Sweet Romance12 min read
I Kept His Candy and He Kept Showing Up
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I held the flattened candy in my palm and waited for the school bus to bring the crowd.
“Morning,” Finn said, dropping a paper-wrapped bun onto my desk like it weighed nothing.
I looked at the bun, then at Finn Nicolas, who everyone called the school king and feared even the teachers a little. I answered in a voice so small I surprised myself. “Thanks.”
“You didn’t eat it.” He rolled his eyes and pushed his chair back. “Eat it. I’ll stand guard.”
“Okay.” I folded my hands around the bun like it was warm glass.
He watched me eat it like he was reading a map.
“You’re the top student.” He said it like a fact. “You tutor me, I don’t skip class, deal?”
I nodded with my head buried in the textbook. “Deal.”
Two weeks later, he called me “mine” in front of our class and everyone laughed.
“Quit it,” I whispered.
“I’m serious.” Finn leaned close, his breath cool. “You keep me from failing.”
“Then keep doing that.” I pushed open my notebook.
Bryant laughed somewhere behind us. “You two are funny.”
“Keep laughing,” Finn said. “Just don’t be the idiot who calls her names.”
That day Bryant called me “trash” as a joke and everyone laughed louder than the joke. I kept my head down.
After school I walked home through alleys that smelled of old plastic and tea. My house was a shed of boxes and old furniture, my world held together by the careful hands of my grandmother. She had raised me, saved every cent, and called me “my little light” with the kind of love that made me both proud and terrified I would lose it.
The first time Finn stepped into that alley, he waited until I turned the corner. He walked after me two steps too long.
“You live here?” he asked, looking at the stacked boxes.
“Yes,” I said, and felt the sound of the word peel off like paint.
He did not say anything else. He handed me a plastic bag of two steamed buns. “For you and your grandma.”
“My grandma cooks.” I tried to refuse.
“Then she can’t say no.” Finn smiled once and the street felt less sharp.
When I was small, people called me a curse. After my parents died, relatives left me and called me names until my grandmother took me in. I learned to swallow hard, to be small.
“Why are you so stubborn?” Finn asked once when I wouldn’t take his jacket on a winter night.
“Because I’m used to being cold,” I said.
He didn’t answer then. He only pulled the jacket closer over my shoulders, like he wanted me to melt into warmth.
One week later, a rumor spread that I had written a note to Finn and slipped it into his desk. I didn’t know how the paper got there. I didn’t know anyone had seen it.
At the morning assembly, the loudspeaker played a thin, private message that was not meant for a room full of hundreds.
“My dark star has eyes like the moon, and she keeps my days bright,” Finn read aloud with a bored voice that made everyone fall silent.
My mouth filled with dust. I wanted to die.
He spoke my name, then shrugged and finished the speech like it didn’t matter.
When a girl in an expensive dress slapped me that same day because she thought Finn liked her, he stood between us. “Are you sick?” he asked her.
“You protect her?” she cried. “She’s beneath you!”
“She’s my desk mate.” He said it flatly. “What are you?”
The girl fumed and left. He looked at me like I might break.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine.” I lied.
He stayed by me in the class even when the teacher scolded him. He kept books on my desk, left notes, and once—because he liked to throw things—tossed a comic onto my textbooks.
His friends teased. “You’re in love, bro! You got a soft spot!”
He pushed them away with a cold hand and said nothing.
At night, I went home to an old woman with shaking hands and a tin of medicines. We sold cardboard to keep the lights on. My grandmother told me stories about clean rooms and good food and people who kept promises.
One night, the smell of hospital rooms filled our kitchen. My grandmother folded into a chair and said, “Go study, my child.”
I wanted to say, I can’t afford a hospital bill. I wanted to say, the money is gone. I only nodded and left.
The next day the principal called me into the office.
“Someone reported you for dating Finn,” the principal said.
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
“You’re a top student. This could ruin your future. Tell me—is this true?”
“No.” My voice was soft as paper, but I meant it.
Finn slapped the chair with his foot hard enough to make the principal blink. “Heard it a hundred times,” he said. “It’s not true.”
