Sweet Romance10 min read
My Semester as the Campus "Heartbreaker" (and How I Got Caught Between Two Men)
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I woke up one morning and the whole campus treated me like a brand — hot, scandalous, and clickable.
"You're number one," Jaime said without looking up from his phone. "Top three scandal queens, and you're the queen."
"Very flattering," I said. "Who organized the poll?" I laughed, but my laugh landed flat. I had better things to waste my time on than trophies that smelled like gossip.
"You're not even hiding how proud you are." Jaime tapped the screen again. "Someone wanted drama. You gave them a whole soap opera."
I rolled my eyes and stood, brushing hair from my face. I had a day planned. I had men to meet.
I loved men the way some people love movies — for the moments, the thrills, and the stories you could tell later. I was good at the stories.
"Where are you off to?" Laura peeked from the doorway, eyes soft. "Again?"
"Bar," I said. "Conquer a wolfdog or two."
"You always say that." Laura's voice was steady. She had been my roommate for seven months and my conscience for five minutes a day.
By the time I slipped into the bar, the lights were low and the music slept in my bones. I ordered to blend in and looked up to find a new constellation: a boy with headphones, hair damp from sweat, moving like the beat had named him. He was younger than I expected, cold-lipped and dangerous in his quiet.
I nudged Jaime and whispered, "Who's the DJ?"
"No idea," Jaime said. "But check out the way he works the crowd."
He worked it like a map. He made it look like the club spun on his wrist.
I almost didn't notice when someone plopped down next to me, cool and careful. It's impossible to sit in a bar and not be seen. I was performing and the audience had arrived.
"You're drinking alone?" a voice asked.
"Who wants to share?" I teased, not looking.
He laughed, light and crisp, and then said, "You won't find what you're looking for here."
"Challenge accepted," I said, and smiled.
Two drinks later, my eyes kept finding that boy on the stage. Then someone called my name.
"Janelle!" Jaime leaned in, cheeks flushed like he'd climbed stairs. He had that alarmed, handsome look he got when he was proud or drunk. "Where are you? We were looking for you."
"I'm right here, battling the sea of mediocre boys," I said, and then Jaime said something that made me drop my glass: "My brother's coming."
My glass exploded on his face. Not literally, but I spluttered, and a perfect strip of bar napkin landed where my drink had been. "You could've told me earlier!"
Jaime's brother was Ezra Alexander. He came in like a cross between a storm and a library: quiet, contained, dangerous if you stepped on him wrong. I'd known him since he was a tall kid who counted our childhood mischiefs in margins of notebooks. When he was around, I became small in a way I did not control.
Ezra moved as if he had rehearsed folding silence into his bones. He sat, took my glass, tasted it, and then, to the shock of everyone, put his jacket over my shoulders.
"You always wear too little," he said simply.
"You're not my father," I shot back, but my throat had narrowed and my voice sounded rusty.
He only raised an eyebrow. "You aren't the same."
I did the only thing I could think of that would hide fluster: light a cigarette. There, in the ash-and-blue haze of the bar, I felt temporarily brave.
Then Karter Duran walked in.
He looked like a storm in sneakers. He had that boyish chill and a jaw that did not suffer fools. He smiled once at me and the way he smiled was a dare.
"You're the girl from the poll," he said when he reached our table. "I'm the DJ you keep watching."
"I thought you didn't answer messages," I teased.
"I read them," he said simply. "I just don't reply to things not worth my time."
"Is it a crime?" I asked.
"It's a preference."
I wanted to press him, to see how far the silence could be stretched before it tore. Jaime nudged me, and the two of us settled into something dangerously comfortable: the three of us, the two men at my edges, the spotlight on me. I liked the heat. I liked the choice.
One drink turned into another. Karter slid closer, and Ezra, who said almost nothing all night, put his palm against the table and watched as if he was keeping the world from slipping.
"You like him?" Ezra asked finally, and the room seemed to shift toward a new axis.
"Do you like him?" I returned.
"Not the point," Ezra said.
He wasn't kissing me, but when he took my cigarette away and threatened to kiss me if I didn't behave, I felt like the world condensed to a point between his eyes and mine.
"What happens if I do?" I teased.
"You'll know when you try."
Karter smiled that cold smile again. "You won't manage me."
"Try me," I said and moved toward him, letting my hand touch his neck. He flinched in a way that we both found interesting.
"You're a senior sort of trouble in a sophomore's body," I murmured.
"I'm trouble." He said it like a confession.
