Sweet Romance15 min read
I Quit Playing Girlfriend — He Came Chasing All the Way Home
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I never meant to fall in love for real. I signed up to be a public girlfriend for two years because they said it would help him, and because I was a fan before I was anything else. I thought I could keep being the cheerful, unpaid assistant to his star. Then one night, the host asked about marriage on live television, and the moment the question hit me, something inside me cracked.
"I'm done," I told myself. I typed the statement, closed my laptop, and left.
Two days later, he was on my doorstep with takeout and a ridiculous, determined face.
"You shouldn't have left without telling me," he said.
And then, smiling like the worst, softest fool, he added, "So I'm here to beg. Can I be your devoted idiot?"
I did not expect to hear those words. I also did not expect to say yes.
1
The award ceremony lights dimmed and the audience leaned forward like an answer. The host announced the nominations, and my hands felt light because I had brought nothing except a dress and a promise: one of us would accept the trophy for the absent nominee.
"Clara Kaiser," the screen read. My name flashed huge and bright. My heart was a hummingbird inside my ribcage.
My manager, Therese Benson, tapped my arm. "If he wins, you go up and accept for him. Okay?"
"Okay," I said, and my voice trembled and then steadied. I had practiced the speech in the mirror; I had practiced being small at the center of a giant spotlight. I had practiced smiling like cotton.
Two years ago I was nothing but a small actor with a handful of shows and a lot of online fangirling. Nathan Avery was everything I could not be: a polished, talented leading man who looked like he had stepped directly out of a classic black-and-white movie poster. I fell for him the way people fall for constellations — from a distance, memorizing the shape and the shine.
When my life collided with his — the studio proposed pairing me with Nathan as a publicity couple — my childlike, ridiculous fantasy bent toward a possibility. They said we would be a public relations ease: him, the polished gentleman; me, the petite, upbeat partner everyone could love. I agreed because my heart had a memory of chasing his performances on loop at night.
We announced the relationship and my life changed. I went from an anonymous background actor to "Nathan Avery's girlfriend" almost overnight. People found me because I was adjacent to him; suddenly I had interviews and offers. It was dizzying and sweet and real enough, except for one detail: he never quite belonged to me.
Two minutes into my acceptance speech, the host couldn't help themselves. They knew us as "the model couple." The host leaned in and asked with a playful grin, "So, Miss Clara Kaiser, are there wedding plans?"
My smile faltered. Warmth flushed my cheeks, then drained. I wanted to run back to my seat and hide behind Therese's shoulder. I walked off stage with a practiced bow and a head full of questions.
Later, backstage, Therese praised me like I'd done bravery, not a favor. "You were wonderful," she said. "But Clara, we need to discuss the media. His movie—"
"I'm asking to uncouple," I blurted. The words surprised me when they left my mouth.
"Unbind?" Therese's voice clipped.
"I don't want to be labeled anymore. He has his own path and I don't want to ride his tail. I want my own work, my own mistakes. Please tell the company. I'm done."
Therese's face went from surprised to worried. "Clara, he brings you opportunities. Think of the 'Moonwind' IP rumors. You can't just—"
"I like him," I said quietly, and Therese's eyebrows softened. "But I realized I'm not his girlfriend because he loves me. I'm a lucky charm. I can't be a charm forever."
2
Two days after the awards I flew home ahead of schedule, because I needed space and the kind of silence that only the countryside gives. My parents were away, so the house was mine and mine alone — and I wanted nothing except lazy days and no notifications. I turned off my phone. I ate whatever I wanted. I let the radiator clank. I thought the world had moved on already.
The next morning I found him in my living room.
"You're early," I said. I should have been annoyed, but the sight of him in my house — the way he folded around the news that we were not a real couple anymore — punched at something tender.
"You should have told me you were leaving," Nathan said, and he smiled like he was embarrassed to look so out of place.
"I posted a statement."
"You left the country?" He lifted a brow.
"I left the ceremony," I corrected.
He sat down very carefully, like a man whose life had taught him how to handle fragile things, and pushed a plastic bowl toward me.
