Sweet Romance17 min read
My Key, His Red Sugar, and the Open-Air Confession
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I woke to summer light pooling on my face and a ridiculous, embarrassed smile I couldn't explain.
"Ugh," I muttered, pulling the blanket over my nose. "Of all mornings."
I stayed absolutely still for a full minute, not wanting to disturb the tiny dream that had left me with a flush. In the dream a man stepped from a shower wrapped in a towel—only muscle and mystery, no face—and my stupid heart had done that catch-it-doesn't-have-a-rhyme thing.
"Alaina, are you awake?" my mother shouted from the kitchen.
"Yeah," I called, scrambling upright. "Tell Dad I want the sesame buns!"
I threw my phone on the bed and nearly collided with a pile of dresses. University orientation day. I had exactly one outfit and a thousand opinions about all of the outfits.
"Which one?" I asked out loud, because the room deserved at least a jury.
"Any of them," my mother shouted, "you look like a doll in anything. Stop fretting."
"Fine." I picked three and mentally ran them past Kayden like he'd been my stylist since birth.
"I vote lace, doll," I whispered to my phone, imagining his being-there grin. "Lace, black, or floral?"
I hit send on a voice message before I could change my mind. "Kayden, come pick me up. Don't be late."
The knock came two minutes later.
"About time," I said, opening the door and blinking into the sun.
He wore the same simple white t-shirt and dark jeans he'd worn at every age that mattered: comforting, honest, a shirt I knew the shape of. Kayden Zimmermann had a laugh that made my knees forget themselves. He had a mole on his nose I still thought about. He was taller than me by so much that I could sneak a catlike look at him and find the world steady.
"You look ridiculous," he said, grinning, and I punched him lightly.
"Shut up," I said. "Which one?"
He glanced at the bed, weighed the look of three dresses, and without thinking announced, "Black doll dress."
"You decide for me all the time," I protested, but I let his choice stand. He turned away and fiddled with the strap of his backpack like he thought I wouldn't notice.
"Don't do that," I said.
"Do what?"
"Be so steady."
He shrugged. "I like steady."
"You like me steady?"
He looked at me, and there it was: that soft, certain something. "I like you."
We laughed too loudly and too long for the stoop of our building. I remember his hand finding the small of my back as if I'd been there a thousand times.
"Wait," I said, suddenly anxious, "are you coming to my dorm to help with unpacking?"
"Of course," he said. "I wouldn't miss it."
I felt bolder than I had a week ago. "Promise?"
"Promise," he said, and for a flippant second I believed we could be two halves of a spell. We rode our bikes together, and the city felt like a set that had been waiting for our arrival.
At the university, things were a blur of banners and new faces and slogans shouted into megaphones. I clung to Kayden's elbow like a secret.
"You'll be fine," he said, plucking my hand like he could pluck worry from me.
"Do you ever think you'll stop being my alarm clock?" I asked.
He rolled his eyes. "Not until you stop being unreliable."
We parted at the registration line. He had his speech and I had mine: directions, schedules, forms. I told myself I'd be brave, that college was a break, a beginning. I told myself a thousand little lies until the truth lodged into my throat: this would be the first time in my life that I would be far enough from my family to taste real independence.
"Text me," he said, squeezing my fingers.
"I will," I promised, and then went with my roommate, Blair Foley, who smelled faintly of citrus and confidence.
"I missed you," Blair said, flinging her arm around me. "We should be roommates."
"I know," I sighed. "You and I and whatever drama we summon."
Blair nudged me with a grin. "Summon responsibly. And don't pretend you don't already have a boyfriend back home."
"Boyfriend?" I said, punching her arm. "No. Kayden is—"
"Your lifelong keeper," she finished.
We checked into the small dorm with two beds and a city of cardboard boxes. The room was cozy in a way that promised both freedom and solitude. We unpacked for an hour, saying nothing important and everything important.
At night, as the city smoothed into the black of a new routine, my phone buzzed.
