Sweet Romance12 min read
"Strawberry cake" — How He Came Back
ButterPicks12 views
"Strawberry cake, please."
I heard myself say it like a dare, like I could force my heart to steady by ordering something sweet and ordinary.
"You sure?" the counter girl smiled at me, handing a box to the young man who looked like he did in the photos I kept — the man who had left without a word four years ago.
He looked at me for the first time in four years.
He froze. His face said a question I couldn't read. I gave the cake to the girl and we both acted like strangers.
"You'll pay?" she mouthed to him. He paid. She tore the box, scooped a spoonful, and fed it to the small girl beside him.
I should have been glad. I should have been relieved that he had moved on.
Instead, my throat burned.
"Hector?" I heard the sound of my name in my head like a bell that I had been taught to ignore but couldn't.
He glanced at me once, and the look was a knife and a hug at the same time.
I forced a smile that fell in pieces. He held the girl's hand and walked out. I watched the door close as if it were closing on my breath.
"Leslie, come on, go home," Catherine told me, touching my shoulder like she had since I started working at her bakery. Her voice was small but steady.
I left early. My eyes burned and I didn't notice the apron strings snag on my wrist.
That night, alone in my little room, I thought of all the times he had given me pastries in high school, of the way he smiled from across the class, of the childish courage he once lent me. I thought I had gotten over him.
"I thought I had too," I told my pillow, and then I cried until I had no voice left.
Across town, I imagined Hector lying in his room with a rain of old memories.
"I thought of you for four years," I pictured him saying to the dark. "I saw your face every night and didn't know if I could risk bringing pain with me."
We both slept badly that night.
The next morning he stood across the street from the shop, looking at the girl who tied her hair in two messy buns and hummed while she arranged tarts.
Maki Schmitz — the older sister who ran a booth of recipes and rules — saw him first.
"Leslie, someone's been waiting," she said later, and that only made my heart hit my ribs harder.
Milo Case came in like a wind — sweaty, tall, wide-shouldered — the bakery's owner’s brother who tried to steal my heart with jokes and an offered box of egg yolk pastries.
"Small one, do you want it?" he teased, and I pretended to be offended. My cheeks hurt from smiling.
Hector watched us from the street like someone who had slipped into a movie he once knew the script for.
He followed us to the cinema that night without making a sound.
I pretended not to notice him when our tickets turned out to be side by side. The world became a small room with a screen and my flinching chest.
"Don't sit so close to the edge," he said later to the girl beside him in that fake brother tone that made my skin hot.
"Brother," she called him, and he didn't correct her. The ice in my throat turned to water.
I couldn't tell him why I was angry. I couldn't be the girl who clung, the girl who begged.
After the film, when I left the dark theater wrapped in the city's noise, he followed at a distance. I went home hungry and restless and finally stepped out to buy ramen at a 24-hour corner shop.
His shadow leaned against the wall near my door. He looked like someone who had run half his life to get there.
"You're here," I stammered, surprised at my own voice.
He stepped aside like a boy who had lost his courage and then found it again. "I thought you were someone else," he said, but his voice cracked.
"Do you believe in that? 'Wrong door'?" I scoffed.
He didn't try to fix the joke. He just stood there like a man who had been given permission to wait.
"Do you want to eat?" he asked finally, and something in me — some small, soft part — wanted to believe the world could still be ordinary.
"Really? You will?" I asked.
"Yes," he answered like a simple promise.
We walked in the night. He took me to a place that smelled of garlic and bright oil, sat me down, peeled shrimp for me, and watched me with that old careful patience I had loved.
"Why did you leave?" I asked against my will after the plates were nearly gone.
He didn't answer at first. He handed me a napkin then tucked my coat under my shoulders like a father did for his child.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I couldn't bear to bring my trouble to you. I thought leaving would keep you safe."
That night he carried me home, put me to bed, dabbed my cheeks with a cool towel, and left a small note on the table. I found it at four a.m. when my throat burned from sleep and salt.
