Sweet Romance10 min read
My Little Dog, My Needles, and the Night He Became Mine
ButterPicks15 views
I woke to wind in my hair and wolves calling like someone had dropped a radio in the trees.
"Where am I?" I asked no one. My head hurt and my phone was dead—a bad start to the day I had planned for a press launch. I sat up and found wild grass tangled in my jacket.
A car crash, the crew told me later. But right then the word in my head was worse: I was not Greta Wells anymore. I was a woman from a book I had read—an ugly, beloved-for-a-while heiress who had been thrown away.
"Don't panic," I muttered. "Just get to the road."
I walked until the asphalt blessed me. I thought of the book. I thought of Jovie Cantu and Simon Kraemer and the way they'd all lived inside someone else's story.
Then a hand grabbed my ankle.
"Help!" I yelped.
"I—" a sleepy, small voice answered. I leaned over and froze.
He was the most ridiculous kind of beautiful.
"Who are you?" I whispered, because a thing that beautiful could not be real.
He looked up at me with doe eyes, bandaged and lost. He said, "Dylan?"
"Dylan who?" I asked, because I was pretending I had rules.
"I don't remember."
I did not exactly have a plan, but I had an impulse: beautiful things must be rescued so the world can look at them. I slung him over my shoulder like a sack and walked back to the car.
"You are insane," I told the seatbelt.
He slept while I bathed him, while I inspected my new face in the mirror. I kept thinking of the fictional woman: her mouth, her color, the way she was hated. I wanted better for myself.
"You're hurt," I said, fingers pausing at a bruise under his collarbone.
"I don't know why," he whispered.
"Because you were in a car wreck and I saved you," I lied quickly.
"Thank you," he said, soft as a cat.
"You're welcome, my little dog," I said because I could not resist.
Later, when he woke properly, his small voice trembled.
"Who are you?"
"I am Greta," I lied again. "Your sister. You have amnesia. Don't worry."
He blinked, then nodded like a child who trusted adults by default.
"Will you stay with me?" he asked.
"Of course," I said, and something in my chest tightened, the way a clasp clicks shut.
He would not speak much for days. He learned the shower slowly, and he slept on the floor because of a childish dignity I could not break. I tucked him into the bed after I dabbed antiseptic on his wounds.
"You're so pretty," he said, when the morning light laid its gentleness over our faces.
"Obviously," I said and pecked his forehead. "Don't tell anyone."
He would say "sister" and "sister" until I believed it myself.
When the show I had been dragged to audition for put me on stage, I did something very stupid and very real.
"What will you perform?" the judge asked.
"I don't know," I admitted.
"Sing," another judge suggested.
"I can't," I said.
"Then dance," someone else said.
"I can't," I said again, and forgot to care about the cameras.
I did a backflip.
"How many?" Chet Ayers asked, eyes wide.
"Three hundred?" I shrugged.
"Three hundred?" he echoed like an accusation and the lights blurred into applause.
Then I pulled out a handful of needles and made them fly like a gardener planting seeds; they stuck into the wall in a perfect flower. The director smiled so wide I thought his face might split.
"You'll stay," he said.
That night the line outside my dressing room was longer. My phone would have been confiscated with the rest of the cast, but I shook the staff's hand and said, "Wait until later," and they took my "no" like it was a joke.
Back in our small room, Dylan "played" with the props. He called me "sister" and blinked in a way that was all trust.
"I will teach you," I promised once, when he watched me balance pins like small soldiers.
"I don't want to be alone," he said, pinking at my thumb.
"Then stay with me," I said, and the word felt right.
The reality of showbiz is a mob of opinions. People typed things into the void.
"Is she for real?"
"She's so pretty."
"Get her off the stage."
The world debated my career while I tried to memorize breath. Then I was gone for a month: an audition death, a dramatic "eliminated," and the cheers for my nonsense trickled away.
"Don't be sad," Mia Crouch said in the parking lot. "This got you millions of eyeballs."
"I didn't want eyeballs," I admitted. "I wanted pay so I could keep Dylan."
"Pay is the same as eyes when eyes pay," she said and guided me back to the van.
We were invited to a horror show the next week: locked rooms and fake ghosts. I thought it would be boring, but my stupid fearless heart found keys in a corpse's costume.
"How did you...?" Halo Blevins asked, trailing behind with a scream in her voice for effect.
"I have a blunt nose for trouble," I said, and the production staff mumbled because we solved things too fast for their budget.
Dylan watched from the audience, pale and tender. Later he curled up next to me after a long day and said, "I missed you."
"I missed you," I lied and kissed his cheek.
Weeks passed without my wanting them to pass. I slept badly and poked things and taught Dylan to be unafraid of the world. He learned to read; he learned to tell time. He learned how to be my small dog.