"I got you breakfast," he said. "Therese told me your flight was early. I caught a morning plane."
"You flew all the way here for Italian takeout?"
He blinked. "I didn't fly for the pasta. I came because you left without telling me."
The room felt both normal and strange. He looked exactly the same as in photos — even more contained in the presence of no cameras — but this version of him had a worry line that I hadn't seen before.
"Why did you leave?" he asked, quiet and blunt.
"Because I saw some… things," I said. "I found out you were visiting an old lover's social media account. I saw how you checked it. I've been a fan of you for years, Nathan. I can live as your fan, but I want honesty. That's all."
Nathan's face shifted like a sunrise. "It wasn't me."
"What? The visits to that page? Therese said it was, but your assistant—"
"My assistant manages a lot of my social. There are things that get tossed into my accounts; sometimes the team looks up old press, exes, rumors — it's the job," he said. He reached for the trophy I'd brought back and set it on the coffee table between us. "I should have told you I left the awards. I should have told you about the visits. You were right to be upset."
Then he did something unexpected: he reached across the table and tucked a stray curl behind my ear.
It sounded stupid in my head to make me feel this way — that small physical claim — but the warmth in his palm spread through my whole body. It was one of the first times I'd felt that he cared with intention rather than courtesy.
"All right," I said, and something let go inside me. "But Nathan, you get to know something about me now: I'm not content to be in a box. I want to act because I love the craft. Not just because I'm tied to you."
"I know," he replied, and the way he said it made my breath hitch. "I like how you say 'not just because.'"
3
He didn't leave. He stayed that week, turning down shoots, reading scripts in my hallway, bringing blankets and bringing arguments with him. A few days in, he asked if he could help me with my water scene on my low-budget web drama — the one where the heroine must jump into the lake without a stunt double.
"You're not kidding about jumping in water?" he asked.
"I'm not kidding," I said.
On set, Jude Cummings — my co-star — argued that my character's fall into the water was too dangerous. "We need a double," Jude said, concerned.
"I'm doing my own stunts," I insisted. I didn't want the rumor mill any fodder. "I'm an actress."
We argued at the edge of the lake for a while. Nathan, who had been two yards away, came forward and put his hand on my shoulder. "Clara, if you think you can do it, I'll support you. But promise me you won't do anything idiotic."
I looked up at him and saw a look I had been missing for two whole years: he wanted to protect me for my sake, not for show. My chest fluttered in a way that had nothing to do with press conferences or photoshoots. It felt like home.
"All right," I said, just to see his face break into a smile — the same smile that had kept me awake watching interviews at midnight.
That night, after the scene was shot, he walked me back to my trailer and stood beneath the strip of light outside, hands shoved into his jacket pockets.
"Are you angry?" I asked him.
"Angry? For what?"
"For coming," I said.
"I come because I want to be around you," he said.
"You just said you weren't—"
"And I was wrong," he cut in. "I wasn't honest about how much I notice things about you. I notice when you avoid my touch; I notice when your eyes light up at a line; I notice the way you sleep like an exhausted poet. I notice everything, Clara."
I tried to laugh. "That's very poetic for you."
"That's because you make me be like that," he said, and he touched my hand, and I could have sworn the world rewound into the background noise of reeds and insects.
4
When fans and tabloids chewed at our heels, I learned how badly I didn't like being someone else’s accessory. On a variety show, a five-second nervous blink of mine was replayed until it became a scandal. People called me "two-faced," suggested that I was shallow; someone found a clip of me flinching on live television and the comments said I had a lover on set — Jude — who had stolen my heart.
Someone put a narrative together and then hammered it into me.
"You're cheating on Nathan," my phone's notifications screamed.
The noise was relentless. Therese begged me to do a clarification interview. Nathan's publicist called. Nathan himself texted, then called, then stood in my trailer doorway with an unreadable expression.
"Say something," he urged one day. "Say it's nothing."
"It is nothing," I said. "He's a friend. There's nothing."
