Sweet Romance16 min read
Second Chances, Lighter Flames, and a Tattoo
ButterPicks14 views
I never planned to be brave. I planned to survive. That was the difference.
"You smell like smoke," Bram Luna said the first time I tried to comfort him.
"Good," I answered, because lying was easier than explaining. "Someone's gotta be worse off than me."
He stared at me the way frost stares at a winter river — cold, sharp, and as if any warmth was an insult. He had a wheelchair then, a halo of pity around him, and the look told me to keep it at arm's length.
"Move," he said, and kicked the tray I'd set down. "Go."
He could be blunt. He could be vicious. He could also bite my wrist so hard my skin split and I still wouldn't run. Because I owed him a life.
"I told you to bite me if it hurts," I said in the ambulance months later, when his teeth found the soft place on my skin. "Not the other way around."
He laughed like he was surprised by tender rules. "You're weird."
I had learned weird. I had learned to laugh at things other girls cried over, to wear the scarred hem of my skirt like an armoured flag. I had been pushed to edges and dragged back, over and over. Once I died. Twice I died. Each time, I woke up days earlier, before the kidnapping that started it all.
The first loop always begins the same: I'm in a damp room with just a sliver of light, and I don't know the year. People speak in low voices as if the walls can hear. After three days of darkness, I escaped once. I came back to school, expecting comfort. Instead I found hunger.
"She came out of the basement like it was nothing," Arlo Dietrich said, loud enough for three people to hear in Geography. "All smug, all scars, then acts like she's a victim."
"She asked for it with that skirt," another voice said. The chorus grew like a tide.
"Do you hear yourself?" I had whispered it to myself in the shower so many times my throat had paper in it. I had nothing left but stubborn breath.
I blew my smoke on the rooftop and told myself stories until lung pain anchored me. Did I deserve to survive? Was I owed anything? I always found the answer: I was owed nothing — except a chance to stop this repeating.
Then the concrete under my foot crumbled. I remember the lighter falling from my fingers and the sky tilting like a page torn.
The rumor afterward was that I missed. The rumor afterward was that no one was supposed to die. But there are facts I can't escape: I fell. A man on the street below was crushed by my body and by chance, by the path I took down — a wheelchair toppled, and a boy named Bram Luna slammed against fate. He bled. He died in one loop. In the loop before this one, it was worse: he made it to the ICU and I made them pronounce him gone. I remember his face smiling at me from a dreamscape I had carved with my guilt.
"I didn't kill you, did I?" I asked him, hands trembling as the monitors sang somewhere behind me when we first met in the second, living loop.
"You did," he said, with that same coldness. "Then you came to hold me while I bled. I'm not sure if that's mercy."
"You were in my way."
"You're dramatic." He pressed his face away, then bit my wrist so hard I tasted metal and he tasted my name.
I learned what the loops wanted: change. Not just mine. The future wanted to be edited.
"You should go back to your boyfriend," Bram snapped a week after the accident, once he stopped throwing objects at me.
"I dumped him." I liked the truest lies. "You'd be happier without me."
He glared as if I'd stolen his air. "Good."
"You're terrible at gratitude," I told him the night he couldn't sleep. He shook, not because of the leg pain but because his world had been peeled open.
"Get away," he said.
So I did. I left and lit a cigarette on the roof because the dizziness in my head from living was less than the dizziness from all the pity. And I slipped.
When I woke up the first time on the floor of the basement, the loop reset again. Every time I or he died, I bounced back to that stretch of days when everything could be rewired. I learned how he liked his sandwiches: peanut butter if he'd had a bad day, because it grounded him. I learned he hated pity, loved basketball, and always looked at the sky like he wanted to throw himself into the light.
"You keep showing up," Bram told me one afternoon in the hospital corridor.
"I'm your shadow," I said. "The one that won't stop following you."
He snorted. "Lucky me."
Between the loops I did three things: I healed, I learned, and I loved the small rebellions that made him flinch and then melt. There were small victories that stacked like bricks. I pushed a basketball into his lap once and he laughed like a kid — the sound was so rare I kept it. I brewed coffee when his IV pole kept him awake. I turned off lights he couldn't reach. I learned how to change dressings. I learned the way he said my name in the dark: "Lois?"