Leslie,
I am sorry. Four years ago, a car accident took two lives. The man who died was my father's friend. His little girl, Emma, was left alone and scared. My parents could not bear to lose another person. They asked us to take Emma away from her old life. I stayed to help. I thought my staying would be right. I thought separating myself from you would be right.
I read every message you sent. I watched, but I did not reply. I could not be the person you deserved while I was holding someone broken together.
If you want me as a friend, I will be there. If you want me to go, I will go.
— Hector
My first feeling was stunned disbelief. Then it was a hot emptiness I couldn't name. I had nurtured a thousand little grudges — why didn't he tell me? — and now each one crumbled to dust. He had been carrying a weight I never suspected.
I ate the congee he left the next morning. It was plain and perfect, like everything he did when he tried not to show pain.
"Leslie, are you okay?" Catherine asked, watching me with eyes that had seen many young hearts.
"I read his note," I said. I could not keep my voice steady. "He had his reasons."
"You'll see him," she said. "People who mean something come back."
He did. He came back to the bakery, to a place where sugar and work made time pass. He walked in and my knees threatened to buckle.
"You're here," I said, not brave enough for anything else.
"Do you want to come to the movie? I have a ticket," Milo tried to be gallant. He had earned his place as a friend who liked me in the small quiet ways of someone who didn't demand me.
Maki watched us with a kind-of-sad smile, like a sister who both watches and arranges fate.
That day, for the first time since he became a ghost to me, Hector showed up again and did things that made the space between us shrink: a message at night, a bowl of congee, a pair of moments stolen to talk.
"I will come and get you after work," he told me one afternoon. "I can pick you up."
"You'll pick me up?" I said. My pulse did a strange dance.
"Yes," he said simply.
He took me to his apartment. I thought I couldn't imagine being inside his life; then I saw the small pink slippers waiting in the shoe box and I felt my chest crack open.
"I bought them in case you came," he said like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He cooked for me that night, and we laughed while we prepared a hot pot. He teased me about the way I devoured food, and I accused him of hiding muscles under shirts as if that were a crime.
When he kissed me for the first time that night, it felt like the world had tilted and given me permission to breathe differently.
"Don't leave me again," I said later, clumsy and small and honest.
"I won't," he answered.
We walked the streets holding hands, a small band around our fingers that said more than we did.
"Are we okay?" I asked, still not brave enough to believe.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, we are."
In the days that followed, he introduced me to his world. Andres Beasley and Gunnar Harvey — his work brothers — pretended not to be curious and then asked too many questions about the girl who stole Hector's focus.
"Bring her to the office," Gunnar said.
"Bring her," Andres agreed, and that was how I ended up following Hector into a glass building and sitting on a leather couch while women in neat skirts whispered and the company's chat lit up with hearts.
"Hector, who is she?" a voice texted in the staff group, and the office filled with a buzz that made me blush.
"Your boss looks happy," someone giggled, and I hid in Hector's coat.
He had a way about him there — confident, careful, full of small commands given softly. He didn't change for the way people looked. He only held me like something precious.
We ate together in the staff canteen. Andres and Gunnar offered me tips on staff food and welcome like an extra set of parents.
"I like your drawing," Andres said when he saw the sketchbook I'd built in my spare hours.
"You should come by more," Gunnar grinned. "We like seeing the boss smile."
At work, I learned fragments of Hector's life: meetings, a stubborn team, late nights that he surrendered to sometimes. I watched him and drew him when he didn't notice. He kept stealing my sketches after that.
One night he asked me to the amusement park.
"I have something silly to test," he said with a lightness that made my heart jitter.
"Like what?" I asked.
"The Ferris wheel," he said. "They say if two people kiss at the top, they'll keep going together."
"It's just a story," I said, but I grinned because everything he said felt like a map of a future I wanted to go check into.
We rode the Ferris wheel and it turned us slow and high. The city at night looked like a scattering of tiny lights. At the highest circle, with all the world small beneath us, he leaned in and kissed me.
"Do you mean 'forever'?" I murmured in the dark.