"Are you happy?" he asked one night.
"If I am with you, yes," I said.
"Then I'll be with you."
And then, like every book I remember reading, a revival came. The show called me back. The audience voted to bring me back from elimination. I was a curiosity in a park of talents—no one expected me to be serious.
"You're back," Chet Ayers said like he'd been given a puzzle with a missing piece that I'd returned.
"I am back for pay," I said.
"Also," Mia said, "you owe life to some discipline. You must learn."
I learned. I trained under Claude Brown until my muscles remembered things my head had forgotten.
They made us pair up for a final; I drew a slip and got paired with a girl who wanted to be good. We made a mess look like a plan and then made the plan look like a moment.
When the votes were read, I excused myself.
"I have homework," I told the crowd that loved me for my foolish bravery.
"Graduate school?" a reporter guessed.
"Military school," I said, the truth like a coin slipped into my pocket.
"Military school?" the room laughed, but I had applied to a place that loved discipline and metal, a place so unlike the back of makeup chairs.
I left the entertainment circus because Dylan needed a life that didn't have flashing cameras.
He waited.
He waited like small dogs wait for a person to come home.
He would say, "Sister?"
"I will always be your sister," I promised him, but the word curled into a promise that felt more like a vow.
He would kiss my cheek like a teacher had taught him to and then were his eyes different one night.
"Dylan," I said, because something about his jaw suddenly pretended it was older.
He blinked. "Greta."
His voice had a thickness, like something else had spoken through him.
I laughed. "Don't tease me. Sleep."
He slept like a child, and I watched him.
Then Anton Brock came into our quiet life like thunder after summer rain.
He had my Dylan's face but the clean line of a man built to command rooms. He moved like a knife that knew how to cut. He told me straight away—
"You called him Dylan," he said, as if it were a test.
"He's Dylan to me," I replied, heart modest.
"You're wrong," he said.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
"Anton," he said. "And he is mine."
"Not mine," I said. "Mine."
Anton laughed—an ugly sound—then settled across from me and told me about the world he ran behind velvet curtains. He moved like land, like power, and his voice wrapped itself around my name until the edges burned.
"You're in my house," he told me one evening, when I found him sitting at my table. "You should be grateful."
"You're in my life," I said. "You moved in without a lease."
He opened his mouth to say something sharp and stopped.
Between Dylan and Anton there was a dangerous symmetry. They were the same face, played in different keys. I wondered which one would stay for me and which would leave for his empire.
The world has a way of showing its fangs. At a red carpet, Jovie Cantu—white and flawless as always—stood beside Simon Kraemer, the man who had once dictated my life in the book I had read. He had been the reason my character was erased, the reason my resources had been cut.
"You're here," he said to me, his voice like a blade sheathed too close to my throat.
"Yes," I said. "For a walk."
"Leave," he told me, like a man born to say it.
"No," I said, which was not the me who had run from pangs of shame in an old life. I had learned blades on my own body. I had learned to heal.
But a different kind of blade was waiting in plain sight. When the awards banquet's lights dimmed and a thousand phones tilted like tiny stars, I walked up to the podium not as the book had planned but as someone who could hold the past.
"Simon," I said into the microphone.
He smiled like a prince who had not yet had a riot.
"Greta," he replied. "You have the floor."
I clicked my thumb and a screen lit behind me. The webcast filled with people who wanted to see fashion and fame.
"Why don't you show them?" I asked.
A video began playing. Text messages unfurled, recorded whispers of him counting benefits and stopping contracts, of his private messages to his inner circle calling me a "resource to be severed," of a voice note where he mocked the woman he had squeezed for twelve years.
There was laughter in the room, until silence fell like an act. His smile dropped, and the people around him began to shift uncomfortably.
"Play the next one," I said.
More messages: "She is a liability," "Stop her feeding," "Make her ruin public." It wasn't rhetorical anymore. The audio had a rasp where he congratulated himself.
"You are a monster," someone shouted from the crowd.
He stood very still, like a man who had not expected sunlight to find him.
"Simon," I said, and the words came out pricker-sharp, "you used your power to strip me, to cut the fuel to my life. You made choices that stole opportunities. Now everyone can hear you."
"You can't—" he began, voice steadying into denial.
"Stop it," a woman near him hissed.
"You're lying," he said, eyes huge.
"You're lying," he repeated, then shrank, as if the word had the capacity to break glass.
"Play the next file," I told the stage manager, and the little theater of sound grew jaws.
He reeled through the motions of guilt, anger, then fragile denial. He called out, "This is doctored!"
"Open the private ledger," I said. "The one your assistant left on your desk."
