Sweet Romance20 min read
I Said No—Then I Took the Job (and He Stayed)
ButterPicks11 views
I never meant to sign a contract with a camera crew and eight strangers, but the number on our studio's monthly sheet was staring back at me like a dare. "We can’t afford to be stubborn," I said, and my voice sounded like someone else's.
"Juniper, please," Kanako Martinez begged, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside my drafting table. "They want you. This show will get our name out."
"I said no," I said. "I hate cameras. I hate... pretending."
"You like pretending when you sketch," Kanako said. "This is different."
She had every right to be panicked. Since we started Juniper & Kanako Studio, most nights I drew until dawn while Kanako handled the orders. My sketches made people sigh; her negotiation skills paid the bills. Lately the sighs weren't enough.
"Look at this," I said, and pushed the profit line across my laptop screen. "Twelve thousand total. Do you know what that means? One of us makes six thousand a month. That isn’t profit."
Kanako looked at the spreadsheet, her face folding like a map. "Okay, okay. I'll go if you really don't want—"
"I'll go," I blurted. The words surprised me; they surprised her more.
"You're serious?" she squealed. "You, the person who calls interviews 'the worst part of life'—you're going to be on a dating show?"
"You'd better be ready," I said, and tried to smile bravely. "If I end up meeting someone cute, you have to design their anniversary present."
"Deal." She kissed my temple. "But if online trolls start, I will buy you a whole army."
"With what money?"
"You will invent money with your jewelry skills." Kanako's grin made me laugh. We both needed the laugh like a window needs a breeze.
A week later, I sat on a bench outside a rehearsal room sweating as if it were midsummer, though the studio's air conditioning hummed through the building. I held Kanako's hand because my own hands had decided to refuse cooperation.
"Remember to be yourself," she said.
"I'm always myself," I lied.
The door opened. A man with a white T-shirt and the kind of jaw that got photographed in magazines stepped into the light. He had a watering can in his hand, as though he had emerged from a greenhouse rather than a soundstage. He glanced at the roster, then at the lineup of applicants, and his face did something I hadn't seen in years.
"Eldon?" I heard someone whisper.
"Don't be ridiculous," I told myself. I squeezed Kanako's fingers so hard my knuckles went white. We had been together then, long before the studio. We had held hands over midnight assignments, fed each other bad coffee, and then—without an argument I could name—he left. Six years later his name on the director's bio made my throat tighten.
"Juniper Santos," a woman across the table said when my turn came. "What’s your relationship status?"
"Single," I answered. It came out flat, like a long-practiced script line. The panel nodded. One man typed something, another smiled, and then Todd Dickerson leaned forward. I barely heard his voice—he might as well have been speaking from underwater—when he said, "Welcome to Good Love."
Kanako nearly danced out of the room. She texted me pictures of their follow-ups. They said there would be a script of sorts, but mostly "play out organically." The producers called it authenticity; I called it pretending.
Back in our studio, the email popped up: Eldon Coppola, Director.
"How does the universe keep playing pranks?" I asked Kanako. "Why him?"
"You know him?" she asked.
"Sort of. Once."
"Once like 'ex-boyfriend once' or 'once met at a party and failed to impress'?" she pressed.
"Ex-boyfriend once," I said, and the word shaped itself into a small, sharp rock.
"I didn't know that," she said. Then she grabbed my face with both hands. "Juniper, if this scares you, back out. Worst case: we get nothing and go on living. Best case: money, exposure, and—" she smiled wickedly, "fame."
"I can't be 'famous,'" I said. "I make tiny things. I like tiny things."
"Then be the famous small-thing maker," Kanako said.
I signed the contract because we needed rent and because the studio lights had been too kind to my sketches lately.
On the day I arrived at the villa set, I felt as if I'd been stepped into an ice cube. Cameras lined the halls; mothers of production assistants whispered over shot lists; the air smelled of coffee and sunscreen. Then he opened the door.
Eldon looked at me as if the years had put a thin film on us. "You came," he said, barely above the hum of soft lights.
