Age Gap14 min read
He Calls Me Little Apple
"I almost fell," I said, breathless, my hand clamped to the blistering edge of the corrugated metal shed.
"I saw," Maxwell said, his voice low. "Hold on."
I let him guide me back behind the crate. Sweat prickled along my jaw. The August sun in A‑City felt like a hairdryer set on high. The metal walls radiated heat. My palms were sticky. My chest pinged with a small, useless panic.
"You've got burns here," Maxwell said, tapping the inside of his forearm. He was shirtless, heavy with muscle, and every bead of sweat made him look unreal. "Come with me."
"I—" I swallowed. "I shouldn't be here."
"You are breathing, so you're here." He smiled in a way that didn't have room for drama. "Can you walk?"
"I can try."
He hooked an arm around my waist before I could refuse. His grip was solid, careful. Up close, his skin smelled faintly of tobacco and the kind of sweat that says a man has been working all day. My scalp prickled where his palm rested lightly against my ribs.
"Why were you watching?" he asked.
"I—" I pointed at the trucks. "I like big trucks."
He snorted a laugh, but his eyes warmed. "You do? You're twenty. You should be at home eating air‑conditioning and milk."
"Milk is gross," I said without thinking. The words came out half a joke, half a child clinging to honesty.
He blinked, surprised. "You are twenty?"
"Yes. Sophie. Sophie Su."
"Maxwell Lange." He held out a callused hand and I took it. His palm swallowed mine.
A week before, a scalded arm and a stranger had saved me in a hotpot restaurant. I had tasted the red broth in my mouth, smelled the iron of panic, and then his big shape folding over me like shelter. I had run into him the next day while I was passing the warehouse where his trucks loaded. I had been peeking. I had been curious. I had been a little stupid.
"Thank you," I said then, handing him a small tube from my bag. "This is for scars. I, uh—heard it might help."
He turned the little tube over in his big fingers, looked at the label, and a strange softness touched his face. "You brought this for me?"
"Yes. You had burns on your arm that day."
"You remembered." He smiled like it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for him. He shoved the tube into his pocket with a grunt. "Go. Get out of the heat."
"I work right across the street," I said. "At a bubble tea shop. I just wanted to see."
He squinted at me. "You work in that pink uniform?"
"Pink helmet," I corrected, and his eyebrows rose. "Please don't make fun."
"Never," he said. "Not if you keep bringing me curative creams."
He was my neighbor before he was my neighbor. He became my neighbor after he appeared at my door one sweaty noon with a pair of apples and a stare that made the space behind my ribs ache.
"Open the door, Apple," he said.
"Why do you call me that?" I asked, startled.
"Because you look like a little apple," he answered matter‑of‑fact. "Round, surprised, sweet."
I slammed the door because using 'Apple' in public felt like having someone read my diary.
That night I ate a bowl of egg noodles he had seen me make before work, then went to the tiny leather sofa and wrote numbers in my black accounting notebook. Rent. Electricity. Food. The list was unsentimental. I had learned to keep it that way. That was who I was—twenty, small, practical. I took odd jobs, saved a little, supported my grandmother back home. This city was not gentle. It left you hungry and taught you to be clever about pennies.
A week later, he knocked like a man who expected breakfast to be open. Holding a canvas lunch bag, he said, "I made you breakfast."
"That's a lot of trouble," I said. "You don't need to—"
"I do," he said. "Plus, I cook now."
He startled me. "You cook?"
"Been reading," he said, like that explained everything. He was thirty this year, give or take. He had that kind of rough charm that made people assume he'd never read a book, and then surprise you by owning a well‑thumbed cookbook. He owned Maxwell Freight. He wore grease sometimes. He smelled of tobacco and the road. He looked like someone who could lift a truck and then gently peel a shrimp for you. He also called me his 'little Apple.'
"You're not supposed to come in," I said.
"Too late." He stepped through the threshold and set the bag down. "Eat. Tell me if it's good."
