Sweet Romance15 min read
Spicy Chicken, Red Oil, and the Quiet Bully
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I still remember the way the chili oil bled down his forehead like a flag.
"Why did you bring that here?" Hugh Cline said, voice sliding between surprise and apology on the phone. "Fin— I'm busy. Come back."
"Busy?" I said. My fingers tightened on the plastic fork. "You told me to wait at the park."
"Baby, help me order a bucket of chicken," he said, then clicked the call into voice message.
Three hours later, my phone had a string of "Sorry I'm away" texts, and the park lights had blinked awake one by one around my bench. I had been hungry, I had been patient, and I had been stupid.
The fried chicken felt hotter for the way my impatience had boiled into rage. I didn't plan the rest. I only remember the stairs to dorm 303, the deli woman yelling that I couldn't take food into the men's building, Oleg Roussel laughing at the doorway, and me walking on like I belonged there.
"Whoa—whoa," Oleg laughed, voice bright with alarm. "Sister-in-law? Why are you here?"
"I'm delivering his chicken," I said, and the words felt like glass.
"Hugh's lucky," Oleg said, like he'd been rehearsing a compliment.
"His luck's about to run out," I said.
I kicked the door.
Everyone froze. The men inside probably expected another rumor, another midnight prank. Hugh—Hugh crouched by the table, his teammates mid-roughhousing, and when he saw me he looked confused as a child who'd been caught stealing cookies.
"What are you—Finley?" Hugh blinked, the chicken box in my hands hovering between us.
"I brought your fried chicken," I said, and then I did what my heat and I decided was dramatic and final. I dumped the entire platter of the spiciest chicken I could get from the deli onto his head.
Red oil streamed down his scalp. A potato slid into his collar. A strip of chicken cartilage stuck to his eyebrow. He sputtered, blind and furious. Someone rushed with a towel. For a second Hugh was a flailing red mess and the room was one sharp, stunned sound.
"You're—" Hugh's glare could have cut glass. "Finley—what are you doing?"
"You are supposed to be my boyfriend," I said, voice shaking. "Do you know how many hours I waited? Do you know how many times you asked me to order you chicken and then ignored me?"
Hugh reached out like he wanted to do something gentle, but I was moving faster than his gentleness.
"Stop it," someone said behind me. A pair of amber eyes under gold-framed glasses lowered from I-don't-know-where to my knees.
The boy who someone would later call "campus bully"—Gideon Schultz—was leaning against the window sill. He had been splashed with red spots from the spill, but he wasn't flailing; he was a study in quiet. His white jacket was dotted with chili like a constellation and his glasses sat crooked on his nose. For a second I thought he looked like trouble in a very handsome coat.
"I'll pay a thousand," I blurted to Gideon before I could think. "I'll pay for your jacket."
Gideon looked at me, one eyebrow only slightly raised. He had that slow smile like someone solving a riddle. "A thousand?" he said. "You're very dramatic."
Hugh scrambled up to seize me by the arm. I turned and kicked him in the shin. He toppled, more humiliating than the sauce ever was.
"Touch me again and I'll ruin you," I said, because fury had schooled my voice and kept it pointed.
People at 303 watched, half laughter, half awe. Someone took a video because everything gets remembered now in pixels. I walked out and left them with the smell of chili.
That night the campus forum lit up.
"Did you see? Hugh Cline had fried chicken dumped on him!"
"Who is this Finley? Is she the soft little girlfriend?"
"Look at the clip. It's brutal. And—wait—who's that guy in the white jacket? He's soaked in red. He's like... a painting."
They were naming people, guessing, laughing. That was how rumor started and how it multiplied. Someone saw the man with the gold frames and called him "the bully with the smile." I learned his name later—Gideon Schultz—and I learned how many stories fit into the space of one viral clip.
The forum comments stung. A nickname stuck to me overnight: "the rabbit who bites." People who never saw me in class suddenly had opinions about my character.
Antonia Coleman, my roommate, came back to find me with my hands trembling. "You really did it," she said. "You actually stormed the male dorm and threw food on Hugh."
"He kept saying 'I'll be there' and then he left a voice message asking for more fried chicken," I said. "I had to make a point."
"Fin," Antonia said. "You have to stay low. The so-called bully—Gideon—he's not someone to mess with."
Great. Now I had a bruised ego, a viral video, and a campus terror named in the comments.
