Sweet Romance12 min read
I Pretended Not to Know Him (Then He Kept Coming Back)
ButterPicks11 views
“I’m fine,” I said, but my voice came out like a dry reed.
I was sitting on the small couch in Luisa’s tiny living room, a towel over my hair, bare feet on the cold floor, and Akira Dumont was watching me as if I had grown a second head.
“You are not fine,” he said.
“I am,” I lied again.
“You sound like a frog.” He made a face.
I laughed, which was a good laugh because it broke the tightness in my chest. “A frog with a fever,” I said. “It’s very poetic.”
He did not smile properly. He looked at me in a way that made my throat heat. He had a flat, distant face most of the time. I had learned not to expect warmth. But when he did give small things — a glass of water, a bandage, the quiet hand that tucked a stray hair behind my ear — they felt like wind on cold skin.
“That’s not a poem,” he said. “That’s a diagnosis.”
I slammed the throw pillow at him. “Thanks for the medical note, Akira.”
He rolled his eyes and went to the kitchen. “You have a stubborn head for someone who grew up quiet.”
“You have no right to call my head stubborn.”
He laughed once, low. “Nobody has the right.”
We had met at a goodbye party two years earlier. My first real crush, Zachariah Bass — the neighbor who was like a brother — had been leaving for Canada with a girl. I had been six when I first liked him; I was eighteen when he shut the door and boarded a plane. I kept my face calm. I kept my silence. I thought silence would keep a thing precious.
Then Akira walked in on that night and did something I could not forgive.
“You like him, don’t you?” he had said, as if he had read a note I had hidden in my sleeve.
The truth spilled out like someone pulling the plug. I didn’t know how to be brave. I didn’t know how to say, “No, I don’t,” when my heart was carrying a dozen small storms.
I marked him in my brain as an enemy that day. He was loud in the only way I couldn’t control — by exposing the soft parts of people. He had a way of asking the wrong thing at the wrong time and making you feel like a wet page.
So we became enemies. We teased. We kicked and bit at each other with words. We lived in the same small orbit — the literature club, the late-night coffee shop, the campus courtyard. When we walked past each other, we shared a fight and a strange kind of peace.
“That was harsh on me,” Akira said now, coming back with a steaming mug.
“You asked a terrible question,” I said. “It was a terrible night for you to be a truth-teller.”
He sat across me, warm mug in hand. The kitchen light made him look like minimal art — plain, tidy lines, no frills. He had an old camera tucked by his bag. He shot pictures for the school paper. He said things that were sharp and then chose to keep quiet.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“Because Luisa called me.” He said it like a fact, not brave, not casual.
“That’s nice of her.”
“She said you sounded like a frog.”
I smacked him with the towel. He pretended to be wounded. Then he did something only he did: he opened his mouth to say something mean and closed it again. That silence was a small kindness.
We had known each other long enough to hold small rituals. He would come to my cheap room with the big round mirror and the fallen curtain. He would sit in my chaotic corner and read the script I had written for the literature club. He never asked for credit. He read. He rewrote one line and returned it to me like a present.
“You add too many commas,” he told me once. “You hide feelings in neat grammar.”
“Stop being an editor and be a person,” I told him.
“I tried.” He paused. “I’m bad at it.”
I had wanted someone to be bad at it with me.
“Tell me the truth,” I said now. “Do you ever—”
He held up his hand. “No questions about Zachariah.”
I blinked at him. “Why?”
“Because you’re tired of him,” he said flatly. “He’s a sun you learned to look away from. You don’t need a new sun. You need a coat.”
That night he walked me to the clinic after I fainted in class. He carried me from the bus stop like it was a normal thing for a normal person to carry another. He sat through four hours while the nurse poked me, listened to my temperature report, and scribbled on a chart. He held a tissue for me. He paid for the taxi.
“You owe me,” he said at the front gate like a promise.
“I’ll never call you back when you need anything,” I said.
“Good.” He smiled for the first time. “Because I don’t plan on needing you.”
I wanted to tell him I planned on needing him forever. I wanted to say it like a starthistle seed. I kept my mouth shut because I had been quiet too long to start shouting now.