I lifted the lid. There were two sandwiches stacked with layers of fine cheese, a thermos of hot soy milk, and a small pot of fruit salad. He had even tucked a napkin in. My mouth went dry in a way that had nothing to do with heat.
"You didn't have to," I said.
"Yes I did," he said. "I chose to."
I ate and told him about my grandmother and the little tin roof house back home and the way my teeth had chipped when I was a kid. He listened like someone who stored words like treasures. When I finally put down my chopsticks, he smiled and said, "Tomorrow you cook for me."
"Pardon?"
"You wrap it up," he said. "You make me breakfast. Pay me back."
"I can't cook like you." I laughed, but my heart was a small, frantic bird. "I'm not that talented."
"Just make something," he said. "Learn. I'll teach you."
He did teach me. He watched my clumsy hands and laughed when I cut a carrot wrong, but he never laughed meanly. He showed me how to hold a knife so it didn't feel dangerous, how a pot hissed when it was ready. He was patient in a way men my age seldom were. He would hover at my elbow, sometimes brush my hair from my forehead, and tell me it was fine to be messy.
"How many books did you buy?" I asked once, seeing him stack a small tower of cooking and baking manuals in his office.
"A few." He tapped the spines. "Enough to make biscuits and to stop burning them."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you care," he said simply. "And because you brought me scar cream."
I thought he was teasing. He wasn't. He began to come for breakfasts and stayed. He started showing up at weird times—when a drunk man cursed at me in the street and shoved me, Maxwell arrived and broke the man like a twig. He held my elbow like a relic as though I might shatter.
"Do you need me to call the police?" he asked in the aftermath of that fight, his jaw clenched.
"No," I said. "You already did enough."
"Then tomorrow I'm making you dinner."
He cooked for me, and the food tasted like an apology and a promise. I ate too quickly. He laughed. "Slow down, Apple. You'll choke."
"I wish I had a mother to binge on my food," I said once, and his face softened.
"You have me," he answered. "For now."
We were careful with the rules of the world. I kept my notebook close. I still sent money to my grandmother. I still held on to the plan: save a little money, go home, live small and honest. Yet I found his gestures were not just incidental. They piled up like a stack of warm plates.
"Why are you doing all this?" I asked him on a bus ride once. The city blurred by like a smear. His hand rested near mine on the seat.
"Because I want to," he said. "Because I'm selfish. Because I like your face when you taste good food."
"That's an answer."
"Is it the answer you want?"
"I didn't know there was a list of wanted answers," I said, and he jerked his head in a laugh that sounded like a bark.
He taught me to cook proper breakfast—powdered oats with mashed purple yam, whole wheat pancakes with a savory filling. I started to look forward to his messages: "Woke up. Making oats for the queen." He'd write "queen" like a joke, but his fingers left a warmth in his sentences.
"Do you like older men?" he wrote one night. His tone made me look up from the dim screen.
"Depends," I replied. "Do they have to be scary?"
"I can be scary. But I prefer being useful."
"Like breakfast?" I teased.
"Like fending off drunks and being home before your boss needs you."
"You're basically a full‑service contractor."
"Exactly."
We slid together in a small orbit. People started noticing. My coworkers at the tea shop asked if I had a boyfriend, and I found myself both thrilled and panicked. When I said Maxwell's name, they said, "He's the freight boss? No way." Their faces said, "He is not allowed to be soft."
"Are you sure he likes you?" my colleague Lan asked, leaning across the table and watching my small mouth. "He is big and safe. Maybe you are a pet project."
"I'm not a project," I insisted, and then I laughed because how could I explain that he made me feel seen?
He was not without complications. One evening an old face appeared in front of our building: Lina Chen. I had met her name from truckers' mouths like a ghost that did not leave. She had been Maxwell's girlfriend years ago. She wore a calm that screamed theater. When she saw me with a bag of tiramisu, her eyes narrowed.
"You must be Sophie," she said, like an accusation turned into a greeting.
