Sweet Romance14 min read
He Said I'd Be His Prisoner — So I Decided to Set Him Free
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"I dreamed about being tied with silk," I said, blinking at the ceiling of my room. "It felt strange and close, like someone was leaning over me."
"Again?" Leticia's voice was small and urgent in my ear. "Astrid, you need to listen."
"No, I—" I swallowed. "It's just a dream."
"It's not just a dream," she insisted. "Listen, I can't keep saying this without you believing me. I came back—I've come back to warn you."
"You're not making this easy," I told her, because telling myself that sounded safer than believing she could step out of time. "Tell me why you think Alvaro would ever want to... to imprison me."
"Because I saw it," Leticia said simply. "Because he changes. Because the world squeezes him and he learns to keep everything that matters to him inside his hands."
"You're saying he becomes violent—" I cut myself off. "Leticia, I grew up with Alvaro. He's gentle. He's the calmest person I know."
"He becomes sharp where it matters. He becomes possessive. He thinks his way of protecting me is to keep me. I can't let that happen."
"You sound like you've been through this." I set my milk down and let the last drop slide into my throat. "How did you—"
"I was hit by a car," she said. "I woke up back at school. I remember days now that haven't happened. I remember the hurt. I remember knocking on your door and not finding you, and then finding you in his house and..." Her voice broke. "I can't let it happen. I won't let it happen."
I laughed, a short, bitter sound. "So you go back in time and try to keep me away? From Alvaro Hicks? Really?"
"Yes," she answered as if nothing could be braver or more obvious. "Yes, Astrid. Please trust me."
"Fine." I pinned my gaze to hers. "Then prove it. Tell me something only I would know."
She smiled like she had a secret map. "You keep a stash of old concert tickets in your sock drawer. You hide note paper behind the mirror to write letters to a singer you adore. You never finished learning the last kata in your martial arts class because of a sprained ankle in middle school."
"You knew about the ticket," I said, stunned.
"I knew about more than that," she said. "I know the exact day it'll start getting worse. I know when someone will throw a volleyball into your back."
I frowned. "What?"
"You're going to be hit during gym," she said. "A boy from another class will be the one to take you to the nurse. His name is Duke Warren. He likes you secretly. He'll... he'll lose his courage during the afternoon and then he'll—"
"Stop," I said, half laughing. "Stop. This is getting weird."
"Then let me prove myself." She took a breath. "Please."
"Okay," I said softly. "Okay, Leticia. Just... stay close."
"Always," she promised.
That night I dreamed again. It was darker than the first dream, the light like tea, clouded and strong with smell of laundry soap. Silk wrapped my wrists but it was gentle, like a promise that could become a chain. A shadow moved near my face, and I smelled lavender. A voice spoke my childhood nickname.
"Astrid," the voice whispered. "My light."
I woke up gasping, my heart heavy and confused.
"You're being dramatic," I told myself, but my pulse kept time with the memory of that whisper. It felt like a truth I couldn't shake.
"Are you okay?" Alvaro asked the next day when he found me waiting by the bicycle shed, the place where the world seemed to tilt right because he was there. His presence was an anchor. His hair was still damp from practice; the smell of his shampoo drifted to me like a clean flag.
"I'm fine," I lied. "I just had a weird night."
He studied me for a moment like he was reading a book he loved. "Tell me tomorrow," he said. "I'll listen."
"I always tell you everything," I said, wrapping my arms around his waist as he pushed the bike. "You make it easier to breathe."
That day Leticia followed me like a shadow that had finally gained permission. She winked in a way that meant she had plans, or secrets, or both. I didn't know how to be guarded with her and not feel cold. She had the look of someone who had been given a second chance and refused to waste it.
"Do you remember the orange cat?" she asked suddenly when we sat under a sycamore after school. "You always feed it ham from your bag."
"Yes." I smiled. "It always liked you."
"Everything else will come true unless we change it," she said. "We have to make him trust the world enough to not close into himself. We have to make his life wider."
