Sweet Romance15 min read
I Drank, I Added, He Came Back — Call Me "Daddy", He Said "Daddy, I Love You"
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I should have been proud the night I deleted his number.
"I did it, okay?" I told Melody, loud enough to convince the bar and maybe myself. "I finished with Laurent. I'm done."
"Are you sure?" Melody asked, but her laugh was soft, like a blanket. "You keep saying that since sophomore year."
"Yes! Positive." I raised my glass like a toast to my own bravery.
"I know you," she said. "You hate that he's too gentle. You wanted someone reckless. Someone messy."
"He is messy," I said, and then I lied. "He's just—too familiar. Too... domestic."
Melody tilted her head. "You knew what you were doing when you left."
"I did," I said, because I had to mean it. Because I wanted to mean it.
We left late. The city had a drunk sweetness to it — neon reflections in puddles, laughter from a taxi like a stitched ribbon. I went home in a mood of small triumph, and I did the stupid thing I always swore I wouldn't: I opened my phone to delete Laurent's contact and let the knife of finality slide.
It felt spring-clean and absurd. Six years of sandboxes and gym classes and the same university hallway — gone with a swipe.
In the morning my phone was a quiet, smug thing that wouldn't tell me anything. Maybe it was that smugness that annoyed me. Six months of no texts and I pretended I neither noticed nor missed him. Six months is a lot of weather.
"You're ridiculous," Melody said the next morning when I confessed with too much sheepishness. "You deleted him like he was a piece of gum stuck to your shoe."
"Well, he wasn't the one who stayed up assembling IKEA furniture and asked me if I wanted garlic in the lemon chicken. He was just—present."
"Present, yes. Romantic? Not always," Melody noted, but she was in my corner. She always had been.
That night I got tipsy again on memory and wine and a cruel kind of nostalgia. "Maybe I did the wrong thing," I told her. "Maybe I'm the jerk."
"Then call him," Melody said.
"I deleted him," I said, and that was the whole point.
"Add him back," Melody said. "For a laugh."
So I did. I swear to everything private and petty, I added him back with trembling fingers. My thumb hovered over the phone's green button and, for a second, I pictured him as he was when he was kind: folding my scarf neatly into his pocket, the way he sent voice notes that sounded like sunrise.
"Don't call him," Melody warned.
"Stop bossing me," I said. "I'm an adult. I'll just add. That's all."
I added. Immediately my phone buzzed as if it had been waiting.
A voice message came through.
"Hey," he said. Light, half-laughing. "You remember my number after all?"
My mouth made a reflex sound — something like a tiny protest. "My hand," I lied quickly. "It did it by itself."
"Your hand has a brain?" he teased.
"Shut up. I wasn't thinking."
He laughed, the sound comfortable and infuriating. "You called me after six months."
"That wasn't a call!" I said, and my voice was high and silly like a child caught with jam on her face. "It was—ads." I could feel my cheeks burning.
"Ads?" he repeated. "What brand?"
"I—" I stopped. Melody's eyes were bright with something like delight and a little horror.
Silence.
"Okay," he said finally, "if you're drunk, sleep. If you're sober, answer."
I froze. My chest made a small, traitorous soft sound.
I didn't answer. I couldn't explain that I had added him because the city had turned small and tight and lonely in my bones. I didn't answer because I didn't want him to hear how much I had rehearsed what I would say if he ever called.
Another voice note arrived ten minutes later.
"Are you there? Kaiya, talk to me, please. Don't make me worry."
I pressed play with a thumb that felt like it belonged to someone else.
"Why did you delete me?" he asked in the next recording. No drama. Just flat, steadied curiosity. It stung.
"It was—" My recorded voice caught on a laugh. "I thought... maybe I needed space."
"Space for what? So you could find some other version of yourself that hates me?" His voice had no anger, only the kind of quiet that lands like small stones on glass.
I didn't have an answer that wasn't humiliating.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yes." I lied. "Goodbye."
"Don't be that person," he said. "Go to sleep. Take honey water. Check the second shelf in the fridge. I put it there."
My breath left me. He always had this way of knowing what to say to make the corners of the world sit back into place.
"Laurent—" I typed and deleted five times.
"Sleep," he said in another voice message. "And if you want to see me, tell me."
Stop the world: I heard a change in my skin, like a curtain moving.
