Sweet Romance11 min read
My Neighbor, My Little Dog, My Wedding Countdown
ButterPicks14 views
I keep a toothbrush in my hand and a sink full of half-foam when somebody knocks on my apartment door at midnight.
"Who is it?" I ask, toothpaste still foaming on my lips.
"It's me," the voice says, soft and amused.
I open the door and there he is—Grant Guerrero in a white shirt, one hand on the jamb, the faint smell of alcohol trailing him like a bad perfume. He leans in the doorway and looks at me in a way that makes the toothbrush feel heavy in my fingers.
"Grant?" I drop the brush without thinking and reach for him. "Did you—did you drink?"
He steps in, shuts the door with his shoulder, and before I can think he reaches out and mops a smear of toothpaste off my chin.
"Head hurts," he says, voice small. "I drank. Sorry."
He sounds like a child saying sorry after breaking a plate. He smells like cheap beer and summer. My heart tightens because I've been keeping it quiet for a long time—this tiny crush that sits in a dented jar in my chest. Grant is my neighbor. He's younger. He's always been a little too polite, a little too golden to notice me in the right way.
I help him to the couch. He leans into me, and his weight is warmer than I expect.
"Do you like me?" he asks, breath hot on my neck like a dare.
I answer like a responsible older sister. "Of course I like you. You're my little brother in the neighborhood."
He lifts his head and stares at me, suddenly very serious. "I don't want to be a little brother."
Before I can think, his hand is at the back of my neck and his mouth is on mine.
It's clumsy because he's tipsy. It's intimate because it's him. My heart hammers and my first sensible reflex is to freeze—too afraid of what I might do if I move too fast. But when he kisses me, it's steady enough that my defenses start to melt.
"Grant," I whisper when we break apart. "You drank too much."
He laughs low, mischievous. "Then teach me to be better, then."
I move him toward my bedroom because common sense and panic don't fit in the living room with my mother potentially knocking. We close the door and we don't stop until morning.
I wake up to the sun and a quiet that isn't mine. Grant is asleep next to me, half under the duvet, his arm flung across my waist. My mind pieces the night together like a film strip—laughter, clumsy kisses, a small glowing plastic ring he fished out of some vending machine and put on my finger to make me grin like an idiot.
I look down and my cheeks go hot. This is real. There are little marks on his neck. There is the unmistakable evidence of last night on both of us.
"You're really something," he says before my panic can organize into words. "You were so brave."
Before I can answer, there's another knock.
"Open, open!" my mother's voice comes through the door on a blast of breathy urgency. "Hope? Why aren't you dressed yet?"
I look at Grant, mortified. He sits up, calm as a lake.
"Put something on," I tell him, whispering.
He does not flinch. "I'll put on clothes."
My mother storms in like a small tornado. She stands there and stares at us in a way that ages me thirty years in one breath. Then she lights up.
"Is this—" she starts, and then freezes because Grant has pulled me closer and taken my hand.
"Auntie," Grant says. "I wanted to tell you—Hope and I are together."
My mother goes red, then she slaps a smile on like it's a mask and meets him halfway. "Well, what a surprise. Come in, come in. Let's all talk."
Grant meets my every move with an unruffled grin. He is either fearless or reckless. He laughs as though life is a silly game he's already won.
"Mom," I hiss later in the kitchen. "You said you didn't like him because of his age!"
"I said I'd like him older," Brenda Moore replies, eyes gleaming. "Not that I dislike him. Besides, he looks like a good boy."
The morning spins on: my mom decides to play matchmaker for me with a neighbor's nephew and drags him to our door, and there I am, still wearing yesterday's hair.
Grant casually appears from behind a curtain in my living room like nothing is strange about his being in my apartment, wearing one of my slippers two sizes too small and a half-buttoned shirt. There are two dark circles on his neck.
My mother stares. The visitor stares. I dive for the nearest lie.
"We wrestled all night," I say, which is the stupidest sentence I've ever invented. "Very competitive. He won."
Grant links his fingers with mine like an old promise. "We are together," he repeats, calm, and the whole thing turns surreal.
That morning my mother is suddenly on team-us. She claps like a small judge approving a verdict. "We'll set a date," she says before I've had time to tell her that I haven't even considered marriage.
Grant squeezes my hand and promises small, confident things. "You name the amount of the dowry—I'll match it." He says it like money is something he can always get, like his pockets are magical.
I brush it aside. The world at large blurs into shopping. We buy shirts. We go to a mall and I let Grant flirt with a salesman and try on suits for show. He looks extraordinary in everything. People look. People stare.
He drives a car that makes my jaw drop when I look it up later. "What's that?" I ask. "One million?"
"Yeah," he says, casual as weather. "It gets me where I need to go."
That night is the old classmates' reunion. I bring Grant as my date, because flare and revenge taste like champagne when you add a handsome younger man to your arm.