"Yes?"
"Don't leave me."
That line silenced me every time.
The school had a cruel rhythm. Girls whispered, teachers looked away, exes turned their backs. Arlo tried to cover his distance with a camouflage of concern and a demand that I stop "making our lives difficult." My mother, Giselle Hartmann, scraped the wound open whenever possible, calling me names in front of friends, trading me like a shameful item. She invited men into our house like seasons change — briefly, loudly, and then gone. One of them, Everett Barbieri, sent messages that made my skin crawl. Elena Garza, my so-called best friend, smiled at me and then plotted like a house cat.
"You always exaggerate," Elena told me once. "It's how you get attention."
"You called me 'a liar' in front of half the cafeteria." I said it like a payment due. "You pushed me down stairs."
She blinked, then grinned. "Self-defense."
"You call me fat," a boy would say. "You call me easy." Others parroted it. The classroom became a courtroom where I had no lawyer. I kept my head down and my hands busy. I wrote notes for Bram about the way a tendon would heal. I bought cheap tattoos to feel like I owned my skin. One night we both got matching things inked on our wrists: my line said "Lois — No Regrets." His said "Bram — Always Forward." It was ridiculous. It was ours.
"Promise me you won't be stupid," Bram said when he first held my hand.
"Promise me you won't leave," I answered.
He laughed, then kissed the back of my hand.
The gang incident was a turning point. For weeks there had been rumors about Forrest Buckner and his friends — a boy group who smelled of bad decisions and worse tattoos. They cornered Bram and me at the edge of the field, their shoes scraping like wolves.
"Hey, pretty," Forrest mocked, "why are you with a cripple?"
"Shut up," Bram said. "We don't want trouble."
"Forrest," I said quickly, playing naïve, "we're not looking for a fight. Run along. There's pizza and things to eat."
"Forrest wants a better show," one of his boys hissed.
They flipped Bram's wheelchair. He fell, the metal shrieking, and hands grabbed. They were fun when they were watching. They wanted something more than spectacle: they wanted power. They wanted a story to tell. I stood like a statue; I was not brave enough. But Bram — something in him was a hard jewel. He took blows without flinching, and when his face bled and his pride cracked, something in the crowd shifted.
I did the stupid thing. I picked up a bench and swung. The scene blurred into noise. Someone sent a fist into Forrest's jaw and then another and another. The crowd screamed. A boy's phone filmed the whole thing. Bram — bleeding — rose like a man who hadn't finished his script. I had never felt such fierce heat of protection in me. That night we both learned the shape of being someone's worth.
Things changed after that. A seed of rumor turned into an avalanche. Elena started to look over her shoulder. Everett Barbieri's messages were exposed — a leaked conversation made the rounds, and he hissed lies. My mother sputtered like a broken motor and begged for privacy she hadn't afforded me. The world did that dramatic thing where it could not stay still; it had momentum now.
We decided to fight back. But to punish them in a way that would stick — and public — we had to be smarter than the crowd. I had been cruelly good at planning since the loops taught me strategy.
The punishment had to be public. It had to be thorough. It could not be a private apology. It had to strip the arrogance that makes predators safe among other people.
The day came like a razor.
"You'll be alright with this plan?" Bram asked, eyes soft as wool.
"I've waited my whole life for this," I said. "I've rehearsed words when I was bored in detention. Let's go humiliate them."
We picked the school assembly. The auditorium would be full — teachers, parents, camera crews — because our school loved big shows. I walked in with Bram on my arm, rolling because his leg still gave him fits. My lighter — the same one I dropped the first time I slipped — was tucked into my pocket like an old friend. On my arm, my wrist said "Lois — No Regrets." On his, "Bram — Always Forward." That was our signature.
I stepped to the microphone.
"Good morning," I said, and the room quieted. I had thousands of words rehearsed, but I only needed three. "This is about truth."
"She's going to call you a liar," someone hissed in the back. Elena's laugh scraped my ears like broken glass.
"One by one," I said. "Names, details, witnesses."
The auditorium held its breath. Elena sat berry-red-cheeked, faking innocence. Everett Barbieri, leaning on Giselle like a badge of public success, smiled like a man who has never had to apologize.
"I will read the messages," I said. "I will show the photos. I will tell the story."