By the time the club tilted toward close, the three of us had made an accidental choreography: me, in the middle. I stumbled and leaned into Karter because he caught me like he was used to this sort of thing; he smelled like mint and something sharp. Ezra pulled me back when Karter tried to take me toward the back stair. Ezra's hand on my wrist was firm enough to bruise the carefulness out of my drink-fueled bravado.
"Janelle," Karter said low and soft, "come with me."
"You're hard to get," I laughed, because I liked that my refusal wasn't the end. "Make me a reason."
Karter looked at Ezra, and the air tasted like competition.
I woke up the next day with my hair a mess and my phone full of unread messages—Karter's voice memos, Jaime's GIFs, Ezra's missed calls. The university had already made me a headline for less reason. I went to lunch with Jaime and told him to help me plot the next move.
"Be more complicated," Jaime advised. "Or less. Depends on your stamina."
"Complicated sells," I said.
"Just don't hurt anyone," Laura warned later when I told her the barest outlines. "You say it's a game. People have real feelings."
"I know the difference," I said, and didn't look at her long enough to see her sigh.
When I met Karter the next time at the student-run club night, he was different. He smiled like someone who had decided I was worth looking at twice. He moved around the DJ booth like a god at a pulpit. He grabbed me by the waist when the bass cut and his hand was warm and settled.
"You said I'm hard to get," he murmured, breath hot in my ear. "You mean the right things when you're trying."
"I can use that," I said and meant it.
But life, as it does, kept throwing me evidence I did not plan for.
There was a night when the campus horror-house hosted a "NPC" night and one of the actors — white, elegant, famous around campus — blocked my path when I tripped. He said my name and meant it. Arturo Reynolds. I knew of him like everyone did: the school's infamous charmer, the kind of boy who wrote headlines for breakfast and heartbreaks for dinner.
"You're dangerous where you stand," he said softly. "You keep getting people to bet on you."
"Someone's got to make bets worthwhile," I said, and he laughed.
Arturo listened the way people do when they plan to become part of your story. He said things that landed and stayed like a scent. He proposed a strange bargain: an honest month. He said, "Try me seriously for a month. No tricks. No games."
A month. I laughed because the word sounded like a dare.
"You're asking for a month of me?" I asked.
"For your attention," he corrected. "And I'll return it honestly."
Ezra watched from the edge of the crowd while Arturo worked his charm. He had the expression of someone who'd been promised something and was trying to avoid believing it had slipped away. That look cut through me like a draft.
"I don't like lies," Ezra said one night, unexpectedly. I was sitting between three men and the world was loud and small.
"Are you calling them lies or masks?" I asked.
"Both," Ezra replied. "And if I can't have the truth, I'd rather have nothing."
Arturo pulled me aside and said, "He's the steady kind, but he will never fight to be kept."
"Is that a reason to leave a man who fights?" I shot back.
Arturo's eyes were blue and bright. "People keep things because they want them, not because they are told to keep them. I want to be the thing you choose freely."
Those words turned into a list of small, concrete things. Things like: he would come unexpectedly when I said I hated being alone, he'd keep an umbrella in his car when snow came, he'd remember the exact way I took my coffee. Each small thing sealed a kind of trust.
"I'll give you a simple test," Arturo said one day, voice soft. "One day with no tricks. If you still want the other life, walk away."
I should have said no. But the idea of someone offering pursuit without plague felt like a promise rather than a strategy. I agreed.
The day with Arturo was small in steps and huge in meaning. We rode a ferris wheel and Artu‑— I mean Arturo — told me stories about when he used to wait for trains at midnight just to feel that the world had a pulse and he wasn't the only one awake at odd hours. He held my hand in a way that taught my fingers where his bones fit. When the wheel stopped at the top, the city lights fell around us like permission.
"You're not like the stories," I told him.
"Some stories are written badly," he said. "I wanted to write well."
I was learning the difference between being chased and being chosen, between excitement and shelter.
Ezra called that afternoon. "Where are you?" he asked, voice close, as though he had been standing outside a closed door for years.
"Out," I said. "With Arturo."
"Come home," he said. "Please."
It was not a command; it was the word I had always loved least and most: plea.
I ended the day by telling both men something that was half-confession, half-not-madness.
"One month," I told Arturo. "You asked for one month. I can give it. But understand this: I have a past of not being faithful to the idea of 'forever' in the ordinary sense."
Arturo only took my hand tighter. "I don't ask for forever. I ask for a day at a time."
"Do you think that's safe?" I asked.
"I think it's everything," he said.
Then the month became a test out in daylight. Arturo invited me to ordinary things: a Sunday market that smelled like spices and bread, a small cinema where the projector hummed like an understanding, the hands of a clock making small progress. He was consistent. He washed the dish I stubbornly left for hours, he noticed the way I tucked my hair. Little things. The kind that say, "I am paying attention."
