Sweet Romance12 min read
"I Took His Little Brother — and Then We Both Lost and Found Ourselves"
ButterPicks10 views
"I think that's enough for today," I said to the freshmen, closing the folder with a practiced calm.
"Professor Matilde, you're really the department's only successful TA," a girl near the front said, her eyes bright like stage lights.
"Come on, Matilde, any secrets? You must have a boyfriend," another piped in, playful.
"I don't," I answered quickly, and then I felt it — a shadow walking down the back row. He hovered, taller than the boys in class, and when his hand stopped the girl's phone mid-search, the room stilled.
"This poor girl allows herself to imagine too many things," he said. "Matilde has standards."
"He's being rude," someone laughed. "Is that Elio? He touched my hand!"
Elio's fingers covered the student's phone like a promise. His eyes slid over me, and something in that look made a small, dangerous warmth rise in my chest.
"You're teasing," I replied, aware enough to smile.
"Don't blush, two people in this room would be tempted." Elio's voice landed like a soft command. He stood then, walking down the aisle with the assured gait of someone who had always been protected.
After class the students clustered and gossiped. I exited into the hallway and checked my phone. His location hadn't updated in three hours; I assumed he had gone straight home. I walked the short route to my apartment and told myself I was being careful.
"You're home," he said, appearing at the doorway like a thought.
"I'm here," I answered, and tried to sound indifferent.
He tilted his head. "Hungry?"
"Always," I lied.
"Then let's eat," he said, and when I turned toward the couch the world narrowed to the angle of his jaw and the line of his throat.
He kissed me like a boy who had learned to give and not to expect. The kiss took me and gave me back something I had packed away: childish laughter, secret games, the way he used to tug the remote from my hands and force me into silly bargains. We collapsed onto the couch and then the bed. He was eighteen the month before; I was twenty-five and supposed to be a woman who had outgrown childish laws and revenge games.
"You shouldn't," he murmured against my skin.
"I know," I answered. "But you promised me a game, and I like winning."
He laughed, breathy and young. "You are very bad."
"Good," I said. "Be bad with me tonight."
The truth was ugly and delicious: I had taken him to punish someone else. Svetlana had been my closest friend since kindergarten. We shared secrets, snacks, and wards against bullies. Then she took what I loved in pieces and kept smiling through it. She stole my boyfriend; she leaned into the kind of charm that men swallowed like candy. Every man I loved, in an unaccountable crowd of pasts, drifted into her life and left me believing I had been the wrong one all along.
So when Elio arrived a year later as a freshman at my university, I did what hurt. I became the special senior who helped him register, who walked him through the library, who let him fall asleep on my couch. He trusted me because I was older; he called me "senhora" in jokes and "Matilde" in whispers.
"You're an old woman," he said suddenly one night, smiling in his sleep.
"Not yet," I whispered, and later I told myself I had protected myself by making a bargain with cruelty.
The morning after, I poured coffee while he cooked breakfast bare-chested and earnest. "You remember how I like my eggs," I said, and he nodded, flipping them with a clumsy, sincere touch.
"Only for you," he answered, which was a small thrill, until the phone rang. He answered and then refused to let me hear. There was a tension then that I didn't understand—cold edges in his face I had never seen.
"Family," he said finally, a shadow crossing him. "My father."
"Why do you avoid him?" I asked.
"He... is complicated." He shoved his phone into his pocket like it was a hot coal. I let it lie.
Living with him was like living on borrowed sunrises. He worried about me in small gestures—he tightened my coat around my shoulders in crowds, he learned the exact temperature I preferred my coffee to be, the brand of jam I would refuse. He told me, once, "I will guard you, Matilde," and I accepted the solider's oath with a guilty heart.
"He is my family," Svetlana said to me one night, the first time she accused me to my face. "He's my brother. You can't—"
"You went to his boyfriend," I said too quickly. "You took men I liked."
She blinked. "You left, Matilde. You left without telling me why."
"I left because you replaced me," I shot back. "You have always been the pretty one."
