Sweet Romance14 min read
Mermaids, Rabbits, and the Last Week: Three Strange Confessions
ButterPicks11 views
Part One — The Mermaid’s Deadline
"I have a curse," I told the dorm mirror, and the mirror only gave me its usual honest glare.
"You do not," Katelynn said, peeking around the door. "You have a creative way to hate yourself."
"I woke up with scales at my toes," I said. "Blue, shiny, impossible scales. If I don't get him to say the three words within a hundred days, I—" I stopped because the thought felt like a blade. "—I turn into foam."
Katelynn put down her pens and laughed. "Right. So this is a romance novel, a viral challenge, or a full-blown curse?"
"It's in my feet," I said. "Which is a real thing, Katelynn."
She folded her legs on the bed and studied me like a small animal at a rescue center. "Isabelle, you picked Enoch because he is safe. You picked him because everyone else picks him. Now you're cursed because of a forum joke?"
"Exactly," I said. "And now the forum joke is going to eat me."
"Then don't be dramatic. Use plan two." She had that glint that meant she had read too many strategy guides for winning boys and had practiced them. "Text him with a contest. Make him say 'I love you' to win."
"I tried," I said. "He answered in three dots."
"Try again." Katelynn smiled wickedly. "Send him something dramatic."
I spent the morning drafting a ridiculous text: "Dear Player EnochZ, reply 'I love you' to win a crystal." I hit send and waited. Thirty-five seconds later his name flashed back.
"Isabelle, I will not say those words," his message read.
"You saved my number?" I typed before I thought. "You have my number?"
"You insisted in the cafeteria the other day." He was blunt, clean. "You wouldn't give me the tray back."
"I was negotiating for attention," I said, stupidly proud of the ancient bargaining tactic. "Please. Just a fake 'I love you'—I only need a hundred days recorded."
There was a long ellipsis. Then: "I won't say those three words."
Katelynn rolled her eyes. "Alright. The direct approach won't work. Operation close-range begins."
We did the assembly-line romance: handwritten note stolen from Katelynn's stash, a staged 'accidental' spill in the library, an offer to lend Enoch my father's rare badminton racket—the one his favorite player signed five years ago. "If you say the words," I told him when we encountered him on a practice trail, "you can keep it."
He weighed the wooden frame like a man weighing a trivial thing.
"Do you truly like me?" he asked.
The campus wind seemed to fold itself up. I had practiced my confession in front of every reflective surface on campus and failed every time. "I like you," I said. "But not too deep. I don't want to be crushed."
He scoffed, stepped away, and left me standing with my foolish, offered sacrifice.
Katelynn found me pacing. "Near misses," she said. "You need to be near him when he needs you. Be the energy he expects."
A practice match—his club's match—was the perfect arena. I hauled out the signed racket. He was wearing white; a halo of people orbited him. I offered it as tribute. He handled it like an object he did not want and yet could not refuse to inspect.
"Isabelle—" he said, quietly. "Are you being honest?"
"Of course," I lied. "You may keep it if you say it."
He left. I wanted to throw the racket at the sky.
The night before, to make myself braver, I recorded myself reading Katelynn's copied love letter. When I reached the last line and called the wrong name, my voice cracked like a popped balloon. The audio leaked to him, as if the universe liked my suffering.
The next day I watched the match until my palms hurt from clapping. His strings broke in the second set. I shoved the racket into his hands. He paused, looked at me, then at the crowd, and said, to my surprised delight, "I will win because of this."
He did win. We ate with his club mates. The rival—Mariah Dunn—sat close to him, polished, smiling exactly like a springtime advertisement. She was pretty in the lethal way of people used to getting what they wanted.
At dinner her eyes skipped my way like a tiny, sharp thing. Then she spoke up, voice like silk with grit. "Isabelle, I heard your father and mother died in an accident. That must be hard."
My fork froze halfway to my mouth. For an instant I nearly thanked her for remembering; then I remembered how she'd used my note earlier—stolen line, wrong name in the letter. I swallowed and told the story I had practiced about my parents' deaths ten minutes before the crowd of people who had come to join them. Her mouth twitched.
"Did you really put their names at the bottom?" she asked mock-innocently.
My throat tightened. "Yes," I said. "It's private. Why would you—"
"Just checking for authenticity," she said. "Some people borrow grief for effect."
The room quieted in a way I had once thought was only possible in funerals. People stared. His eyes went flat.
Enoch did not stay flat for long. He rose with a motion like a slow blade.
"Mariah," he said. "Stop pretending you don't see. You copied that letter from Meng Katelynn. You changed the signature."
She blushed with a manufactured offense. "Enoch, you're rude. I didn't."
He grabbed his phone. "Katelynn, did you write this letter?"
