Sweet Romance14 min read
Spicy Chicken, Red Oil, and a Campus That Won't Let Me Be Quiet
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I never thought a plate of extra-spicy chicken would change anything — until it landed on Kenneth Avila's head.
"I can't believe you came up here," Kenneth breathes, trying to wipe the red oil from his hair. "Brielle, what are you doing?"
"I'm making you eat the chicken you told me to bring you," I say. "And I'm feeding you the truth." I set the plastic lid down as if it's a verdict.
"You can't—" he stammers, rubbing his face. The sauce drips off his jaw and splashes on the dorm floor. "This is a prank!"
"A prank?" I laugh, and the laugh is sharp. "You stood me up. Again."
"Baby, I—" His voice is soft like he wants to be forgiven.
"You told me to wait," I say, and I remember every "I'll be right there" that never came. "You said 'help me order chicken' and then you sent voice messages from your room. You think I'm stupid."
Chandler Estes, Kenneth's roommate, freezes in the stairwell. "Whoa, sis—"
"Stop calling me that," Kenneth says weakly, then he looks at me like he expects me to melt.
"Fine." I lift the carton and cap it. The steaming, red-scented steam wraps around his head like an accusation. "Fine." I press the lid down, then flip it up and pour more, because one cap down wasn't enough. The hot oil runs into his eyes and he screams.
"Ow—Brielle—" He clutches his head and slides to a knee in front of Bear Cohen.
Bear Cohen is sitting on the couch, hands on his knees, clean white shirt dotted with spots of spicy sauce where the splatter reached him. He doesn't move much. He watches me with amber eyes that feel like they can see the bones under my skin.
"Really," Chandler says, dazed. "You did that."
"Kenneth," I tell him, standing when I'm done. "You said you'd show up. You didn't. You lied so you could be comfortable in your own lies." I step closer. "You led me on because you knew I'd wait."
Kenneth sputters. "Brielle—"
"Save it," I say. I turn to Bear without thinking. "Sorry about the splatter. I'll pay for the jacket."
Bear Cohen looks at me — the whole dorm is watching, a ring of boys with wide eyes. "One thousand?" he asks, voice flat.
"One thousand," I say. "Cash." I reach into my bag and pull a folded bill, hand it to him like an apology and a challenge at once.
He snorts. "I don't want your money."
"You took sauce on purpose?" I ask him, feeling like the room has narrowed to the three of us.
"Not on purpose," Bear says. He dips his fingers into the red dots on his sleeve and wipes them, not flinching. "You're loud."
"I'm loud because I'm angry," I answer.
Kenneth tries to stand. "Brielle, don't—"
I stomp his knee so hard he goes down. "Stop making excuses," I say. "I won't be your easy target."
Around the dorm, someone starts to film. Somebody whistles. "This is viral," someone mutters. "She actually threw food."
"We should've guessed Kenneth would be a jerk," Chandler says, helping his friend up but keeping his distance. "He's always—"
"I got you for the jacket," Bear tells Chandler in that dry drawl of his that feels like a reprimand wrapped as a joke. Then he looks back at me and there is something almost like amusement in his eyes. "You're crazier than you look."
I push past them and the door slams behind me. Under my skin, something has shifted.
"You're brave," Avianna Case says that night when I finally get back to our room, her voice small in the dark. "Or stupid."
"Both," I tell her. "And tired of being played."
The next morning, the campus is already loud.
"Has anyone seen the video of Kenneth getting chicken on his head?" someone posts on the forum.
"That footage—" another comment says. "The girlfriend ran into the boys' dorm—"
"She wasn't just any girlfriend," somebody else writes. "She looks so sweet but—"
"Sweet girl punched him in the face? No way." A thousand replies roll in. My heart bangs with every ping.
And there, in the feed, a clip that is cropped and grainy: me, white dress, anger like a flare. Kenneth with red oil in his hair. Bear Cohen, stoic and still, a line of sauce like a war stripe on his cheek.
"Only one person noticed the other guy covered in sauce?" someone writes.
"Bear? The 'art guy' got splattered," another replies. "Not bad looking. Kind of like a wolf."