"I mean 'I will try,'" he answered.
A week later, Emma Cherry — the little girl Hector had cared for — let everyone into the truth about the accident. She came downstairs with Hector and told my sleepy, shy family that she remembered, that she forgave them and wanted to stay.
"I'm sorry," she said, and the air shifted like cloth being smoothed over.
We built new shapes of family around a long-ago loss. Hector's parents, who had taken Emma in, softened like dawn. They welcomed me the way they welcomed their son’s choice. I ate breakfast with them sometimes and watched Hector become a kind of brother to everyone all over again.
I met his father and mother properly for the first time when I brought Hector a cup of tea he liked.
"She makes the best tea," his mother told me. "Why are you so good to our son?"
"We are good to each other," Hector said, and I wanted to make sure that line sat in my chest for good.
Work days slipped into folded evenings. We learned each other's habits: the way Hector humms low when deep in thought, how I tap my pen when I'm thinking. We were small, steady rhythms in a bigger song.
One Friday we went to the old ghost house at the edge of the park because I wanted to be brave and Hector wanted to see me jump a little.
"Choose the hardest mode," I told the attendant, and he looked at us like we'd lost our minds.
"You two do know it's tough," he said.
"Bring it on," I replied. "We have each other."
Inside, Hector held my hand and found keys where they'd hide. He tugged me past curtains and cracked jokes at the wrong time that made me bite my lip to keep from laughing. At the end of the maze there was a piece of paper with a puzzle on it.
"Is that the 'hell' question?" Gunnar later said when I texted him our victory.
"Everything about our day is ridiculous," I told Hector and he laughed, and the sound fell into my favorite place.
We drank cotton candy at a stall and took a picture and the girl who printed it handed us the glossy square like a relic.
"Can I keep it?" I asked.
"You always can," he said, squeezing my fingers.
The week before I left for school the first time after we got back together — I had a return ticket and a bag and a heart that didn't want to leave — Hector drove me to the station in the small blue car he kept for rainy errands.
"I'll call you when you get on," he said.
"I will," I said. "I'll call when I get settled."
"Promise me, tell me everything," he said.
"I promise," I said.
He kissed me on the station platform like the Ferris wheel twenty times folded into one. People watched. I felt like our small world had gone public, like love had been given a place on the map to prove it existed.
"You promise you'll come see me?" I asked, blood loud in my ears.
"I promise," he said, and his promise had the weight of two hands and a heartbeat.
The train moved like a slow animal. I waved until the platform blurred. When I turned to the window, Hector was still there, still holding the small black cup we had bought for him earlier — the pair we bought for the house. He raised the cup and tapped it twice like a drum.
Later, living apart for the first semester, we learned the strange shape of distance.
"How was class?" he asked one night.
"Fine," I texted.
"Are you sleeping enough?" he wrote.
And when tests were hard, I would call him and he'd be awake and somehow able to fix everything with one quiet, steady voice.
"I painted today," I told him once, and it felt like telling something sacred.
"You always make things pretty," he said. "Bring me the pictures when you come back."
On weekends he would come to my city like a comet, bringing his careful hands and a habit for surprise lunches. Maki and Catherine would laugh like a chorus as we walked back into the bakery.
"Show him your new tart," Catherine nudged me, and I did, and he tasted and praised and I felt like a chef and also like a child who'd made a good school project.
We made plans that sounded like a future — small, big, easy and terrifying. I would finish my course. He would keep the company afloat. We would test living together again, for real, with a room that belonged to both of us.
"I will wait less and love more," he promised one evening, fingers around a cup of coffee.
"Okay," I said, giggling like some secret was between us.
There were hard days. Sometimes Hector came to me a little hollow, carrying the ghost of guilt with him still, because the wound had been deep and he had to live with being the person who survived, who took not just his own weight but also a child's grief.
"Do you ever think I ruined your life?" he asked late once.
"Stop," I said. "You saved a child. You carried what no one else could. You didn't ruin me."
"Leslie..." he whispered.
