Sweet Romance13 min read
He showed up at my signing and said, "I'm your hero."
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I still remember the stiff smile I wore like a mask that day at the book fair, how my wrist ached from signing too many copies, how my cheeks hurt from holding a grin for hours.
"Eggie—I'm taking your book into the college exam week!" a shy voice said, and I murmured, "Good luck," not really listening. "I love your plots," another fan said. "Thank you!" I said. I meant every one of those thank-yous, but by the time the lines thinned to the last five people, my hand felt like it had been through winter without gloves.
Then he appeared.
He wasn't like the other readers. He was well-dressed in a hooded denim jacket, stood perfectly straight, and the watch on his wrist flashed like a quiet promise. He had that kind of chiselled face people say belongs in novels. When he looked at me, it felt like a winter wind cut through the hall—strict and oddly familiar.
"Do you have a copy?" I asked out of habit, the public smile glued on, voice patient.
He frowned once as if the world offended him. "About time I found you."
I blinked. "There are a lot of writers here today—"
"I'm not here for an autograph," he said, so quiet that the hubbub around us seemed to pull back.
My smile faltered. I'd never had someone come to a signing to be rude before. "Then—" I tried to deflect, "—maybe someone else can help you, sir."
He bent slightly, not enough to be threatening, and murmured into my ear: "I'm your book's male lead. Meet me on the roof after lunch."
He handed me a postcard with the book's cover and left. The postcard landed on the table like a dare.
After the signing I went back to the staff room. I told myself I was not going to the roof. I imagined five-thousand-word cliffhangers where a crazed fan cornered me. My editor, Graciela Renard, popped her head in.
"Eggie, you okay? The afternoon crowd won't be large. We can close early."
"I—I'm fine," I lied. Not because I thought I wasn't fine—fine felt too big a word—but because that man existed somewhere between "odd" and "impossible."
I almost didn't go to the roof at all. But curiosity is a dangerous friend to a writer.
The roof was empty except for a bench and a light breeze that smelled faintly of someone else's cologne. He was already there.
"You shouldn't be here," I told him.
He closed his eyes as if hearing the wrong answer. "I said I was your male lead."
"You mean—" I swallowed hard, "—the one I haven't even published?"
He smiled the smallest, strictest smile. "I am Yan Yuze."
I didn't know the name at first. Then it hit me—that was the protagonist's name in the draft I had sent to Graciela: a meticulous botany professor who objected to sloppiness, who loved order and hated night live-streamers until he didn't. I had only sent a beginning and an outline. I had not published a word.
"You can't know that," I said.
"Do you think the people I am—" he twisted his fingers, thoughtful, "—would enjoy being written badly?"
His tone made no room for argument. I tried logic. "You sound like a fan with a dramatic streak."
He looked at me like someone pitying a child. "I have reasons to dislike who you made me love."
"That's not—" My protest stalled. He walked away toward the edge as if satisfying some internal clock. "If you're a fan, then go ahead and be one. But don't harass people."
He passed me a hand, surprising me with how warm it felt. "Come with me," he said.
My writer's gut told me no. My throat told me curiosity would be a good plot device. My hands shook and I let him lead me. He took my fingers, and in a blink the streetlights became different, the air more saturated, and there was a cat purring against my calves.
The cat nudged my hand like a small weather sign. It was an orange tabby with one white paw and a name tag that read "Custard."
I was sitting on a leather sofa, a soft blanket over my shins. A kettle sang on the stove. Across from me a man—my man, according to my own notes—was smoothing the tabby like someone washing his hands of the world.
"Welcome home," Yan—no, Finn Bradley—said.
When I looked at him more carefully, he was nearly identical to the Yan Yuze in my file: close-cropped hair, near-sleepy brown eyes, a hint of uncompromising neatness about how he folded his napkin. "You must be joking," I said. "This is impossible."
"You're the one who loves impossible," he answered, smiling with an honesty that made me blushingly embarrassed. "Why are you so surprised? Aren't you used to writing characters who do the unexpected?"
"I write fiction," I said. "Fiction has rules. You can't just—"
"Break them?" he finished for me. He sat. "Neither can real people when stories demand it."
We argued, and we negotiated. He insisted I change the heroine. I insisted on editorial sovereignty. He threatened gentle mutinies in the manuscript. I kept a running list and tried to out-reason him with craft terms and character arcs. He called me Author; I called him Professor. He called me Eggie, a nickname that landed like warm sugar. We were, very quickly, ridiculous together.