"I did what I had to," she said softly, and then she told me things I hadn't known.
"Do you know where my father went?" she asked across a kitchen table one cold afternoon.
"No," I said.
"Our father left years ago. He came back and started asking about birth records, paternity. It ruined the house."
She looked like she had aged ten years in one breath. "He used my blood, Matilde. He planned to use it. He wanted to see what he could get from my family, what leverage—"
I closed my eyes and pictured her laughing in the park when we were six, her small hand sticky with jam. It was then she said, "I did what I had to do. I chose people who could save us."
"Even if that means hurting you?" I asked.
Svetlana's apology landed like a quiet thunderclap. "I was a child. I thought I was protecting us."
"I slept with your brother because I wanted to hurt you," I told her later, raw. "Because I couldn't face you breathing beside the men who had hurt me. I wanted you to feel a loss."
She laughed then, and it was not cruel. "You are terrible," she said, and then, "But you told me tonight you were wrong."
We didn't end it with fireworks. We sat on a couch wrinkled by years of arguments and small reconciliations, and under the hum of the refrigerator we began the long, small work of remembering our shared past and choosing, again, whether it might still be friendship.
But there were other storms. Laurent Valdez reappeared like a bad chapter in the wrong book. He had been my first grown-up love—smooth, smiling, and the sort of man who believed apologies could dress old sins in new costumes. He had turned into the man who slipped his hand into Svetlana's life like a thief into a dark room. He was handsome, practiced in charm, and dangerous in the particular way of men who never had to look at their own hands.
"Matilde," he said the first night he found me at a hotel charity event. "It's been so long."
"Laurent," I replied with cool. "You're the sponsor's guest."
"I owe you an apology." He inclined his head, sincere like an actor taking his bow.
"Keep it for the cameras," I said. He laughed as though I had told a joke.
"You never forgive," he said. "You should let me try."
"Try what?" I asked. "To ruin my life and smile about it?"
He set off a string of words, excuses thin as thread. "I made mistakes. Svetlana and I—" He stopped as if by naming it he would make it small. He declared himself repentant, but I've learned that the word isn't much use unless action follows.
He wasn't the only man who thought he could circumnavigate consequences. After the event he tried to meet me privately at coffee shops, in lobbying rooms, even leaving messages that shut like a trap. Each time, Elio glared or stepped between us like a boy who learned his anger early.
One night, after an event, Laurent's hand closed on my elbow in a way that smelled of old hunger. "Talk to me," he said. "Give me forty-eight hours and I'll explain everything."
"Explain what?" I asked, and felt the weight of the hotel's chandeliers on my shoulders.
"A mistake," he said, trying that worn charm.
"Laurent, you owe more than words," I said.
He was not prepared for what came next. Public scenes are a doctor in humiliation; they set the heart racing and the world watching. I had planned a careful reveal, because easy revenge is cheap and clumsy. I wanted him undone in the place where his reputation mattered—where the sponsors, the board members, the people who had once written checks to him, the kind who measure men by profits and smiles, could see he was not the kind of man to be trusted.
I arranged a talk at the university gala where Laurent had been slated to present a scholarship. The hall filled with people in black and soft light. Cameras flashed for the donors; plates were stacked with the careful geometry of wealth. I stood at the podium beside an awards plaque. My hands didn't shake as I took the microphone.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I began. "I'd like to speak tonight not about scholarships, but about truth."
A hush slid over the room. My pulse ticked. Elio stood at the edge of the dais, jaw tight.
"Laurent Valdez has been generous to our department," I said. "He has also, for years, been doing something else. He has preyed on women he thought could be guided out of his orbit and then tossed aside when they were no longer useful."
A few heads turned. Laurent's smile hardened.
"Last week," I continued, "he tried once more to charm his way into my life and, when refused, he followed me, threatened my job, and attempted to blackmail me with a private conversation. He has repeatedly used charm and money to convert consent into something else."
"That's a serious accusation," someone murmured.
"It is true," I said. "And I will not let him speak to anyone here as if he were a man of integrity."