"Say that," Nathan said slowly, like he was teaching me to tap a rhythm.
So I posted a statement. "We have broken up. I was a fan. I am so sorry for the chaos. It was my small girl's greed that made me jealous and petty." I tried to make it a final punctuation, a clean line.
I meant it. I meant to close the chapter. I wanted my own opening paragraph.
I flew home that night and let the quiet settle. I deleted the app notifications and tried to sleep. The next morning, someone knocked loudly on my door.
I peered through the peephole and nearly dropped my phone. Nathan stood on my doorstep with two cartons of the takeout he had raved about.
"I thought you'd be mad," he said when I opened the door.
"I'm not mad," I said. "I'm… tired."
He stepped into my living room like a man who had practiced walking across stages and somehow made the living room small and warm.
"Why'd you post that?" he asked, not accusing, just needing to know.
"Because I wanted it to stop. I wanted them to have the truth and then leave me alone."
"And you thought being single would make them stop talking?"
"It was for both our sakes." I put the jar of pasta sauce down and crossed my arms. "I should have talked to you."
"You should have," he admitted. "But you left. You left the way fans do, like you couldn't stand how large the thing between us had become."
"I didn't want to be your thing," I said. "I wanted to be myself."
"So do I," he said.
"Then why did you talk to my manager like I was a promise to be kept?" I asked, sharp now.
"Because I was trying to be fair to the people depending on me," he said. "But that doesn't excuse—"
He stopped and I watched him breathe. He looked like someone afraid of losing the only person who saw him without his armor.
"You know what?" he said, suddenly earnest. "How about we restart. No PR stories for a week, no staged photos, no 'couple' interviews. I'll go back to my schedule and you do your work. But every time you need something, tell me. Don't run."
My hands trembled. "And if I don't want to run back?"
"Then we'll be friends. But I would like to be one of your friends."
He sounded like he was bartering for me with small, honest words. I smiled despite myself.
"Deal," I said. "Friends."
5
The restart wasn't neat. We tried to be colleagues and failed, because the things we could not control — the way his thumb brushed the back of my hand while we shot a scene; the way he determinedly brought hot soup to my trailer when I was sick — reminded us both of what being "just friends" sometimes meant.
Once, on a day with three scenes, he didn't come to set. I panicked, even though I knew my panic made no sense. At lunch, he texted, "Be at the theater at seven. I have something to ask you."
At seven we stood backstage where only the sound of technicians and the mechanical smell of lights filled the air. He held a small, wrapped box. "I've been stupid," he said. "Two years ago, I didn't want to go back on stage. I thought about quitting. You helped me want to stay. You cheer for me in a way none of them do. I want to keep playing...with you."
I swallowed. "With me?"
"Yes." He opened the box and inside it was an old, cheap ticket stub glued to a note. The ticket was from the time he'd told me later was the film that had gotten a special performance because of someone he'd been with. "This was in my script drawer," he said. "When I realized I couldn't keep everything, I put this toward the things I value. Clara, will you let me be selfish? I want to be selfish about you."
I laughed-cry-laughed because his expression was both awkward and well prepared. "Nathan," I said simply, "You are asking me to be your girlfriend."
He nodded. "I am. But only if it's because we choose it. No more label for the press unless it's honest. No more being your 'career's crutch' unless you ask me to. Will you let me try?"
He reached for my hand. I let him take it.
6
Three small moments make themselves permanent inside me. One is the night he first took up my hand and held it like a promise. The second is when he showed up in my trailer at two in the morning with a sick bag of soup because a water scene had left my lungs tight and shaking. He pressed the spoon to my lips and watched as I ate. The way his eyes softened when I swallowed made my chest blossom like a small sun.
The third is, of course, the awards night two years later when he stepped onto the stage and called me by name.
"Nathan," I said into the microphone, the studio lights making the audience a warm blur. "Yes, I'll collaborate with you."
I had expected him to propose in some other way. I had expected stilted speeches and white roses and a staged moment. But his proposal — the way he chose words about partnership, months and years, about being present for auditions and being honest when he was jealous and apologizing when he was wrong — was so intimate that I wanted to collapse.