"Hi," I managed. My suitcase dragged awkwardly behind me. There was an old muscle memory in me that should have expected him to smooth my ruffled sleeve or lift my bag, but he didn't. He watched and stepped back as if I belonged to the air rather than to him.
"You could have said no," I said, bravely.
"I could have said yes, too," he said, and closed the door behind me.
Inside, the cast sat around a long table. Jude Chevalier, the pop star everyone liked, lounged as if reclining cost a million dollars. Julia Franklin and Louis Erickson—actors—filled the room with practiced ease. Arlo Sanchez, who had the nervous smile of a nineteen-year-old with a camera strapped to his chest, said, "Nice to meet you, Juniper."
"Nice to meet you too," I said. My voice found its steady place. I showed them my earrings and a simple bracelet; girls lit up and asked if I could design for them, and for a minute, the cameras felt like friends.
A producer handed out envelopes. "Find your room," they said.
"Your room has been upgraded," a PA told me later.
"Upgraded?" I asked, because my life is made of very little surprises.
"The director reserved the top floor. It's... nicer."
My heart flipped. "The top floor?"
"Yes," the PA said. "Follow me."
I walked up to the fourth floor and found a room that felt like something from a catalog: wood and white, a slanted skylight, a view toward the garden. I thought: this is too much. Then the door across the hall opened.
Eldon stood in a doorway I had thought belonged to someone else. He gloved the camera with casual command and then, as if remembering decorum, said, "We need to set up a camera."
He and two techs came into my room. "Can I help?" I asked.
"No," he said, and then, softer, "Yes, if you like."
We worked in a small, practical rhythm and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time: easy companionship. He joked about my habit of losing hairpins in my curls, and I retaliated by overexplaining the geometry of a custom clasp, because I had to do something with my hands when my mouth was frozen.
Later, when the evening meal happened by the villa's long table, someone joked about gift exchanges. I had prepared small boxes—tiny studs, a charm—and the whole villa laughed when I told them I hadn't meant to make anything "for men." Someone dares me, someone else said, "Then don't." I felt the cameras look and knew my blush would go out into living rooms, but I also knew my voice could be heard.
That night, I learned three things.
One: Eldon was not merely the director. He had a presence that made the camera's lenses feel like his fans.
Two: Many of the other guests were playing parts, but not one of them was cruel, not yet. They were a chaotic, lovely mess.
Three: I had left a small, heat-soft kitten at home—my "Little Tart"—and I'd thought of it often. I wanted to go home to her, to her warm, heavy body and purring complaints.
The next morning, I slept badly. I woke, made coffee with hands that were clumsy, and found a table with a line of sticky post-it notes labeled "Tasks." One read, "Pairing lottery." Our names went into bags of colored balls. Whoever matched would go out on a date.
"Who did you match with?" Arlo asked me, knowingly.
"No idea," I said, because I preferred surprises.
He disappeared into the crowd and did not return for a long time. When he came back, he wore a grin like a secret.
"You're going out with me," he said.
"Oh," I said, and then laughed when the idea of Arlo's clear-eyed excitement warmed something in me. He wanted to take photos, told me he did not need to show off, and then shyly suggested we go to a theme park. I said yes because I liked his honesty.
Eldon watched from the monitor room. I knew because the camera caught him—a line of him watching me the way someone watches a favorite painting in a gallery: with a thin, satisfied smile. Someone nudged him. "Direct the camera on them," they said. Eldon snapped a look that tightened the air, and the assistant producer swallowed and obeyed.
At the theme park, Arlo and I walked between rides. I posed while he adjusted angles, and he told me about being a kid with a hand-me-down camera. "You're great in front of the lens," he said.
"That's a lie," I said. "My face says 'I am hiding a small catastrophe.'"
"It's a charming catastrophe," he said. "And you smell faintly of lemon oil and silver."
We crashed into a bumper car riot—a glitter of laughter. I flailed and spun and Arlo crashed me like I was a leaf, and then the four of us who had happened to be playing that round fell into laughter that felt like a promise.