After that, the literature club did a play for the campus festival. Akira was the editor-in-chief of the club, though he always said it like he owed it to time. The club chose a hard script. I wrote another, because I liked hearing pages clack and stories rise. He read my script, frowned, and then gave me a line he thought was soft enough to stand up.
“You will direct,” he said.
“I will?” I was thrilled and terrified.
“You will direct,” he repeated. “You will tell people how to breathe on stage.”
That night on the courtyard, he taught me how to hold a room. He stood in the middle of the scattered performers and said, “Be smaller. Let the line do the heavy lifting.”
“Be smaller,” I joked. “What is this, stage yoga?”
“Stage yoga,” he said, and didn’t laugh. He took my hand to move a fallen prop. For a second, our fingers tangled like the first page of a practiced book.
The festival was a patch of bright hours. We wore borrowed suits and too-much-makeup and laughed because people watched the fragile thing we were putting up. I called Luisa a dozen times that day and sent snapshots of every staged bow. At night, after the lights dimmed and the applause tumbled into the empty hall like glitter, Akira walked me home.
“You looked brave on stage,” he said.
I tried to answer but the reply turned into a string of nonsense words. He heard the clumsy thing I said and then pulled me closer, just once, at the corner of my building.
“Take care,” he said.
“Take care of what?” I asked.
“Your stubborn head.” He kissed my forehead like he was placing a bandage.
That small, strange gentleness rewound me. I wanted more. All of me wanted more.
Then life got complicated in the soft, real ways things do.
My parents were never much into hugs. They paid for the room I had at Harbor Vale and told me to be sensible. Luisa had been my anchor. She had run away to advertising school and returned with a sharp suit and a harder laugh. Quinn Andre — quiet painter, the boy who brought me soup — became a friend I trusted to carry an umbrella if it rained. Foster Munoz, a reporter with ink in his veins, would drop by the studio building like he always knew when the lights were low.
Akira kept giving small things. He sent me a capsule book of poetry with a page where he had underlined one line and written, “You are allowed to be loud in here.” He left it on my desk like he had done nothing.
We moved toward each other the way tide moves rocks — inevitable and slow.
“Do you always know what to say?” I asked him in the silence of a late-night bus.
“No,” he said. “But I know what not to say.”
“Not bad for someone who was born to piss people off,” I said.
He looked at me like I had offered him a talisman. “I study people who hide. You are honest even when you hide.”
I kept my secret about Zachariah in the back pocket of myself. Sometimes it felt like an old photograph; sometimes it felt like a coal I forgot under a pillow — still hot. Akira never asked for it. He never tried to pry. He just sat with whatever part of me he could hold.
And then the first big break came: a scholarship trip for Akira to intern for a magazine in the city three hours away. He kept it partly secret. He said, “It’s work.” He said, “It’s only three months.”
I felt the hollow of something opening. “You’re leaving.”
“I said three months,” he said. “You said you were fine.”
“You’re bad with leave-taking,” I told him.
“Some people are born to leave, some people are born to hold.” He didn’t tell me which he thought he was.
On his last night in town he sat on the rooftop of our building and we ate noodles in paper cups. I had boiled the water with hands that shook.
“You’ll come back,” I said. It sounded like a question and also a prayer.
“I’ll come back,” he said. “Unless I forget the way.”
“You don’t forget things.”
“I forget small things,” he admitted. “Keys. Names. Bad lines in plays.”
“You won’t forget me,” I said.
He looked at me like I had said something brave. “You’re not small.”
The three months came like a film strip moving faster and faster. He sent postcards with small notes: “Saw a theater. Thought of you.” “Your comma is rebellious. Love it.” I read them and folded them into the back of my planner.
Then, the drama I did not see — that sharp, cutting thing — happened.
An urgent assignment flew him away for longer than three months. He called less. He said, “There’s more work.” He said, “This might stretch.” The messages thinned. I learned to be small again.
One late night a rumor hit the campus forum — a rumor about Akira being invited to a major showcase in another country, maybe a job. I saw my hands go white around my cup.
“Has he stopped caring?” I asked Luisa.
