Sweet Romance11 min read
My Accidental "Wife": Live-Stream Chaos and One Relentless Movie Star
ButterPicks17 views
I never wanted drama. I wanted followers and a decent foundation routine. Instead, I got a whole viral mess and a very jealous movie star.
"You really think you can handle a duo with me?" Remy asked through the game mic, his voice low and amused.
"I'll try not to die in front of twenty thousand people," I told him, fingers slipping on the mouse. "No promises."
"I'm KAM in-game, but you can call me—" He laughed, and the chat erupted. "—call me Remy."
"I already have a nickname for you: the guy who makes me miss my shots less," I said, and the room filled with heart emojis.
I am Eliza Braun. I'm a small-time beauty and lifestyle creator who streams when I can. I study full-time and I edit longer videos between classes. I like bad coffee, soft sweaters, and the sharp, stupid comfort of battle royale games. I am not a gamer by trade; I am a joyful disaster with a headset.
"Cover me, Eliza," Remy said. "Step left at my mark."
"Left," I echoed. "I heard you."
The squad moved like a single beast. Remy was calm, precise, a kind of quiet hero in the headset. He sheltered me without being patronizing. He handed me loot, took bullets, and told me where to peek. We made it to the final circle together.
"You're my teammate," he said suddenly, softer. "Hold tight."
"I'm holding," I replied. "Okay—oh my God, there's a guy behind the tree—"
Shots. A plume of smoke. Victory.
"Good job, wife," Remy piped in through the mic.
For a second, the world bent. My brain registered the word and froze, like a frame that had been paused. My chat filled with caps-lock panic and heart emojis.
"Did he just—" one fan typed.
"Remy said 'wife'?" another wrote.
I laughed, embarrassed. "Honestly, the word slipped. We're friends. Team friends."
Remy cleared his throat. "I was caught up in the moment. I'm sorry—"
But the clip had already been clipped, tweeted, screenshot, reposted into a thousand group chats. "Remy calls Eliza 'wife' on stream" trended in three countries before I could blink.
The next day, my notifications were a small hurricane. Fans were shipping us with reckless joy. People typed things into search bars that made my throat hurt. Someone put our faces side by side on a fan edit that felt like a dare.
Then my phone vibrated with a message that stopped me cold.
Cade: Are you okay? Saw the clip.
Cade. Cade Chambers. My boyfriend. My secret. My entire complication.
He was a movie star who had grown up in my neighborhood and in my life—tall, quiet, unshakeable. When he smiled it was like someone turned the lights on in a dark room. He was also the kind of man who filed his feelings like precise paperwork: never messy, always exact, slightly jealous in a way that made me both fond and nervous.
"Don't worry," I typed back. "It was nothing. Some gamer shouted. We're not—"
"Don't let that gamer near you," he replied, and the message was a warm blade. "Delete any photos. Block him if you have to."
"I did," I said. "I already deleted the screenshots. It won't happen again."
He paused. Then: "Okay. Tell me later."
That "tell me later" hung like a weight.
Remy sent me a direct message the next day. "Sorry for the chaos," he wrote. "I didn't mean to cause trouble. I can help clear things up if you want."
His kindness was honest and quiet. "Thanks, but please don't wash my mess away with a public statement," I texted. "Cade's private. He doesn't like attention."
Remy typed back, "I understand. I didn't think. If you need anything, tell me."
"It will be fine," I said aloud to myself.
It wasn't.
"You know how the internet is," my roommate Hayden said when she came back from class, dropping her backpack on the couch. "One clip, boom, you're trending."
"I know," I said. "This will die down."
"It won't," Hayden said. "People will make gifs. They'll write fanfics. They will ship you forever."
I sat down to stream again the next weekend, shaking. My hands hovered over the palette brushes more than the mouse. The chat was kinder when I stuck to lipstick shades, but a splinter of the game's clip had lodged in the algorithm—someone referenced KAM, someone tagged Remy, someone asked if he could teach me recoil. It was tiny at first, then bigger.
A day later, I got an email from a publisher asking for a collab. "Your clip with Remy went viral," it said. "We'd love to feature the story of an unexpected duo."
Meanwhile, fans in my chat begged for more: "Bring Remy back!" "Do a duo stream with him again!" "We want the wife-hubby content!"
I felt my phone buzz constantly with a tremor of panic.
"Just tell him everything," Dylan said one night, appearing in my doorway with two steaming cups of instant noodles. He was my brother, except he's not a brother by blood—Dylan McDonald had been my family since we were kids. Rugged and loud, he looked like someone who had read one too many spy novels and assumed life needed more action. He was overprotective and wore the title proudly.
"He can't know you gamed with an esports player," he said, handing me a cup. "He'll freak."
"I already told him it was fine," I said. "Cade said he'd be okay."
"Let's see how long that lasts."
On a messy Thursday, I took a bus into the city for an event. A few classmates met for dinner. The restaurant served too-spicy noodles and felt like an exam hall for being seventeen. There were jokes about my viral clip, but it wasn't until someone pointed that I saw Remy at the next table.