"Do I get to choose the heroine's type?" he demanded one morning as I scrolled through fan photos of Dixie Bloom—the small-time streamer who was my story's neighbor.
"Of course you don't," I replied. "You're not even the person writing the story."
He tapped my notebook with a fingertip. "Half my life belongs to your notes. If I walk according to your choreography and every move is scripted, then what am I? Who am I to love in the way you stage?"
We bickered like a married couple practicing for them to-be. Then he took my hand and without preamble we turned the room into another page of my draft: houses, trees, a bakery's afternoon warmth. The reality in front of me had come from an outline.
"Stay for a night," he said finally, matter-of-fact, when I tried to leave. "It's good research."
I let him coax me into a strange truce. He fed me soup, defended my writing to my sleep-starved brain, made me tea and boiled eggs just right. Custard, the cat, pawed at my ankle as if time in this world was as simple as a purr. For a long time I scribbled notes—minute observations on how Finn Bradley steamed milk, how he frowned when a stray cat hair floated onto the couch, how he straightened his books in a particular, precise way. It was research. It had to be.
At times he was infuriating: upright as a law, sharp as a schoolyard teacher. At other times he was tender, pulsing with soft small kindnesses, like returning my phone when it fell into a puddle, or handing me a towel when I came back from a storm-damp walk.
"You'll change her," he said one night, leaning close as if whispering secrets. "You'll make her different. Better."
"I don't change characters unless they earn it," I said. "And anyway, you should trust me."
He was quiet for a long time. "What if you've written me a man who learns to smile because of her? What if I had no other way to learn than to be the victim of your pen?"
I laughed until I started to cry, because that was exactly the temptation of writing: control. The next morning I woke to messages on my phone. Someone had posted a photo of the roof incident and the comments were irreverent and whipped into a minor frenzy. The man—Finn, or Yan, or whatever—had gone viral. I was suddenly more uncomfortable with fame than before.
Back in the real offices, Graciela was practical, soft-voiced, and wonderful: "Hailey," she said once, "You look like a ghost. Go home and sleep. Or finish a chapter. Do whichever will save you."
"I can't catch up on both truth and fiction," I replied.
"You don't have to choose," she said, which was silly advice but true.
For all the absurdity of it—literally being yanked through a screen into a world made of my own sentences—there was a very human set of rules I had to learn. Finn Bradley was not a prop; he had opinions. He critiqued my research notes with the dryness of someone dissecting an insect. He complained when I normalized an unkind line. He nudged me like a stern editor who had fallen in love with me.
It was ridiculous then entirely inevitable that I found myself defending a girl named Dixie Bloom to him, even as she streamed late into the night, voice bright enough to cut through static. Dixie was young, messy, talented, and lively—everything Finn insisted irritated him. But I loved the way her mess created possibility for my own conservative man to loosen his joints.
"She is not an idiot," I told Finn for the hundredth time. "She's warm, she survives by juggling too many things, and she loves with an uncalculated heart."
"Love shouldn't be a handicap," he replied, dying to sound stern. "Love should be a mutual aid kit, not a one-way bridge."
That was why he wanted the heroine changed: he wanted someone who would challenge him by being better, not by being more lovable. He wanted a woman who matched his standards on some level, who could fight him and not lose herself.
Life in the invented city wasn't only ours. It had people who behaved like extras: passersby whose lines and gestures echoed the tropes I had used and the clichés I had tried to avoid. Some were easy to satisfy; others were stubbornly scriptless. I spent mornings in markets making notes, afternoons helping Dixie with a clumsy donation raffle on stream, nights arguing about whether Finn could be patient.
The absurdity of my day-to-day life reached a peak when I was dragged into a world I’d never wanted to inhabit—a small, glossy, hectic corner of the media industry where a polished, polite man I'd briefly met at a family-arranged meal reappeared.
Mason Cherry had been the well-dressed gentleman who picked me up from the station—the son-of-a-friend-of-mum with a soft smile and too-clean teeth. He'd been gentle enough in the restaurant that I agreed, against every instinct, to meet him again, because the truth is, sometimes reality is good at surprising you too. Two hours into a company lunch, his messages flooded my phone. His words were warm and a little impatient, and when he later called, he introduced himself not as the shy suitor but as a creative director. He spoke in formal cadences. He asked whether I'd consider adapting my novel into a show.
"That could be… an interesting experience," I told him, half-heartedly, because I had been up all night on Finn's couch, editing lines while Custard pushed my hand every now and then.