"I'll forget by morning," I told him into the pillow, a small ceremony of stubbornness.
"All right," he said, laughing softly, the kind of laugh that forgave me before I could apologize. "Don't forget the honey water."
I hung up the phone like one does after a confession. I told myself I would not be soft the next day. I would be brisk and witty and unbothered.
Morning came and my phone had grown a warmth. There were messages, long strings of them. He'd woken up and done what he always did: arranged my life from six hundred kilometers away.
"Did you sleep?" he wrote.
"Yes," I typed back, with composure.
"Drink honey water right now. Not later. Now," he demanded, benignly tyrannical.
"You're annoying," I replied.
"You like it," he said.
I nearly dropped my coffee. I was a fortress of stubbornness and he carried a catapult of small mercies. It was infuriating and irresistible.
"Are you in town?" I asked in a moment of reckless bravery.
"No," he answered. "But I'm coming back this week. I had a case finish up early."
"Right," I said, panic and a bright, idiotic thrill colliding. "Why would you—"
"Because," he cut in in a voice message, "I missed you."
Don't call it a heart attack, call it an inconvenient electrician. My chest jolted.
"Don't be dramatic," I hissed into the glass, then typed: "Prove it."
He did. He sent me an address, coy. "Don't follow me," he warned. Then he said, "I won't stay long. My sister is in town."
He didn't have a sister in the city in my memory. But memory is a funny thing. He had told me a thousand small details about lives we almost had.
"You're mean," I wrote. "Fine. Come. Tonight. No grand gestures."
"Fine," he answered. "I'll bring dinner. Wait for me."
I bought a ticket on a stupid impulse and a second later resented my own weakness. My phone buzzed with his messages while I paced the apartment.
"Are you serious?" Melody asked.
"Of course I'm serious," I lied. "I'm not going to be pathetic."
"You're already pathetic," she said, and then she laughed, the laugh that always made me feel safe.
The train to the city where he'd said he was was three hours of rehearsal and fear. I pictured him with someone new: a girl with easy laughter, carrying colored groceries, who would fit into his life like a sock.
I arrived with a bouquet of stupid flowers and an even more stupid idea of how the reunion would play out. I imagined an awkward hug and then two strangers walking away hand in hand.
I saw them from across the lawn before I realized I was running.
Laurent had his hands full of bags and a tall, bright girl walked beside him, laughing at something he said. She had a high ponytail and a smile that cut across the afternoon like a slice.
My plan died in two heartbeats.
I pressed my body to the tree and considered throwing the flowers into the trash. My chest was a cold animal. "That's him," I whispered to Melody, who had texted frenzied emoji encouragement.
"Go home," she said. "Run. Burn it all."
Instead, I watched them walk into the building. He touched her hair with the gentleness he'd once reserved for me. She touched his shoulder like a photograph might be touched — natural, comfortable.
My fingers opened and closed around stems until petals sighed off. I threw the bouquet away somewhere a taxi driver could find it.
That night a storm rolled over the city like a ship. The rain came sudden and loud, and while I stood at the bus stop my phone was stolen.
There was a small station house nearby. Soggy and embarrassed, I went in. The sergeant at the desk looked like he belonged on a poster for "Help, I'm Lost." He was kind and calm. He said his name — Jude Cantu — and he had a smile that did not mock me.
"Your phone?" he asked, and when I told him I didn't have any numbers left because I'd deleted a man who was probably having dinner with someone else, he didn't laugh.
He sat me down, gave me tissues and said, "We'll make a report. Maybe it will turn up."
"You always help people," Melody had said about me through the day, but I never expected strangers to do it the way they did.
"You okay?" Jude asked while he typed.
"No," I admitted. "Not really."
"You look like you need company," he said simply. "Wait a minute. I'll call someone for you."
"I'm not calling Laurent," I protested before I could stop myself.
"Whoever he is," Jude said, with a smile that had the patience of someone who has listened to worse. "Tell me the story."
I told him the ridiculous outline: childhood together, the breakup, the drunken add, the sighting with another girl, the stolen phone. He nodded like a person at the end of a book who understands the characters' bad choices.
"Do you want a ride home?" he asked when the report was filed.
"I don't want to impose."
"You're imposing on my commute now," he said, and for some reason I took it as an offer.
We left the station in a dry silver car and some private, ordinary kind of conversation began. I felt ridiculous talking about love to a man who'd only just met me, but Jude listened like it mattered. That in itself was a balm.