Laurent stood then. "Matilde, you cannot—"
"I can," I said, and I lowered my voice until it reached the rows of donors and professors close enough to hear. "This is not just a woman's grievance. There are records. There are messages. There are witnesses who will testify to the way he manipulated and used young women in our city."
Whispers mushroomed. Laurent's face, once a mask of practiced indifference, tightened.
Someone near the back—an old colleague of Laurent's—stood and said, "Laurent, you've been too smooth for too long." Murmurs of assent rolled through the hall.
"You're making a scene," Laurent snapped. "You have no proof."
"Proof exists," I said. "And tonight I will let those who were harmed speak." My throat pulled the words together like breath.
Then I did something that made men's faces go pale and the women's jaws set: I invited three young women onto the stage. They had no prepared speeches. They came one at a time, and each told a small truth—a text message, a meeting gone wrong, a promise turned to silence. Each voice was quiet but the sound multiplied in the room.
"Why are you doing this?" Laurent demanded, swallowing.
"Because when men like you think you can buy goodwill with donations, you forget people's lives," one of the women said. Her hands trembled like wind through a glass.
The board members exchanged looks. A sponsor whispered into a phone and then another sponsor did the same. People recorded on their phones. The ballroom that had been filled with flattering applause for Laurent shifted into its opposite: a gallery of witnesses.
I watched Laurent's expression as the truth landed. It was the slow constriction of a man who had always marked others by their usefulness and never by their humanity. First came disbelief. Then anger. Then the legal defenses he'd kept in his back pocket began to rust under public scrutiny.
"No," he said finally, his words small. "You're lying."
"I'm not," Elio said, stepping forward. His voice, when it came, was steady and young. "I saw what he did. And I'm not the only one."
"Elio," Laurent hissed, but the boy did not back down. He had something like a grown man's moral courage when cornered.
The scene that followed is the one that will not leave my memory. Laurent's denial moved in waves—denial, pleading, attempts to charm the crowd back. He accused us of theatrics. He tried to call his lawyer. He tried to brand the event as a setup. But the room had already seen the women, the messages, and the network of small, stubborn truths that do not disappear because an influential man snaps his fingers.
"People started recording him," one of the women said. "He tried to leave, but he couldn't. Security wouldn't escort him out at first; the board members demanded an explanation. Then the media arrived."
"You're making this public," Laurent cried. "You can't do this."
"I can," I said. "And I will." My voice had gone thin with the adrenaline of standing and the moral clarity of a wrong being named.
As cameras flashed, Laurent's posture changed. He first tried to take the podium back, then suddenly realized the ground had shifted. The sponsor's checks began to look like they might be redirected. Board members whispered about withdrawal of funds. A woman in the second row—one of Laurent's former interns—stood and accused him of promises broken, of summer meetings that turned into private dinners with blurred lines.
He staggered through a catalogue of defenses. A man in a dark suit attempted to shield him. But the crowd had heard too many voices. Heads turned away. A high-profile donor who had once toasted Laurent's charisma rose and left his table. People began to stand and leave. Their faces were not unkind; they were deciding which side of history they'd prefer to sit on.
Once the room emptied into a corridor filled with flashbulbs and low conversations, Laurent's defenses collapsed. He stormed toward the exit, his hands brushing at his face like a man trying to remove a public mask that would not come off.
"You're going to regret this," he said, brittle.
"Not as much as you'll regret being the kind of man who thinks it's okay to use people," I answered.
The weeks after the night at the gala moved fast. Emails accrued. Laurent's firm's PR team sent a carefully worded press release about 'differences in recollection.' The university launched an inquiry. Sponsors withdrew tentative support. I found messages from other women—some anonymous, some apologetic, some just steady lists of dates and details.
Laurent's reactions were a study in the stages of collapse. At first he called me wrongful, then he attempted to smear me as an attention seeker. When both failed, he sought legal counsel and tried to start counter-claims. But the public is a curious tribunal; once a story is out it is not easily swallowed back.