He laughed—genuine, almost boyish—which softened the stubbornness in my chest. I shared a single sentence about my work and nothing more. But Mason was persistent. A week later I was in a meeting where a woman from a production company sat with me and smiled like a blade hidden behind lipstick.
"You're Hailey Brown," she said. "Your voice has clarity."
Her name was Christina Fournier. When she spoke, her lips formed air-tight sentences that slid the wrong way across the floor like oil. She'd been my college roommate once, or almost: we had overlapped in a seminar and she'd made a hobby of pretending I did not exist. When she recognized me now, her smile had the same tiny rue as old paper cuts.
She worked as a screenwriter. She said things like, "sweet sells" and "tension is currency," while eyes flicking to my notes as if they were under her control. It became painfully obvious, rapidly, that she resented my being here. She prodded at my critique and demanded a fury of rewrites to cater to a demographic she called "the heart-of-market."
"I'm not here to please the market if the market kills the character," I said once, and the room quieted. The assistant offered me coffee; I refused.
At the meeting's close, tension braided itself into the elevator ride home. Christina's voice had been an undercurrent of barbed steel all morning. I should have walked out sooner.
That afternoon, in the lobby, someone leaked an old college scandal about Christina. The rumor grew like mold. After two days of whispers and an angry thread, a press conference was called.
The Punishment: public undoing of the antagonist
It was, in every sense, public. A packed small auditorium, the press like a swarm of hungry moths, cameras blinking red like opal stones. I sat between Finn and Graciela, my hands curled into fists in my coat pockets. Mason sat near the back, face locked in polite confusion. Christina sat center stage, an immaculate black suit that made her look like a statue carved for legal hearings.
"Ms. Fournier," a producer who had been sidelined by her manipulations said into the microphone, "we are here to explain decisions on this project. We learned—through internal audit—that scripts were being altered and that unauthorized comments about other writers were distributed from internal accounts. Ms. Fournier, would you like to explain?"
She drew a breath and smiled. "I have always believed in strong narratives. Competition exists. We all play the game."
"Do you deny the log records," the producer asked, "which show you accessing Hailey Brown's drafts, altering them on a company server, and sending redlined versions back to management with malicious comments about her personal life?"
Her smile did not falter. "That is—an unfortunate misinterpretation."
A young editor came up with a laptop and projected the screenshots. There it was in black and white: timestamps, edit histories, private messages that Christina had sent: mocking comments about my health, snide remarks about my appearance, and a draft that bore her fingerprints like fingerprints in wet clay. The auditorium buzzed.
"But how do we know what she wrote?" one reporter yelled.
Graciela stood. Calm, precise, like someone used to holding a pen steady. "We have backups. We have author timestamps. We have emails. Ms. Fournier had access. Ms. Fournier altered scripts without notifying the author, and she used company emails to leak misinformation to press accounts to deliberately undermine Hailey Brown's reputation."
"That is—ridiculous—" Christina's composure cracked for the first time. Her lips twitched. "It is a smear. I am a professional."
"Your company account shows multiple edits to Ms. Brown's file," the producer said. "Your company account shows messages to a press aggregator known for targeted harassment. Do you deny sending those messages?"
She started to flail in front of the microphones. "You cannot—this is—this is a witch-hunt!"
A man from the legal team, who had gone through her email chain, spoke precisely. "You had a pattern: you would suggest 'edits,' then anonymously criticize the 'marketability' of the author, then leak pieces to third-party accounts with a narrative that the author was 'unreliable' and 'disconnected from reality.' This is digital harassment, followed by conflict of interest. The company will terminate your contract."
The auditorium reacted. A low wave of disapproval rolled through the seats. Reporters clicked like a uniform of small, tiny claws. Christina's hands found the edge of the podium and dug in, knuckles white.
"You're ruining my reputation!" she screamed, voice high and brittle.
"No," someone in the crowd said—an assistant who'd been one of Christina's victims—"You ruined yours."
Her face changed. She went through the stages the audience loves: defiance, confusion, denial, then a flaring resentment that looked almost carnivorous. A studio executive read out a transcript of her messages—cruel jokes at someone's expense, an altar of malice built out of private lines. Cameras panned close, catching her mouth as it shaped disgrace.
People murmured; someone gasped. Her allies avoided her eyes. The top-tier producers stood frozen, the ones who'd once smiled at her as she pushed ideas. She had been a puppetmaster; now the strings were visible, and the audience loved how visible they were. Someone began recording and the clip would go viral within hours—her humiliation would live in bright pixels.