"I'm outside," the message said. His messages were short and punctual and warm like bread. It was two weeks into school, and Kayden had taken to checking on me in the evenings.
"Oh, will you look at that," I whispered, and leaned my head back on the pillow.
"Don't go to sleep yet," he texted. "Say something dumb."
So I sent him a silly picture of a stuffed lamb and then a text that read, "Sing me a lullaby?"
There was a pause that stretched into ten seconds, then his voice appeared in a soft image of sound. I pressed the phone to my ear and listened.
"I'll be there in two minutes. Sleep tight, Alaina."
He sang me a song he’d picked from some corner of the internet—low and steady—and for a while I let myself be the child again who hadn't yet learned to brave the world alone. I clung to the phone like a talisman until the words slowed to nothing and sleep took me like a tide.
The next morning, my alarm was a grating whine. I stumbled out of bed to the kitchen, and found Kayden already there with a thermos.
"What is that?" I asked, blinking.
He offered me the thermos. "Red sugar water. For you."
"For me? No." I held the cup in both hands like it might explode. "I don't have—"
"Thought you might," he said, simply.
"You didn't have to—"
"It's September. You're starting university. Boyfriends do ridiculous things."
I wanted to protest but the liquid in the cup was warm like a memory. "You're ridiculous," I said, and smiled.
"Shut up." He stuck out his tongue. "Drink."
I sipped and the warm sweetness walked through me like a promise. He knew the exact temperature I liked things to be. He always knew things about me I didn't tell anyone.
"You're coming to military drill today?" he asked quietly.
"No. We have separate exercises," I said.
"Okay," he said. "If—if you need anything—"
"I will," I promised.
At noon, under the bright sun and the copper chir of cicadas, lines of blue-uniformed students marched and stuttered into positions. The first day of drill was a hot, blunt experience. My stomach flinched and then began to throb. I tried to keep my face steady until the sight of Kayden in the crowd made my knees remember what it felt to tremble with joy.
"Alaina!" he called across the sea of students, and I followed his voice like a magnet.
"You okay?" he asked as he squeezed my hand. He smelled faintly of soap and something that reminded me of winter.
"Just..." I faltered. "Just a little—"
He saw right through me. "Come with me," he said, and guided me away.
He found a small gazebo behind the bleachers and poured us both a cup from the thermos. "Here," he said. "Drink."
"You brought a thermos to military drill?" I murmured.
He shrugged. "I have my ways."
"You have more than one way."
He looked at me like he was measuring a lifetime in small decisions. "There are things I can do," he said, "and things I shouldn't. But today, I wanted to do one thing."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Take care of you."
He said it so simply that the words folded into my chest like sunlight. I drank and watched him watch me.
Later, back at the dorm, I changed into the pajamas Blair had brought me and curled up with my phone, waiting for the evening message that had become a small rite. The bubble of the present was fragile and sweet.
Two weeks passed and then three. Kayden kept his promises like a craft he had refined. He texted. He left the small thermos on my desk when he came by. He would call with the most mundane of updates: "Went to the lab," "bought oranges," "saw a cat." The cadence of his attention stitched me into a calm I hadn't thought possible.
Then one night my phone buzzed and a voice trembled like something fragile on the other end.
"Alaina," he said. "I need to go away for a bit."
"Why?" My throat closed.
"Professor Mercier needs me at a conference. It's sudden. They want me on the team."
"How long?"
"A week. Maybe more." There was a pause. "They said possibly a month."
"Month?" The word hit like a stone.
"Will you be okay?" he asked.
"Of course. It's fine." I said it because silence felt like a bad option.
"But—" His voice was careful. "I won't be gone without leaving something. I promise. I—"
"I know." I heard the airplane engines in the background of his message, a distant, cold sound. "Go. Do the thing. Be smart."
"I will," he said.
