Sweet Romance12 min read
He Was the Moon in the Sky
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I was seventeen the first time I asked him, "Will you date me?"
He blinked, calm and pale as a moon, and said, "Early romance will affect my Tsinghua chances."
"I'll take the exams too, then," I answered like an idiot, and he smiled—only slightly—and the smile burrowed under my ribs for years.
Now I'm twenty-four, and I sell roasted sweet potatoes on a street corner. He walks past my stall like a gentleman in a magazine, and I stare at the QR code on the drum until my fingers go numb.
"How much?" he asks.
"Five," I say. "Five yuan." My head is bowed. My thumb points to the code on the iron drum.
He holds the plastic bag like it belongs to a stranger. "Brooks Jones," he says? No—his voice is too cool for that name. "Ezekiel Webb," he says. The name sits between us like a clear glass barrier.
He scans. He looks at me—curious, tidy—and for the first time in years my stomach trips.
"Boss, move him to the front," someone calls softly.
He steps aside, the group he came with laughing as they file into the building across the street. "That sweet potato seller is biased—why only five for him?" someone teases.
"Don't be ridiculous," a man's voice says. "You can't steal his luck, small fry."
Their laughter drifts away like stray heat. I let my head stay down. I hope he doesn't remember me.
I know he would. He was my school idol: elegant, quiet, always first on the list. But I was a troublemaker, the kind of student who scraped through. I followed him through school like a shadow. Once I even stuffed his desk with pink notes and had to, in a fit of shame, apologize to the class and then secretly empty the pile into a trash can. He fixed it for me and bought me milk tea to make peace, but he bought a round for everyone. I swallowed that humiliation and called it the price of being close to him.
At sixteen, drunk on ridiculous courage, I asked him to date me. "If you only date after you get into Tsinghua, then I'll study too," I told him.
He said no. "Early romance will affect my Tsinghua chances."
He smiled like the moon, and my heart rearranged itself around that smile. I studied like a madwoman for three years. I stayed up nights. I wanted that school, partly for me—mostly for him.
He promised, "After the exams I'll tell you a secret."
I never made it to the place where he would tell that secret.
I come home late from the stall. Mom is on the bed with a cast on her leg. She holds a fan with slow, patient waves. "You closed early," she says. "I was expecting you later."
"The stall needed a rest," I lie. "And I'm keeping an eye on you."
She sniffs, then softer: "The matchmaker called. There is a... man. He seems steady. He's coming tomorrow to the café."
"No," I say immediately. "Mom, I'm twenty-four, not thirty-four. Please—stop pairing me off."
She flares. "You have to be practical, Clementine. Your cousin married early and her life is different now. I am just trying to help."
"Design isn't 'just drawing.' It's work. I'm building a career," I say.
Her laugh is sharp. "Work? Has it fed you? Has it paid your bills? You have to settle!"
She sobs, then overacts, slapping her leg. "If you hate me, do you want me to die?"
I groan and agree, and the next afternoon I sit at a café across from a man with thinning hair and cold, sharp eyes. "Mr. Jones?" he says.
"Brooks Jones," he tells me, like a list. "Two million in stock portfolios, a flat mortgage, my parents are old and expect peace. After we marry, you will live with them. I will give you one thousand a month for personal expenses. You must bear a son to secure the family line."
I want to laugh and I want to cry. "You sound like a car parts warranty," I say. "You need a housekeeper, not a wife."
He scowls. "Don't be impertinent."
Then a soft laugh rises from the café. I turn. There at a nearby table, propping his chin on his hand, is him—Ezekiel Webb. He is calmer, cleaned-up, an owner of a café and things that gleam. The world condenses around him.
The suitor explodes. "You're mocking me!" He flings his coffee across the table like a small, furious storm.
Hot liquid splashes down my back. The cup shatters and glass scatters like a small, dangerous constellation.
Ezekiel moves without a tremor. He steps in front of me like a wall and says, "Apologize."
The man sputters and refuses. "You—what right do you—"
"This is my café," Ezekiel says quietly. "There will be no rudeness. You will apologize and compensate for the damage."
The man balks. The staff bring a calculator and a list. Everyone stares.
I remember, in a flash, that once he walked me away from bullies in middle school. He had fallen, pale and angry and brave, and handed me a lollipop. "Don't be scared," he'd said. Once, he protected me. Now, six years later, he protects strangers on modern days.