Karter's messages blurred between teasing and nervousness. "You okay?" he'd send. Then, "I want you." Then, "Is that too much?" He would sometimes show up unannounced as if he could walk into my story and write new lines.
Ezra watched. He became quieter and more watchful. That scared me more than anything, because I had always been the one who did the choosing. I learned how it felt to watch someone else watch you, to know that you are held in a look and to feel the weight of that hold.
The day the campus turned our private weather into public rumor, someone posted photos. Someone always does.
"Did you see?" Jaime asked, voice low. "Arturo posted us. He called you his."
"I didn't give him permission to post," I said, though some ember of thrill warmed my chest. I wasn't sure which feeling I owed to myself and which felt borrowed.
"You are his now," Jaime said, half warning, half grin.
It is confusing to go from being a headline to being a person in someone's hand. I wanted to be brave and say no, to say yes, to say maybe. The truth lived in my moving feet.
Ezra found me that evening outside the library, arms full of old books. "You look like someone else's story," he said, not kindly.
"I'm reading," I said. "And you're here like you always are."
"I am leaving," he said suddenly.
"You are?" I dropped the book. "When?"
"Tomorrow," he said. "I got offered a job abroad. I leave next week."
It hit me harder than I expected. He had wanted to keep his distance, had kept his loyalty fragile and unspoken, but this was a bridge closing.
"Why didn't you tell me earlier?" I asked.
"I needed to," he admitted. "And I was selfish. I wanted to come back later and find you the kind of girl who had time to wait."
"Is that your last reason?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I want you to be happy. If you are with Arturo, then trust the man you chose."
We arranged an impossible, tender thing: one last night where we pretended to be nothing more than the people we had always been. We drove to the coast, radio and quiet and the small habits of two people who had been family for a long time. He took off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders like a map. "Keep this," he said. "If you ever decide, put this on and remember someone who will always make a soft place."
I kissed him on the cheek and then we both pretended it was not more.
When Ezra left, the campus hummed with farewell and rumor. Karter went quiet for a while, and Jaime kept saying, "You did good," the way a friend says things that try to be wise.
Arturo and I stayed honest in a way I had not practiced. He would call at noon just to say he saw a book I might like. Karter would come back into the picture like a sudden wind and ask me to DJ nights and sometimes to run away with him for an hour.
I learned a delicate art: how to choose every day. Sometimes I chose Arturo because he brought me soup when I had a fever. Sometimes I chose Karter because he taught me to move with the music. Sometimes I chose myself when I sat at the window and watched the sunset turn the campus into a fire.
Weeks later we had lunch with Jaime. He looked at me and then at Arturo and said, "You look alright together."
"Do I?" I asked, and the truth was that I did. He made dinners that fit the space between us; he showed up.
Arturo looked at me across the table and said quietly, "I know you aren't someone who trusts easily. I'm asking you for what tastes like a small thing: time and honesty."
"Done," I smiled. "One day at a time."
"It's enough," he said. "It's everything."
I still see Karter sometimes, when the club lights fuzz the world. We dance together as if no one is keeping score. He presses a kiss to my forehead once, and I return it with quick gratitude. It is soft and unruly and real in its way.
There were nights when the world smeared together and I felt small and terrible for having played at hearts. But there were mornings too, with the sunlight on the pillow and Arturo making tea, where I felt like someone learning to keep a promise.
At the end of the semester someone whispered that I was a "heartbreaker" at first, but then they started saying something else.
We had a small circle in the campus café one rainy afternoon: Jaime, Laura, me, Arturo, Karter stopping by with damp hair. A photograph of us, informal and messy, landed on the university forum. People commented for a week.
"You're who?" someone asked in a private message. "The girl who has everything."
"Not everything," I replied. "Some things."
"Like what?" the message said.
"Like a promise," I typed, and leaned over Arturo's shoulder to kiss the top of his head.
He looked over and said softly, "You made me want to be honest. You made me keep the small things."
"And you made me want a home," I said.
I do not owe anyone a trophy for being complicated or a medal for being notorious. What happened that year was a lesson.
I was many things: told, titled, watched. But in the end I learned to choose — not as a game or a headline, but in tiny daily increments. Not everyone stayed. Ezra left for a different life, but he left gentleness behind. Karter became a friend with a wild grin. Arturo stayed by choice, the slow kind who offered time instead of fireworks. Jaime and Laura laughed and rolled their eyes, forever my family.
In the end, what I learned was simple in form and complex in feeling: choosing someone every day is a kind of love, and sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.
The End
— Thank you for reading —