For two days I hid. I ordered less, read less, and slept less. Then hunger betrayed me. I walked near the basketball court where boys were laughing; someone sank a three-pointer and the crowd cheered. A flash of red at the waist caught me out of habit. He turned—Gideon—amber eyes, gold-framed glasses, and a red waistband rim showing like a flag when he lifted his shirt.
He saw me staring. "Not playing?" one of his friends yelled.
"Don't," he said coolly, then he walked over to me and asked in a voice that made my stomach drop, "You okay?"
"I—" I couldn't say anything. My voice was a thread.
"Finley Rizzo," he said slowly. He said my name as if checking its shape. "You owe ten thousand?"
I choked on my laugh. "I owe nothing."
"You owe me class attendance."
"I—"
He looked like he decided something in the time it takes to blink. "You can sit in for me," Gideon said. "Tomorrow. My painting class."
"Wait, what?" I said, and I don't know why my answer slid out of me like a pebble. "You want me to replace you?"
Gideon glanced at me over his glasses like a teacher looking at a mischievous student. "You can borrow my clothes. Don't mess it up."
I did not know how to draw. I did not know how to be a boy. Gideon shrugged, tilted his chin, and left a list with Arlo Winkler, his curly-haired friend, who would explain the rest.
That night I walked four routes in my head. I told Antonia in whispers that I would go. "You can't be serious," she said. "You know nothing about art."
"Neither does he when he misses class," I said. "If he wants to skip, it's fair."
The next day I wore Gideon's large gray jacket and his cap. I sat in the back of the studio, an impostor in paint, and someone whispered, "Is that him?" followed by, "No—it's a girl." I felt my face burn. The teacher's slow, sleepy gaze landed on me.
"Arlo," the teacher asked, "Is your classmate okay today?"
Arlo, perched on the edge of an easel, cleared his throat. "Mr. Cole, Gideon had a back thing. I told you."
The teacher's eyebrows lowered. "A back thing? Very well."
My chest became a drum in my ribs. I couldn't draw a straight line, couldn't tell charcoal from despair. But Gideon's tools were neat. A folder was waiting. He had left me sketches and a careful patchwork of shortcuts that made the work look like a studio success.
When the class emptied, I slipped out, half laughing, half terrified. Gideon was in the doorway with the amber eyes and the glasses and—horribly—paint on his thumb. He looked at me and said, "You did better than expected."
"That's... you did some of it," I whispered.
"Some of it," he echoed. "You're good at pretending."
Then, his voice softened like something I could not name. "Hurry up. Go change back before anyone recognizes you."
We moved like two actors in a play that had not agreed on lines. But the more time I spent in his jacket, the more I noticed things: the scent of his aftershave, the way his fingers handled brushes, the way his smile shifted when he thought of jokes or art. He was cruel in small jokes and kind in smaller ones. He offended the world with a look but spared it with a touch.
Rumors multiplied. The forum lit up with staged photos—someone had caught us in hallways, people whispered that we were a scandal, that a "sweet soft girlfriend" and a "campus bully" were an unlikely pair.
And then—because stories like these like to crack open the ground—the real trouble began.
Karsyn Fleming posted a set of black-and-white photos in the middle of the night. Her caption was a slow poison: "Some people have teeth and wear them on their hands. Be careful." The pictures were precise, cropped to a cruel angle, and they told a lie. I looked at one: a close shot of me with my hand somehow across Karsyn's chest, my face a mask of anger. The angle was chosen to make me look violent and monstrous.
She wrote a story beneath the images about how I ambushed her, how I scratched and tore her clothes and how she had been left covered in bruises. She used the forum audience like a courtroom.
The campus turned. Comments boiled to a roar.
"She looks like a bully."
"How could she do this to a girl?"
"Isn't she the one who dumped chicken on Hugh?"
I called Arlo, hands shaking. "We had camera footage!" I said. "Carried a camera. We recorded. It—"
"The camera," Arlo said, "was there. But they only posted photos. The angles were false. We need to show the full video."
"Do it," I begged.
But Karsyn's post had a push. People had their minds made; people loved a scandal.
Gideon didn't post at first. He watched like someone watching a match he would step into. Then he did something unexpectedly public: he opened his laptop in the middle of the studio and began to edit.
"Are you going to defend me?" I asked, half stupid with disbelief.
"Yes," he said.
