Sweet Romance11 min read
His Voice, Bright as You Lit My Heart
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I woke in the middle of the night because of a pressure I couldn't ignore. I reached, instinctively, to swing my right leg off the bed and then bit down on my own tongue because a sharp pain shot up from my calf.
"Ow—" I mouthed, but the sound died in the dark.
I felt dampness spread under me. My face heated like I'd swallowed the sun.
"Call the nurse," I croaked, hands trembling as I hit the alert button.
Footsteps came after what felt like ten slow minutes. The door opened and a man stood framed in the doorway. He was tall and stable and wearing a mask, but his eyes were black and clear enough to read by.
"Please leave the room," I blurted, embarrassed beyond words. "Let the nurse come in."
He gave the tiniest nod and stepped aside without being told. "If you need anything, tell me."
He closed the door very politely.
The nurse laughed softly and shook her head. "You had an accident. We'll need to change your sheets and clothes, and we have to move you. Right now, only Graham here has enough strength."
I felt like a child caught doing something shameful. "I'm sorry," I whispered.
Graham Brantley moved the blanket back gently. His presence filled the small room with a cool, clean air. I couldn't help it; I opened my eyes.
"Don't worry. Hold still," he said, and he lifted me like I weighed nothing at all.
"I—I wet the bed," I admitted, cheeks burning.
"You need a clean dressing," said Nurse Molly Diaz, calm and practical. "Graham, can you help?"
"Of course," Graham answered. His voice was steady and soft. He put me on the small sofa and instructed, "Don't move."
I clamped my hand over my right ear and nodded like a child obeying strict rules. They changed my sheets and my clothes. I watched Graham's profile and the way his lashes lay on his cheek. For some reason his face looked like it belonged in a frame; nothing there was wasted.
"Lin?" Nurse Molly teased him as they finished. "Call me if she stirs."
"Call me if you need me," he said instead, and then he left the room, closing the door quietly.
I stole a look at Molly as she helped me settle. "Is he always that kind to patients?" I asked, curious and small.
Molly smiled like she had seen this before. "We care for patients. Some of us have faces that make it easier to fall in love with us."
I colored. "Oh."
She tapped my chart. "You need to be cleaned, and there are bruises. It looks worse than you say."
"Just... a little pain," I lied.
When Graham returned he didn't hurry to put me back into bed. He checked the bruises, the swelling on my leg, the grazes on my cheek.
"Does it hurt here?" he asked, fingers gentle.
"A little." I squinted and tried to be brave.
"We'll apply the ointment again," he said to Molly. "Keep her steady."
He sat nearby and asked, quietly, "Do you want to go back to bed?"
"No," I said. "I'm fine."
He shifted conversation to distract me. "I recommend you tell your parents to come. You shouldn't be alone at the moment."
"My father's factory is busy this season," I said. I almost said more, but I stopped.
"And your mother?" he asked.
The question made me light up. "My mother is the head of cardiac surgery at the city hospital."
He blinked, genuinely surprised. "Professor Kailey Gentile?"
"Yes. She teaches at the medical school," I said. Saying it made me feel smaller and bigger at once; like a child showing off a toy and like a small bird in a huge sky.
"I took Professor Gentile's class in my junior year," Graham admitted. "I did a year's internship at the same hospital."
He said it without fanfare, but somehow the world rearranged itself. It wasn't just doctor and patient anymore. It felt like two lines converging.
"Do you... have a girlfriend?" I asked suddenly, reckless and clumsy.
He looked surprised at my bluntness, then answered calmly. "Not at the moment. My work keeps me busy."
Before he could say more I pulled a scrap of paper and a pen out from my bag. I scribbled my number, folded it, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. "If you change your mind, be the first to call."
He didn't return it.
Molly came in with a new tape. "Hold still," she ordered, and Graham knelt beside me, focused and quiet. I remembered the ambulance and the hurt and how fragile I had felt, and his voice had been the tether that kept me from slipping away.
Three days earlier I'd decided to cycle through a city I didn't know. The road had given me a second to think and then took my balance and spun me. A driver—Mr. Eduardo Doyle—was dependable enough to get me to the ER and pay the initial fees without argument.
"They'll probably give you an X-ray," someone said. The masked figure gave instructions like a well-ordered man at the helm of a small ship.
I woke to whiteness and a steady voice. He told the nurse not to panic and arranged for tests. After the X-ray, they told me what I had already guessed: a closed fracture in my right lower leg. No surgery needed. A cast, rest, and rehabilitation.
"How long will I be in the hospital?" I asked, listless.
"Until the swelling goes down. Then a cast," said Graham. "You should stay in a private room if you can."
"I'm traveling," I explained. "My parents are busy. They couldn't come."
"Who will look after you?" Molly asked.
"No one," I said. "I'll pay. I'm fine with being independent."
They found me brave and stubborn in the way people who had lived alone often looked to them: competent and slightly lonely. Graham's expression softened. He promised to check in. Little things multiplied: a bowl of fish soup in the morning, a towel already twisted and warm, a toothbrush placed neatly at my bedside.