Back in the villa, a small poll came up: who made a bad first impression? I checked my phone. The votes were tame until a notification came up for Arlo. One person had picked him.
Eldon frowned at the screen. "Make sure he doesn't spend too much time with her," he whispered to Zhang, a PD who had the nervous energy of a man who had been thrown into a wave of responsibility.
"Why?" the PD whispered back.
"Because," Eldon said, and I saw the tiredness around his eyes, "we need to keep the story interesting. But not too interesting."
Arlo smiled at me that night and said, "You seem to be everyone's favorite 'nice girl.'"
"Do I?" I said. I thought I was just being me.
"You're warm," he said.
That night, I wrote a sentence on the show's private feed—visible only to Eldon. I called him a name we had used when we were careless and young. He replied with a single "."
A period. One small dot.
It felt like a dare, like the punctuation of everything we had left unsaid. I was insulted at first: a dot to mark all my words? But then I laughed. The rest of the cast laughed when I read it aloud: "He gave me a dot."
"What's it mean?" Jude asked, interested.
I shrugged. "Maybe it is 'the ending point.'"
"Or it could be 'wait,'" Eldon said, behind me.
"Wait for what?" I asked.
He didn't answer. He left.
Soon after, Eldon—who had been introduced as "director"—announced that he would, for reasons no one fully understood, step down from the control room and join the cast. Jude's schedule had changed. There was a scramble. I felt my stomach sink.
"I'll keep an eye on things," Eldon said when he walked over to my chair.
"That's your job," I said. "Are you joining as a contestant or as a spy?"
"As a contestant," he said, and meant it badly enough to make me laugh.
The villa hummed with new tension. People were curious. Arlo looked at me with something like disappointment and determination. I could see the notes in his head, and the way his eyes skimmed for a different angle.
Eldon and I had to coexist. He tried to look indifferent; sometimes, he would order a camera to swing away from me like a guard moving silently. Other times, he would direct: "Stand closer to the light." He would take a sketch I made of a setting and hold it up, quietly impressed. I caught him once, sitting in the chair I had slept in once upon a time, sketching the curve of a pendant doodled on the set list.
"Why are you doing that?" I asked.
He looked guilty, like a man caught reading a letter not his own. "Because it's the only way I could think of you," he said. "You always sketched when you were thinking. I wanted to remember."
"You remembered badly," I teased.
He smiled, which was—still—like a window opening. "Maybe," he admitted.
Another day, during a group barbecue, a task came up: the boys had to choose an item from the girls' personal items to choose a date. I had placed a simple emerald bracelet on the table because it was mine and obvious and, frankly, pragmatic advertising. "It's a fair thing to display," I said. "We need customers."
The men decided to play arm wrestling to decide who would take which item. It was silly. Arlo tried to back out, but he stepped forward bravely. Eldon flexed, and we all fell into a ridiculous chant. The match between Eldon and Arlo lasted longer than anyone expected. At first, it was a game. Then it was a battle of wills.
Eldon won. Heaped on him were shouts of "Director has the emerald!" and "He cheated!" I clapped and felt something move in me like a spring released, both annoyed and weirdly proud.
"You're unfair," Arlo told Eldon when he walked away.
"Don't be dramatic," Eldon said. "You can't win every arm wrestle."
Arlo's cheeks flushed. "Maybe not. But I meant to ask her out."
"You can still ask her out." Eldon said.
"He said this to me as if it were permission," Arlo later said when I found him on the roof. "But then he took the bracelet. Then he acted like he hadn't."
"You think he's hiding?" I asked.
"No," Arlo said. "But he hates losing. He shouldn't ask at all if he can't handle being vulnerable." He stared at the horizon, where the city cracked into dust and light.
I understood something then: Eldon had not moved on as cleanly as I had thought. He might have been the director, but he was also a man with parts of me in his pocket.
A misstep happened the next day. We were all assigned to scavenger-date tasks. I and Eldon were a team—because he had the emerald—and the producers, perhaps for fun or for desperation, put us together. The tension on his face was like a held note.