Two hours later he was gone, swallowed up by a world I couldn't follow. I sat at my desk and tried not to fill the empty spaces with images of him with someone else. The phrase he had spoken in the lecture hall at the opening ceremony echoed in my head: "The person I like is right there." He had blinked in my direction and the campus, for a heartbeat, spun differently. He had been daring in front of a thousand strangers and then gone. That was Kayden: bold, then gone.
The days we were apart felt like a slow test. I imagined him in sterile conference rooms with slides and acronyms, the kind of place where attention hung on the edge of a pin. I imagined him lectured, cajoled, burned through with intellect. But I also imagined a woman—someone with a clear, confident voice—rushing him off to the plane. He had told me it was the professor's request. The doubt worked on me like water on stone.
I tried to be brave and reasonable. I told myself he would be back. He had promised. He had left me with the thermos, with small evidence. He had given me a key because I'd given him access to my apartment like he owned a small part of its nook and dust.
Weeks blurred. I checked my phone every hour even though logic told me to sleep. Two weeks turned into nearly a month. I called the department office, and they told me only that a team had been dispatched and that resources had shifted for the meeting. They gave me gentle facts and little. My nights were threaded with lists: breakfasts I cooked because he would be surprised; pages of notes I imagined hand-turned in another country; a thousand small items I would later accuse myself of not packing well enough.
One afternoon, as I sat with Blair in the student café, she nudged me. "You should get out," she said. "Meet someone. Or at least get your mind off him."
"Can't just swap old notes for new ones," I said.
"Try," Blair said, and then texted a photo of two tickets and a smirking emoji. "You owe me for this."
Before I could answer, someone was staring at me. A young man with a haircut halfway between daring and cautious. He walked closer as if he'd rehearsed several lines and rejected all but the bracing honesty.
"Hello," he said, with a practised smile. "I'm Dane Richardson. New music major. You must be Alaina Abbott."
"Yes," I said, feeling like a novelty in the wrong museum.
He sat without asking. "Mind if I do?" he asked, and in his voice I could hear the ease of someone trained to win over rooms with a verse. "I couldn't help noticing—you're Alaina Abbott. I read your net posts. You're funny."
"Thanks?" I said, wary.
"Do you have plans for the holiday? I could—"
I looked at Blair, who was elbowing me like she had just drawn the curtains aside on some hidden stage. She mouthed, Try him.
"I'll be visiting my parents," I said curtly. I didn't ask Dane to remember that my ancestry didn't need consolidation.
He persisted. "I can come. We could ride together. I love city tours."
"That's sweet," I said, and smiled the polite smile of someone who'd already decided nothing would happen. But he was persistent, sweet in the way that grew on you like warm bread.
Before I could say no, Kayden burst through the café door like a place he'd been meaning to come for all his life.
"Alaina." He crossed the room quickly and then stopped, breathing like a man who'd run through storms to arrive in time for something that mattered.
The air seemed to freeze for a fraction. Dane looked to Kayden. Kayden looked at me with an expression that frightened me into honesty. The person who arrived had something changed about him—an intensity lined his features. His eyes had the tired halo of someone who had not rested.
"Kayden?" I said, my voice splitting into two: relieved and furious.
"Hey," he said simply. "I came back."
"Kayden," I said. "You didn't tell me you'd come back today."
"I didn't have time," he said. "I had to. I couldn't—"
He stopped, swallowed. There was a long moment in which every café patron became a jury. Dane's smile faded. Blair's fingers curled into her cup.
"What happened?" I asked, though I thought I already knew.
"The conference was intense. They held everyone. They took our phones. We couldn't contact anyone until a certain release went through." His voice was low. "They had to—"
"Why didn't you use someone else's phone?" I asked. "Why not—"
"We couldn't," he said, and his hands found mine across the table. "They had protocol. I'm sorry I worried you."
"Kayden," I whispered. "You had me worrying for weeks."
"I know." He leaned close and his breath was near my ear. "I'm sorry. But I couldn't stand the thought of you thinking I left because of someone else."