Katelynn—sweetly serene—showed the drafts. My humiliation folded up like paper and was refolded by the teller. Enoch looked at Mariah with something like sorrow and then an expression that stung worse—disappointment.
"You lied," he said. "You plagiarized grief to get attention."
The room pulsed. "Why?" someone asked.
"Because she wanted to look like a heroine in someone else's story," he said. "And not enough to do it honestly."
Mariah's composure thinned. "That's not true," she whispered.
By then the room's phones were humming. People were recording. Some faces were shocked. Some people were smiling to themselves like predators detecting a weakness. Her mouth moved through denials, then the familiar escalation: smug, then small, then pleading. Enoch did not shout. He did not have to. He read through the transcript of messages and held them up like proofs. Others in the room murmured, "Oh," "Really?" "Wow."
She began to cry, showing the kind of theatrical weep that couldn't hide the arithmetic of her failure: she had plotted something petty and been found out. Enoch's friends exchanged looks. Someone muttered, "Low."
"Mariah, apologize," he said. The choice was a soft rope or a sharp blade; she grasped the rope like a drowning person. "I am sorry to everyone for what I did—especially Isabelle," she said, voice shaking.
But apologies tasted of the same sugar as her manipulation. The crowd turned away from her like a body rejected by a field. Some laughed, low tittering, while others shook their heads. Someone put the evidence on social and within minutes the clip of her confession had a slew of comments. A girl I knew took out her phone and whispered, "Public humiliation, career killer."
Mariah's face emptied into disbelief, then anger, then defeat. Her friend rushed to her side and hugged her. People stepped away from the radiator of her crumpled ego. A few brave ones applauded Enoch. "Good," someone said. "Finally."
She tried to plead—at first with rational excuses, then with the ancient strategy of "I was trying to impress." Each attempt only made the room colder. At the end she fled with a group to the hallway, sobbing. One boy whispered, "Karma." Others replayed the clip.
Later that week, the rumor mill turned into a grinding machine. Her social accounts received messages: "Unfollowed." "Deleted." Her presumed suitors started ignoring her. One by one, invitations dried up. The public punishment had laid out an anatomy of her misdeed—fraud in the name of grief—and she walked home through a field of scorn.
I sat with Enoch afterwards, raw and shaky. He held my hand without speaking. "I didn't deserve for you to be hurt like that," he said finally.
"I almost died," I told him. "Not just because of her words, because of the curse."
He swallowed. "Tell me—what happens if I say it?"
"You know the rules," I whispered. "The hundred days. Say the three words and you save me. Say the three words and—"
"You will live," he said. "And if there is a cost to me…we'll face that."
His voice trembled on the last syllable. He did not say "I love you" that night. He leaned close instead, and kissed me—fast and rough, like someone afraid of losing his footing in an earthquake.
The curse thrummed under the skin of my feet like an electrical current. A small blue scale shimmered and then faded. I slept and dreamed of an ocean room, blue curtains like sails, and of a future in which his lips said all the things I wanted.
The countdown continued.
"One week left," he murmured during a snowfall. "I'll tell you the answer on the night of the last day."
"Promise?" I asked. The word was too heavy to be honest. "Promise me you'll tell me."
He smiled and said, "I will." And then he became serious. "But if I do, Isabelle, everything changes."
I nodded, because survival is not about cleverness. It is about saying yes when someone offers to stand in the rain with you.
Part Two — White Rabbit in the City
"Thomas," I said into the freezer light. "I ate your carrots."
He opened the fridge, eyes traveling like a man counting small treasures. "My carrots?" he said. "You ate all three?"
"Yes," I replied, in that small voice I thought would win indulgence. "I have been starving. I am a thousand-year rabbit spirit who can go months without a carrot and then collapse. I'm sorry."
He grabbed me by the scruff of my borrowed rabbit form and dangled me like a toy. "You are the one who vowed to repay me," he said. "You are supposed to be grateful."
"I am grateful," I protested, "but I thought—"
"You thought you could steal from my fridge?" His voice was hardly angry. It was disappointed. "Get dressed like a human. No more rabbit tricks."
I changed into human clothes, using all my best illusions. When Thomas left for work, I turned back into my softer, furrier body and plotted: I would win him over properly. I would show my gratitude by helping him survive the city crises of the lockdown. I would bring vegetables, save grocery orders, and if necessary, flirt and charm until the edges of his heart softened.
I am not named Isabelle here. My name in the mountain is not for humans. But when I pass among people I let them call me Morgan. I arrived at his apartment a little less tidy than the fables recommend and immediately began to hog his ramen and his last chocolate bar.
"You're eating my food," he said.
"Only what's mine in spirit," I answered. "And besides, it's rude to bring temptation into the same plane as me."
He clicked his tongue. "Stop being dramatic. You are a rabbit. Eat carrots, not my packets of instant noodles."