Ezekiel's voice is cool. "Two thousand. Compensation for the cup." His hand points to the receipt. "Pay it."
The man gapes, then sputters, then shouts that it's extortion. This is the seed of his undoing.
"What do you mean, two thousand?" he screams. "It's a cup!"
I can already see the faces in the café: patrons pause mid-sip, phones lift. The staff treat the menu like a weapon. The man stands, red-faced, the very caricature of an insulted man.
"You're being ridiculous," he says, and in his chest the pride gathers like a storm cloud.
Ezekiel doesn't fight him with words only. "You broke a cup, you threw scalding coffee at a woman. You will be responsible."
The police are called—not because he's violent, but because it's Ezekiel's café and he's unbothered enough to call. The man tries to bargain with crude threats. The patrons whisper. Someone takes a picture.
"What proof?" the man bellows. "He can't just throw numbers. Two thousand for a cup? This is a scam."
A server pulls out another receipt. "Sir," she says. "We have a purchase list. The cups are specialty, imported. The kettle is custom. Repairs and replacements are expensive for a high-end place."
Someone records on a phone. The man's red face flushes the more the crowd turns. "Two thousand is absurd," he repeats, and the murmurs shift to amusement.
"Then you can leave," Ezekiel says. "But you'll have to leave two thousand on the table. Or we'll call for damages."
"Call—" the man reaches for something, but the staff are faster. A female barista says, "You spilled coffee on a customer. We cannot accept that."
The crowd's tone flips like a switch. The man notices cameras now. Faces in the café lean in, and phones buzz. A stranger says, "Did you see what he did? He threw coffee like it's nothing. You can't treat people like that."
"I—this is—" the man stammers, suddenly aware of his public spectacle. He tries to laugh it off. "I didn't mean—"
"Apologize," Ezekiel says. "And pay."
He gets up. "Fine." The man stumbles over the words, searches his wallet, pulls out a card, and pays. The card reader beeps. Two thousand—gone.
The silence after is heavy. People discuss him in whispers, shaking their heads. "What a pig," someone says. "What a coward." A woman snaps photos and posts them.
Then—something else happens. One of the café regulars, a young woman with half-dyed hair, stands. She is angry in a way sharper than the man deserves. "Who treats a woman like that?" she says. "You should be embarrassed."
The man puts his head down. He looks smaller. He tries to explain away his behavior, but his voice thins.
"Don't you dare say you were provoked," someone else calls. "You threw hot coffee in front of people. You're disgusting."
The barista takes back the cup and sweeps the shards into a bin. The man is left with red face and fewer words.
He takes his payment card back. He tries to storm out like an offended king, but the café has him already wrung out. The staff exchange looks: victorious, a kind of civilized justice.
It's only a small punishment. But it's public. It's calculated. It's not knives or police; it's humiliation in a room full of people who now know who he is. He leaves with less swagger than he came in. He knows his image has been damaged.
I watch him go, and the warmth of the coffee on my back is nothing compared to the chill that settles in my chest. Ezekiel doesn't apologize for making me be the center of spectacle; he only says, "You should leave now."
I gather myself. He walks me into his office behind the café, a clean, tasteful room that smells faintly of roasted beans and cedar. He kneels by my swollen ankle that I didn't know I'd sprained when he yanked me free. "You hurt it," he says. His hand is gentle. "Let me help."
"You're being dramatic," I say, because I don't have the words for the way my heart thrums.
"I'm being responsible," he replies, and the tenderness in the tone makes me dizzy.
He puts balm on the sore spot, fingers slow and careful, and I let him. "I'm Clementine Casey," I tell him because my throat is a tight knot and I need to say something normal.
"I'm Ezekiel Webb," he answers, and he looks at me as if seeing me for the first time. For a beat, the million little memories—lollipops, stolen notes, his quiet kindness—swell.
He surprises me. "Are you in a hurry to marry?" he asks without preamble.
"Me? Marry—" I blink. "My mother… thinks I should. But no. Not really."
Ezekiel's face remains unreadable for a second. Then, in a tone that is too casual to be casual, he says, "I need a wife for appearances. If your mother is pressuring you and mine is the same, maybe a contract would suit us both."
I almost laugh aloud. "You want me to be your fake wife?"
"If you'll pretend for a time," he says. "I will help you with your family. You will help me. We will keep the pretence until it's convenient to end it."