I felt the shame bloom hot and full. "I didn't—"
He cut me off with a half-laugh. "You did. You were brave and stubborn and full of little rebellions. I heard the rumor that some music major had been charming you," he said, looking briefly at Dane, "and I panicked."
Dane stood up. "Look, Kayden, I didn't mean—"
"Leave it," Kayden said. He turned to me again. "Can I explain? Please?"
"You can try."
He took me aside into the courtyard, under a tree where leaves made small, nervous noises. The story under his breath smelled like midnight flights and lectures.
"The professor called suddenly," Kayden said. "They needed a specialist who knew the project inside out. I was called. We left fast. When we landed, the phones were collected. They ran microbial tests—data only—no freebies. They said the meeting would last days, but then something shifted. They accelerated. People stayed. They wouldn't let us have phones."
I listened and watched his figure. He spoke with that precise calm that hid a pressure like an acting hand.
"Why couldn't you call here?" I asked, trying to keep my voice small.
"We had nothing—no connection. They sealed the room. I wanted to tell you on the plane, but then the plane shut down our devices." He swallowed. "They froze our contact. Remember the opening ceremony? I tried to say your name from the stage. I wanted to make sure you'd hear, but then they cut the mic. I wasn't trying to hide. I was trying to make a memory you could keep."
"From the stage?" I asked. "You risked—"
He took both my hands, and for once the world narrowed to the weight of his palms. "There are things I can't explain. The conference was sensitive. I'm not important enough to guard secrets, but I was in a place where they needed one failure to doom a whole team. I couldn't risk anything."
A breeze rustled the leaves and, for a moment, all logic bowed to something simpler and truer: relief.
"Why didn't you come earlier?" I asked.
"Because I was told to stay." He said, simply. "But they let me leave for an hour because Professor Mercier needed my input at home, and I told him I couldn't leave without coming to see you. He laughed and said, 'Then come'—and here I am."
"Why didn't you tell me when you were at the airport?"
"Because my phone was dead on takeoff, and then we turned it in." He winced like it hurt to say. "I should have found a way."
"You should have."
"I know." He put his forehead to mine. "I should have chosen you first."
The confession wasn't cinematic. It was small, a series of choices like stones placed into a river. I looked at him and felt something like the beginning of a truce between my heart and the world.
"Why did you say my name in the speech?" I asked.
He smiled down at me sheepishly. "I wanted the world to know. It was an impulse."
"It was brave," I said.
"Stupid and brave."
We laughed. Then he did something that was so simple I could have dissolved into it: he slipped a key into my palm.
"For your apartment," he said. "So I can come in and not knock like an anxious neighbor."
"You already have one," I protested.
"Now you have one with me in mind," he said. "Don't overthink it."
We sat long into the evening. He told me about long rooms and formal dinners and a professor called Matteo Mercier—white-bearded, brilliant, and terrifying in the way of people who have devoted their lives to something. He told me about being asked to speak about a project that could shift whole industries. He told me about the phone confiscations and the way that control can feel like safety or like theft, depending on which way it swings.
"I should have told you sooner," he said again.
"You should have," I replied. "But you came back."
The next week we walked through the campus like people who had learned their edges. We made little rituals: he brought me my thermos on bad days, I left him ridiculous notes. We flourished in the small and ordinary.
One evening, he asked me to meet him at the courtyard where we had argued and made up and reargued. The newsfeed on my phone was filled with campus chatter and the latest campus playlist. I found him there, hands shoved into his pockets, watching the sunset like a man who had carried his share of guilt and decided to clean it with sunlight.
"Alaina," he said softly when I arrived. "I need to tell you something."
"What?" I replied, already braced like a runner at the starting line.
He took both my hands. "I want to be somewhere you can count on. Not just as your childhood friend who remembers your favorite color, but as someone who will stand up and be a man for you. I'd like—would you like—"
Before he could finish, I heard someone shout his name in the distance. Professor Matteo Mercier had arrived with a group of students, and something in the professor's eyes went sharp when he saw Kayden.