He grabbed my hand that day and pulled me out of the office. He left the principal fuming in the doorway. I didn’t understand why he cared so much.
He started to skip classes less. He did what I told him. He folded his studies under my watch like it was a toy to keep him busy. I came to his house once, a place with lights and soft rugs and windows that did not creak.
“Your brother?” I asked one evening, because I remembered someone waiting in the car that day.
“Family,” Finn said. “Rich people problems.”
Then one day he shouted, sudden and sharp: “I’m chasing her. I told you I’d try.”
Bryant smirked. “You’re playing a game, right? A bet?”
“I’m not playing.” Finn turned cold with a look my heart couldn’t meet.
Bryant kept his mouth shut, but later that night, when I was at the hospital with papers and a bottle of cheap medicine, a voice offered money.
“You need help?” a boy from school said, his eyes soft. “I can lend you some. Don’t let them say no.”
His name was Finn Nicolas. He counted out the cash in a way that made me understand I would never be able to pay it back easily.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about what I do,” he said. “Just take it.”
I took it. I wrote him an IOU because that is what one does with shame.
Weeks passed. I tried to be invisible. I sold tin cans and drew diagrams for the sleepiest mornings.
At school, they said I smelled. That word had weight. They said I was poor. They said my hair points to the sky like a beggar.
One day the smell rumor turned into a public nightmare.
Someone put my life on a stage. Someone called me names. Finn pulled his jacket over my head like a shield. He said, “If anyone says one more stupid thing, I’ll break it.” No one dared speak after that.
Later, in a corner where the sky seems closer, Finn asked me a stupid question.
“Do you like me?” he blurted.
“No,” I said. My heart hammered and I lied. “I don’t.”
He took that answer and drove away like it was the end of the world.
On a night when the rain refused to stop, I sat on my bed and counted the money for hospital bills. My grandmother’s bank log was folded small. There was not enough. I felt the floor fall away.
I did something a cowardly person does. I hurt myself with a knife and lay down because pain can be simple and final.
Someone called my name and it was not the old telephone of my grandmother, it was Finn.
“Answer!” he whispered into the receiver.
I answered, weak, and I told him to sing. My voice went thin. He sang like an idiot, because he had learned words to make me sleep the week before. His voice came across like a stranger’s lullaby.
“Stay,” he said, because for the first time it was not a game.
I woke in a hospital with bandages and stitches. Finn sat by my bed like a shadow made of loyalty.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said softly. “Don’t do it again.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I snapped. It was the worst way to hold someone who had given me his money and his time and his anger.
He left in a huff and came back with soup, like a grown-up stealing cakes for a child.
“You eat,” he said. “You study. You live because you owe me money? No. You live for you.”
“You’re annoying,” I said, but I ate.
The day of the last mock exam, I tried to avoid people. My relatives came out like flies when there is heat.
“Sign the paper. You’ll get money.” They begged and cried and wanted what my grandmother had saved but I had already signed away.
I felt like I had nothing left. They took the house, the room with the radio, the small box where my mother kept letters. They called it a legal matter. I called it theft.
Finn saw the look in my eyes when I walked back into school. He opened his mouth and breathed fire.
“If anyone touches her, I will—” he started, and the threat hung like a sword. The relatives clammed up, unsure of what to do when a rich boy became loud.
He took me to a farm day, because the teacher said we should breathe. The bus rolled with the noise of noisy kids. Finn sat beside me and did nothing. When I fell on a banana peel, he grabbed my arm with animal speed and didn’t let go.
We walked through a field of sunflowers he picked for no reason. He told me, “Live, Mai. You chase the sun like a sunflower. Your job is to live.”
I told him about the job the school found me for the summer: a sponsorship that paid my tuition if I worked for a company for five years. It was not romance. It was currency and safety.
“Come to my adult party,” he said. “It’s the ninth. Be there.”
“I don’t have the money,” I said.
“Come anyway,” he said. “Or don’t. I’m not your boss.”
On the ninth, I saved a hundred of the five hundred that my manager had given me. I wrapped the money in a small envelope and bought a cheap mug. I rode to his house in the rain and left the gift at his door. The phone went dark.