I read Everett's messages aloud. The words were small and filthy. He had used jokes and 'gifts' as bait. As the sentences left my lips, faces in the room turned. Some hid their hands like children who had seen a grown man pinch. Everett's faces drained color; Giselle's eyes flicked away as if she could melt into the stage.
"Everett Barbieri contacted me, asked for pictures, promised favors, called me 'pretty hip to older tastes' in a message. He offered to help me with my mom if I 'kept quiet.' He bought my silence with promises." The auditorium was hot and the silence was heavy.
He stood. "This is slander," he said, voice a thin rope.
"Watch." I tapped my phone and played a recorded voicemail where his voice sounded like a snake. The sound echoed. People gasped.
"It was a consensual conversation," Everett spat. "I—"
"You emailed me the offer to 'sponsor' my studies if I was 'compliant,'" I said. I had thought about the exact words for weeks. They landed with the weight of proof. "You were preying on a child."
The room filled with the sound of whispers and the click of phones capturing his face.
Elena's punishment was worse because she hadn't only lied. She had pushed me down the staircase and boasted about how it "cleaned the classroom." Her betrayal had the sting of intimacy; a friend had weaponized a normal thing. I had the security footage. I had the messages she sent to her father, who had cheered her on.
"Elena Garza pushed me," I announced. "She told her father, Hugo Burt, that 'something must be done' because I was a problem. I have CCTV. I have witnesses. Elena, you pretended to grieve with me when I was in hospital; you plotted dominion over my life behind my back."
The auditorium whispered. Elena's face crumpled and twisted through stages: first disbelief, then anger, then a slow, petulant denial. "You're lying," she wailed.
I held up the footage. The screen showed a stairwell and a small blond head moving like a puppet. Elena's hand shoved mine. The camera angle was clinical, merciless. There wasn't space for performance now.
At that moment the principal took the microphone and called for Elena to step forward. Her father sat in the front row, mouth open like a child in a dream. All of them looked warmed by an arrogance that thirsted for privacy.
"Elena," the principal said, voice hollow with disappointment, "explain yourself."
Elena tried to explain. Her words were a terrified tangle. She denied ownership. "It was an accident," she said. "I only touched her. She makes everything about herself."
"You're protecting your choices," some girl in the audience yelled. "Is that better than owning what you did?"
Her father started to stand, to protest, then froze when the screen showed a message he'd sent encouraging her to 'make trouble for Lois' because 'it would be easier to get the house if people blamed her.' He had encouraged scapegoating; his corruption was now visible.
The crowd's reaction was a slow wave and then a crash. Parents shifted in their seats; teachers looked like they had swallowed stones. Some students recorded parts of the footage with their phones, and the shared recording already started to creep into the school's social feed.
Elena's face changed — the bravado she had worn so carefully was stripped by the public. She went from insolent to flailing, to a trembling plea. "Please!" she screamed. "Please don't ruin me!"
"How does it feel when your so-called best friend tells people you were asking for it?" I asked, voice flat. "When your father uses violence to hide your falsehood?"
Now she shook. The audience closed in with looks — disappointment, contempt, anger, and at least one steady gaze of pity. Her privilege became a device for her undoing: she had no armor against a live screen, public shame, and piles of evidence.
There was a sound like a small avalanche when a parent from the audience stood and slapped Elena's father on the back. "You raised a liar," he said. "You pushed for her to do this. You taught her cruelty."
The crowd applauded — not for me, but for the balance restored. Elena's reaction moved through stages I had been told to expect: denial, then pleading, then self-preservation. She finally crumpled into tears, the kind people make when they realize no one will pull them out of their mess. Children make mistakes; adults must face them.
But that was not all.
Outside the assembly, as cameras and phones recorded, Everett's company revoked his access to the gala fund he had boasted about. The board sent him a notice in front of dozens of witnesses. He tried to argue, but the board members — who had seen the message — put forms on the table that could not be ignored. He lost a job, a reputation, and influence that day. People who had been willing to keep secrets suddenly would not.
Elena and her father faced school discipline, community service, and an internal investigation. The man who had whispered to me in the dark was exposed, shamed, and publicly humiliated with his messages read on the stage. He begged for forgiveness. No one clapped.