"Yes." I kept my voice level. "Do you know Maxwell?"
"Once," Lina said. "We were...together."
"I like the tiramisu," I said because I could not conjure the words to explain how small I felt all of a sudden.
She watched me like a scientist would watch an experiment. "You are very young."
"Twenty," I said. "That's grown."
Lina smiled with too many teeth. "Age is funny."
Maxwell's reaction to Lina was not the one Lina had hoped. He looked at her like someone had summoned a bad memory.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"We should talk," she said.
"Not here," he said. "Not again."
Lina's face changed. It was subtle: a tremor in the jaw, then a cool set around the mouth. "You abandoned everything for your little truck company. You left—"
"I didn't abandon," he said, his voice low, dangerous. "I built my life. I made my choices. I am not answering to you."
Lina's eyes flashed. "You owe me—"
"I owe you nothing," he said. "Especially not in front of her."
She stepped back, a fragile smile folding like paper. The people around us whispered. Lina left, trailing a rumor that felt like a storm cloud.
"Are you alright?" I asked, seeing the anger blistering his face.
"I am fine," he lied, and then kissed the space under my knuckle, hard enough for me to feel it like a vow. "Don't be sad. She's a ghost."
"She came here to remind you of what?" I asked.
"To say she could come back," he said, and then added, "She won't."
We learned each other in small, dangerous pieces. I told him things I had never said aloud: the way my father had left, the way my mother had died when I was a baby, the way my grandmother had scraped coins together to keep me fed. He listened and then he quizzed me on my favorite things: "Pancakes or porridge?" "Which fruit do you prefer?"
"Apple," I said.
"Of course," he said, like he'd known before I even had to answer.
Work at the tea company got rocky. The boss announced a move and compensation and stress. I worried about future incomes and whether my plans to go home were feasible. When I told Maxwell, he shrugged and said, "We will make do." Then he turned the language of "do" into action: more lunches, more help with moving boxes, offers to accompany me to the doctor when I twisted my ankle carrying crates.
One night, after a messy month and a wine‑fuelled holiday, Lina came back with a temper that had teeth. She knocked on Maxwell’s door and made a scene: a scene of old grievance dressed in silk. She spoke loudly about sacrifices, about pain, about what they used to be.
"Why are you here?" Maxwell asked, his jaw hard.
"To tell you," she began, and then she looked at me like someone watching a child play with fire. "You are making a mistake."
"Can you leave?" Maxwell's voice was a blade. "Now."
"You can't tell me what to do," she said, stepping closer. People in the corridor gathered like curious birds.
"I will if I have to. Sophie does not deserve this." Maxwell lifted his chin and his words were light and heavy in all the right ways. "Take whatever you think you want, but leave the rest."
People's eyes flicked. Lina flinched like someone struck. Her face drained.
"I—this is unfair," she said.
"Being here is unfair," Maxwell said. "You made your choices. I made mine. I live my life now. And my life includes Sophie."
The woman in front of us made a sound like rag paper tearing. "You love her?" she asked as if that were a commodity she could appraise.
"I love her," Maxwell said, and the corridor seemed to fall away. "I will not be threatened. I will not be blackmailed. I will not be made to feel guilty for choosing a life I built."
Lina's mask crumpled. She started talking about debts and promises and then stopped. She backed away and fled down the stairs, like a bad idea that had been revealed.
"See?" Maxwell said, turning to me with a softness so deep it hurt. "See what happens when people try to take from you? I protect what's mine."
"You said 'mine'?" I stammered.
"I did," he said, and then kissed me in a way that made everything in me rearrange. "Sophie, I like you. I like your quiet. I like how you care for numbers. I like how you frown when you concentrate. I like how you eat my pancakes like they're the best thing you have tasted."
"Do you mean it?" I asked. My voice was little.
"I mean it," he said. "I am thirty. You're twenty. I know that. But I'm not apologizing for wanting you."
"I don't want you to apologize," I said. "I just—"
"Don't worry about the world," he said. "Worry about the two of us."