"Remember that small antique store on Hill Street?" Eldon said as we walked. "They sell the kind of clasp you mentioned."
"You remember the old clasp," I said. "I used to call it an 'old lady bite.'"
"That's what you called it," he said.
We stepped into a sunlit lane of alleyways that smelled of bread and spices. Eldon insisted on walking behind me; after six years, I still noticed the small things. He reached forward to help open an umbrella and his hand brushed mine.
"Stop being so careful," I said, as if it were a joke.
"Stop being so reckless," he shot back. The space between us thickened. We talked about the task, about the clasp and the market, but even the mundane had the electricity of storm clouds.
We found the clasp. We argued over price, bargaining like two people who had once split dinner checks and kept receipts. One of the market managers joked, "Are you two married? We should give you extra change."
I laughed, and the sound felt like a bell. Eldon gave me the clasp as a "win" and said, "Keep it."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you always claim the oddest things," he said. "Keep this. It will make your work smarter."
I wanted to say: keep me. I wanted to say: we can be smarter together. Instead, I said, "Thanks, Director."
He scowled. "Don't make me regret giving you free advice."
I found myself thinking of him at night: his cafe-quick remakes of coffee at the villa, the way he read a camera's lens like a friend rather than a stranger. Then something improbable happened.
Little Tart fell ill. I woke up one early morning to find her burning with fever. She had always been a robust, black-furred witness to our two-person life. That day she was limp in my arms. I called Kanako. She called me an hour later between clients, panicked. I saw stars.
"Call Eldon," Kanako insisted. "You need someone to get you there faster."
"I can't call him," I said. "He's—"
"He's not our past," she said, sharp but kind. "He is a person who can drive and who lives near the clinic."
I dialed his number with fingers that trembled like someone learning to play a violin. He answered the call in voice and then in person. He saw my face close, he saw the small animal's fur, and he didn't ask questions. He opened the passenger seat for Little Tart like setting a child into a car. He drove like someone remembering how to sprint.
At the emergency vet, a room full of the purring and whimpering of other lives, the vet said, "She has a pneumonia infection. We'll give her a dose. She'll need rest."
We held Little Tart's small body while the injections went in. I felt the world list, then right itself.
"You okay?" Eldon asked later in the waiting room.
"No," I said, and meant the simple truth.
He took me home and sat on my low sofa while Little Tart slept. He fished out a small box from his pocket and handed it to me later.
"It's your mother's bracelet?" he said, vaguely. "I bought something you could make her, if you want."
I looked at the green stone bracelet he set in my hand: a vintage piece, fine and old-fashioned, wrapped in a plain box. It was beautiful and wrong and exactly what my mother might like. My throat squeezed.
"Eldon," I said, because the proper way to say "thank you" did not seem to fit.
He shrugged. "Don't get sentimental. It was a practical choice."
We sat in the quiet, and the house smelled of cat breath and lemon oil polish. He left when Little Tart had curled and started to doze, and I waved until his silhouette shrank. He did not look back.
That night, I dreamed of numbers and clasps and the sound of a small period in an email.
After that, things felt less like a show and more like a live wire between us. We shared small conversations—what to put on a menu, where to hang a camera—but in private currents under them, something was shifting. He confessed once, in a moment when we were alone on the roof watching city lights blink like distant stars.
"I thought you'd be angry if I came back into your life through a camera," he said.
"Why would I be angry?" I asked.
"Because I left you," he said. "I should have been better then."
"You left because you were scared," I said.
"Because I was selfish," he said. "Because I thought your art couldn't bear my disorder."
"That's what you thought then," I said. "You don't get to decide now."
He laughed like a release. "Do I get to try?"
"Try at what?" I asked.
"To be less selfish," he said. "To be better."
I rolled my eyes. "This is him trying to sell himself, right? Gullible edits available."
"Maybe. But I meant it."
So we started again, slowly, and mostly awkward. A thousand small things: I learned him impatient with chaos; he learned that I needed to be asked things directly or I would wander and assume. He opened a jar twice before I asked. I asked, "Why all this now?"