"What do you want?" Bram asked me when we left the hall. He was quiet, and his fingers found mine with an unfamiliar care.
"To be safe," I said. "To survive. To stop the loops from running."
He looked at me as if the world had shifted a fraction of an inch. "We did it."
"We didn't only punish them," I said. "We made sure no one could treat that behavior like a joke again. That is public. That is irreversible."
He kissed my forehead. "You are terrifying when you plan."
"I'm afraid when I don't."
The punishment was varied and real. Elena had to give a public apology; her father's company barred him from any youth-oriented roles; Everett Barbieri lost access to charities, held a press conference where he apologized with visible shame, and then faced a civil suit I helped file — evidence, witness lists, and recordings supplied. The audience watched the sequence play out on social media for days. The replies were savage, the comments full of disgust, and the people who had protected predators now had to answer. That public shaming was different for each person: Elena's public academic probation, her father's career setback, Everett's social irrelevance. Each punishment was tailored to the offense and hammered home in front of witnesses.
There was a long, ugly moment when Elena tried to kneel and beg — a performance only a vain person could stage. At first she was met with disdain. Then, someone whispered, "Stand up. Face it. You hit her. Apologize like a human."
She did. The apology was shaky and thin, but she said the words. The crowd watched her climb down from the pedestal she'd made of herself and saw a child exposed. People filmed her confession. Parents began conversations at dinner tables, asking their children about consent and cruelty. Teachers called staff meetings. The school's counselor schedule doubled. The ripple became policy. That was the most satisfying part: consequences that lasted beyond the applause.
And then, because this is life and because the universe sometimes balances itself with both mercy and fire, the person who had kidnapped me — a man connected to a dead patient of my dad — was arrested when a former accomplice confessed after seeing the videos and the town's outrage. He had thought his crimes could be hidden in private. He thought wrong. The police marched him out in cuffs during a press conference. His face lost its color in front of cameras and neighbors. He tried to scream. People recorded his disgrace and the video spread. That was punishment too: a man who had kidnapped a girl and hurt many was brought out into the open. He looked small under the lights. He looked like a broken criminal. The family of the dead patient who had once harbored him now stood in silence, ugly and ashamed.
The punishments were different: public humiliation, job loss, social exile, criminal charges. And watching the humbled faces of my former persecutors was a ritual we had needed. Bram watched me, his gaze steady. He squeezed my hand. "You did it," he said.
"We did it," I corrected.
After that storm, something shifted. People who had turned their backs — in pain or in cowardice — had to look at their choices. The school provided support. My mother, Giselle, had to accept the glare of public opinion; she had to explain why she'd allowed men like Everett into the house. Her eyes were red and hard to meet, and for the first time she seemed smaller. She tried to bargain for privacy. I sent her a text: "You woke me. You can fix this by being honest." She read it, then put her head in her hands. There is no dramatic overnight repentance, but there was a crack in the armour. It was enough to let a little light in.
After the public scenes simmered down, Bram and I returned to the quieter battles: homework, therapy, and waiting for his leg to improve. We studied together, graded each other's wrongs, and laughed when the math got unbearable. He would tease me and then, in the middle of a problem, stop and put his forehead against mine as if to remind us both of the world that still existed outside of sunlit punishments.
"I don't want to be a man who only protects," he told me one night. "I want to be someone who builds."
"Who builds what?"
"Everything." He squeezed my hand. "A life."
I wanted that too. I wanted to quit the loops. I wanted one life that remained steady. We worked to make it so.
The loops stopped, not because we performed ritual sacrifices, but because we finished learning what they demanded of us. Bram survived each near-death. I survived each humiliation and each fall. We gave the world witnesses and evidence; we made our pain public and, in the chaos, we carved out a future.
We kept small things that mattered. The lighter I had dropped years ago I found in a drawer once we were safe. I still smoked sometimes — a terrible habit I never quite left — and he would take it from me and ask me to sit. He liked to light it for me once in a while, because the tiny flame looked like an anniversary we had survived.
We both kept the tattoos. They were just ink, but we glanced at them like two people who shared a secret language. Our wrists read our promises: mine, a short line — "Lois — No Regrets"; his — "Bram — Always Forward." We pressed them together like a vow.