The next morning I found a message: “Remember my adult party.” And nothing more.
Months later I went to university at the top of the province. I left with a scholarship and a handful of friends and a tiny scar behind my wrist. Finn left for a long time, suddenly. His world was a suit and a plane ticket and people who wore gloves to eat.
He returned without notice at my campus city as an exchange student. He wore black and a cap and he did not smile much. People stood up from their chairs when he walked into rooms.
“Is that him?” someone whispered.
“Yes,” I said. My heart did a small, foolish thing.
He sat next to me on the bus; his seat was like it had always been reserved. He said, flat out, “I am not here for you.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m busy.”
He smirked, but when other men in the dorm teased about me, he changed. He moved like a man who learned how to break things and chose to hold them instead.
Bryant and others told stories about the bet: how Finn had once boasted he'd chase me around for sport. How he took me as a challenge and then something in him changed.
Finn never told them to stop talking. He told them to watch. He did not need their applause. He only needed to show me.
One day, in my coffee shop job, a woman from high school sat down at my corner table. It was Valentina Jensen—the pretty girl who had once lost her temper and slapped me. Her eyes were bright with perfume.
“Can we talk?” she asked. “I wanted to apologize about the school thing. I was jealous.”
I stared at the cup in my hands. “Nice to see you,” I said. “But I’m working.”
Valentina would not leave. She invited me to sit and asked about Finn like an interview. I gave polite answers. She smiled and said, “He’s back, you know. He’s cold now. He left without a word.”
“People change,” I said.
She leaned forward, mischievous. “He used to like me.”
“He told me he was chasing me,” I said. My voice was steady.
Valentina’s smile dropped. She looked away and then—because she wanted to hurt me—she said the one thing she thought would kill the soft place in me.
“You think he stayed for you?” she said. “He told us he was betting. It was a joke. He was bored.”
You learn how to take certain hits, but other ones stay as bruises.
“If you want to know, ask him,” I said.
At the party for Finn’s coming-of-age night, the room filled with expensive chatter. Men in suits laughed as wine glinted. I stood on the edge with my cheap mug in my hand, my dress secondhand and my palms trying not to shake.
Then Bryant pushed through with a grin.
“He wants to see you,” Bryant said.
I walked in like a small animal in a room of bright lights. Finn was there, tall as a shadow and as impossible as ever. I expected him to say nothing. I expected him to leave me in the dust.
Instead, he stepped forward and pulled a paper from his pocket. He read in a slow voice, “When I first bet on her, I thought it was a game. I lost the game.”
People fell silent. Some of them laughed, thinking it a joke. Others waited for the punchline.
Finn looked up at me and the room smelled of lemon cleaning stuff and strange perfume.
“Bryant was right,” he said. His voice was low. “I thought I could play like a child. I thought I could walk away when it ended. I was wrong.”
“You used me.” I said it loud enough for them all to hear.
“Yes,” he said. “I did. And that is why I am an idiot.”
“You hurt me,” I said. “You made me live smaller.”
“I know.” His hands were steady. “I was wrong. I took your pain and I called it sport. I want to undo what I can.”
“Can you?” I asked. My voice cracked.
He stepped forward and did something no one expected. He told them everything.
“He said he bet on me,” Finn said to the room. “He offered money like a dare. He laughed. He thought it would teach him something about life. It taught him this—what he did was cruel. If anyone here ever laughed at her pain, you are cowards.”
Bryant turned red. Valentina’s face drained.
Finn did not stop. “And if anyone in this room has ever touched her—my hands are on my own money, but my hands are not empty when it comes to defending her.” He said it like a promise.
A man who always hid his feelings smacked the table with a palm and walked out. Men muttered. But then Finn did the most shocking thing: he reached across the floor and put a small band around my wrist—gold and cheap but strong.
“I bought it for you,” he said. “You can keep it.”
I wanted to run. I wanted to fall and sleep forever. Instead I asked what I had wanted to ask since the alley with the buns.
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes.” He sounded tired and honest.
The room held a breath.
“Then why did you hurt me?” I said.