"Kayden," Matteo said, smiling thinly. "You should be preparing for your next trip."
Kayden's jaw tightened and then relaxed. "Professor, everything is fine now," he said.
Matteo smiled at me politely. "Alaina, I presume? Kayden's told us stories."
"Hello," I said, and felt the circle of his attention like a halo. There was respect in his voice. He had watched Kayden work and had asked him to travel. He had, perhaps, singlehandedly shortened my nights of worry and lengthened my afternoons of relief.
After Matteo left, Kayden turned back to me. "I was going to say—"
"Yes?" I said, my heart against my ribs.
"I will try not to scare you," he promised, and his voice was the anchor of every promise we'd ever made.
"Do you still want to try?" I asked.
He nodded. "Yes."
We sealed the moment without fireworks. He didn't need a grand scene on a platform or a crowd to pick me out. We had our key exchange, our thermos, our small private myths. The campus seemed to approve with its low murmur of crickets.
The rest of the semester was a mix of study and tenderness. We claimed ordinary things as proofs: the thermos lived on my desk, the jar of dates—four little preserved dates to remind me of a lunch he once cooked—shared a shelf. I made a rule: if something was too big to be solved together, it was too big for now.
Then came a day that felt like destiny trying on a new costume.
It was the day of the autumn fair. Kayden had let it slip that he would be making a speech—not the kind that would threaten national interests, but a campus speech: a small, earnest talk at a student gathering. The organizers had insisted, the microphone practice had been awkward, and a thousand students had assembled under a sky that promised to rain but didn't.
He took the stage with all his old calm—and then, as he spoke about ambition and mistakes and the long, patient thing called learning, he said my name.
"My favorite person is sitting right over there," he said, and pointed exactly in my direction. The sound of his voice was a bell.
People laughed, people yelled, someone started a chant that sent shivers into my spine because it was silly and perfect. I felt both like the center of a silly divine plan and like someone who had been tucked away in back rooms. Kayden's speech was part lecture, part dare, part song. He spoke about chemistry and persistence and then about something else entirely.
"He said who?" someone hissed behind me.
"Kayden just—he mentioned a girl," another whispered.
My friend Blair looked at me with eyes like supper plates. Dane, who had been around earlier handing out a playlist, melted into a polite grin.
After the speech, as students milled and millennial banners flapped, Kayden found me and took both my hands, as if to anchor me in a sea that had suddenly come awake.
"That was loud," I said.
"Yeah," he said, breathless. "I thought you deserved a scene."
"I did? You made a scene."
"You deserved the world," he said, and I didn't have enough reasons left to refuse him.
We walked home hand in hand. The streetlights made a soft corridor and in their hum everything felt less fragile.
At home, we sat at the kitchen table, a bowl of small dates between us.
"You know what I did," Kayden said, "after the first time they confiscated our phones."
"What?" I asked.
He leaned in. "I opened a little notebook and wrote things I wanted to say. Some of them were about chemistry and some were about you."
"What did you write?" I asked.
"Everything from 'You look ridiculous when you sleep' to 'I think I like you more every day,'" he said.
"You wrote that?"
"I did," he said. "And then I drew the thermos beside it, because I knew I'd bring you red sugar water when you were sick."
I laughed, a small sound that made him smile wide. "You always know the things."
We talked late into the night. We made tentative plans that sounded ridiculous and perfect: coffee shops, study dates, an eventual trip to see my parents in the city I hadn't lived in for years.
One day in the late autumn, walking home beneath trees gone gold-quilt, Kayden stopped.
"Alaina," he said, "I have one more thing."
"What?" I asked.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small, battered ticket stub—an errant plane ticket, dog-eared and slightly coffee-stained. "I brought this back because it belongs to the week I failed to tell you the truth. I keep things that remind me of choices."