That day the gossip in the building fell into a hush. People watched us with new eyes. Maxwell's friends teased and called him soft, but the teasing had a shade of respect now. I felt strange, walking through the corridor that used to be only about old men and laundry. Maxwell put his hand on the small of my back; it fit like a promise.
We kept our small life private in the ways that mattered. He brought me food. I cooked for him. I saved money. He taught me how to knead dough and fold pastry. We argued about nothing and then made up by sharing late‑night coffee. I taught him the names of the songs I liked on the radio. He introduced me to the trucks and places behind his business. He never asked me to change my plan to go back and get married and do a quiet life in the countryside. He didn't demand I choose between him and my grandmother.
"Will you stay?" he asked me in the middle of a cool morning, when the city felt like new.
"I don't know," I admitted. "I like saving and then going home. I like the thought of building a small house for my grandmother."
"Then we'll build it together," he said. "I can give you half a life and you can give me the other."
That wasn't a threat. That was an option.
Then one evening, Lina returned in a different form: as a woman seeking another chance. She came to the freight office with a lawsuit threat about money and promises. She sent people to ask questions. She called at night. Maxwell answered each one with the calm that comes from certainty.
"She keeps trying," I told him, worry in my voice.
"She is a map with dead ends," he said. "Ignore it."
"Easy for you to say," I said. "You're him."
"Then walk with me," he said.
He brought me to a dinner with partners and friends. Everyone saw us there. He lifted a glass and made a small toast: "To patience, to simple things, and to the woman who taught me how to like breakfast." People laughed; his cheeks flushed. He was a man who wanted to be seen as mine.
Then the weekend arrived when the company took a break and I had plans to take the bus and then suddenly Maxwell appeared, hand on my waist, and said, "Come."
"Where?" I demanded, suspicious.
"To the place where I was a kid," he said. "I want to show you something."
We drove for a long while and then climbed into the old dirt patch behind my grandmother's village on the trunk of an old truck. He set down a tiny sapling, a dwarf apple tree, with soil like a dark pillow.
"What are you doing?" I asked, stunned.
"Planting," he said. "An apple tree."
"It's so small."
"So you'll know it's growing," he said, his voice a hush. "You called me once a big fire. I want to plant something that will last. If you want to leave with your grandmother, this apple tree will be proof that you were here."
"My grandmother will laugh," I said, thinking of her loud voice and soft hands.
"Then she will taste apples from this tree," he said. "In a year maybe. In three years, definitely. I like the idea of being patient."
We knelt and covered the roots together. My hands smelled like soil and his fingers grazed mine. I felt like a child planting a secret.
"Promise me one thing," I said, watching him tamp the earth.
"Anything."
"Don't ever leave without saying so," I said.
"I won't," he said.
Months moved like slow scenes. Maxwell kept his breakfast ritual. I kept my little black notebook and one day, at the bottom of the list where I wrote "Plan: 1. Save 2. Return home 3. Build small house", I added another line, small and shaky: "4. Maybe stay? With Maxwell?"
He made sure I had options. When my company moved, he helped me pack and then offered a small, reasonable job at one of his clients. I started to think of life in terms of choices where he was a constant possibility.
Lina tried one more time. She came to the freight yard and invited Maxwell to a meeting, claiming there were old debts to sort. He went alone because he said he didn't want to force me into anything.
When he came back, he was tired and smelled of diesel. He sat at my little table and simply said, "It's over."
"How?" I asked.
"She wanted money. She wanted to take my company for the past. I told her she had once nearly ruined me and now she wanted to ruin the people I care about. So I told her to go."
"And she left?"
"With a lighter suitcase than she came with."
I pressed my cheek to his shoulder and thought of the apple sapling we had planted. The tree had leaves now, thin as coin paper. I wanted to protect it like we were protecting one other.
We kept building the strange architecture of a relationship that the world sometimes does not bless. He set up a small counter by my shop and made simple lunches for me when my shifts ran long. He sat at the back of my small flat, reading while I slept. He wrote a name next to mine in his phone: "Apple."