He arranged the frames, synchronized the audio, and found the real film—raw footage from my and Antonia's camera. It captured the moment Karsyn launched, the shove that was self-defense, the sound that proved intent. Gideon then took Karsyn's black-and-white pictures and overlaid them with the timestamped footage: the black-and-white images were a crop of a frame taken after Karsyn planted herself and staged the shot.
Gideon uploaded it with a single line: "Truth has more frames. Watch this."
It blew up. People watched the full clip. The narrative flipped.
Karsyn's phone began to ring. Her followers, their likes, and their outrage began to flutter away like spent birds. In the cafeteria the next day, four hundred students watched the clip on a projected screen someone had set up. Karsyn stood before them in a rumpled designer jacket. She had expected applause for her posted images; she faced instead a room that was watching her like a mirror.
"Why did you post those photos?" someone called.
"You can't—" Karsyn started, eyes glinting with anger.
Gideon stepped forward. Up close he was quieter than his screen presence. The studio's light struck his cheekbones. "Explain," he said.
"What do you mean 'explain'?" Karsyn spat. "They saw what they saw."
"People saw edited frames," Gideon said. "You cut them to fit a story. We have the full video. They can see."
"No one forced you to post," someone else cried. "We're tired of liars."
Karsyn did the motion of accusing me. "She attacked me!"
"I pushed you away because you lunged at Finley," Antonia said, voice steady. She was there, and so were Arlo, Oleg, and others who had the footage. "We have the original files."
Karsyn's expression slid from anger to a strange, thin shock. Her mouth opened like a cave.
"You're lying." Her voice shifted. "You edited—"
"Either you admit it or you sit down," Gideon said. "This is public."
The audience was loud now, a physical thing that pressed the room like wind. Smartphones clicked. People whispered, then watched. Some recorded the recording, a layered mirror of evidence.
Karsyn's eyes flicked from phone to phone, from faces to Gideon. Her confident mask peeled. "You have no right—"
"You created the story," someone shouted. "You own it."
Her breathing quickened. She began a sequence of reactions I had seen in films and only now believed: denial, flaring anger, pleading, then collapse. "I didn't mean—" she started. "You're betraying me—"
"At least be a decent person," a freshman cried out, throwing up their hands in disgust.
The crowd's reaction changed the air. Hisses turned to scorn. Phones aimed. Some students laughed; others spat words like spat seeds. The girls who had been her followers stepped back. A few people applauded. An older woman in the back, the campus volunteer, started to clap slowly, then loudly. Her clap was contagious.
Karsyn's face crumpled. She looked at us, and for the first time in weeks, she had to watch her audience not as worshippers but as jury. Her denial melted into flailing: she shouted that she was misunderstood, that she was trying to warn girls about predatory types. Around her, the students were no longer impressed.
Someone produced a megaphone and read Karsyn's earlier post aloud. Each sentence sounded smaller when the full video lay beside it like a witness.
People shifted, like tectonic plates that have been told the truth.
She tried a new tactic: demand privacy. "This is revenge!" she cried. "You can't shame me—"
"You're the one who tried to shame another girl," Gideon said, voice flat. "And you built a narrative on lies. Apologize. Tell them how you picked those frames."
Karsyn's mouth moved. Her tone changed: guilty, then pleading. "I—I'm sorry," she said, and the apology sounded thin.
"Stand on that stage and apologize publicly," someone demanded. "Explain to every girl here why you did it."
"Explain why the footage told a different story."
She stared at the crowd, and the crowd stared back. Her eyes darted to the cameras. "I—"
The moment stretched. Her body trembled. Then she started to speak, voice uneven. I watched her face as she moved through the stages: she tried to be fierce, then weak, then pleading. And slowly, the audience's reaction turned from fury to pity, and then to contempt. Phones no longer streamed her as a goddess of gossip. They recorded a fallen figure, once adored, now subject to the scrutiny she had used against me.
My punishment for my earlier outburst—my viral chicken attack—had been the price of a lesson. But Karsyn's punishment was public, long, and instructive. She had orchestrated the smear to rule the gossip circuit. Now the circuit turned on her.
Outside the auditorium, students choked with excitement. "Did you see her face?" one said. "She had no plan beyond the lie."
"No one will trust her again," another said. "She engineered this like a trap."
