned months later, it felt like I had been learning to breathe. He was at the station with a thermos, as promised, and a small look of a man who had been saving kindness in jars.
"I waited," he confessed, modest and huge all at once.
"So did I," I said.
We picked up where we'd left off and then tended to the life we had begun to build—together and carefully. We still had little fights about who would wash the dishes; we still texted each other ridiculous photographs of cats. We still argued like two people who deeply knew one another.
"Why do you draw me?" I asked one day, fingers tracing a sketch he had handed me in a small, wrapped bundle.
"Because I'm better at that than saying things," he replied.
"Say things," I returned.
"I love you," he said, at last.
"I love you," I returned.
There were no fireworks that day, only a sunlight spill across the table and the smell of coffee. The small things had become steady and the big moments had found their rhythm in the quiet.
We kept the pen safe—this ridiculous talisman that had seen everything from confessions shouted into a phone to quiet notes written in margins. Whenever I felt small, I held it and reminded myself that someone across the world had chosen me enough times to write me on a page.
Near the end of the year, at a reunion where our class had gathered, someone asked about exes. I smiled and felt a tail of awkwardness wind through the crowd. Then Hugo, forever composed, spoke in his precise voice.
"I have been in a relationship," he said, and then, softer, "I was left once."
Everyone fell quiet, and the air did that thing where it tightens.
I seized his hand under the table.
"You won't leave me," I whispered.
"I won't," he promised.
We had come a long way from spilling wine and awkward confessions. We had found a language of small things, of sketches and repaired pens and midnight thermoses. We had learned to carry each other in the quiet, which maybe is what love is most of the time.
One last secret he gave me—a paper tucked into the cover of my favorite book. It was the drawing of me, in ink, with a phrase at the bottom: "Tonight is quiet. I love you."
I thumbed the ink until it blurred. I pressed the paper into my pocket and left for class with the pen in my hand like both a shield and a key.
I did not laugh at myself anymore for the things I'd done in the name of panic and hope. I laughed with him.
"Don't laugh at me," I'd say in private.
"Only with you," he would answer.
We kept the little rituals: the chocolate, the spare umbrellas, the way he'd say "close your eyes" and reach for my hair. He had been a sanctuary at first, and later became my home.
The rain would come and we would shelter together. The pen would sit in the mug on the table, witness to the ordinary and sacred. I would hold his hand in the dark, and we would be grateful for the small, steady things we had chosen.
The End
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