"That's not—" he said.
"Tell them why you denied me healthcare funding," I said. "Tell them the meeting notes where you pushed termination. Tell them you're the man who stamped on a girl in a book and then on an actress in real life."
He took two steps forward. His face shifted from proud to confounded.
"Stop it," he pleaded. "Please, stop!"
Cameras were everywhere. Phones lifted up and recorded the moment with the cruelty of unblinking witnesses.
"You tried to make me small," I said. "You thought you could erase me. You were wrong."
He staggered like an actor who had been asked to improvise shame.
"Get him out," someone hissed. "Get him—"
"No," Simon barked suddenly, attempts at control returning like a reflex. "I will not be—"
A cough ran through the room the way the tide goes out. People had eyes like hammers. I watched his face change in exacting stages: pride, confusion, denial, panic, collapse.
"No," he said again, a single word like a child.
A chair scraped. He fell into it heavily. His hands trembled.
"Please," he whispered. "I didn't—"
"He did it," the costume designer said loud enough for cameras to pick up. "He cut Greta's roles because it suited his plans."
"No," he cried out suddenly, the mask of control shattered. "Please, I—" His voice broke and he tried to push himself up, but a cluster of assistants closed around him like a net.
"Stop yelling," he begged. "Stop, I'm sorry."
People recorded his pleas. Someone began to clap—polite for a beat, then harder, a sound that bent into ridicule. Others laughed. Others took out their phones. The atmosphere changed into a court.
He reached for the table and fell to his knees with a ridiculous, theatrical thud.
"Please," he whispered, "please forgive me. I can fix it. I can make it right."
"Make it right," I said. "Start with every contract you ruined. Start with a retraction. Start with a public apology."
"Yes—yes," he sobbed. "Yes. I will. I will apologize, I will—"
"I want you on record," I said quietly. "Not the polite actors' apologies. I want the names. The deals. The dates. And I want you to promise this will not happen again."
"I promise," he said, words cracking like poor ice.
Around us, cameras captured everything. Some guests murmured, others cheered. People took photos. Someone uploaded a clip the instant his apology trembled loose.
"He is done," an editor said into a phone. "This goes across networks."
He was broken in a place where power lived: in public. He bent his head until his forehead hit the lectern, and people took pictures like it was a show.
"Please," he said again, quieter now, the kind of begging that had nothing to do with boardrooms.
He would have to rebuild from the rubble he made. I didn't gloat; I had never wanted a man's career to die. I had wanted to breathe again.
The cameras hated a vacuum. They fed on heartbreak and on justice and on the way an empire collapsed with the sound of a single microphone.
When the last footage stopped, I sat down. Dylan—Anton—whichever face had come to stand by me—was there, hands clasped like prayer.
"You did it," he said, voice the same that once hummed lullabies.
"I told the truth," I said.
"It made him kneel."
"It made some people pay attention."
He kissed my forehead, then Dylan's warm hand replaced it. Faces shifted and settled into the life we had built.
Later, when the press fingered the story into smaller headlines and redesigned truths, I found a quiet bench and a small tin box.
"Are you going to vote?" Dylan asked softly.
"For what?"
"For us."
"For life," I said, opening the tiny box. Inside, my silver needles lay like small stars.
I had begun as a joke and become a bridge. The needles were medicine and an instrument, both. I kept them clean and sharp.
"Promise me," Dylan said, thumb stroking the side of my hand, his eyes serious as new wood.
"I promise," I said, and put one tiny needle beside his knuckles. It glinted like a comet.
We went on to fight small battles—a hard casting here, a mean article there. We trained harder. I left the industry for a while and started at a school where my muscles learned new hymns. Dylan learned to read everything I loved. Anton sometimes appeared like a shadow and sometimes like a savior. He was dangerous and tender in ways the world did not understand.
We lived in the strange margin between light and armor, farmed small joys and practiced kindness like a language.
The city taught me how to sit still, and the needles taught me how to heal.
One night, when I had threaded a needle clean through a little girl's worry, I put the last silver needle into a velvet case and closed it slowly.
"Dylan," I said, because my world was always in small syllables, "I keep my tools close."
"Keep them on you," he said simply.
"I will," I promised.
I did not vow forever. I promised to hold the needle steady when someone needed it.
And when I looked down at him—the man who was my foundling, my problem, my answer—I felt something honest and raw.
"Are you mine?" I asked.
He smiled, crooked and certain.
"Only if you are mine too."
I slipped the velvet case into my pocket and buttoned my coat.
Outside, the wind pulled at the city's edges, and the lights looked like a thousand curious eyes.
I held Dylan's hand. My needles lay quiet and trusted.
We walked on.
The End
— Thank you for reading —