"Wolf and rabbit," someone adds, and a thread blossoms with nicknames and shipper speculations.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "They called us—"
"They'd ship anything," Avianna says. "Ignore it."
But I can't ignore it. I didn't plan this. I didn't plan to walk into a dorm and humiliate my common ex. Yet the video is out. It spreads faster than I can scrub my fingers clean of sauce.
At noon the forum fills with sharp little messages.
"Is the 'sweet' Brielle Bergstrom actually a tiger?"
"She looks like she'd bite."
"Bear Cohen is my art crush. What is his story?"
I freeze when I see a comment that says: "That guy in the white jacket — who's he? His glasses look nice."
Bear Cohen has a way of appearing like a photograph someone forgot to caption, then suddenly everyone is wondering who took him.
Later that day, as I walk past the basketball court, lights cast long lines across the pavement. A ball flies through the net. Someone peels off his shirt. I almost drop my phone when I see him: Bear Cohen again, white shirt dark with sauce, gold-framed glasses glinting.
He looks up. Our eyes lock.
"Don't be weird," he says, but his voice is even more casual than usual. "What, you following me?"
"No," I lie. My legs go rubbery in spite of myself.
He catches the way I look at him, and something like a grin flickers. "You're staring."
"You're the one with the red inner lining showing," I blurt, too loud.
Bear's face goes from amused to darker. "Is that what you noticed?"
I want to die. "It was a joke. Sorry."
"Keep your apologies," he says. "Come to practice or not."
"I—" I don't answer. He saunters off and his boys fall in step behind him, laconic and dangerous.
That night, the forum calls him "the gold-frame wolf." I keep thinking about the way he watched me clean sauce off his sleeve. He didn't flinch. He commented like he'd expected chaos and was only bored. The way he smiled — crooked, definite — it pulls at me like a thread.
"Why do you keep looking at his pictures?" Avianna asks when we compare forums. "He looks dangerous."
"Because he isn't pretending to be gentle," I say. "He seems honest about being dangerous."
"And you like honest," she says, smirking.
"I like someone not afraid to hurt a liar," I answer, and it sounds harsher than I mean.
Two days later, the forum explodes again. This time it isn't just a viral clip but a full-on thread. "Who is she? The white skirt girl who stormed the boys' dorm?" they ask. Someone posts Bear's art studio schedule. Someone else drops a class roster. My face blooms red on a hundred cell phones.
"I saw her in a skirt yesterday," one commenter writes. "Then I saw a black-clad version of her in the studio. Same person, different worlds."
"You mean cosplay?" another replies. "No way."
The next week, because my temper won't allow me to hide forever, I go to the boys' dorm again. Kenneth has stopped answering my texts. Chandler stares like he wants popcorn.
Bear is there, in the doorway, sleeves rolled. He says one sentence while the others gawk: "If you keep making a mess downstairs, I'll make you a deal."
"What deal?"
"You can either give me that thousand and never come near the studio again, or you can do me a favor." His voice is dry as dust.
"What favor?" I ask.
"Sit in for me at painting class tomorrow," he says. "Wear my hat, don't speak, and don't get caught."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not."
He looks at me like I'm the only moving object in a still room. His eyes are the color of old amber rain. "You'll survive a day. I mostly don't want the teacher to notice. He still thinks I go to class."
I think about Kenneth. I think about my ruined dress, my bruise of anger. I think about being tired of being hung on someone else's timetable. "Fine," I say.
"Good." He lifts one side of his mouth. "Wear grey. Don't faint."
The next day in the studio is a small war zone of quiet. I wear Bear's oversized grey jacket, his hat sliding over my eyes. Everyone pauses. A teacher's voice thunders: "Why on earth is Bear Cohen in the back today?"
"He's feeling ill," Stan Feng says quickly. Stan is Bear's curly-haired friend; he moves like he knows the precise room to occupy at the right time.
"Lower your head and paint," Bear whispers before I sit. "And don't move your hat."
My hand trembles. I pick up the brush. Colors smear. The old man teacher yells about composition and line.