The idea lands like a feather. My brain says runaway. My heart says—something else. I studied for Tsinghua once because of him. The image of him waiting under rain like the moon in daylight is stuck in my bones. I know a contract could make him closer. But I also know the pain of being a joke.
"I won't let myself fall," I say, though my voice fails me.
Ezekiel's eyes soften. "Then we will be business partners," he says, half-smile. "One month. Two months. For your mother, say it's real until she settles down."
I leave with a small, secret hope lodged like a coin.
My mother, Louise Mancini, prepares a meal and is delighted. "He buys so many things!" she says when Ezekiel comes with packages. I stand awkwardly in my small apartment while he smiles politely. She fusses and fusses and then praises him to the skies.
I feel invisible between them. He is courteous and charming, and I am a shy guest in a life that once seemed to orbit him. At night he drops me at the end of the alley and says, "You sprained your ankle worse than you think."
"Thank you," I say, and I try to sound cold.
He is not touchy. But his fingers catch my wrist—once—and something like heat runs along my arm. I am an animal whose foot has been stepped on and whose heart still remembers the old song.
He doesn't call for days. I think I'm foolish. I refuse to message him. My heart is stubborn, like a small, foolish coin at the bottom of a well.
Then, the day before my first day at a new job, he walks into the office where I now work. "Margarita Rose?" the new director says. She is lively, dressed like a woman with plans and a wedding in two weeks. "This is our new designer, Clementine Casey."
Margarita introduces us and smiles. Her fiancé is none other than Ezekiel.
I freeze. The room tilts. She says, brightly, "Ezekiel, meet Clementine, our new hire. Clementine will be designing my wedding pieces."
He meets my eyes, briefly, like a camera shutter. He is polite. He nods. "Hello, Clementine."
I want to hide in the fabric samples.
The next evening I faintly remember an old phone number and a ringing. A late-night call claims that "your boyfriend" is stumbling outside a bar, and the bartender begs me to come. I walk into a bar to find Ezekiel asleep on the counter. I carry him out like an awkward rescuer and learn what is hidden behind his polite face.
He is drunk and whispers, "You didn't come. You promised you'd come. You promised at the end of the exams."
I freeze. My throat closes. "What—what happened?" I ask.
He talks about all the years he came back to the same spot, rain or shine, waiting. He thought I had humored him. He had a memory that wounded him.
I hold him like a child more than a man and take him home. He mistakes my hand for a new object, a password changed long ago. When he struggles with the door, the numbers he enters are those I once set—my birthday. I realize then that for months, for years, he kept my number, my secret, my code. I am a hollow bell struck by that knowledge.
The night becomes chaos: he is drunk enough to pull me into his bed in a terrified, clumsy way and kiss me like someone trying to stitch up an old wound. He curls around me and sleeps, hand clamped like a small anchor.
In the morning, he is sober. He walks me to a small breakfast—an awkward sandwich and warm soy milk—and asks me to come with him to the places where we used to be children: the old school courtyard, the wall we once climbed.
We talk and he says, "I waited. Every year I waited in that rain, and you never came."
I remember the day I didn't. The hospital lights were sharp. My father was dying from an accident. I sat shellshocked for five days in the corridor while the surgeons fought. When he died, I left the hospital and walked until I reached the school. I saw Ezekiel standing there, a wealthy car idling somewhere, and a woman hugging him. I ran. I thought he had chosen to leave.
He listens now, the truth like an ache between us, and then he kisses me in the airport terminal amid people hurrying home. "Don't say sorry," he says. "Promise me this time."
The scene at the airport is private and public at once. People pass. He holds me like a secret he has hoarded, and I say, "I love you," and mean it with a real, trembling bone-level honesty.
We part and meet and part again. Lives tangle. Margarita is not a villain; she is complicated—she tells me about her own fake-plan-to-get-back-at-a-ex that turned real. She says, "I fell in for real." Her disappointment and jealousy carve tidy marks. Her anger is not monstrous enough to be a crime, but it sharpens the edges of everything.
There are moments that sting, like the time my mother storms into his company lobby and slaps me in front of strangers, claiming he has wronged us. The security cameras record the whole, and laughter bites at my cheeks. People whisper—"Who is this woman?"—and I float like an embarrassed ghost.
Ezekiel watches all of this with quiet thunder. He looks at me afterward like someone who had been robbed. "Do you always make everything dramatic?" he asks later, but it's a false lightness.