"That sounds like a plan." I shrugged. "How do we do that?"
"Simple," she said. "Make him belong. Make him needed by more people than himself."
We started small. I sat next to Alvaro in class. I asked him to help other students with math. I made sure he didn't sit alone. I told people about how careful he was when I fell in the hallway and how he had once stayed up all night to help me with an essay. Word spread in whispers that turned softer. I used every friendly voice I had to build him bridges.
"You're being ridiculous," Brittany Bonner said to me one lunchbreak, poking at a fruit salad. "Why are you doing everything like you're leading a campaign?"
"I'm making a campaign for someone who doesn't know how to be seen," I said. "Look, try it. Ask him one question. Smile."
"He will be fine if he just learns to speak," Brittany said. "But if this gets him hurt—"
"He already is hurt," I said. "He just hides it."
It wasn't all cleverness and satire. There were small stumbles. Once, during gym, Leticia's prediction came true: a volleyball hooked a careless arc and smashed into my back. I remember the hot pain and the way it stole my breath. Duke Warren, the boy from the other class, helped me to the nurse with apologies stitched into every step.
"I'm sorry," Duke murmured, looking like a deer who had run into a net. "I didn't mean—"
"It's okay," I assured him. "Thank you for helping."
He smiled at me like he had just been given permission to exist. "If you ever need help with math—"
"I will," I said, and meant it.
Every time Alvaro looked at me, I felt that he saw me as someone bright and delicate. I loved the way his eyes steadied when I spoke. Yet Leticia's warnings were a drumbeat in my mind: he could become someone who would close his hands around what he loved.
We did better. The class shifted. People noticed Alvaro's kindness and his patience with others. He started having simple conversations with people he had passed like ghosts. He smiled more. I believed—for a while—that we were changing the future.
Then I saw his home.
"Wait here," I told Brittany that afternoon. "I'll be back."
She stood under the sycamore and did that funny thing where she pressed her knuckles to her mouth like she was trying to hold everything in. "You're doing something reckless," she said, but her eyes were loyal.
I walked across the square and watched him slide his key into his door as if it were the most ordinary thing. The apartment was neat, almost too neat. There were no scattered notebooks, no mugs with half-drunk tea. It was like a room made by someone who wanted to be invisible.
Alvaro's mother, Janet Andre, answered the door with a smile that didn't touch her eyes. "Hello," she said, pleasant like a practiced greeting.
"I brought your homework," I lied, and stepped inside.
He sat on the bed like a small statue of a boy who had been scaled down to avoid notice. When he looked up at me I saw the exhaustion in his face. There were marks on his arms.
"I—" he started.
"Are you okay?" I asked, because I was no longer brave enough to lie. I wanted the truth badly enough that it ached.
"It's nothing," he said. "I don't want to worry you."
"Tell me," I demanded, more gentle than I'd planned. "Tell me. Let me help."
"I don't want you to worry," he repeated.
"Then let me worry for you," I said. "That's my job."
He tried to pull the sleeve over his wrist, but I caught it and found the neat rows of faded scars like a map across his skin. His mouth trembled. Then, a little like a tidal shift, his composure broke.
"Astrid," he whispered. "You shouldn't see that."
"You shouldn't have to hide it," I told him. I bandaged his arm with the little kit I kept in my bag. He watched me with an intensity that felt like gravity.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked finally, voice small.
"Because you have people," I said.
"And you?" he asked.
"You," I said, feeling my face warm. "You have me."
He exhaled, slowly, and then laughed at the absurdity of the moment. "You make me feel like sunlight," he said. "You keep coming back."
That night the world turned toward our small orbit. He began to speak, to ask questions in class, to give answers with the careful precision of someone who feared being wrong. The class softened. People stopped avoiding him because a girl from another class had made it known that he would be good to know.
We wanted this to be enough. We wanted to unwrite whatever future Leticia had seen.