"Is it just me or is Bear's posture odd?" someone mutters.
"He looks smaller," another says. "Why is he painting that way?"
I don't speak. I focus on the canvas. I copy what Bear does, because hidden under my fear there is a strange peace in the marks I make. When class ends, I slip away. The reveal in the forum after that day spawns bets: "Is Bear ill? Is he using a substitute?"
After a week of this, maybe two, I see Bear differently. At odd hours he brings tools, a spare sketchpad, a palette that's too deliberate. He watches me with a sort of guarded amusement. Every time I stare, he answers with something small and arch.
"You're here again," he says once.
"I'm leaving," I say. "Soon."
"You say that every time," he replies. "And yet you keep coming back."
One evening Bear calls me out. "Come with me," he says.
We walk to the basketball court where he was practicing before. The moon washes everything in pale light. He takes off his hat and hands it to me. "Wear this," he says simply.
"It smells like you," I say.
"Good." He jabs at my ribs. "Keep it."
He throws a small grin and then, for the first time, he looks nervous. "Tomorrow at noon the whole studio will have a group show. Come. Or don't."
"I'll come."
On the day of the group show, the campus quad is filled with students. I stand next to Bear in his grey jacket. Kenneth's face is there too, all graceless charm, looking mildly disgusted at the crowd. Then someone shoves a phone across the crowd and says, "Watch this."
A short clip plays: it is the studio security footage from two nights earlier. It shows the confrontation in the stairwell — not the way Christina Baldwin edited it — but the real sequence. The camera angle is blunt and honest: me, Chad's (Christina's) group pushing, words thrown, hands grabbing. Then the brutal shove, the angrier shove, and then — the rescue. My arm jerks, I flip, and the footage shows the man who grabbed me falling first, not me. My own voice can be heard, singing curses and fists. The audio picks up the slaps, the screaming, the sound of something breaking.
In the clip, someone shouts, "Stop! She didn't start it!" The mic picks up a voice — it's Bear. He is exactly as he was in life: slow, perhaps bored, but decisive. He steps in and the three girls stop.
On the screen, later, Christina Baldwin is shown posting doctored stills and captions. The footage plays side-by-side with Christina typing and polishing a narrative. Students who had believed her revision stare at the real clip, eyebrows raised, mouths open.
At first someone gasps. Then the crowd bursts.
"She faked it!"
"She set this up!"
"He saved her?"
Someone shoves Christina. She's beautiful and cold, her makeup perfect. Her friends scatter, faces pale. She clutches her jacket like armor. "You can't—" she begins.
Bear steps to the small stage where the show is announced and picks up the mic like a boy who knows how to silent a room. "Christina Baldwin doctored images and lied about Brielle Bergstrom," he says, voice flat. "I have the original footage. She made it look like Brielle attacked first. She did not."
The crowd murmurs into a roar. Phones are already recording. Christina's expression — first arrogant, then worried, then something like anger, and finally a small, dark crumble of panic — shifts on camera. She looks like someone unscrambling an egg.
"Christina." The dean of students is unexpectedly there. He holds up the evidence, the clips, the audio. "We will review this. I advise you to speak honestly."
"No!" Christina's veneer cracks. "He—he made me look—"
"Enough," the dean says. He points to the student body. "You tarnished someone else's name. You staged false evidence, knowing how powerful social media is. What's your defense?"
Her friends scatter. A few girls who once laughed in the stairwell step back, faces creased.
"I—" Christina's voice is small in a crowd. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant to ruin her." Bear's voice is not loud but it cuts. "You meant to ruin someone you saw as competition."
I step forward, pulses of thunder in my ears. "She came at me. I defended myself."
The dean looks at me. "You knew to record. You kept the footage."
"I did," I admit. "We have it."
The dean turns to Christina. "You will be placed on disciplinary probation. The student court will review further action. You will publish a public apology."
Christina's face is red, then pale, then made of something brittle. "I have people," she says. "My parents—"
"This is not for your parents," the dean says. "This is for our students."
A hundred phones rise up to film her reaction. A hundred voices that once cheered as she blocked me in the stairwell now whisper, and then loudly chant, "Apologize!"