At my block the streetlights puddled on wet asphalt. I saw moving luggage near my gate: Laurent had arrived. The suitcase at his feet looked like proof that he had plans. My stomach pitched.
"Go," Jude said. "Go talk if you want."
"I can't." Or, "I won't." I didn't know which was truer.
"Go," he repeated, and he meant it like a command from someone who understood what people need to do to feel alive again.
I walked up the path.
"You're back," Laurent said as soon as I was within breathing distance.
He had that look on him that belonged to the man who could hold a room with apologies. He leaned on his suitcase as if tired and very real.
"Don't," I said, but my voice didn't hold. "Don't act like you didn't have dinner with her."
"I didn't," he said. "She was just taking me to my sister's place for the night."
"You have a sister here?" I asked, because memory is a sieve and things leak through.
"Sort of," he said. "She lives here sometimes. She just got in and I couldn't not see her."
"Of course," I said. "Of course you couldn't not see her."
Laurent looked at me like someone waiting for an answer. He stepped closer, the way people step when they're patient and brave.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked. "Tell me and I'll do it."
"I want you to stop being everyone's kindness and be mine when it counts," I said without thinking then. "I want you to be more than the guy who always fixes things. Be the guy who decides."
He cocked an eyebrow. "You're asking me to be decisive."
"I'm asking you to be decisive with me."
He blinked, slow and sure. "Fine." He reached into one of the bags and produced two plain sandwiches, as if the world were not bizarre at all. "Eat. You're soaked."
He held out a paper cup of hot tea and my hands shook when I took it. He made me sit on the steps while he fetched a blanket from his suitcase. He draped it over my knees like an apology.
"Laurent," I said, because we had to talk.
He tutted softly. "Stop calling me names. Talk."
So I told him that I had been stupid and spiteful and that I'd deleted him because I told myself I wanted something else. I told him I had thought we were too familiar and that intimacy had become like a script. He listened, eyes on my face as if he were learning the map of me again.
"I was angry," I said at last. "And I hurt you."
"You hurt me bad by leaving," he answered. "But I didn't stop caring. I couldn't."
"Why didn't you call me?" I asked, and the old bitterness prickled.
"Because I thought you wanted space," he said. "Then I thought you'd come back if you missed me."
"That's not a good plan," I said.
"It's a terrible plan," he agreed.
We sat in a silence that hummed. Rain ticked on the pavement like a drummer practicing when no one was listening. I felt exposed and childish and warmed by his presence.
"Besides," he said suddenly with a half-smile, "you called me back, didn't you? So I figured I'd come see if you still knew how to be surprised."
"You're impossible," I said, and then I surprised myself by throwing myself at him. The world narrowed to the two of us, the rain, and the suitcase.
"Don't throw yourself at me," he said, fingers quick and gentle, catching my waist.
"Who told you to be so soft?" I asked, muffled into his shirt.
"You always liked soft things," he said, like it was a secret he had been keeping for years.
He kissed me then — a small, careful, dangerous thing. For a moment I couldn't tell whether I was reliving something or making something brand new. My hands found his collar and the world clicked into a new focus.
"Are you staying?" I asked when we parted, breathless.
"For as long as you'll have me," he said.
"I won't be pathetic again," I promised.
"You will," he answered, and this time there was a smile in his voice. "Because you'll love me."
"Don't be sure," I said.
"Fine." He lowered his voice. "Then I'll make you sure."
We went inside and he unpacked like he belonged. He took care of me with a thousand small orders: "Finish your tea. Put your feet up. No stupid walks tonight." He turned on a show to distract me and then pulled a blanket over both of us.
That night my phone — the one they'd found — buzzed in the other room. I didn't reach for it. The warmth against my shoulder was enough.
We slept like people who have been lost and found within the same street.
The next morning I woke to him frowning at me like a parent who doesn't like the state of his child.
"Did you sleep well?" I asked.
"Somebody smashed the honey jar," he said, and I had to laugh.
"I didn't," I protested. "But maybe the jar couldn't handle you."
He left for an errand and I dozed off, waking to the sound of him coming down the stairs and cursing softly. He had his hand on his lower back and moved like someone with a hidden storm of pain.
"Are you okay?" I asked, suddenly fearful.
"I'll live," he said, but there was a hollow note. He put his hand on his back again and flinched.