“Because I didn’t know,” he said. “Because I thought I could learn how to care by playing. I learned how to be cruel instead. I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you if you let me.”
I closed my eyes. In them I saw my grandmother folding laundry, the stains like tiny islands, and a small candy wrapped in paper pressed into my palm years ago. I opened my hand and found the flattened wrapper.
He took my hand gently and placed his on top.
“I will not play anymore,” he said. “I swear.”
The room saw him swear. People around them had no choice but to keep quiet.
Later, when my relatives tried to sue me for more, Finn hired a lawyer because he could. He stood in the court room like an unexpected storm. He said what I could not say: “She won’t be bullied. She won’t be stolen from.”
They sank. People who had built their lives on other people’s grief lost ground.
At university, I studied. I worked at the coffee shop. I learned how to balance books, and living. Finn came often, siting in the corner with cheap paper and a sweater borrowed from someone. He sat near and he listened.
“Why stay?” people asked him.
“I had a bet once,” he said. “Then I realized the bet was a measuring stick for how awful I could be. I wanted to be better.”
“You can’t fix the past,” I told him one night when the summer winds smelled like distant rain. “You can act now.”
He nodded and kissed me in the dark like a promise.
We fought sometimes. He had friends who made jokes and he would not stop them quick enough. I had scars that flared with fear. He would sit and hold me and say, “I know.”
Once, in front of the whole campus, a group of students mocked where I grew up and my past. Finn took the microphone at a small student gala and simply said, “She got here by force of will. You will not mock bravery.”
The crowd whistled. The ones who had insulted me muttered apologies. He did not need to demand their shame, it came like an echo. That was enough for me.
Years passed. I graduated top of my class. The scholarship paid for my degree and a life started by a woman named my grandmother. I stopped taking the pills because I did not need them anymore. The black corners of my mind turned into places I could pass by.
On a roof one late night, I gave Finn the flattened candy wrapper and the tiny paper box where I had kept the IOU. “I kept this,” I said.
He smiled and opened his hand. Inside was the small tin of milk candy I'd given him years ago, still soft and sweet. He had kept it.
“Why?” I asked.
“For the same reason,” he said softly, “you kept your blanket for warmth. I wanted a thing that reminded me I had done something right.”
He took my hand and took my mouth. The world narrowed to the two palm-prints of us.
We married quietly, in a little room with folding chairs and a bowl of soup. My old friends came. My new family came.
Bryant apologized once, more honest than he had ever been. He hugged me like a man who had seen a storm and wanted to be part of the house afterwards. Valentina and I talked and she told me about her shallow choices. We forgave each other because forgiveness keeps a heart alive.
On the night of our small wedding, Finn reached into his jacket and took out a small paper-wrapped candy.
“You kept my candy,” I said.
“No.” He smiled. “You kept mine.”
He clasped my fingers and said, loud enough so we both heard, “I will always keep showing up.”
I let the candy melt and smiled through my tears. The taste of sugar and salt and the memory of hospital nights and bus rides folded themselves into one bright present.
We lived messy days. We had money sometimes and we did not at others. Finn paid back debts silently. He left his old arrogance by the door. I said yes to small kindnesses. He learned the weight of promises.
Years later, when I am older and my hair picks up the light, I will sometimes take the tin from the shelf and open it. The candy will be gone. But there will be another small object: the IOU folded so many times it is soft. I keep it as proof. Not proof that I was loved; proof that love can be learned.
“You did teach me one thing,” Finn says on a quiet night, tracing the scar behind my wrist with a thumb.
“What?” I ask.
“How to be brave,” he says.
I laugh. “I was brave before you.”
“You were,” he says, “but you taught me how to stay.”
I look at the paper wrapper between my fingers and then at him.
“We have both kept things,” I say.
He kisses the back of my hand. “Then let's keep each other next.”
I fold the wrapper into a tiny boat and set it on a puddle by the doorstep where once a morning bun warmed my hands. It floats and goes slow.
“Keep going,” I tell it.
Finn slips his hand into mine.
“All the way,” he answers.
The End
— Thank you for reading —