Karsyn tried bargaining. She begged people not to call her parents. She offered to delete the post. She fell to her knees. The onlookers watched her fall and then walked away. Someone recorded. Someone else whispered a prayer. People who once admired her left sticky notes on a bulletin board saying: "Truth matters." "Don't weaponize others."
This lasted for hours. The crowd's energy made the punishment a slow spectacle. It was not legal; it was not criminal. It was public shaming with a twist: because the evidence was digital and irrefutable, her humiliation was a mirror. She had been the architect of someone else's shame; now the mirror asked her to face herself.
Gideon stood beside me through it all, his jacket back on his shoulders like a shield. He never raised his voice except once. "If she harms you again," he said quietly, "I'll make sure she cannot step back into any official position in this school."
He took care to do more than threaten. He sat with the dean and coaxed the college's security to keep the original video as evidence. He made sure Karsyn could not spin the story into further lies. He asked the forum moderators to remove doctored images and to attach the full footage to the thread with a headline of correction.
Karsyn's change went through stages: she was blazing with rage, then flailing with denial, then bargaining, then she begged for forgiveness, and finally she crashed with the weight of her own exposed actions. Around her, the crowd's reactions were a living thing—shock, mockery, pity, applause when the truth avenged the wrong, disgust when she tried to flip the narrative.
For the first time in weeks, I slept.
"What were you doing," Antonia asked me the next morning when the forum had rested, "while all that happened?"
"Breathing," I said. "Trying not to vomit at the commentary."
"You did well," she said. "But watch your back."
And the back I watched was not only rumor. At home, things were about to get worse.
My father, Hayes Carvalho, was a man who ran numbers and silences with equal skill. He called the morning after Karsyn's post and then again after Gideon cleared me. "You're causing trouble at the school," he said over a clipped tone that never softened. "I've arranged for you to come home."
"No," I said, because I had reasons not to go home. I liked the world where, even with forums and whispers, I had art studios and Antonia and Gideon's odd protection. I could not say this remotely soft voice: I'm not staying to be policed by my father's cold concern.
"It's for your good," he said. "We have contacts. I will arrange for you to stay at the estate for a week. No visitors."
He was blunt. He was done listening. He hung up. Mid-afternoon a black car arrived at campus with a driver who refused to take my explanations. I packed one bag, left Antonia with an uncertain hug, and I watched the campus slide away as the car's tinted windows sealed me from the world.
The estate was large and obedient in the way old money houses were. My father sat in the drawing room like a judge. He towered above me as he spoke. "You're too young for scandals. I brought you home to keep you safe."
"I'm fine," I said.
"You will stay inside. No meetings. No interventions. We will handle this."
I wanted to fight. I wanted him to ask me for my version. He did not. He dictated. He controlled. It was suffocating in a way that made fingers claw at my throat. I was supposed to be the obedient daughter, and yet I felt the world sliding under my feet.
I called Gideon. He answered slow and hoarse, the sound of a bar in the background, but steady. "Where are you?" he asked. "You sound like you swallowed a storm."
"Hayes took me home," I whispered. "He locked me inside."
"Stay put," Gideon said. "Tell him you're resting. I'll come."
"Don't be ridiculous," Antonia said when I told her. But Gideon came, and he did not ask permission.
That night Gideon rode a ladder over the estate wall, slipped across the courtyard, and came in through my window. He had a rope and a grin and something like a child's stubbornness. He also had consideration: he carried in a small bag of essentials and a phone. For a minute I forgot my fear and only watched the way the night shaped his face.
"You shouldn't have," I whispered.
"You should have asked for help earlier," he said.
We didn't run. Instead we sat on my bed and he sat quieter than I had ever seen him. Then he spoke about the days before—about a boy with a candy, a little hand, a promise to fight. He told me he had left because his family moved and that he had painted me once on a wall with a child's brush because he liked the curve of my smile. It was strange, then, to realize that the boy who'd taught me to fight had become the man who guarded my nights.
"Why do you care?" I asked, because the world's indignity had made me suspicious of kindness.
He looked at me and did not treat it like a riddle. "Because you once saved me from being bored," he said. "Because you were the only one who didn't treat me like trouble."
"That's not an answer," I muttered.
He smiled a little. "Come with me," he said. "Leave the estate. I have a motorcycle, an inferior playlist, and five plans that are all terrible. Pick one."