"You should see someone," I said.
"It's fine," he muttered.
"Laurent," I said. "Please. I'm not sharing my body with a person who ignores their health."
He tried to joke. "Then we'll only share porridge."
But he was limping, thin and real. I insisted and he relented with a softness that had the shape of surrender.
At the clinic, the doctor gave us two shared looks before he said gently, "Not serious but needs rest. No heavy lifting, avoid exertion. And for a few days, avoid intimate exertions as well."
My face hot, I spoke faster. "We won't. We will not—"
The doctor raised an eyebrow.
"Noted," he said dryly, "then take painkillers. Ice, rest."
We left with prescriptions and a driver to take us home. I fussed over him like a terrier fusses over a blanket. Melody called and teased: "Already back together? Quick work."
"Shut up," I scolded, but smiling.
That night I made him porridge and then sat beside him as he leaned against the pillow. We talked in small sunlit ways: childhood embarrassments, the peculiarities of our neighbors, the time he hid my favorite sweater.
"I can't believe you stayed anyway," I said more softly than I intended.
"I stayed because I love you," he said, plain as a fact.
"You make statements like that so easily," I said. "It scares me."
"Good," he said. "You should be scared sometimes."
We laughed. I pressed my head to his chest and listened to the slow pace of his heart. There were a dozen things unsaid. There was also the enormous wonder of being forgiven and forgiven back.
A week later, my phone was returned. The police had tracked a thief and the phone, battered but alive, had been found abandoned. Jude Cantu mailed it with a note: "Don't let go."
"I didn't," Laurent said, watching my eyes skim the note and melt. He kissed my forehead in a way that booked that moment into some private ledger.
Life slipped toward normal. He stayed. We cooked. We argued about small things, like whether the sugar belonged in the top cupboard or the bottom one. When I joked that he was a nag, he puffed his chest in a way that was entirely unthreatening.
"You're going to make me a better person," he said, mischievous and certain.
"You say that every year," I said.
"That's because I intend to keep doing it," he replied.
There was a night when I got jealous of the past like an old friend I'd seen kiss someone else. I told him so, blunt as a knife.
"You went to see your sister," I said. "And you let me believe you were with someone."
"I walked into an old habit," he said. "I panicked. I thought leaving space meant you would grow into someone else."
"Did you think you would lose me?" I asked.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "I thought you might find another path. I didn't want to force you."
"You're impossible," I said, laughing until I cried.
"You're mine," he answered, and then, like a child trying a new joke, he said with a mock gravity, "Call me Daddy."
I blinked. "What?"
He looked at me with the kind of seriousness that breaks like sunlight. "Call me Daddy. Try it." His eyes glinted.
I snorted and rolled my eyes. "No way."
"Try," he urged.
I laughed and then, joking back in a voice like a dare, I said, "Fine. Call me Daddy." I said it like it belonged to a game.
He was quiet for a heartbeat. Then he put his face in his hands and in a voice low as velvet, he said, "Daddy, I love you."
My mouth fell open. "What did you just—"
He leaned forward and kissed me like the answer to some long, silly puzzle.
He wasn't mocking me. He wasn't being coy. He had folded my joke into the only language he had: absolute softness.
"Say it again," he whispered.
I couldn't, not because I didn't want to, but because a thousand small things stood in my way: pride, memory, the stupid conversation that had sent us away before. I hugged him instead, and his arms tightened like a vow.
Months unspooled into something steady. The house filled with plates and shoes and the ridiculous intimacy of shared towels. We visited Jude Cantu once to thank him. Melody threw a party where everyone laughed like drunk light.
One afternoon, when the sun was thin and proper, Laurent took me aside and said, "I want us to be official—living together fully. Move your things."
"You're asking me to move in?" I teased.
"I'm asking us to try," he corrected. "I want to see if we can be practical and messy and also still kiss like we steal things."
My heart was a skillet over a flame. "Yes," I said, and everything in me exhaled.
We moved together like two people learning to share a blanket. There were tiffs about the toothpick jar and battles over whether the house plant was under-watered or over-loved. He put the honey water on the second shelf in a small ritual of care.
Sometimes when we were quiet he'd kiss the space behind my ear and say, "Daddy," with a smile, and I'd sputter and then laugh. The words lost their absurdity and became a private compass.