But the world, as it often does, had other plans. King Escobar, the bully who had lorded over the adjacent class, didn't like that Alvaro was becoming visible. He didn't like losing power. One afternoon, during a lesson that smelled of chalk and heat, King slotted a large book under his arm and sauntered to Alvaro's desk.
"You're getting big, Hicks," he said in a voice that pretended to be kind. "That's... new."
"Back off, King," someone muttered. The air tilted.
"You think this class likes you now?" King sneered. "They don't. They like what's easy. They like someone who takes what's theirs."
Alvaro didn't reply. I could feel the tension like static.
"Leave him alone," I said, louder than I had meant.
King looked at me as if tasting a new flavor. "Oh? The hero speaks."
He lifted a book and threw it. My reflexes moved first. I put my body forward because Alvaro's shadow would have broken me into pieces if it had to. The book hit him instead. The sound of impact was an ugly punctuation.
Alvaro leaned over me, arms around me, shielding me in a way I never expected. His shirt had a dark smear. People were staring. I swallowed the cocktail of fear and something else — a bright, weird gratitude.
"This is it," Leticia whispered to me later. "This is the kind of moment that hardens him."
"No," I said. "We can keep going. We can keep widening the world."
"We need more than kindness," she said. "We need proof."
Proof. The word sank in like a stone dropped into a still pool. I had an idea, one small and dangerous and honest: if King had hurt Alvaro, there were witnesses. If there were witnesses who would speak up, the tide could turn in a way that did not close him but opened him.
I began to collect testimonies quietly. I asked the students who had been present, one by one, what they had seen. I coaxed confessions out of embarrassed kids who had watched and done nothing. I recorded what Duke had told me. I kept notes in the little notebook behind my mirror, the one Leticia had said I had, the one that smelled faintly of stage lights and old ticket glue.
One afternoon I stood before the school with a list in my hand and an urgency in my chest. We had organized — not a mob, but a steady, determined group of students and teachers who had seen too much pass. We had the video from a phone, and we had witnesses who would not be silenced. The principal had been uneasy but agreed to let us present the case in a school assembly when the bigger truth would be visible to everyone.
"This is about him?" King snorted as he took his seat cross-legged on the stage, the crown of the hall's attention planted awkward on his grin. He did not know what was coming. He did not know that ordinary people could make extraordinary things happen.
I stood at the microphone. My heart slammed in my throat like a trapped bird. All the faces in the gymnasium were a blur and yet so clear. There were students, teachers, the principal, even some parents. Alvaro sat to my right, hands folded, his shoulders tense and sharp like a sculpture ready to fracture.
"Everyone," I said when silence finally fell. "We are here because someone hurt a classmate. We are here because we've watched it happen and we've done nothing, and we need to stop doing nothing."
"That's a strong opening." Duke's voice was small but steady at my left shoulder. He had given me courage in ways he didn't know.
"I will show what happened," I said. "We have a recording. We have witnesses. We will not let fear decide who lives and who doesn't."
I pressed play.
On the screen, grainy and direct, King and his friends encircled Alvaro in the courtyard weeks earlier. The footage was clear enough; King's hand shoved Alvaro's shoulder hard, laughter echoing. In another frame, a stack of books toppled on Alvaro. The gym murmured as each frame unspooled like a confession.
King's face flickered, the first hint of a mood change. He looked smug, then startled as the faces watching him shifted. A teacher whispered, "That's him." A wave of recognition washed the room. A parent in the front row covered his mouth.
I called witnesses to the stage. Brittany described the first time she'd seen King push him. Duke told about the afternoon he'd taken me to the nurse and how he'd seen King with the same expression. Other students told of small cruelties, teasing that built up like rust.
King's smile thinned. He tried to laugh it off. "This is ridiculous," he said. "They're making a big deal out of nothing."
"Why would we make this up?" Brittany asked. "Why would we risk this?"
"I didn't do anything," King ranted, the words slippery now. "You're all liars."