He handed it to me with fingers that trembled. I held it like a relic. The ticket smelled faintly of airplane wings and a certain classroom tea.
"Keep it," he said. "If anything ever looks big and impossible, take out this ticket and remember there's a boy who left a conference to come to you."
"I will," I said. My fingers closed around the paper and the shape of his promise.
Time threaded forward. Finals came and went. Kayden and I became a quiet team, two people who brought each other tea and sent each other tyrannous memes at midnight. We argued, like any pair of imperfect creatures, about chores and about whether a certain poem was worth the hype. We made up quickly, because stubbornness never won over us. We learned how to negotiate the small things.
Late one evening, as frost kissed the windowpanes and the city had thinned of noise, Kayden pulled a jar from his bag and placed it on the table.
"Four dates," he said. "Do you remember when you told me dates were the best and I scoffed?"
"You pretended they were too messy."
"I did," he admitted. "But I remembered the sound of you describing them. I cooked them down the way my grandmother taught me—soft, sweet. They're for when you need to remember that someone knows your flavor."
He offered me one. I accepted and tasted the tiny piece of warm sugar. It tasted like ordinary days made holy.
"Do you believe me now?" he asked.
"I always did," I said. "I just needed evidence."
He laughed. "Now you have evidence and tickets and keys."
I looked at him and said, "Promise me one thing."
"Anything."
"Promise you won't get called away to some conference without a note."
He smiled, like someone who had just read a sentence that fit perfectly into a margin. "I promise to leave a note."
"And to bring red sugar water if you can."
"And dates."
"And the key."
"And the key."
We sealed that childish pact like it was a cathedral of small, true things. It wasn't dramatic, not the kind of bold declaration you'd find in novels, but it was ours: a set of tokens that mapped a future we both wanted.
The semester changed like the weather. Students came and left and learned and taught. Kayden traveled again—briefly—and then came back. He spoke at panels and laughed with Matteo in a way that made the professor's stern face melt. He brought me lectures turned into notes and notes turned into small presents. He made my room into a harbor and I made his into a place to land.
One afternoon, as frost still clung to the window and the city tasted of cold, Kayden said very plainly, "I want to be the one who makes you soup when you're sick."
"You are," I said.
"I want to be the one who steals your blanket if you leave it on the sofa."
"You already are."
"And later—" He paused. "I want to be the one who argues with you about silly things while we both pretend to be reasonable."
We laughed, then kissed, small and honest like a closed secret. Outside the window, leaves scraped like fingers at the glass. Inside, our world was a tiny, deliberate thing.
At the year end, Kayden took my hand and led me to the place where we'd first sat in a gazebo while the rest of the campus marched and sweated in uniform. He held out his palm and in it was a tiny jar of dates—four of them, tender and shining.
"Keep it," he said, "for the nights when the world wants to be too much."
"I will," I whispered.
We walked home beneath a sky spilling a quiet light. The keys jingled in my pocket and the thermos lived on the shelf in the kitchen. The ticket stub folded gently in my coat. The jar of dates rested on my bedside table like a promise. I tucked each into their own place as if to make the world orderly.
That night, I took the small things out and set them side by side—the thermos, the ticket, the jar of dates, the key. For years I'd thought life was about making big decisions on grand stages. In the end, life taught me that everything that matters can be kept in a palm: steady, small, warm.
"I have an idea," Kayden said, as we lay together with the blanket pulled over our knees. "When things get complicated again, we'll count the dates. Four good nights. We'll leave the ticket where we find best luck. We'll drink red sugar water. We'll make a ridiculous scene in a public place to embarrass each other. And we'll always, always keep a spare key."
"Deal," I said.
He breathed my name like a blessing, and I felt the truth of it. We were two flawed, stubborn people deciding to try. We were ordinary. We were brave.
I wound my fingers into his, and in that small gesture the universe seemed to approve: imperfect, patient, and perfectly ours.
The End
— Thank you for reading —