Christina stumbles. "Fine," she says. "I'm sorry."
Her apology is thin and meaningless. The crowd boos. Someone shouts, "Not good enough!" Others clap. The same students who once smiled at her now turn away like the sun.
Bear doesn't gloat. He remains there, palms warm on the mic. He says, "Truth matters. Don't ruin someone for attention."
Christina's friends whisper to her, but the board of student judges and the dean make notes. It's public. It's humiliating. She had wanted to be noticed; now she is noticed for being small and cruel.
After the announcement, many students crowd around me like a tide. Someone shoves a bottle of water into my hand.
"Are you okay?" a freshman asks.
"I am," I say. "I'm tired."
Later, forums fill with apologies and with ugly comments that get erased. The tide reverses in hours. The post that once painted me as the attacker becomes the thread where Christina is questioned. People write, "Sorry, Brielle." Strangers send me messages. Bear sends one line: "We did it."
I answer: "You did most of it."
He replies: "You stood up. I just pressed play."
The humiliation for Christina is... public, messy, and complete. It lasts longer than any one assembly. Her followers turn on her, the threads are merciless, the administration sends a formal notice to all that false evidence will be severely punished. A few of her supporters quietly unfriend her online. That night, a hundred students step into the studio to tell their own versions of things they'd seen and heard.
But the school is merciful in procedure. This is not the sort of spectacle that ends in a single scene. Yet there is a scene — the punishment scene — that I will not forget.
It is the student tribunal in the auditorium. Christina Baldwin sits on the small stage facing a packed house. The judge — the school's appointed ethics officer — reads the charges. Each charge is precise: fabrication, malicious defamation, harassment. He plays the original security footage for the entire hall. Everyone watches a cold loop of moment-by-moment evidence.
As the video ends, a hush like a held breath falls over everyone.
"Do you have anything to say?" the judge asks Christina.
She stands, buttoning and unbuttoning a borrowed blazer like armor.
"I..." she begins, and for a moment she seems to look as if she'll break into a confession. Instead, her face hardens. "I made a mistake," she says. "I panicked."
"But you didn't stop there," the judge says. "You crafted a lie, altered images, and posted them across forums to destroy someone's reputation."
"I didn't know..." Christina whispers. "People told me how fragile reputations are. I wanted him, and she—"
"Enough." The judge puts down the tablet. "Students, we will not let a few malicious posts dictate our community standards. Christina Baldwin, you are suspended with probation. You are to write a public apology and each week for the next month you will do community service under student oversight. You will post your progress."
"Please," Christina says. She sounds small. "I'll—I'll comply."
"Do you understand that your actions have consequences?" the judge asks.
"Yes."
"And do you understand the difference between remorse and manipulation?"
Christina cannot meet the judge's eye. "Yes."
The crowd watches her. A couple of students stand up and say things: "We trusted you," "We followed you," "We were wrong." Their words are direct, a cascade of public judgment. Christina's face crumbles under it. She goes from defiant to shaky to broken. By the time she is escorted out, a small group of students has surrounded her and the whispering is not friendly. She begs, she denies, she reasons. Her friends look away. Cameras capture it all. The humiliation is not solitary; it is a public falling-out.
Outside the hall, people record, and the video spreads. But it's different now. The narrative flips. People watch and say, "She did that?"
The punishment is not revenge. It is a consequence: public, undeniable, and corrective. Christina's circle of influence fractures. She is still a person with a family and a hurt; but the truth is now in motion and she is forced to reconcile with what she did, one student reprimand and a thousand judgmental stares at a time.
And Kenneth? He had his moment that first night covered in sauce, but that wasn't enough for the campus appetite. Because he had played me, there was an expectation of public price.
A week after the dorm incident, the administration calls for a simple meeting. Kenneth is named in the minutes as "unreliable in social commitments and as a figure who allowed manipulation of romantic expectations." It sounds clinical. But in the student dining hall, there is a louder scene.