At the table I see Elliott Duncan. He's the boy I once liked in school—still safe-looking, still familiar. Across the room sits Giavanna Olivier, who used to be our class beauty and now looks like she hasn't forgotten how to make a room tilt toward her. She keeps glancing at Grant and her eyes are knives.
"Is that your brother?" she sneers loud enough for half the table to hear.
"He isn't my brother," Grant replies smooth as glass, has already taken the seat next to me.
The night grows stranger when a silly party game starts. Giavanna proposes the spinning bottle game.
"Wine bottle," she says. "Where it points, you kiss the person to your right."
"Fine," Grant replies. He turns the bottle, but he surprises everyone by pulling me into his seat so the bottle lands into a place that forces someone else into a corner.
"I'll take it," he says coolly.
He kisses me in front of everyone. It's not small. It's not shy. It is loud and messy and fierce. People whooped and laughed and some of them gasped.
Giavanna's face hardens. She walks away, storms out, and returns with a theatrical air of annoyance—like someone who believes the world owes them performance.
She still tries, though. Later, during a round where she is forced to either kiss someone or drink, the bottle points her to the one lonely, kind, not-very-handsome classmate at the end of the table.
Everyone laughs. "Do it!" they shout.
She chooses to drink. She gulps down two beers to prove she is above being made a joke. The beer makes her stumble. She leaves the room and returns red-faced and loud.
That is where things curve sharply.
She stumbles near the door and vomits, dramatic and public and humiliating. People gasp. Plates clatter. Someone calls for water. I feel a little sick watching it, because despite everything I am still human enough to hate watching another person suffer.
But humiliation isn't the end. What follows is punishment—not a private shove, not a whispered betrayal, but a clear, public unmasking.
I stand up. My stomach is a fist curled inside me for reasons I can't explain. Grant catches my eye, and he nods. He can see the way Giavanna came tonight to bait, to raid the nest she swore she wanted back ten years ago. He knows she tried to buy men before; he knows, better than I do, how people like her work.
"Everyone," Grant says, voice calm and carrying. "Can I say something?"
All heads turn. There is a delicious silence. Even the clinking of chopsticks quiets down out of habit more than respect. Giavanna's attitude sharpens into defensive preening.
Grant stands. He walks over to the front of the room where everyone can see him, and he reaches into his pocket.
"What are you doing?" I whisper.
"My little moment," he says. He steps into the light, and he holds out a small manila envelope. He doesn't open it. He doesn't have to.
"Giavanna," Grant says, and now the voice isn't playful but measured. "You told my friend at the bar you planned to pay someone to—" He stops, eyes sweeping the room to make sure all their eyes settle on hers. "—buy me. You offered money to 'acquire' me for a night. You said you'd pay to be with me."
The room takes a beat. Giavanna's face dolls and then clamps into fury. She opens her mouth to deny, but people at the table mutter, "Is that true?" One girl pulls out her phone. Others point. The whispers swell.
"I didn't," she says, shaky now. "You—you're lying."
"I'm not," Grant replies evenly. "She told my friend the exact figure."
A quiet phone camera is up, filming without malice. Someone says, "Show us the message."
Grant's fingers are steady as he produces the screenshot on his phone. The messages are ugly: offers, figures, a tone of purchase. They are undeniable. Someone gasps aloud. Someone else laughs, but it's anger-laced.
Giavanna's expression changes faster than a weather vane. Pride drops. She looks first like someone who wants to deny, then like someone who wants to storm out, then like someone in slow motion realizing that people she fancied were friends are now just witnesses.
"You're not making this up," someone says.
Giavanna begins the stages: shock, denial, venom, collapse. Her denial tries to be loud. "You can't post that," she says. "Those screenshots are fake. I didn't—who would do this?"
"Someone you offered money to," Grant says. His voice is quiet but it slaps. "He told us. He recorded it because he was offended. We didn't want to make it public. You made it public."
People gather around. "Is this true?" Kallie Carney, my friend, asks. "Giavanna, what's going on?"
Giavanna tries to pull herself together. She lectures, negates, then starts to plead, stepping carefully through the social script: "You all don't understand. I—this is a mistake. I was drunk too. I didn't mean—"
Her voice is small. The crowd doesn't buy it. Someone records. People snap photos. Their phones light up like tiny suns.
My mother, who is watching from two tables over, stands. She does not clap. She looks at Giavanna like a judge who will take away a toy and never give it back.
"How dare you treat people like merchandise," Brenda Moore says loud enough for the entire room to hear. "How dare you think you can buy respect."
Giavanna's guilt now is visible. She tries to retaliate with insults, but the room has closed ranks. Someone mentions that Giavanna had tried to seduce men before and then brags about it; another says her efforts to ruin girls' reputations have been a pattern. There's a roll call of petty crimes: gossip, sabotage, flirting with people's partners. People nod. The sum of small cruelties becomes bigger in the light.
"You're going to apologize," Grant says, "to everyone you've tried to buy or belittle. And you will not ask for forgiveness unless you mean it."