He had grown from the man who had once been content to be admired from a distance. He had learned to show up without being asked, to apologize without a publicist's script, to love in small, fierce acts.
7
There were never villains in our story, not in the cinematic way a love story asks for them. There were messy people, sure: fans who judged harshly, a tabloid that wrote a headline to sell newspapers, colleagues who misread signals. But there was no person whose comeuppance would be a satisfaction that mattered to me. I wanted to heal rather than humiliate.
When rumors flared that I had left him for a co-star, Nathan publicly wrote a few lines on his account that were equal parts embarrassing and tender: "I was wrong. She didn't cheat. She chose to protect me by stepping back." The fans turned their energy into sweetness. People sent us chili noodles, jokes, and photoshopped mugs of us sipping coffee together like an art installation. It was ridiculous and lovely.
8
We had quiet days at home where there were no cameras and no agendas. We went to rehearsals, we wrapped each other with jackets, we argued over lines and over salt. We were imperfectly functional.
Once, when I had a small audition for a different role, he sat on the floor outside the casting room and waited for me for two hours, his hands folded like a person holding their breath. After I came out, nerves and adrenaline still fizzing, he stood and reached for me.
"How did it go?" he whispered.
"I froze on a line," I admitted.
He smiled, the kind that resembled relief and glee and everything in between. He pulled me close and, very softly, said, "You are my little comet. You are wild. You are loud and you are brave."
In the night when I could finally breathe again he took my hand and said, "I don't want to be the name on your arm or the picture in a magazine. I want to be the person who copies your favorite snack order, the idiot who hides silly notes in your coat pockets, the man who will stand outside your dressing room with a blue scarf because you always steal mine."
He did all of those things, even the petty ones. He tied my scarf around my neck for warmth and for show, and sometimes he would sneak a note into my bag that only said, "For when you forget I'm here." Those notes were the kind of details you tile into a life.
9
We had a test, like every couple does.
It wasn't huge. It was not some melodramatic betrayal. It was a day when he had to film a scene where his character, in a different script, kissed another actress. He told me about it in a rehearsal. I smiled and said, "Okay." But inside my stomach churned, the old insecurity knitting itself up like an old sweater.
He watched me for a heartbeat — his eyes searching for permission — and then he did something that made every fan and every self-respecting movie hero be jealous. He kissed my forehead in front of the crew.
"You don't have to be brave for my sake," he said softly. "Just be brave for yourself."
Everything was simpler after that. The crew laughed. I laughed. The gag reel was later posted and people said we were "the real thing" without needing to be told. I felt oddly victorious for not letting the past shape the present.
10
Time went by in a way that felt like seasons instead of hours. We acted and we ate, we argued and we made up, and we learned the small mechanics of loving someone who is both a person and a star. We learned to say sorry without grand gestures — just a look, a hand on the small of the back — and to hold space for each other's work without making it a contest.
One evening, months after the awards, I sat at a small table with Nathan in a kitchen that belonged to both of us. He poked at his coffee with a plastic spoon as if contemplating a future chart.
"Clara," he said, then paused. "Will you move in with me?"
The question wasn't flashy. It wasn't on television. It was unpolished and private. I thought of the nights when we shared a kitchen light and a kettle, of the times he had fallen asleep at my shoulder while reading a script. I thought of the note he had slipped into my coat, the small, steady way he had kept showing up.
"I will," I said. "But on one condition."
"What's that?"
"That I can still make the messes I'm proud of. That I can be stubborn and loud and small and big."
"You can be all of that," he said. He smiled like the man who had learned the grammar of my heart. "And I will be here for the messy parts."
So I moved in. He practiced making coffee in the way that would become the soundtrack of my mornings. I moved forward with auditions and with classes and with my own little projects. We built a life that was quiet and loud in equal measure.
11
People asked us how we survived the public aspects of our relationship. We had learned three rules that we never told a PR person. Rule one: no staged photos unless they are honest. Rule two: wake-up texts are sacred. Rule three: if the world gets too loud, go home to silence.