There were ordinary pleasures. I learned that Bram could, sometimes, make my coffee just right. He discovered that I liked rain and that rain made math problems easier to chew. We marked the days with little things: a second-place stamp he got me after a stupid race where I finished breathless and proud; a night where I climbed into his lap in the wheelchair and refused to get down. We called those moments "small victories" and hoarded them like coins.
People change slowly, but the world we built was enough. I started to imagine a life where the loops never returned. I pictured walking into my twentieth year with less fear and more appetite.
Then came the night before my eighteenth birthday. I was going to light a candle and wish for nothing in particular. Bram called.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"On the roof," I said.
"Come down," he pleaded. "I want to see the moon with you."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because once, I thought I could live without you. Now I know I can't." He was quiet for a second. "Also, my dad is arriving from abroad. He promised to bring me something." His voice sounded like rain. "I want you to be the first to see if I can take it."
"I'll be there."
We sat on the roof and watched the moon be stubbornly whole. He squeezed my fingers in the dark. I was tempted to promise him forever, but I kept it simpler.
"Stay," I said.
"I will."
That became our truth. He didn't make grand vows in language dressed up to impress. He made them by showing up. He made them by braving the world with a bandaged leg and by reading my messy notes and by teaching me how to study.
We had days of weakness. I had days when my mother called and begged me to move back. I refused. I stayed with my father, Duncan Rinaldi, who had been at the center of his own storm — the surgery scandal, the indictments, the internet hate. He had come home broken and human. He learned to write simpler notes and leave them around the fridge. He learned to keep dinners on the table. I learned to answer him less cynically and, sometimes, to hug till we both stopped being afraid.
"So this is happiness?" Bram asked one night when we were back home, warm from dinner and wrapped in shared blankets.
"No," I said. "This is practice. Happiness is harder. But we can make practice enough."
He kissed my wrist, where the tattoo read "Lois — No Regrets." "You keep your promises," he murmured.
"I keep them because you keep yours," I told him.
Years are not kind always. They make mistakes and they move on. But in the quiet evenings, when the world had been tamed enough to hold the two of us, he would pull me close and whisper something like, "Second place stamp," or "lighter flame," and we would laugh because those small things belonged only to us.
One evening, when the sky had that thin blue that hinted at rain and the city lights reflected like small currencies, he said something that felt like a bell.
"Lois," he said, "when I took off my pride and let you be my anchor, did you ever think I'd be the one to ask you something I was ashamed to ask?"
"What?" I asked.
"Will you — in six months — come with me when I go to the next surgery, the next therapy? Will you take your lighter and light a candle for me in the waiting room?"
I thought about the loops and the stairs and the many nights of shouting and the many small victories. I thought about littleness and the way love grows acne and scars and beauty.
"Yes," I said. "I will be there. I will light twelve candles if you want."
He kissed me like the man I had seen throw a basket and like the boy who had let me fall and then caught me, arbitrarily, against his heat.
In the end, I discovered the loop didn't want me to play god. It wanted me to learn to be human. It wanted Bram and me to learn that saving each other is messy work, that public justice can be the sharp edge that breaks a cycle, and that love is the warm, inconvenient thing you keep choosing even when you are tired.
On the day we finally closed the cycle, we tattooed our wrists again, small and foolish, but with intent. We kept the lighter in the same drawer where I had found it the first time. We framed the second-place ribbon in a scrap book. We kept the recordings of the messages as evidence in a folder called "Never Again." We ate burnt toast and spilled coffee and laughed at how awful we both were at being adults.
Once, after a storm, as the sunlight poured through the kitchen and dust looked like tiny planets drifting, Bram took my hand. "Promise," he said simply.
"Promise," I repeated.
We had known long ago that the future is not mercy. It is work. It is the steady turning towards someone else's pain and the choice to press a bandage, to speak up, to make wrongs right in public when necessary. We had learned to be loud and quiet, fierce and forgiving.
When I eventually turned twenty-one and Bram showed up with a paper box tied in ribbon — his father smiling in the background — he winked and said, "Open it."
Inside was nothing rich. Inside was a new lighter, bright red, with the words engraved: "Light for Lois."
I laughed, and when I put the small flame to a candle, Bram's face warmed in the same way every true thing had warmed me across all the loops: like a light that refuses to burn out.
The End
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