She tries to storm off. People block the way—not to hurt her, but to make sure she doesn't escape this reckoning. Someone hands her a glass of water; another thrusts a chair in front of her. She sinks into it, wilted.
There is silence except for her breath and the scrape of chairs. Her face collapses. She starts to crack.
"Please," she says. "Please, I'm sorry." The words tumble out and this time they are raw, not rehearsed.
But the crowd isn't satisfied with a panic apology. They want accountability. "Say her name," someone says. "Tell them you tried to buy him."
"Say it to Hope," another insists.
Giavanna looks at me. Her eyes are hollow. "Hope," she says, voice small. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"
The room lets out a collective exhale. Cameras keep rolling. People who used to side with Giavanna stare like they are seeing her the first time.
Her reaction unfolds: the arrogance drains away; denial becomes tears; tears become pleading. She tries to regain control by name-calling—an old defense—but the crowd turns its face. Someone whispers, "Shameful." Another says, "We all knew."
The punishment is not cruel. It is a mirror. People speak about how they were affected by her in the past. A woman tells a story about how Giavanna once spread a rumor that cost her a job. A man says he stopped trusting a friend because Giavanna engineered a fight. The room re-assembles the truth of Giavanna's small cruelties into a pattern all can see.
Giavanna tries to laugh it off, but the laughter sounds frayed. She looks at each face and sees no ally. Her bravado has been stripped. She stands and leaves amid a hollowing silence; a few people throw insults at her back, but most watch her go with disappointment and relief.
After she leaves, Grant sits down and takes my hand without drama. "You okay?" he asks quietly.
"Do you regret this?" I ask.
He shrugs. "I don't like making someone humiliated. But I don't like people thinking they can buy people, either."
The scene finishes with Giavanna's raw collapse and the crowd's quiet verdict. It is the kind of punishment that is public and long and irreversible: the rumor mill now turns against her. That night she is the story of the party for all the wrong reasons. People whisper. People double-take. Her social currency drops like a coin off a cliff.
After the reunion clears, Elliott—my old almost-love—tries to come back with an apology. He looks different in the aftermath of Grant's show. Standing at the doorway, he says, "You've changed."
"Maybe," I say. I'm not sure I want his apology.
Grant stands between us like a calm, young statue. "She has," he says softly, and the way he looks at me is like a promise made out loud.
A week later, my mother's matchmaking stops being a joke and becomes a plan. My mom and Grant's stepmother, Leilani Francois, are old friends with unfinished history—like two worn books that open in the same pages. They fight, they make up, then they fight again. But when it's time to talk weddings, they talk numbers like commodity traders.
"Twenty-eight," my mom says about the dowry.
"Twenty-five," Leilani counters.
Round and round. The numbers climb until both fathers, Samuel Farmer and Tobias Costa—my dad and Grant's father—quietly intervene because the two women's banter will cost them too much.
In the midst of this, Grant and I stand in a strange bubble. There are negotiations about dowry and bridal gifts, but when the parents are done, they announce a wedding date like it's a surprise party.
"What?" I mutter. "I didn't sign anything."
"That's fine," Grant says, delighted. "We're on the same page, aren't we?"
We are. We are reckless. We are ridiculous. We also are oddly steady together.
Later, when the dust of parental haggling settles into something like a shared meal, Grant pulls me close on the balcony and says, "If you behave, I'll increase your allowance."
"How much?" I ask.
He whispers a number that makes me laugh and blush at once. It's outrageous and adorable.
The world makes space for us then. The two mothers reconcile on their own terms—like old actresses who finally remember their lines. They come together on video from two different living rooms, hand in hand in front of cameras, and tell us to come home because they want grandchildren.
We go along with it, playing our parts, then we steal away for small, soft rebellions: a night at a cheap hotel where the front desk clerk looks at us as though we are comic relief; a secret trip to hot springs where we kiss until our lips wrinkle.
One night, in the stairwell of our building, Grant produces a small plastic ring that glows faintly when he shakes it—the same kind from the vending machine that made me grin earlier.
"It's silly," he says, putting it on my finger.
"It's charming," I say.
He leans in and kisses me like a promise and it lands like a small, perfect truth.
We call our parents and sit through questions. We sleep in, sneak out, run wild when the mothers sleep. For two days we play at eloping, then the mothers soften, the call comes through, and they ask us to come home. They tell us to pick a date. They tell us to hurry.
The ending is small and specific and my kind of true.
When the wedding date is set, I take the glowing plastic ring from the drawer where Grant tucked it and wind the tiny battery to make it blink. The tiny light goes on, then steadies. I hold it up and I hear him in my head—his laugh the night before our first kiss, the quiet promise in his voice when he stood up in a crowded room and protected me from someone who thought money could buy a person.
"Keep it," I tell the ring and the thought of him all in one. "It looks like a promise, and I love promises that glow."
—END—
The End
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