"You're not the only one who can play roles," I said. "But the role of bully doesn't get to be a script you write for other people's lives."
"Everyone," the principal's voice carried heavy. "We will investigate. But right now, I want to say that this conduct is unacceptable at our school."
King's face went through a series of shifts I will never forget. He started with arrogance, the kind that walks into a room expecting applause. Then came irritation, a flicker as people stopped giving him the space to be comfortable. Then denial, the hands clapping over his chest like a shield. He tried to pull his coat around himself. He tried to shake hands with the person in the front row as if to say, "See, nothing wrong." When those hands pulled away, his posture broke.
"You're lying," he spat. "This is revenge. This is a setup."
Duke stood before him then, courageous with a tremor. "You made him bleed," Duke said. "You cracked the skin on his arm. You left him alone. You taught us to look away. None of us will do that again."
The gym's reaction was a concert of murmurs that lifted and swelled into a tide. Some people whispered, some clapped, some shouted, "No!" A few students took out their phones to record the scene. Some parents tightened their fingers on each other's sleeves. The teachers looked at him, not as a kid, but as someone who had chosen a hurtful path.
King's face shriveled. "You don't understand," he said suddenly, voice thin and raw. "You don't get why—"
"Why what?" I asked. "Why you had to choose someone to hurt? Why you feel stronger when someone bends?"
"I... I had problems," he stammered. "My dad—"
"Everyone has problems," the principal said. "No one has the right to hurt others."
King's voice lost knots of pride and turned into pleading. "It was only once—" he tried. "I was drunk with a crowd—"
"That's not an excuse," a teacher said sharply. "You knew better. You have choices."
King started to crumble. He looked around like a man who had been dropped into a spotlight and found the ground beneath him crumbling. "Please," he whispered. "Please don't—"
"Do you want to apologize?" the principal asked.
King's eyes were wet and incredulous as if surprised that consequences could be so ordinary. He mouthed, "I'm sorry," but it came out thin, worn. He stood on stage and had to absorb the faces that no longer bowed to him. Students who had flinched at his name before now watched him with a sober disinterest. A group of his former friends shifted away. A few recorded his apologies with cool, detached thumbs.
His collapse had a public arc: arrogance, shock, denial, unraveling, sorrow. He tried to look fierce one last time, but the fierce face was empty. He wanted to regain control, but the room had turned its back on the person who had traded other people's safety for supposed esteem.
"What are you doing?" he demanded, voice hoarse. "You can't ruin my future."
"Everyone's future matters," Brittany said firmly. "But we will not let you carve it up with other people's grief."
Parents murmured approval. Some students stood and left in disgust. A few teachers wept quietly. The principal called for a disciplinary committee. King was asked to stay; he sat hunched, the notorious swagger replaced by a small, frightened kid.
He begged later in the hallway, hands trembling. "Don't tell my parents," he said. "Please. They'll ruin me."
"Then make amends now," I told him. "Start by telling the truth to those you've hurt."
He didn't knell in the dust, didn't bow like some stories of public contrition demand. Instead he sat on a bench and sobbed. It was not the triumphant fall I'd imagined in my darker thoughts; it was raw and very human. People passed him by with looks that ranged from pity to contempt to weary indifference. Some offered nothing; some called him a coward; one teacher sat beside him, silent, then finally said, "You'll learn this the hard way."
It was not a perfect ending for anyone. There was no grand punishment except exposure, shame, the rebalancing of social currency. King lost the space he'd dominated, and more importantly, the permission to be cruel without witnesses. The best justice was that people no longer pretended not to see. The worst part was that his parents had to know, his future would be complicated, and he would have to live with the evidence of what he'd done open in the eyes of his community.
As for Alvaro, he sat quietly during the entire assembly. After the initial shock, he looked lighter as if having a window opened in a room he'd been breathing stale air in for years. He closed his eyes and then, without drama, reached for my hand. "Thank you," he said.
"You're not a victim," Brittany said later as we left the gym. "No one gets to throw that word on you like a blanket."