He came to the department for a kind of informal meeting, the last public scene. He stood before faculty and students and tried to explain himself. His voice cracked and the old charm was gone. "I am sorry for any pain," he said, but the room sat like a jury.
One of the sponsors whispered into a microphone and asked whether he had ever used his position to coerce. The room listened. Students took notes. A former intern shared a detailed account, and then—like a turn of a key—the dean announced an investigation.
Laurent left that day with his face pale. The news outlets had already begun running pieces. People posted recordings of his wordless fury on social media. Business associates texted his number and then deleted messages. He watched as the structures he'd built began to look fragile.
"You're being unfair," he told me on a street later, alone. Rain dotted his shoulders like glass.
"I told the truth," I said. "You can build your life on charm or you can build it on integrity. You chose both, and now the world is making you reconcile them."
He tried to rage. He tried to plead. Then, for the first time, I saw him shrink. The public humiliation did not only come from cameras; it came from the slow shattering of a self-image. He had thought himself indispensable; now he was dispensable.
He lost the scholarship contract. He lost his place as a golden donor in our department's social calendar. He lost the sheen that had allowed him to move through rooms without scrutiny. The people closest to him looked at him differently; some avoided him. He attempted to appear before an ethics committee and spoke too loudly, too raw, too convinced of his own rightness. They listened, then they voted to suspend his privileges.
The worst punishment, perhaps, was watching him attempt to rebuild a life and find doors closed. He began to ask for help from the very circles that had once applauded him, and received only polite refusals.
The final stage is always the quietest. He tried to rebuild with apologies that read like press releases. Women refused. Students whispered. He became a cautionary tale.
In the end, the public punishment was not a single scene of violence but a slow, sharp unspooling: his reputation unwound; sponsors left; colleagues stepped back; the press kept the thread pulled. He went from polished donor to a man who had to answer questions in public and accept consequences he had never planned for.
As for me, in that same time I learned things I had not expected. Elio's anger at my betrayal was a clean, cutting thing. He moved out of our apartment and then, months later, moved back when I finally said what I meant and didn't mean.
"Why did you do it?" he asked one night, voice small and bright as glass.
"To hurt her," I said, ashamed.
"Did it help?"
"No."
He was quiet. "You hurt me too."
"I know," I said.
We healed in the clumsy ways of two people who had both been used and who wanted to be better. He apologized for the nights he had kept me innocent; I apologized for the nights I had used him as a weapon. After a while, the hatred softened into something complicated: real affection, threaded through old hurts and new promises.
"Promise me something," he said once.
"I can't promise forever," I said, "but I can promise I'm trying."
He laughed. "That's better than some men get."
We planned, awkwardly and tenderly. He went to his family after I introduced him not as my secret but as the person who mattered. Svetlana and I spoke honestly and painfully. She told me how she'd chosen survival and how sometimes survival meant painful bargains. I told her how I'd felt abandoned. We cried and then we made a plan to care for each other differently.
The engagement came in a small, honest way. He handed me a ring that had been bought with his savings. We didn't hide from the differences in our ages or the ways our pasts had wounded us. At our small ceremony, Svetlana clapped the loudest.
"You're mine by vow," he said, voice steady.
"You're mine by years of stolen sunrises," I answered.
The locked diary he gave me still sits in my drawer. There is a page folded between leaves, a child's note in a childish hand: "You will marry me. You must." Elio's handwriting, unchanging over years, made me remember that promises can be small and sacred.
I learned the cost of revenge. I learned the cost of being used and the cost of using. I learned that punishment is sometimes public and sharp, and sometimes it is private and internal. I learned that friendship can survive astonishment if both people step toward truth.
The last time I saw Laurent he was leaving the city. His plane ticket was unremarkable. He looked at me in the terminal, and I saw in his face the hollow place left by his public fall. I said nothing. He took one last look and walked away.
At home, I close the diary and feel the lock's cool weight. The brass is small, the key smaller still. "Don't lose it," Elio said once, mischievous.
"I won't," I said, and I trusted myself.
The End
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