That is how it began: domestic life, him making me the kind of homemade soup I had only seen once as a child; me trying to be the mythical grateful pet. People came by—neighbors, volunteers—and we were thrust into the minor dangers of a city shutting tight. One morning a city health official knocked and suggested a quick swab. They wanted to swab animals now. I thought he'd made a mistake.
"No animal tests necessary," Thomas said calmly. Then he put me in his arms and said, "I'll handle this."
The working nurse was delighted. "What a cute rabbit." She laughed and swabbed my mouth like I was a child. I gagged. The nurse gasped when I retched onto Thomas's sleeve. He did not flinch. He treated me with the impatience of someone who had watched many lives and learned how easy kindness was and how rare.
I became determined to repay his kindness. I stayed up all night toggling through delivery systems, fighting for a slot to get produce. I won one: a small haul of lettuce, celery, and—at last—carrots. I ran home like a thief in a fairy tale, soaking rain into my fur. Outside the lobby, a man I knew as Kyle—once a rival, now an enemy of sorts—caught me.
"Well, if it isn't the little legend," he said. "Out stealing food for your human." He laughed too loudly. "Give me that stake. Five decades for a cake? That's rather steep."
His tone turned to menace and he grabbed me. "I'll be the one to teach you city manners."
He wanted to blackmail me with a trick: fifty years of my power in exchange for the cake. My stomach dropped. The idea of giving him half my years made the world tilt; I felt dizzy and small. I handed him the offered charm. He shoved me into a cooler and said he'd return me when he had asserted himself as champion of torts.
I was afraid he was right—what if I had been foolish in trusting? We are creatures of stories, yes, and I had always been braver with stomach full.
Thomas came back and found me gone. He tore through the neighborhood like a man possessed. "Where's the rabbit?" he demanded of a vendor. "Has anyone seen her?" He didn't rest. He tracked the man down. He barged into the marketplace, breathing like thunder, and set me free from the cooler as if opening a cage.
I was shaken, trembling in my fur and ashamed that my attempt to repay had almost been my undoing. "You can't do things like that alone," he said. "People aren't always kind."
"I am not a person," I said. "I am a spirit."
He held my hands like a human whose stern was melting. "You are more than that to me," he said. "I would rather be poor and warm than rich and alone."
Before long my foolishness became a story of near sacrifice. I had given him the ruby of sacrifice—fifty years of my life—and he had given me back his breath, his money, his anger, and his stubbornness.
Weeks blurred by. We ate, we argued about whether the sun tastes better on boiled carrots or raw ones, we guarded each other against the stray cruelty of the city. I began to grow something else—something like tenderness—in my chest when I thought of him. I had never expected a human heart could be as steady as that.
"Promise me you'll stay," I said one pale night. The city murmured outside like a dream.
He smiled, and for the first time I saw him softer, like light on river water. "If you promise me a life worth staying for," he said, "I will try."
We sealed it with a clumsy kiss. The mountain was far. The future was unknown. But for now, we stayed. I wore his old bracelet and his grandmother's keepsake—and one day, the last of the petals on my arms rose into a band of scarlet flowers, and I knew I had committed.
Part Three — Where the Road Ends
"I'll hold him while you get the vaccine," he said, one hand on my son's small back.
"Thanks," I said. "It's stupid people assume everything."
"Someone's always making assumptions," Gabriel said, voice flat. "Who said we couldn't be complicated?"
I had run into Gabriel—my ex—at the clinic. He was tall and cool and clean in that way that made other people notice the angle of his jaw. The boy—my son—clung to the long legs of this man, calling him "Dad" in a voice that made my chest knot with old memories.
"Who is this?" Gabriel asked me finally, gaze like thin glass.
"He's mine," I said. "Sort of." I swallowed. "Actually—"
"Is he—" His eyes closed just the fraction of a second that makes a man look guilty. "Is he mine?"
"He's B-type blood," I said. "Not A. You're A."
His cup clattered in his hands. The silence between us thickened into something that smelled like old fires. He suggested a paternity test in the kindest possible way—like a man trying to not look like a monster.
"He... he might test as the father," he admitted finally, after the clinic confirmed the truth was not what he expected. "But I was never the one who wanted a child with you."
The room had become an arena. People watched because humans always watch when two comfortable people collide. Gabriel's expression hardened. "You never told me," he said.
"I never asked you to be the father," I said. "I asked you to be a companion."
"Companions can choose," he answered. "You chose differently."
He left to stand in a hallway. I clutched my son's sleeping shoulder. He called out once: "You have responsibility."
I had a responsibility I had accepted long before we met. I had no illusions. He and I had been together many years ago; we had loved, and we had been young and cruel and tired of being each other's only warmth. The city had eaten us. He had drifted to places where his hands would not need to hold me.