"Come here," I said, and I put my head on his chest and I felt him slow, and at that moment I knew I would fight for the shape of us.
When I finished school, we had a little party with Milo, Maki, Catherine, Andres, Gunnar, and Beatrice.
"You two are ridiculous," Beatrice said between bites of cake. "But I love you both."
"She makes the cakes," Hector said, smiling with a pride that swallowed the room.
I had learned to make more than pastries. I had learned to become a woman who could keep a plan and build a life. He had learned to let me come with him into all his mornings.
"Leslie," he said that night, pulling me to the balcony of the small apartment he'd bought to be near his parents, the place that smelled like soy and lemon cleaner and my memory.
"Yes?" I asked.
He put a small box into my hands. It wasn't a big box, not at all. Inside were two tiny rings, simple bands, nothing idiotic like crowns or stars. They fit like our hands fit together.
"I don't have a better word than 'always' left," he said. "I will not pretend life is easy. I will not promise every day will be perfect. But I promise to pick you when it matters. Will you marry me?"
The word traveled like the sound of a bell through me. I remember laughing and crying and nodding like the world was a page I had been given license to write.
"Yes," I said, and the city held its breath.
We married quietly. There were tarts and a small crowd who loved us into one room. Catherine baked the cake. Maki cried. Milo performed a terrible song. Andres and Gunnar made a grand plan to take over the dance floor and failed spectacularly. Beatrice gave a toast that made everyone laugh and cry.
"To Leslie and Hector," she said. "May you always have enough cake."
We moved into the apartment and turned one corner into Leslie's shelf of tiny tins and another into Hector's shelf of precise boxes. We kept the two cups from the first week in a place where the sun found them every morning.
Some nights we walk to the park and sit under the Ferris wheel, now quiet and still, and kiss like people who know their own smallness is perfectly matched.
"Do you remember our first kiss at the top?" I asked him once, stealing his breath with my question.
"I remember," he said.
"Did you mean then?"
"I meant the chance to try," he answered. "And I do try, every day."
We learned how to fight fair and how to cook for one another when the other was tired. We argued about small things — whose turn it was to take out garbage, whether the cat should eat at the table — and we made up over bowls of miso soup.
The years didn't make love easy. They made it honest.
One day, when the bakery where I had first learned to shape the tart had a small window for rent next door, Hector watched me with the same steady eyes he had always used to see me.
"Open it," he said simply.
"Catherine kept that place for years," I said. "She would never let us."
"Let her," Hector said.
"Will you help?" I asked. "Will you be there when it starts at four a.m. and the ovens fail and the orders flood in?"
"I will be there," he promised.
So we opened our shop together. We put the picture of us from the amusement park over the counter beside the register, and we put the two cups on the shelf where customers could see them.
"Strawberry cake?" Hector asked one morning as a girl came in and pointed.
"One strawberry cake, please," I said, and he looked at me with that same stunned, soft look he had given me four years earlier.
"You sure?" he teased.
"Yes," I laughed.
He paid, not for my cake but for ours — for the house, for the shop, for the small brave decisions that keep holding hands across time.
Our shop is full of small things: a bell that rings little when the door opens, a shelf of odd plates, a photo of a Ferris wheel cornered with flour. People come and go, and we watch seasons change over the pastry window.
"Do you ever regret the waiting?" I asked him once on a quiet morning when the kettle sang and the sunlight fell into sugar shapes.
"Some nights," he said. "But I like the life we have now better than any regret."
"I like it better too," I said. "You came back."
"I came for you," he said, and kissed me before the bell could ring.
Outside, the city moved like it always did — people with reasons to be brave, reasons to be small. Inside we had our place, a counter and two cups and a promise that lived like a recipe we could call again.
"Strawberry cake, please," I hear customers say all the time.
I always remember the first time I said it.
"I will always make you strawberry cake," Hector says.
"And I'll always ask for it," I answer.
We both laugh. The bell rings. The oven is warm. The world is ordinary and perfect and ours.
The End
— Thank you for reading —