"But he did something to me," Alvaro whispered. "And no one stopped it."
"Yes," I said. "Until now."
The days that followed were not cinematic but they were kind. Alvaro, freed from the worst of the weight that had been on him, began to reenter the world as a person who expected to be seen and treated fairly. He came to class with a smile that had shadows but also light. He laughed with more ease. He told me once, quietly, "You were the bravest thing that happened to me."
"No," I said. "You were brave first. I only had a clipboard and a loud voice."
We started going on little dates that were bigger than ordinary: a pastry shop where we shared a cream puff, a long ride on a battered bus to the riverbank, a place where the orange cat waited on the steps like a small lord of comfort. We sat on the ferris wheel one evening, the city lights like spilled jewels below.
"Do you remember the first time we rode this?" I asked, as the cabin climbed like a slow inhale.
"You fell asleep with your head on my shoulder," he said. "I thought I had to invent reasons to hold you."
"Now you don't need reasons," I said.
"I never needed reasons," he corrected, voice soft as twilight.
Leticia watched us from across the park like a guardian who had done her work. She had that tired, satisfied look people have after surviving something terrible. "You changed things," she told me one night as we walked home.
"We did," I said. "But you came back. You risked everything to tell one person the truth."
She smiled, a small, proud curve. "I couldn't bear it otherwise."
We learned that day after day, small acts add up. Alvaro learned to puncture the armor of solitude; I learned that love can be a shield but not a cage. There were hard parts: King had to face disciplinary hearings, parents had to speak to their children, and Alvaro had to continue healing. But the worst of the future Leticia had described did not come to pass.
One night, after we had finished our homework and the house was quiet, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a narrow strip of silk — a ribbon he had bought at the market and kept always. He frowned at it the way people do at relics of past selves.
"This is silly," he said.
"No," I told him. "Show me."
He tied a loose loop on my wrist, not binding but tender. "You won't be a prisoner," he promised in a way that was both apology and vow. "I would never cage you."
"And I won't let you lock yourself away," I said. "We promise each other, not to hold but to keep one another open."
He laughed at my solemn tone. "Open like a window."
"Or a door," I said.
We kept to small, ordinary promises after that. We would feed the orange cat. We would ride the ferris wheel when it was cold so the stars were bright. We would sometimes, very occasionally, let silence settle between us like a blanket and know that silence did not mean distance.
Leticia faded back into ordinary life, then one day she told me, quietly, "I have to stop changing things. I've done what I can. Keep him wide, Astrid."
"I will," I said.
At graduation King walked through the courtyard as another student, smaller than rumor had made him. He had to pick up the pieces of his future. There was no spectacle beyond the assembly and quiet consequences. The public shame had stripped power from him and given it back to those he'd tried to intimidate. The world, messy and imperfect, went on.
On the last night of our senior year we went to the amusement park one last time. The ferris wheel creaked in the night breeze. We rode in the same cabin, at the top where the city spread like a map. Alvaro squeezed my hand.
"What do you want most?" he asked.
"To be free," I said. "To keep being me."
"I want to be someone who can keep you free," he said.
"And I want to be someone who helps you open up," I answered.
We laughed, then leaned our heads together. The light blinked under us and the ride began to descend. Below, the orange cat prowled the gates like a small king. Above, the stars looked like the holes in a lace curtain — but tonight the curtain was open.
"I was wrong," Leticia had said once, "that it has to end with chains."
"Chains break or they never form," I said now. "We chose the second."
Alvaro turned his head and kissed my forehead, a gentle press of warmth.
"You'll always be my light," he said.
"And you'll always be my sun," I replied.
We dropped down with city lights around us, and I remembered the silk and threw it away into the trash can near the exit — not to forget, but to show that we had chosen, together, something different. The ferris wheel hummed on. We walked away like kids who had been told to go home and hadn't rushed to do the dramatic thing to cap the night. We had made our own ending: not dramatic, but true.
The End
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