There were nights we were foolish and tender. There were nights he tossed a towel over my shoulders when I complained about the cold and nights I sewed a missing button on his favorite shirt while he watched with a mouth half-open.
One evening, months after we'd stitched our lives into a better fabric, I went to the mailbox and found an envelope. Inside was a dried petal and a note in Laurent's neat hand: "For all the times you thought you couldn't stand without me."
I laughed and cried at the same time and then called him. He answered on the third ring.
"You're impossible," I told him.
"You're impossible too," he said, tender like bread buttered warm. "Would you be my impossible person forever?"
"Call me Daddy again," I demanded, ridiculous with the smell of the petal.
He laughed, a sound I had learned to keep in my pocket like treasure. "Daddy, I love you."
And so the joke had become serious and the serious had become gentle. The rain and the phone and the stolen moments had turned into a safe shape we called ours. When I worried, he reminded me to drink the honey water from the second shelf.
Once, when I was near tears over some small thing — a contract, a missing sock, the feeling of being too much — he looked at me and said, "You don't have to be anything but you, Kaiya."
My throat closed on the gratitude and I kissed him. He tasted like porridge and a little like the medicine he refused to take without me nagging him. I called him names and he called me softer ones.
We never became a story that other people could finish. We were private and loud and stupid and brave. He sometimes answered my petty tests with impossibly patient gentleness. I tested him again and again — picking fights, pretending cool, walking past his hand and checking whether he'd catch me.
Every time he caught me.
At a party once, someone asked, half-mean, half-sincere, "Are you two finally happy?"
He squeezed my hand and said, without show, "We are honest."
That's the truth I kept: honest, not perfect.
On a rainy anniversary, I found myself humming a silly tune he had once hummed in the shower. He came up behind me and tied me into a soft embrace.
"Call me Daddy," I whispered back as a dare.
He kissed my shoulder and then my neck and his breath was like the warm after of summer. "Daddy," he said in a whisper, "I love you."
"Say it out loud," I demanded.
He tugged my chin up and looked at me like the man who had known me from the sandbox and never stopped learning how I fit in his hands.
"Call me Daddy," he repeated, and this time I said it back, not as a joke but as a promise of ridiculousness.
"Okay," I said, grin wide. "Daddy."
"Daddy, I love you," he said, and it was everything that followed storms and silence and the stolen phone and the honey water — the whole of us wrapped in two words.
The rain on the window clattered like applause. The little jar of honey on the second shelf glowed under the kitchen light like a private sun.
That night we ate porridge and pretended doctors had not lectured us, then fell asleep tangled in a way that made tomorrow look softer.
If someone asks me how we came back to each other, I would say: I added him in a drunken, stupid moment; he answered like he always had — steady, kind, with honey water instructions — and then he came. He made himself a person who would risk being decisive. He apologized by staying. He repaired his back partially because I nagged, and then we built a life that was ridiculous and safe. He was not perfect. I was not perfect. Neither of us performed better for the audience. We chose each other in private.
And the phone? The stolen phone came back with a shrapnel of rain and a paper report. Jude Cantu wrote a short note inside the case: "Don't let go." I carry it in my wallet like a small relic.
The second-shelf honey water is forever a domestic talisman. It reminds me that sometimes love is the smallest acts: "Did you drink it?" "Yes." "Good."
"Call me Daddy," he says with a laugh that has settled into my bones.
I do, sometimes, because the joke became a promise and the promise settled into things we do: making porridge, folding sweaters, staying up stupidly late to talk about nothing and everything.
"Daddy, I love you," he says, often, and I say it back in my own foolish, steady way.
We are ridiculous and we are home, and when someone else tries to read our story, they can only see the outside — the rain, the stolen phone, the girl with a ponytail I thought I lost him to. Inside, there are the small lights: a honey jar on the second shelf, a voice note left like a stitch in a seam, a note in a phone case that says "Don't let go."
And so I didn't. I called him back drunk, we fought and made up, and he stayed. He called me "Daddy" when I teased, and he said "Daddy, I love you" back like it was the most serious sentence in the world. I keep that sentence like a coin in my pocket. Whenever I worry the coin jingles and I remember the night under the tree, the stolen phone, the police officer who stayed patient, the porridge in the little clinic tray, the second-shelf honey water, and a man who kept coming back.
That is how our life continued: messy, warm, sometimes loud — and mine.
The End
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