One morning I woke to his voice outside the curtain. "Are you awake? I brought you some congee. Do you want to freshen up first?"
"Now," I said, clutching the thin blanket. He smiled—too small a smile to change the whole world but big enough to confuse me.
"Can you add me on WeChat?" I asked, my voice smaller than the question deserved.
He walked away and the door clicked shut. My heart squeezed. A notification chimed soon after: a friend request from 'Mr.B'. I accepted.
We talked more. He learned my mother's name and immediately remembered her. He was from my mother's old class, which made me feel suddenly known.
"Why didn't you stay in your hometown?" I asked once, curious.
"Work took me elsewhere," he said. "I like being here. It was planned before school."
It was the truth and also an elegant way to say he had chosen his path deliberately.
I kept asking about his life and he answered patiently. Once, when I called him "senior", he corrected me half-jokingly.
"Will you still be this helpful to other patients?" I asked, suspicious and hopeful.
"This is how I treat my junior," he said, cool and unreadable.
The days meshed into routines of small favors. He came by after surgery shifts and left me meals and a way of setting my day by his rhythm. I watched him move through the ward like he belonged to it. He hadn't told me he liked me, so every kindness felt like a gift and a risk.
"Can I stay longer?" I asked on Day Ten when I'd begun to use crutches.
"You could move in with my parents for a while," he said abruptly. "I won't have time to look after you properly during assessment week."
I saw his worry first, then the offer. He was trying to be practical without realizing he'd created an intimacy I wasn't ready to refuse.
"Okay," I said too quickly.
His parents lived in the teacher's apartment next to a school, and they welcomed me with an easy warmth that smoothed every regret I might have had about imposing. "You brighten the house up," Graham's mother, Carol Hicks, told me with obvious affection.
You could tell his parents were simple people—teachers, steady and plain and capable. They fussed over me and kept the apartment tidy. In return I brought little tokens: hand cream, cough drops, and the small luxuries of someone who had money to spare and wanted to give.
Graham came home rarely. When he did, he stayed just long enough to wash his hands and check my cast, and then he would go back to hospital nights, and I would lie awake hearing the night hum like a soft engine.
"You're recovering fast," he said the day the cast came off for the first time.
"Can I stay at the hospital a few more days?" I asked. "I'll practice walking."
"Two days," he said.
Two days became habits of visits, and our silence settled into speech. We spoke by text—the small rituals that built intimacy. He used to 'like' my photos of flowers. The bouquet of reds and purples I posted felt less like decoration and more like a shared secret.
On a late evening when the ward hummed with low engines and people pushing gurneys, he came back from an intense surgery with blood under his fingernails and the look of someone holding too many things in place. Families hovered by the exit, angry and frightened.
"You look exhausted," I said, though my voice was a whisper.
He didn't answer at once. Then, with a tone I hadn't heard before, he said, "You make me feel troubled sometimes."
That little accusation cut clean through some foolish mistake he'd made inside his head and made me flush. "I—I'll be fine," I said, more stubborn than hurt.
"You told my father to come get you?" he asked later, voice softer.
"Yes," I answered.
He bit his lip and then, unexpectedly, he apologized for being short. "I shouldn't have taken my anger out on you."
"You didn't," I said. "Maybe you're just tired."
He gave into the truth. He took a breath. "I promised my parents I'd look after you," he murmured.
His world and my world knotted like two ropes threaded through the same hand.
When I finally left the hospital, I felt awkwardly brave. "Don't fall in love with anyone," I teased as we stood at the hospital steps. "Promise me that."
He looked at me with a light that made the night air thicker and said simply, "I like you, Julianne. Will you be my girlfriend?"
There was a strange sort of ritual to it. He said it plainly, without poetry, and I realized later that those plain words were better than any ornament.
"Repeat that," I said, pretending not to understand.
He smiled low and said the same thing again.
"Okay," I answered, all of me nodding.
After that, we were allowed small freedoms. We spoke all day and sometimes at night. He would call me every night to say goodnight, and he always—no matter how tired—said "I like you" before we hung up. It became my favorite sound.
Months passed in a way that felt both sudden and timeless. My travels became fewer and shorter. I settled in a town I had only meant to visit. I'd show up at his building and he'd lean down and tuck a mask over my face like a secret handshake. He called himself "Mr.B" in the friend list, and I teased him until he allowed me to call him Graham.
"Don't you miss your old life?" he asked once, watching me arrange my things in his small, tidy kitchen.
"I do," I admitted. "But I like this too."
"You traveled so much," he said slowly. "I wondered if you ever wanted to stop somewhere and not move again."
"Maybe I found a good stop," I said. "You know, some people find cities. I found a person."
He made an odd sound—half laugh, half surprised breath. "You trapped me," he said.
"Then you might be caught forever," I answered.
His parents liked me. My parents liked him after they met him. My mother, Professor Kailey Gentile, inspected his hands and nodded with the kind of approval only people who had raised someone who became a doctor could give.
"He's a good man," my mother said, not up for argument.