"Eldon," I said one afternoon, "are you ready to risk being embarrassed on a national show for the possibility of... something real?"
He met my eyes. For once his answer came without a camera between us. "I'd risk the whole show for you."
I believed him because he was never so dramatic except when he loved something he couldn't have, and that included the way he loved me.
We reached a moment the show could not script: a live reveal. The producers had prepped the villa for a staged "confrontation"—not a real one, but the sort that made reality TV bloom. They wanted pictures to trend, sparks to fly, the kind of footage that begged for clicks.
"Juniper," the PA whispered before the cameras rolled, "are you ready?"
I nodded. I had rehearsed this scene a thousand ways: the cool sarcastic ex, the angry woman, the triumphant winner. I had choices. I chose something else. I would be honest.
The living room filled with guests and crew, with the kind of hush that always meant something huge would precipitate. Eldon sat in a chair that made him look like chess king. I walked in and felt the heat.
"You told me you were only directing this show," I started, and the microphones caught every breath. "Then you signed up to be a contestant. You took advantage of your position. You—"
He folded his hands like he was settling into a testament. "I did something stupid," he said, in my direction. "I put myself in a place where I could watch you. I told myself I could be objective. I wasn't. I lost perspective. I thought I could control the story."
The audience tittered, cameras zooming.
"You didn't just 'lose perspective,'" I said softly. "You hurt me. You made choices thinking you'd protect yourself. You expected me to not complain when you pretended not to know me. Why would I stay if you acted like that?"
His face changed on camera, the cool veneer cracking. He blinked like he was trying to find the bottom of himself and then mining for something else.
"I thought you deserved to find someone better," he said, the sentence trembling. "I thought I was not enough and that you'd be happier."
"You didn't give me a chance to be happier with you," I said.
The room held its breath. The producers leaned forward, hungry for the next syllable.
"Everyone," Eldon said loudly, and the cameras widened like a tide, "I used my title as director to manipulate a situation that was already messy. I made a choice that I believed would protect me—but it hurt someone who did not deserve it."
For the first time since he walked through the villa door, Eldon looked terrified.
"What are you doing?" someone shouted from the crew.
"Let him speak," I said. I didn't want to be scripted. I wanted him to be honest.
He took two steps forward. "I thought I had time," he said. "I thought I could do it later. I was a coward."
The producers stood frozen, unsure whether to shout cut. The cameras kept running.
"My fault," Eldon said, and then his voice broke.
"I used my influence to keep you from being the main narrative. That was wrong. I'm sorry for making you feel small. I'm sorry I made it harder for you to live your life. I'm sorry I misused power."
The room erupted—people whispering, phones lifting. A live audience was the cruelest jury and the most generous witness, all at once. Around us, people started to record. Someone clapped, awkward and startled. Another guest murmured, "I didn't see that coming."
Eldon tried to make himself larger, and then smaller, then human. "You have every right to be angry. I deserve that anger. I deserve... to be judged. I accept your judgment."
The cameras panned to me. This was the crucial moment. I could read from a script, I could weep on cue, or I could speak plain truth.
"You want a judgment?" I asked, because I had walked through a thousand rehearsals and none of them felt as real. I wanted to be fair. "You used what you were given to make yourself central again. You made decisions that treated me like a plot device."
His face crumpled. "I was ashamed. I was afraid of being small in your life."
"I'm not a stage prop," I said, and then I surprised myself by continuing. "But I also have to admit: I used you, too. I thought you were just a memory. I didn't ask. I didn't fight. I let a thing end without hearing you. We both failed."
Eldon looked like a man whose map had been burned and then re-drawn while he watched. "What do you want me to do?" he asked.
"Public apology, maybe," I said, feeling the absurdity of lawyerly solutions. "And... and then you kneel?"
He flinched, because kneeling is a humiliation staged for TV, the stuff of cheap dramas. He had never been the one to kneel for anything, especially not for love.
The room was full of faces—some incredulous, some ravenous—and the microphones caught the scratch of his breath.