One autumn night, standing under the tiny apple tree on my balcony—Maxwell had insisted we tend to it; he gave it coffee grounds and sang to it like a joke—we looked at the city lights.
"Do you remember the black notebook?" I asked. "The one with the rent numbers and the things I'm never supposed to forget?"
"I do," he said.
"I wrote something in it," I told him. "A question."
"And?"
"Do we still belong to each other in a year?" I asked, because the future felt like a soundproof door.
He put his forehead to mine, grounding me. "Do you want me to make myself small and easy to find?"
"I want you to stay," I said, which was simpler and truer.
"Then I will stay," he said. "I will make coffee and sandwiches and fix leaks and fight drunk men. And if you ever want to go home, we'll go together."
He gave me a key then, the metal bright and heavy. "It's for your place," he said. "I won't be every hour, but I will be the one who comes. I promise."
I kept that key like an invitation.
A year later, when the little apple tree had small green fruits trembling, Maxwell and I stood in the courtyard of the building. He had organized a small rooftop lunch, nothing big, with cheap balloons and a round sponge cake he had learned to make properly.
"Today," he said, looking at me with a straightness that made me want to cry, "we started as neighbors. We saw each other. You brought me cream and I burned some pancakes learning to make you smile."
"I remember," I said.
"I asked for one thing and stole it: you," he said. "I want to ask for something more."
He reached into his pocket. A small box, cheap and dignified, lay in his palm. I felt the breath leave my lungs.
"Will you stay?" he asked. "Not because your papers and plans need fixing. Not because I'm afraid of being alone. But because I want a life with you. Will you be my partner?"
My fingers trembled. There was the world—family and old plans, the ledger of debts and future savings—but there was also this warmth, this man who had shoveled soil and rescued me and learned to make porridge without burning it. I let myself choose.
"Yes," I said, and the word felt the right shape in my mouth.
He grinned like a man who had won a small war and then kissed me in front of the rooftop crowd, in front of my old coworkers and his truck drivers, and in front of the little apple tree that had grown big enough to shade two lovers.
"Good," he said into my hair. "Now we plant more."
That night we ate cake with our hands. People clapped. Lina's rumor faded like newspaper in the rain. The older men in the yard cheered like children, and the landlord—Elsa, the beautiful woman with the red lips—blushed and said, "Finally."
We returned to our small flat, full of food and loud promises. He cooked eggs and slid them across the table toward me. I opened my little black notebook and under the "Plan" list wrote, in careful letters, "1. Stay. 2. Build. 3. Plant. 4. Eat."
We planted the dwarf apple tree on the balcony together that winter. I watered it. He whistled while he trimmed. We kept our day jobs and our little rituals. He protected me in the ways that mattered and let me keep my plan for the future. Once, in the middle of a busy afternoon when I was counting money and he was on the phone arranging a new shipping route, he texted, "Did you eat?" I replied with an apple emoji and he sent back a picture of a small, perfect red apple he had bought from the market.
"Message received," he wrote.
In the years to come, we would fight and forgive each other enough times to know we weren't infallible. He would still burn something in the oven on occasion. I would still forget to bring an umbrella. We would still disagree about whether to move to the countryside. But there, on my balcony, the little apple tree grew fruit people could actually eat. We picked one together on a hot August afternoon, and it was sweet.
"Do you remember the first time you called me apple?" I asked.
He looked at the fruit in our hands and said, "I do. You were watching people who lifted trucks, and your face was bright. I thought you were a small, good thing. I still think so."
I took a bite, and the juice slid down my wrist. He wiped it away with his thumb.
"Promise me one thing," I said, playfully.
"What?"
"Keep bringing me breakfast," I said.
He laughed, the sound comfortable and true. "Only if you keep being my little apple."
I felt like my chest might split open from the fullness. The city hummed around us, and we were two hands holding a small life between them.
We stayed.
The End
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