Then, in a cafe, months later, I watched him talk to a man in a sidelong way. My chest contracted. He sat with a casual friend, laughing. Another man—nervous and earnest—sat with me later. He asked if my son was my responsibility. He offered marriage terms. I told an untruth: that I still loved Gabriel and wished he would come back. The details fell like stones.
"Gabe," said the man across from me, "you left before. Why are you back now?"
He looked at me with all the accumulated dust of the years between us. He put his hand on my knee like a man anchoring himself to a rock.
"You had a kid," he said. "A child that may or may not be mine." Then he said the thing that hurts the most: "I won’t be the father you deserve."
There are stories of men redeemed at last. There are also stories where wanting is not the same as acting.
When the paternity issue became public, the campus colleagues whispered. People said, "He wouldn't leave a child." But I had the child. I had the nights. I had the long breath of feeding and wiping and fear.
Gabriel's temper turned public one afternoon. He cornered me outside the pediatric ward, voice low and dangerous: "So you were keeping his life from me? You were making me look like the only responsible man?"
"You aren't the father," I said. "You didn't have to be."
He clenched and unclenched his fists. "Then why didn't you let me know? Why did you hide?"
"This is not the life you signed up for," I answered. "You left."
He paced and accused, and the few staff who passed stopped to listen. His words escalated—hurtful, jealous, untrue—until people gathered, until our private pain had turned into a public theater. He accused me of taking advantage of him. I stood, exhausted and sharp. I had been raised on a diet of endings and I had learned to survive.
"You think I needed you?" I asked loud enough for someone to snap a photo. "I survived you. I birthed this small human on my own."
The crowd's hum changed. Someone hissed, "He’s cruel." Someone else said, "Give her a minute."
People began to judge. They looked at Gabriel and then at me. The shift was violent. He tried to explain. He tried to control the narrative, to say he had been devoted at some point. But the truth hung in the air: I had kept nothing from him because there had been nothing to keep.
He fell into the worst of male scripts—public shame, then a demand to be believed. The hospital corridor became a stage for a re-run of old grievances. The staff looked away, embarrassed. A nurse stepped between us and told us to take it outside, but the public had already salted our wounds.
I picked up my son and walked away. The public punishment in that corridor made him small and hesitant. He called after me, his voice thin: "You're making it hard."
I turned and looked at him. "You made it harder," I said. "If you wanted to do right, you would have stayed."
He stood there like a man in a slow storm, inconsolable, exposed. I felt pity, and after that, the coolness of resignation.
Weeks later, there would be messages. People would watch his career hemorrhage because the gossip machine loved a spectacle. Invitations would dry up. He would lose clients. People who had once clustered around his charm now would question his integrity. He would go from "this lovely doctor" to "that man who couldn't do a human duty." The public punishment was not a spectacle of violence—it was a recalibration: the community deciding who they valued.
I walked home alone and looked at my small child asleep in my arms. The world outside struggled with storms and kindness and old debts. I had no illusions about being perfect. I had only the duty to make a life with the person who relied on me.
Epilogue — The Strange Logic of Promises
Three unlikely truths followed me: a boy who said the three words and risked vanishing; a rabbit who offered up decades; and a woman who refused to be shamed by a man’s attempt to make himself a hero at the cost of a child’s peace.
"You ask me if I will not change myself for you," Enoch said on the last night. "Say yes, and I will take the risk."
"Say yes to what?" I asked. "My life? Your loss? The ocean of consequences?"
"Say you'll let me fight for you."
I took him in my arms in the snow and, like every frightened person I had been, I made a simple choice. "I will let you try."
Someone once told me that love is an economy: everything has a cost. But the real truth I found across three strange seasons is different: sometimes people pay with money, sometimes years, sometimes their shame; and sometimes what really matters is that another person decides to stand with you when the ground liquefies.
When the lights went up on Enoch's final show, bubbles rose and his body shimmered with unreal colors. He looked at me and smiled. "I will see you in one hundred years," he said. "If that's what it takes."
I thought of the ocean of curtains and glass and the blue of my scales. I thought of Katelynn's scheming and Mariah's humiliation. I thought of Thomas's steady hands and the carrots that tasted like home. I thought of Gabriel's slow breakdown in the corridor, and of the little chest that rose and fell against my shoulder.
Pulled in all directions, I learned one rule: truth does not always save us, but the courage to answer—either yes or no—changes everything.
"Tell me one truth," Enoch murmured.
"I loved you," I said. The words felt small and everything at once.
He smiled. "Then we did what we could."
And so I kept my feet. The scales shimmered, sometimes. The city kept moving. The rabbits sang. People did culpable things and paid in the currency of their own making. I survived, and I promised myself I would not let foam be the only thing I left behind.
The End
— Thank you for reading —