Those rules were our infrastructure. They kept our private life from collapsing under the weight of applause.
On a summer night, under an ugly streetlamp that turned its pallid face on a rainy alley, Nathan stopped me and tilted my face by the chin.
"Do you know why I put up with fans and lights and the weirdest headlines?"
"No," I said, though I had my guess.
"Because when you told me you wanted your own work, you meant it," he said. "I wanted to be the person who helps you do that. I wanted to be the person who means something to you other than a career-lift."
My breath left me. "You always did."
"No, I didn't. But I learned. I learned to be honest. I learned to apologize. I learned to stand in the background and cheer when you are on stage. Will you let me keep learning with you?"
"Yes," I said.
12
We had no cinematic climax. There was no villain to be toppled in the classic sense. The people who had whispered about me moved on. The co-star who had been named gossip fodder continued to work in smaller projects; Jude and I became close friends because we shared the same rehearsal room. Therese continued to manage my nights and mine; she once told me, "I always suspected you were more stubborn than loyal," which was her strange way of complimenting me.
When people asked me what had changed, I said, "I learned to name what I wanted. I learned to make small fights and then apologize. I learned not to let a label contain me."
Nathan taught me how to be seen without fear. I taught him how to be present without losing himself in public opinion. We became partners in the truest way: a collaboration with no contract.
13
On the night he accepted another award — a role he had worked hard for, away from the movie that had brought rumors and a previous ex — he looked at me from the stage. The camera found my face in the audience and for a moment everything slowed.
"Clara," he said into the microphone, making my name sound like an offering. "Years ago, I asked someone to accept a trophy for me. We were young and terrified and clumsy. Tonight, I want to ask if you'll take my hand for a new kind of partnership. Not for PR. Not for money. For the rest of our days."
The crowd exhaled as one. I felt my whole life like a line of lights turning on, one by one. I stood, my smile unstoppable.
"Yes," I said into the small handheld mic they handed me. "I will collaborate."
We laughed that night, not because the world had told us to but because we had chosen. When the cameras later flashed, there was no script — just two people who had learned to accept each other's stubbornness and soft edges.
14
"Will you let me be your idiot again?" he asked later at our kitchen table, where we sat with mismatched mugs and a half-eaten cake.
"I already said yes," I said.
He shrugged. "It suits me."
"That's because you are good at being tender," I told him.
He kissed my hand and said, "And you're good at being brave."
15
I keep a little box on my shelf with the old ticket stub and some notes. I keep a photograph of that night with the award, our smiles slightly tired and honest. I keep a paper crane Jude folded for me on a slow afternoon. I keep, in a cramped envelope, the statement I posted when I thought the world would be easier if I ran.
Sometimes I take them out and read them, like a believer checking weather patterns. I have learned that love is less a storybook climax and more like a script that you and somebody else keep rewriting — sometimes in the margins and sometimes with whole new chapters.
I used to think being a star's girlfriend meant surrender. Now I know it can be a choice. I used to be content to watch from the audience. Now I'm the one onstage, and he is the one in my seat, wearing a sweater that always smells faintly of coffee.
That is the unique ending to our story. We are not perfect; we are not slick. We are each other’s quiet audience and loudest fan. When people ask me how it turned out, I tell them that the thing that made all the difference was that we stopped pretending our roles were fixed.
He still makes me laugh, and sometimes he still gets jealous like a human instead of a headline. He still pays attention to old messages his assistant archives, because he is human and messy and sweet. I still rail against tabloids and cling to my scripts. We still work. We still love.
When the cameras are off, he calls me "my little comet" in a voice that makes the word feel like a promise. I have learned to answer him in a language he knows: with honesty, with occasional stubbornness, and with a lot of pasta. He shows up in small, devoted ways — on my set, in my kitchen, in the quiet hallway beside my dressing room. He is less a polished trophy and more someone who says, "I will try harder," and then tries.
We both keep trying.
The End
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