“No.” Luisa made coffee and didn’t look up. “You are reading the internet at midnight. Don’t let the internet be a heart doctor.”
But the seed of worry grew into a bramble. I stopped answering his messages at first because silence felt safe and made me feel like I had some control. Then I apologized. He told me to be small. He called me silly. He said, “If I’m gone, don’t let your light go out because of me.”
We tried to be adult about missing each other. He came back for a weekend in the gray rain and stood at my door. I almost refused to go out. I almost chose to be brave by staying inside. I opened the door.
“You look like a ghost,” he said.
“You look like a man who missed trains,” I said.
He laughed softly and there, standing in my hallway with water dripping from his collar, he said, “I’m staying.”
“Are you sure?” My whole body was a question.
“Yes,” he said. “Until I’m not.”
Three months later he was gone again, but he’d left a note that said, “Come to Harbor Vale in December. I’ll be at the inn on the cliff.”
It was a small promise and large like a ruined cathedral. I packed my coat. I bought a ticket. I walked to the inn, breath steaming in the air, and then I saw him.
He was standing at the inn’s narrow counter with a travel-worn bag, an old scarf, and an unreadable face. He looked at me like he had assembled my name from a cloud and could not quite believe it fit.
“You came,” he said.
“I said I would,” I said.
“You made a mess of my plans,” he said. “I had one plan. Move away. Become a person who does not hurt people.”
“You hurt me,” I said, small and direct.
“Not on purpose.” He held up his hands. “I am sorry.”
I wanted to pull him to me and show him what back-and-forth could mean. Instead, I hit him lightly on the shoulder.
“Get off your high horse and make tea,” I said.
He did. He boiled water like an exact man and brewed a cup of tea that smelled like the sea. We sat and did not speak for a long while. The inn had a small radio playing an old song; the owner, an easy woman with kind eyes, put cups for strangers and smiled at us like she knew a cure for awkward.
“Tell me everything,” I said when I could breathe.
He told me. He told me about the job that had turned into a project that never ended. He told me about nights when he did not sleep and mornings when he wrote letters to me he did not send. He told me, finally, that he had thought of staying but had been afraid.
“Afraid of what?” I asked.
“Afraid of being the person who made you small,” he said.
“You already made me small,” I said. “You sat between me and the world and said I should hide. You are not the only one who is scared.”
He covered his face. “I know.”
We walked along the cliff that night, the wind strong enough to steal a hat. He wrapped my scarf around my neck though I did not want it, because I liked it when people tried to guard me. He kissed the top of my head when I stopped to catch my breath. It was tender and secret and felt like the first time I owned my lungs.
A week later, I watched him go again. “Come back,” I said, which sounded less like a plea and more like a thing I would carve into my ribs.
He gave me a look that made the world tilt, and he promised. He was good at promising like that.
Then life gave me cold water. Two words that landed like stones: “I’m going abroad.” This time it was Quinn Andre who called with the news. The freelance thing had cured him of certain illusions. The magazine offered him a post. He took it because he believed in the work and because he wanted to be someone who built his mornings somewhere new.
“You are running away,” I said when he told me.
“No.” He put his hand over mine. “I am stepping forward.” He kept his fingers because we both needed contact.
“You will not love the same later,” I said.
“People change for work every day,” he said. “I changed. You change. Either we keep the same or we keep trying.”
I could not answer that night. I learned instead to keep being brave in small things. I taught myself to make dumplings for Winter Solstice and invited friends — Luisa, Quinn, Foster — to my table. Akira came home for a week and hovered like a solemn guardian. He boiled the water and folded the dough with precise fingers.
“Can I try?” I asked him shyly, wanting to feel his hand in mine again in a less earnest way.
“You make terrible dumplings,” he said. “But they will be honest.”
We ate and squared our faces, and for a few days the world was a warmer place. I thought that was good enough.
Then, after graduation, life tugged. Akira got a job in the city overseas. I got a job nearby, writing for the campus paper. We promised to meet once a month, more or less. The word “more” became a small lie.
Years passed like pages. We kept in touch with messages that said things like, “Saw a play. Thought of you,” and “Are you eating?” He sent me photos of new dishes he tried. I sent him lines from the play I wrote that got a small award.