The escape was ridiculous and glorious. We bought cheap paper tickets, gas station snacks, and a map that tasted like summer. We rode for three days in an unplanned line, through towns that smelled like rain and smoke and bread. Gideon was a terrible navigator and a perfect companion. He drew me on napkins, he painted the sunset with one lazy stroke, and he taped five little handmade hairpins—milk-glue crafts he had figured out himself—into my palm like a child's prize.
"These don't match," I told him.
"They match you," he said. "Keep one in your pocket."
We slept under an old pier and watched the ocean be slow and generous. He woke me in the dark to a sunrise that looked like an oath. He held me like gravity was a thing between us.
On the third night, as a city sign blinked and the sea sighed, Gideon turned to me and said, "Will you be mine?"
I felt foolishly like a child again. "What do you mean?"
He took my hands, the callused part where he gripped brushes visible in the dim light. "I'm asking you to say yes to something that will make people shout and forums tremble. I'm asking you to be ridiculous with me."
I laughed, and it sounded like relief. "Yes," I said, and we kissed like two kids who knew only how to be honest.
Weeks passed like a scattering of light. We told no one at first. We traveled, we borrowed a studio, he taught me to hold a brush with the same hand he used to steady me. We were both terrible at being ordinary, and both very good at being together.
When the campus gossip eventually settled, my father and his anger softened like weather that can't help itself. He found Gideon and found that the boy who had once been a neighbor was now a man who came and polished the place until our family accepted him as less of an intruder and more like a son they'd never known they had.
There were still days when comments would appear and we'd laugh at them, scaring them silly. Antonia kept the story alive with insider photos of us under ridiculous hats. Arlo made a whole album titled "Finley Pretends to Paint." Oleg told the whole soccer team we were in love, and they whistled.
But one evening, many months later, with the circus of Karsyn cooled and her public fall already an instruction manual for the pride that ruins people, I sat on the porch with Gideon. He took the handmade milk-glue hairpin from his pocket. It was slightly sticky and still smelled faintly of the glue he had used.
"You remember when you lost that hairpin?" he asked.
"At the end of our first motorcycle ride, you ran over it," I said, smiling.
He leaned close and whispered, "I made five. In case one got crushed, burned, or stolen."
"You really are dramatic," I said.
"That's why you liked me," he said.
"And you like me because I'm ridiculous enough to dump hot chicken on my ex."
He wrapped the jacket around me like he had the first time, and when the porch light flicked, it painted his sunglasses into gold again.
"Look at the stars," he said. "They don't move for us, but they watch."
"I like that the stars watch," I answered.
He put the milk-glue hairpin in my hand. "Keep it," he said. "If anyone asks, it's a relic from the night you started a revolution with fried chicken."
I laughed. "If anyone asks, tell them the bullies can be quiet and the gentle ones loud."
He looked at me with that half smile reserved for moments we owned.
"I will tell them," Gideon said. "And I'll tell them the truth about you."
"What's the truth?" I asked.
"The truth is," he said, breath warm on my ear, "that the rabbit and the bully both bite. And that sometimes the bully is the one who ends up gentle enough to hold your hand."
We kissed and for the first time in a long time, I believed the universe could be simple and mean nothing by it but the fact that we were safe.
Outside a car alarm barked like a stray dog. A laugh leaked out of Gideon. The milk-glue pin stuck to my palm and then to my hair, and it stayed for days.
We were not a scandal anymore. We were a collage of mess and tenderness.
"Promise me one thing," Gideon murmured later that night, fingers finding mine.
"Anything."
"If someone ever insults your courage," he said, "tell them the chicken is still hot."
I squeezed his hand. "I will."
That night, I slept like I had not slept since the chicken. The red oil had long been washed away, but the scar on my wrist where I'd been grabbed had faded into a pale line the same color as the moonlight. I woke with Gideon still warming my side of the bed and a small milk-glue hairpin tucked safely on the bedside table.
When the world got loud again, and it would, I remembered the gallery—the one Gideon insisted on calling a "studio exhibit"—where the evidence video had played and where Karsyn Fleming had been unmade and then made small by truth. I remembered the crowd, the clicking phones, the way scorn had turned into silence.
And I kept one small thing as a talisman: a sticky, slightly crooked hairpin that smelled faintly of glue and of Gideon's terrible sense of loyalty. Whenever someone tried to gaslight me, I would tuck it back into my hair, smile, and say, "Look—spicy chicken makes for a good story. But the best part is the person who sticks around to eat the leftovers with you."
The End
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