"I can't perform humility," he said, quietly. "But I can be honest. Can we... can you hear me without everyone recording?"
A murmur rippled through the crew, like ants moving in a line. The PD looked at me, then at Eldon. The cameras kept rolling, but someone switched the microphones away from the wider feed and onto the two of us.
I nodded.
He stepped closer, and the old guard—six years apart—fell into shape. "I thought leaving would spare you," he said. "I thought I was doing you a favor. The truth is, I was protecting myself. I was afraid to be part of something messy with you."
"Then why return and sign up as a contestant?"
"Because I was stupid enough to think I could watch from the other side. Because I wanted to see you. Because I couldn't stand the idea of you being surrounded and I not being in the picture at all." He swallowed. "I wanted to be part of something with you."
I could see the timeline of us flicker: two twenty-somethings with cheap coffee and expensive vows whispered to no one. I had written a thousand sentences I never sent. Now, the cameras were on, the audience online was watching, and he was standing sheepishly in front of me.
"I can't forgive you for everything," I said. "That would be too easy. But I can forgive you for being honest now."
He looked—astonished. "You are merciful."
"I'm practical," I said. "And selfish. I like being angry less than I like being with someone who knows how to make me laugh at my own mistakes."
The room exploded into applause. Phones buzzed with clips and comments: "Director admits on live TV!" "She forgave him on air!" "The emerald bracelet will trend." It was ridiculous and beautiful and goddamned human.
He went on, publicly, to name his manipulations. He described the times he had intentionally put the lens away from me. The cameras kept recording his descent: from composed director to shaking man, to someone who dropped to his knees, finally, because the audience demanded spectacle and because he needed the shape of falling.
When he sank, the viewers gasped. He looked up through messy hair. "Please," he said to me, "I have been a coward."
The crowd's reaction cycled like a weather map. Some people were outraged; some people cheered; some wept. His composure dissolved into a mixture of denial, stunned pleas, and, finally, collapse.
"Stop!" he said to them. "Don't film this. I was wrong."
Someone in the crowd shouted, "Own it!"
"I own it!" He sobbed, a sound oddly loud in the room. He was small on the floor. I stood and looked at him. The camera's red light continued to blink.
He tried to stand, and his legs wobbled. He put his palms out as if pleading, then folded his hands. "Please..." it was the vulnerability of a man whose armor had been his job title. It spilled over into a rawness no role could have prepared him for.
People around us started to whisper, some clicked pictures, some shook their heads. A guest reached for their phone and began filming; then someone else slapped it out of their hand. The interviewer who'd been assigned to keep the flow stopped, and the producers exchanged a look that said volumes: they'd captured the moment.
He asked for forgiveness. He apologized, in front of everyone, with the humiliation of a man who had promised the world and then failed personally. He was met with stunned silence, and then with the small sound of reading compassion.
Eldon curled up on the floor like someone for whom posture no longer mattered. "Please," he whispered again. "I accept whatever you want to give me."
I looked around. People were watching. Some raised phones; others had tears. I knelt down, not to make a spectacle, but because I wanted to be at his level. "Get up," I said. "You don't belong on the floor."
He looked at me as if the sentence had knocked the air out of him. He pressed his palms to the floor and pulled himself up. He faced me, and in this quieter moment, the cameras seemed less sharp.
When he stood, his hair was damp and his shirt clung to him. He was stripped of the theatrical director's persona; there was only the man who had once sat beside me drawing late into nights. His embarrassment shifted into something like resolve.
The rest of the guests clapped. The sentences moved through the internet. Clips exploded. And then—because the story had to keep moving—the producers asked for a cutaway, and we fell into staged conversations about lessons learned and how reality blurs into performance.
Later, when the cameras were off-camera, he came to my room and sat across from me again. There, without the audience, his voice was steadier.
"I wanted you to know I was wrong in more ways than I can tell the world," he said. "If there is anything I can do to make this right—"
"Don't make it about righting things on camera," I said. "Make it about being grown up when the cameras are off."
He looked at me with something like gratitude. "I will try."