At a midday event, a group performing a skit reenacts common campus behaviors. Someone casts an actor — Kenneth’s roommate, Chandler — as "The Promised Boy." The actor mime-acts reading a message, says, "Hey baby, help me order chicken," then looks up, embarrassed. The audience laughs because they remember the video. Suddenly the host calls costume-actor Kenneth on stage. "Kenneth Avila?" he asks, voice bright with satire. Kenneth flushes.
"Step forward," the host says. A microphone is thrust into Kenneth's hand. He fumbles. The crowd cheers: "Tell us why you ghost people!"
Kenneth, cornered on a stage like an exposed insect, tries to claim it's a joke, a misunderstanding. He tells a clumsy apology into the mic. Some students boo. Some clap. A few say, "Good, he finally apologizes." The whole event is messy — satire turned public chastening. "You can't treat people like props," a student cries. "This is our community. Treat each other better."
They pass a paper. People write short sentences: "Don't string people along." "Respect people's time." Kenneth's signature on the public sheet is small and quick. He looks humiliated. He apologizes again. Kenneth is left standing on stage with sauce still dried in the creases of his hair and a thousand phones pointed at him. He tries to joke but the laughter is brittle.
For Kenneth, the punishment is not court or detention. It's the slow social unspooling. Friends who once smiled at him at parties keep a measured distance. Girls who once considered being "Kenneth's" girl now look away. The fraternity downstairs seats him awkwardly at a table but the spark is gone. At the next party, no one introduces their partners to him like they used to. It's a quiet erosion.
He feels the heat of it. "Why's everyone cold to me?" he asks me once, eyes ringed and weaker than I'd ever seen.
"Maybe because you played with people," I answer. "Maybe because you thought your words were safe."
He looks away and for once I pity him. Pity and anger are strange roommates in my chest.
Bear is not cruel. He doesn't gloat over Kenneth. He simply exists like a constant answer: steady, patient, slow at revealing himself. He helps me pick up broken things, brings me extra palette knives, and teaches me to shade a cheekbone.
One late night, Bear hands me a cigarette and then immediately snatches it away, smirking. "No," he says. "Bad example."
"Thanks," I say. "For the apology thing and the rest." I lean against a mural and he leans too, shoulders almost touching. "You didn't have to intervene."
"I wanted to," he says. "You didn't deserve to be targeted. People like that only do those things when they think you won't fight back."
"I did fight back," I say. "But you...you did the rest."
He moves closer, voice suddenly softer. "We did it together."
My phone chimes. It's a message from Harrison Burke: "Your father called. Be careful. Your father was upset." The message is simple and typical.
"I should go talk to my father," I say, thinking of the call that followed after the forum burned and how my father's shadow loomed larger. "He—"
"Is your father hard to please?" Bear asks, as if he knows the answer before I say it.
"Yes," I answer. "And he's in his way. He thinks shelter solves everything."
Bear watches me for a long moment. "If he tries to keep you isolated again, take me with you," he says.
"Take you where?" I ask, and his face does that strange half-smile that makes something raw and merciful trickle down into me.
"Anywhere," he says. "There's a difference between shelter and prison." He taps my temple. "I'll help you open a window."
The days become a strange blend of studio hours and stolen nights. Bear and I find a rhythm. I fill in his classes; he surprises me with presents — a carefully glued hairpin he made because he noticed I loved it. We ride his motorcycle to watch dumb little sunsets. He teaches me how to hold a brush like a weapon and a lover.
One night, after we'd fixed the broken social thread and Christina had public consequences and Kenneth had learned the cost of cheap promises, Bear takes my hand.
"Will you try being mine?" he asks, low.
My mouth opens into a laugh that is equal parts surprise and yes. "Are you offering a contract?"
"A lifetime," he says, straight-faced, then cracks. "Plus a refund if you don't like it."
"I'll risk it," I tell him.
He closes his fingers over mine like a promise being sealed.
We kiss in a messy way, with the taste of hot sauce and paint still clinging to our lips. The campus watches, the forum sighs, and I finally feel like I am no longer waiting for someone who didn't care to arrive. I am walking, hand in hand, with someone who will.
The End
— Thank you for reading —