He called from across the ocean and said, “There’s a storm. I can’t make it.”
I said, “I understand.”
The waiting became an ache. The promise he had kept three times smoldered like a slow coal. When I saw him years later at the little inn — the same inn with the same kind owner who did not age — he looked smaller and larger at the same time: small because he had folded himself into a life that kept him busy, large because he had learned to anchor a place for his home.
“You look tired,” I said.
“I am tired,” he said. “But I am home.”
The world made us borrow time from each other like that. We took weekends and small stretches. We built our relationship on the grammar of return: coming back, saying sorry, holding hands, leaving, pleading, promising.
One winter I found a letter tucked in my mailbox with no return address. It was on handmade paper. Inside it read: “If you ever want to run from everything, come to the pier at Harbor Vale at dawn. I will be there.” It was signed, “— Akira.”
I drove in the dark. The pier was empty except for him, standing by the water, coat on, eyes on the sea. He did not look like he had a plan. He looked like he had come to the end of one and the start of another.
“You came,” he said.
“I always do now,” I answered.
He took my hands as if to measure how much time we had left. He did not speak at first.
“I applied for tenure,” he said suddenly. “I want to be in one place. I want to be someone who comes back for real.”
“You could have done that soon,” I said, breath fogging.
“I was afraid I would be small,” he said. “I thought leaving would make me big. You told me to stop leaving. So I stopped.”
We walked to the end of the pier. The sea hit the posts like drumbeats. He turned to me. “Will you give me another try? Not the three-month kind. The staying kind?”
I wanted to test him. “Will you ever leave again?”
“I will always have work,” he said. “But I will not trade you for an idea.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?”
“Okay to try,” I said. “But you will have to learn to call.”
He laughed like he had been told the secret of the universe. Then he leaned in and said, “Promise me we’ll do small things. Tea at dawn. Scripts in the afternoon. Dumplings at winter.”
“I promise,” I said. I wrapped my hands around his coat. I could feel him breathe.
Years later, at the same inn, we stood in less nervous hands. We wore simple clothes: my favorite faded dress and his comfortable jacket. We were not the kind of couple who made a big show. We were the kind who took small rooms, folded sheets, and wrote messy notes to each other on napkins.
On the day we decided to stay forever, the inn owner — who had always liked us and had once said, “Love takes time like tea takes heat” — offered us the old guestbook.
“Sign there,” she said. “Write it like you will want to read it in bad weather.”
We wrote, “Delaney Meier and Akira Dumont — Harbor Vale — we will come back for tea.”
He left his hand in mine like a permanent fixture. He was the boy who had told me to be small and then learned how to hold the whole world without breaking me.
“What if you forget?” I asked in the quiet after.
“I will not forget,” he said. “If I ever forget, remind me like you remind me of commas.”
I laughed. “Don’t make me your editor.”
“Never,” he said. “But you will always tell me when I use a comma wrong.”
We married in a small room with the inn as our witness, shoes in the doorway, hands wrapped around mugs. Luisa baked a cake. Quinn drew a sketch. Foster wrote a tiny noisy article in the local paper like he had to announce our existence. Akira’s mother called from a far country and cried. Zachariah — my old neighbor from childhood, who had loved me in an easy, brotherly way and taught me how friendship could be its own kind of love — sent a small message: “I’m glad you found someone who comes back.”
That was the truth of love we had learned the hard way: it is not only the grand promises; it is the receipts of small returns. It is staying for the kettle to whistle, for the late train to arrive, for the plant on the windowsill to bloom under your care.
On our first anniversary, we returned to the pier and held a small paper boat together. We wrote on it: “Keep coming back.” We set it on the water and watched the current take it gently away.
“Will we always come back?” Akira asked like a child wanting another story.
“Yes,” I said. “We will come back, because that is how we stay.”
He kissed my forehead, soft, like the bandage of a promise. He looked at the sky and then at me and said, “Stay with me then.”
I looked at his hand holding mine. I looked at the water shining like a handful of coins. I said, “I will.”
And I meant it with the whole small, brave person I had become.
The End
— Thank you for reading —