She tried to beg, to reenact sincerity, to kneel. "Please, I didn't mean—"
"Please what?" the producer asked. "Please that we all forget you used our platform to bully a colleague? We cannot unsee the records. We will make sure the press knows the truth."
Around her, the room hissed with the quiet satisfaction of long-awaited justice. It was not a lawsuit, nor a trial in court, but it was a punishment a thousand times worse—public unmasking. She watched as colleagues stepped away, as cameras zoomed in to capture the exact second a beloved industry name cracked. She paced and pleaded and saw everyone document the collapse. The evidence was surgical, the delivery merciless.
Christina's face convulsed between rage and despair. Finally, she sagged into a chair, mouth open, fingers wrapped around a glass of water she refused to drink. The crowd's reactions were a chorus of condemnation and faint pity—pity because even power can be lonely when it's stripped of respect.
When it was over, someone shouted, "Where's your moral compass now?" A dozen phones recorded the final moment of her unraveling.
She was escorted out, still muttering about injustice. The press hovered like vultures. I felt no joy in her ruin—just a hollow sense that the world was finally balanced. For days later, people would talk about the clip. People would take sides. But in that room, under the lights, she had nothing but herself.
It satisfied the "bad people must pay" part of the world’s appetite, yes—but it was also a warning: you cannot weaponize power against people with records to prove otherwise and expect to remain unscathed.
After the public humiliation, the aftermath bent the industry toward apologizing and setting better boundaries. Christina's agents dropped her. Her network collapsed. She tried to rebuild, reaching out with apologies filmed on shaky cameras, but the memory had been captured and shared with an audience that had come to watch her fall.
When the dust settled, Finn sat beside me and Custard once again twisted around my ankles like a small orange comet. "You didn't have to watch that," he said.
"I had to," I told him, shaking. "This life I'm writing affects real people. I can't let someone reduce me to fear and then claim artistry as an excuse."
Finn squeezed my hand. He, who had been carved from my imagination, was, in his way, more real than many I had met.
After Christina's fall, Mason Cherry's production kept moving. He remained professional and soft and consistent—like a sturdy hinge. He asked me to consult, to help shape characters so they wouldn't be weaponized or romanticized into clichés. His company paid well, but more than money, it offered me a chance to show how a story could be adapted without bleaching its heart.
Back home, the lines between pages and people blurred and braided into a life that was not mine and yet it shaped me. Finn refused to simply be written into a box; he nudged me toward being braver with my characters. Dixie Bloom became more than a foil; she became a person with agency and messy courage. Mason became an ally, a man who wanted to translate my novel without gutting it. Graciela stayed calm and steady like the line of horizon I would return to at the end of a day.
One afternoon, after months of rewriting, Graciela said: "You changed a lot."
"Who changed?" I asked.
"We both did," she replied. "You trusted the world with your story. Finn—" she smiled, "—Finn taught you to see people as more than plots. He forced you to consider dignity."
I laughed, meaning it. "He also made me stop writing tidy endings."
"Good," she said. "Tidy endings don't stay true to people."
At night, I would open a blank document and Finn would poke in from the living room, stirring tea. He'd read a line and shake his head, or he'd say, "Less explanation. More truth." He had his own little rules, and I had mine. Together we found a rhythm neither of us expected. I learned to write with him in mind—not to make him a tool, but to let him be someone I would choose to love if he had agency outside my pen.
We wrote slow, like two people learning to sleep under the same blanket. We learned to accept the scratches and the cat hair, the times when one of us felt unfair, and the ways small kindnesses make a future possible.
There were days when he vanished—literally disappeared from my screen, a line of blank pixels where a man of determinate will had stood. Those days I worried like a child. But sooner or later, he'd reappear with a new complaint or a joke that would let me breathe again.
On the day the script was approved for pilot production, we both walked out to the roof where we'd first met. The city was stitched in daytime light, and Custard in his usual way bounced between our feet.
"You were right," I admitted. "A little."
"About what?" he asked.
"About the girl. About the world needing more than just tidy happiness."
He breathed in the air like one who memorizes weather. "And you were right too."
That was the thing about writing: it never truly belonged to one person. It was a conversation, an improvisation scored on paper. On that roof, beneath the exaggerated sweep of blue sky, I felt like both the author and the audience of my life, and that was a deliciously dizzy place to be.
The End
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