"Isn't that—" Hayden mouthed.
Remy stood when he saw me. "Eliza," he said, smiling.
"You could say hi," I whispered.
He sat down, polite, like a gentleman who had accidentally overturned a tea cup at a royal table.
"It's okay to talk," he said. "I wasn't trying to cause problems. I just—" He hesitated. "I like your streams. I like you."
I looked away.
Soon after, my phone buzzed with a message that made the air leave my chest.
Cade: Where are you?
I had not told Cade I was out. He had a way of knowing when I was up to small rebellions. I should have stayed home. I should have told him I would be with friends. But I didn't—so when I stood up and walked out to the curb to take his call, my heart was all wrong.
"Cade, I—" I started.
"Are you with him?" he asked, voice tight.
"No, I'm with friends," I said. "Remy is here too. He just—"
"You were gaming with him," he interrupted. "On a stream where he called you 'wife.'"
"It slipped," I said. "You already know. He apologized. I deleted everything."
"Get in my car," he said. "Now."
Cade pulled up in a silver SUV that smelled faintly of citrus and expensive leather. He drove in silence for a while, and then said, "You know how people look. You know how headlines twist things."
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry. I didn't want any of this."
He looked at me, close enough that I could see the stray freckle at the corner of his eye. He reached for my hand and squeezed it hard. "Then don't give them anything to twist," he said. "I don't like others calling you like that."
I swallowed. "I won't."
The silence stretched. Then his phone buzzed.
"Who is it?" I asked.
"Nobody," he said.
He was not just jealous; he was protective, a shield that could also smother. It drew me in as much as it frightened me.
A few days later came a moment I could not control. Remy issued a post clarifying everything—he wrote that he was a fan, that the "wife" call had been a slip, that he valued privacy. Fans flooded the comment sections with love and confusion, and somehow everything exploded again.
"You're trending," Hayden told me from the doorway as I tried to breathe while making a lipstick tutorial.
"I can't believe this is my life," I said.
"You need to tell him," Dylan said, barging in, red-faced. "Cade needs to know the truth in full. Those little half-lies will kill you both."
"Daniel," I said. "His name is Dylan."
"It's the same lecture, different name," he said.
I didn't tell Cade everything. I didn't tell him that Remy messaged me in private, that he offered to help, that the way his voice sounded made me feel like a different person for a few seconds. I deleted the messages and felt a small grief.
Then everything changed when Cade stood up on a stage at an awards ceremony and did a thing no one expected.
"I have something to say," he announced into the microphone. The camera caught his face—his jaw set, gaze honest. It felt as if the world tilted, like a record skipping to the part where the chorus is about to explode.
"There is a person I care about," he said. "Someone who has been kept away from the cameras because of me. I can't let my fear make her life smaller. I want to say it here: I am in a relationship. I'm with someone I like very much. I know the internet will spin and speculate, but please—please be kind."
The audience murmured and then applauded. Clips of his speech were already circulating while he was still walking backstage. My living room was loud with the ping of notifications. Dylan whooped and jumped, waving his arms like a lunatic. Hayden clapped and looked at me like I was a secret prize.
I sat, trembling. Cade had done the thing that felt brave and terrifying and also embarrassingly proud. He had exposed me to protect me from other exposures. He had given the internet permission to know I existed. He had forced my privacy into the light like someone pulling a curtain.
After that speech, things changed in small ways.
"I'm sorry I made you worry," I told him the next night when he found me at his apartment, arms wrapped around a bowl of takeout.
He kissed my temple. "You don't have to apologize for living."
But not everything was healed. People still wrote rumors. Fans still edited clips. The "wife" moment became a badge for some and a stick for others. And worse: a new rumor spread that a gossip blogger had faked messages and photos to stir drama. The blogger—someone who had earned a small following by selling gossip for clicks—started running headlines about secret hotel meetings. He even posted a fake screenshot claiming Remy had coordinated with me.
Remy was not a villain. He was honest. But the blogger wanted clicks.
We decided to confront him in public.
"Are you sure?" Remy asked. "Public matters. Exposure matters."
"Yes," I said. "If it's lies, we will show the truth. If it's truth... we'll deal with it."
The blogger had chosen a cafe to host a "public apology" event, surrounded by people who wanted a spectacle. We arrived with cameras and our own proof: timestamps, raw clip files, and friends who had been with us.
"Why are you here?" the blogger sneered when he recognized us—his face a little too eager for trouble.
"Because you posted fake screenshots," Remy said, voice steady. "You claimed there were private messages we sent to coordinate lies."
"I run a site," the blogger said. "I report what people share."
"That's not reporting," Cade said, stepping forward in calm armor. "That's fabricating. Show your source."
The blogger faltered. "They were shared," he stammered. "By a follower—"
"Which follower?" Cade asked.
"Look," the blogger said. He tried to conjure a story, something about a hacker, something about an anonymous tip. The crowd around him shifted, hungry for drama.