I get a job designing wedding dresses for Margarita. She asks me to sketch bridal gowns. I work nights and weave things between the job and my stall and the memory of a boy who once sat where I sit.
She and Ezekiel have months of planning and arguments and late-night talks. She is fragile at times and iron at others; she cries into her hands about him and then calls me an enemy when she finds me sleeping in his flat by accident. "You were in his bed," she says one night as if I had committed a crime. "How long have you been seeing him?"
"I'm not... we didn't—" My voice is small.
"Then why were you there when I arrived?" she snaps. I tell her the truth: he was drunk; I carried him. She laughs, and it is brittle. Later she confesses she fell. This, she says, is the ugly part of the plan: the heart decides, not the head.
We are fragile, all of us. But life has a way of being ordinary in the middle of extraordinary moments. I design and stitch and fail and succeed. Margarita and I swap notes over cups of tea. She is not the enemy; she is a woman who wants a love that stayed.
There are people who have hurt me—Brooks Jones first and then the parade of little humiliations. But the worst punishments come through truth.
Months later, at a press event for the café, Ezekiel stands and says, "There are people who think my loyalty is to my image. There are people who think my choices are calculated. But I am tired of that."
A man in the crowd who had once come to the café and mocked me is called out by friends who remember how he behaved. They remind him in public—subtly, but with full clarity—how he threw coffee. They call him 'uncivilized' and 'clumsy' and 'cruel.' He cannot meet our eyes. The baristas point to the way he lacked respect. A few people clap, not for cruelty, but for basic decency decided in front of a room. The man cannot bear that public knowledge.
He tries to justify later at the curb, stammering about a game he didn't understand. He has to sit and listen as people describe how a purchased cup isn't simply a cup; it's a symbol of hospitality. The crowd's contempt does not melt him but it shapes his exit. He leaves—and the story spreads. The humiliation is not lethal, but it matches the scale of the offense. The public record of his actions follows him like a stain.
There is a night when Margarita and I sit across from each other in a quiet bar. "Did you ever intend to be the real one?" she asks. "Or are you a placeholder for him?"
"I'm not a placeholder," I say. "I thought... I thought he was a promise. He is messy and kind and human."
She laughs and then cries, and the cry makes me ache for her. "I wanted him to need me like I needed to be needed. I wanted to be chosen."
"I don't want to be chosen because I was convenient," I say. "I want him to choose me because of me."
She listens. "He loves you," she says finally. "Or he loved you first."
The truth lands like a coin. "He waited," I whisper. "He waited every year."
"He didn't have to," Margarita says. "He could have let you go."
"Maybe," I say. "But he didn't."
We don't have a fairy tale. We have a confession in the airport, a kiss stolen under fluorescent lights, a battered cup and a public apology. We have the memory of the hospital corridor and the sound of my father, gone. We have sweetness and burnt sandwiches and warm soy milk that tasted like apology.
At last, when he holds my hand in front of my mother, Louise, and says, "I'm Clementine's boyfriend," the world tilts with a certain gorgeous absurdity.
My mother asks, "Are you sure? After everything?"
Ezekiel answers softly, "Yes." He meets my eyes and squeezes my fingers.
Behind us the smell of sweet potatoes hangs like a memory. The old iron drum that was my stage sits in the corner of his café now, polished. I keep one small sweet potato skin pressed into an envelope like a relic.
He once used my birthday as a password. He kept it. He says it was the easiest thing to remember, that my number was the only one he ever kept as a token.
I look at him. "You waited," I tell him.
"Like the moon," he says.
He wasn't the moon in some distant way. He was the moon I had always seen—cold, high, and luminous. Now he was here, his palm warm on my annealed wrist. The story had come around to a patch of quiet and honest light.
We decide to be more than pretend. We decide to be careful with each other's hearts. We decide to grow up together, imperfectly.
At night, when I sleep in his apartment, I sometimes wake and see the number 950915 written in a device somewhere, a simple string of digits that I once used as a password. It is a small theft of my privacy now turned into a secret we share. The old promise has teeth now. This time the moon doesn't simply hang—he returns.
And when I pass my old sweet potato drum in the back of the café, I run a thumb over its rim and think, if anyone asks me how we got here, I will say: we climbed walls, we waited in rain, and he kept my birthday as a key.
I smile and say, "He was the moon, after all."
The End
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