"He is," I whispered.
Graham and I were careful with one another. He kept at the edge of his devotion because he refused to use love to fold me into an existence I might resent later for being small. "I don't want to be the reason you can't fly," he said once with a quiet, stubborn look.
"I'm not a bird that needs the sky only," I told him. "I want both."
He laughed, then kissed me so softly I could have thought it a mistake if not for the way he lingered afterwards.
Summer went by like a soft book. I posted photos of pomegranate trees and small courtyards, and he would always press like on them, one small punctuation to the day. He drove me to hospital appointments sometimes, stayed outside the doors while I walked in, and then came to get me later.
One night, after a long shift, he came to the ward and found me sitting on a bench, looking small with my crutches.
"You look tired," he said.
"I was waiting for you," I admitted with honest shame.
He frowned, then his face softened. He reached for me and hugged me like he wanted to keep me there and then return to his endless tasks. He whispered against my hair, "I like you."
"I like you," I said like an echo, and it felt like we had traded two halves of the same song.
There were times when being with him felt like pushing my hand into a cool river and finding a perfect pebble: a small, private joy that made the rest of the world recede. He was steady and precise; I was impulsive and bright. He made lists. I left half of mine uncompleted. He wore his life like a neat manuscript; I scribbled into margins.
He was careful not to trap me with words that demanded settling. "I can't promise much," he said once. "I have tests, promotions, nights on call."
"I don't need promises of calm," I said. "I need presence."
He tried to show it in small ways: bringing soup, sitting up late to make sure I had painkillers, coming back after surgery to check that I had fresh towels. Each tiny courtesy accumulated like a chain.
When the cast finally came off for good and my leg was usable, he supervised my rehabilitation. "You can do this," he'd tell me during exercises when I'd flag.
"I can do anything when you say so," I teased.
He rolled his eyes. "Don't flatter me."
"I don't need flattery. I need your voice," I said.
"You're impossible," he replied, but his smile betrayed him.
We fit together like two people who'd spent enough time watching one another from opposite sides of a room; when we finally turned into each other's view, the light was gentle and exact.
Once, as an experiment in courage, I told my mother about my relationship over the phone.
"Bring him over for the New Year," my mother said, practical and blunt. "Make sure he's not a passing fancy."
"He's not," I said, and then, because I couldn't help myself: "He brings me congee in the morning."
My mother laughed like the sound everything was correct. "Then bring him over."
We learned each other slowly. I learned how to read the tightness in his shoulders that meant he had slept poorly. He learned the things I liked for breakfast and which books I could not resist.
"Why are you always so serious about work?" I asked him one evening.
"Because it's part of who I am," he answered. "And because I can't afford to fail the people who trust me."
"Is it so heavy?" I asked.
"It's heavier than I can say," he admitted.
"Then let me help you carry it," I said.
He looked at me like I had offered him a stranger's hand and then a full harbor. He kissed me in the doorway, brief and decisive, and I felt him anchor himself there, if only a little.
We had small fights—over schedules, over his reticence, over my restlessness. But none of them lasted long because both of us wanted the same thing: to keep what we had.
One night before a major assessment, he seemed distant. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I can't be around like before."
"It's alright," I said. "We'll manage."
"You mean you'll manage without me?" he asked with a sharpness that was more worry than accusation.
"With or without you, I'll be fine," I said, and then I added honestly, "But I want you."
He gave in then. "I like you," he said again, because when you fell in love with someone who loved saying the three words, they always got to you.
Years might separate us from stability, but in moments like that the space between nights and promises shrank to the size of a breath.
When I think back to those hospital days—the smell of antiseptic, the little bowl of congee he brought me before dawn, the cast that once wrapped my leg like a secret—what I remember most is his voice. It was plain and truthful and bright. It fitted me, like a key finding its lock.
"You're not allowed to like anyone else for a while," I told him when he lingered in my doorway.
He laughed and kissed me. "I'm trapped," he said, gently.
"Good," I said.
On my last night in that small apartment-turned-haven, he sat on the sofa with his mask half down and the ordinary light of the lamp painting his face in gold.
"Promise me nothing," he said, "except that you won't go too far."
"I promise," I said.
He smiled, and I learned that a smile could be a promise in itself. I smelled the faint antiseptic from his hands and the faint coffee from the pocket in his coat. He brushed a lock of hair from my cheek like he would a piece of glass.
"Do you remember the congee?" he asked.
"I'll never forget the taste of salt and warmness," I said.
He reached into his pocket and revealed the tiny paper I'd once slipped into his coat. "I kept this," he said, and his eyes were water-bright.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I wanted to show myself I could be brave enough to keep things," he answered. "And because I like the way you say my name."
"What did you like?" I teased.
"The way you call me without the mask," he said simply.
We laughed, and then he kissed me as if we were passing a secret, and then the night closed around us like a curtain.
Later, when I write in my head about our first months, I always include the bowl of congee and the cast and the narrow hallway of the hospital, because those things are unique to our story. When people ask me how I fell in love, I say, "He started by bringing breakfast."
The End
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