"Do you realize how many lives you play with?" I demanded. "You put words in people's mouths and call it news. Show your logs."
People pressed their phones forward like talismans. The blogger's face blanched as friends of ours—tech-savvy fans and a friend from the streaming community—started live-streaming the moment. They traced IP addresses. They showed the blogger's own unpaid-for images from days earlier, then contrasted them with metadata proving the blogger had edited images at 2 a.m. the night before.
"You made this up to get clicks," Remy said. "You fabricated screenshots and timestamps."
The blogger's voice cracked. "I—it's a mistake. I was trying to get traffic—"
"You're making money out of ruining people," Dylan said, contempt sharp.
"Public exposure isn't the same as public evidence," Cade said. "You owe people apologies. You owe Eliza a retraction."
The blogger's bravado crumbled like sugar under hot coffee. People in the cafe—strangers who had come for a show—shifted from spectators to judges. Someone snapped a picture of the blogger in the act of trying to delete files. It spread faster than anything he'd posted.
The blogger started to stammer and backpedal, pleading for mercy: "Please—I've got rent to pay. I—"
"How many people's names did you ruin?" a woman in the crowd called out. "How many relationships?"
The blogger tried to explain himself—"I didn't think it would go this far"—but his audience had already turned on him. Some scoffed. Others took out their phones and recorded him begging. His voice slid through stages: smugness, then irritation, then pleading, then collapse.
"Delete the posts," Cade said quietly, every syllable a soft command. "Publicly apologize. And compensate us for the servers you crashed because of your lies."
The blogger, now shaking, promised. The crowd hissed. Someone typed "scammer" into a search. He posted an apology, shaky and defensive, that earned a thousand scoffing replies and a ratio that would haunt his metrics for months. People talked about him like a bad movie star on social media—mocking, unforgiving. He tried to sue; the evidence of his edits made it an embarrassing, bankrupt attempt.
We left the cafe exhausted but relieved.
"You handled that well," Remy said later, handing me a bag of my favorite midnight snacks. "You didn't let him turn it into another lie."
"It felt like being in the ring," I said, and leaned on him.
Cade watched this, and for once his expression was something close to relief, not suspicion. "Good," he said. "No one can touch you."
The rest of the semester eased into a strange, pleasant blur. I streamed with Cade once, a disaster of lipstick swatches and awkward kisses on camera that left our fans shrieking. I streamed with Remy once more, a cooperative duo that was all professional skill and respectful banter. We became, in the eyes of the internet, a triangle that functioned safely—different angles, different loves, regulated boundaries.
"I like it when you play games with me," Cade said one night as we lay pressed close on his couch, the TV off and the city lights making soft constellations outside.
"Me too," I said. He pulled me closer and whispered in my ear, "You being mine is the best plot twist I've ever got."
He smiled in that way where his eyes crinkled just enough. "Even when you say 'wife' to someone else on the internet?"
I laughed. "Especially then."
Remy texted me sometimes—"How's my favorite streamer?"—and I would send back a lipstick emoji. Dylan remained loud and protective, calling Cade "the man who better treat my sister right." Hayden made a live stream cameo for the holidays, drunk on eggnog and giddy with fandom.
At the end of the spring, when campus emptied and the sun put gold on everything, I sat with Remy on a rooftop after a charity tournament. We watched drones stitch light across the field.
"You did good," he said.
"You too." I turned to him. "Thanks."
He smiled, and for a moment we were just two people who had reached through a noisy world and found a polite, quiet place. No promises. No complications. Just a friendship that had turned accidental and honest.
"Take care of her," Remy said to Cade once, quietly, like a benediction.
"I will," Cade replied.
The internet moved on. New stories took the headlines. New streams trended. People found new obsession and we found our way through the noise.
"Promise me one thing," I told Cade during the summer. "Don't ever make me be secret when I want you to be proud."
He kissed my forehead. "I won't keep you in the dark."
"And don't rant at Remy," I added, teasing.
He pretended to be affronted. "Only if he behaves."
We both laughed and leaned into the quiet. I logged off and closed my laptop with a small smile. The screens dimmed. The "wife" clip lived somewhere in the archive of things that could never be fully erased, but it had become, in time, nothing more than a laugh we shared.
"Remind me," I said, looking at the hummed skyline. "What's worse—the livestream chaos or your terrible dinner nights?"
"Both," he said. "But the award speech was a masterpiece."
"Okay, fair."
I tucked my phone away, fingers lingering on the memory of one small, clumsy word that had made a storm and somehow taught us how to stand together in it.
The rooftop hummed with cicadas. Cade had his hand in mine, warm and real. Remy waved from the sponsor tent below, giving a casual salute. Dylan shouted about pizza somewhere down the stairwell. Hayden filmed a short clip of the skyline and texted me a heart.
"Goodbye, chaos," I said softly. "And hello to the kind of life where I can stream and be kissed and keep my privacy and still get my lipstick where I want it."
"Hello," Cade mirrored.
The city breathed with us, a long, patient thing. The clip survived. We lived.
The End
— Thank you for reading —