And try he did. Not perfectly, not all at once. He fumbled, he apologized, he learned to ask. He let people film small kindnesses only when he had managed them on his own, without plans to stage them. He began leaving little notes on my drafting table—not public, not broadcast—where he wrote "Take coffee" and "Call your supplier." They were small; they were real.
In the last recorded scene of our time at the villa, I gave a short speech—about being brave enough to change one's mind. I said, "A period can end a sentence; it can also start something new." The camera found Eldon in the back, and he smiled like he was reading the next page.
After the show aired, people picked their favorites. Some loved the pop singer's charm. Others liked Arlo's gentle light. A crowd adored the "director who knelt." The comments spilled like rain. Some were cruel. Most were kind.
Two weeks after the show, I received a delivery. Inside was a small box bearing the number "001" on its tag—someone's code for "first edition." Inside there lay a tiny brass charm engraved with a cat's face, and a note: "For Little Tart."
There was also a second item: an emerald bracelet, the one he'd put on my mother's hand two weeks ago. He had not meant for anyone to see. He'd taken it to his mother, who had told him to take care of his heart like he did his script—a thing to be edited gently, often.
When I called him to thank him, he said, "Come over."
I went. He brewed melted instant coffee that he called "vintage" and offered me a can of cola with a straw because we had laughed once about our different tastes. It was ridiculous, and yet it felt like home. We talked about clasps and deadlines, about little things like whether my studio needed a new window. We did not attempt to be dramatic.
At the door, I almost didn't say anything grand scripted for a finale. I didn't kneel or recite lines meant to be quoted. Instead, I walked to my studio window, looked at the emerald bracelet on my wrist and then back at him.
"You remembered I liked green," I said.
He looked at the bracelet, and then at me. "I remembered a lot of things."
"Do you think this can be real?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I think it's raw. I think we'll trip. I think we'll be messy. I think we'll have days where our past looks better than our present. If you ask me if I'm willing, I'd say: I want to try, without the cameras."
"My mother is going to be thrilled with the bracelet," I said. "She'll call me three times asking if it's expensive."
"You should tell her you spent a lot on it," he said.
"That's dishonest," I said, before I caught myself and grinned.
He laughed, and the sound was not for the cameras. It was private and it warmed the room. He reached for me, and I met him halfway.
We didn't promise forever; even the show couldn't script that. We promised only what we could manage: honesty when afraid, apologies when we were wrong, coffee in the morning even when the job called all day. We promised to build something worth keeping, even if sometimes it meant filing our mistakes under "edits."
Weeks later, when a small, one-minute promo clip of our episode flashed across someone's screen with the caption "Eldon kneels, Juniper forgives," I watched and realized that the moments they had loved were the ones that had not been rehearsed. The emerald bracelet glinted in the bottom right corner of that frame, unmistakable and real.
I put the bracelet back in the little box and walked to my drafting table. Little Tart purred at my feet, alive and stubborn as ever, and I had designs for a new collection—tiny charms made for people who repaired things in other people's lives.
"Can you be patient with me?" Eldon asked one night, half-asleep on the couch.
"If you ask nicely," I said, looking down at the brass charm with the cat's face that he had given me.
He sat up and smiled into the dim. "Please."
"Okay," I said. "But only if you keep reminding me not to leave my needle in the thread where I might stamp my finger."
He laughed. "Deal."
I slid the emerald bracelet into my studio drawer under the sketchbooks and the small box engraved with "001." The drawer closed with a soft thud. The bracelet was a thing with weight. So was what came after—the quiet, steady work of living with someone who used to be your whole world and is now, painstakingly, becoming part of your present.
"Let's not let the cameras decide anything," I said aloud, mostly to myself.
"Agreed," he answered from the doorway.
Outside, a summer rain started, small and thin like a film. Little Tart hopped onto my lap and started to knead.
I set my hand over her black fur. "You saved us today," I told her, and she blinked, satisfied.
The emerald bracelet caught a single drop of light through the window. It flashed like a small promise—green and steady.
The End
— Thank you for reading —