Sweet Romance11 min read
Sugar Paper Stars and the Doctor Who Loved Me
ButterPicks10 views
I lay on the operating table and watched his face above me through the surgical lights. Foster Watson leaned in, the blue around his eyes darker than I remembered, and said with a half-smile, "What did you get tattooed there?"
"My portrait," I said, teeth clenched against the pain, trying to push a grin through. "Nice, right?"
The anesthesiologist snorted into silence, then let out a laugh. Foster's long brows knit together, and his gloved finger traced the edge of my lower belly. "On this spot," he said flatly, "do you think your current man will put up with that?"
Cold slid through me. I curled my fingers around his hand without thinking. He didn't pull away.
"Foster," I croaked, voice thin with pain and something like hope, "can you make the suture look pretty? I have swimsuit shoots next month."
"No," he said, tone hard, and turned away.
The anesthesiologist announced, "Start the IV. Scrub done. We begin in ten."
Ten minutes passed in that bright room like a very small eternity. Foster changed gloves and returned to my side. I tried to breathe steady.
"Iliana," he said suddenly, close enough that I could feel the air from his mouth. "If my skills are good, why did you break up with me?"
I had no proof he was playing with me, but maybe he was. He had always been too perfect, disciplined, a man who measured words and smiles. I had been haphazard, loud, a model who partied, and I had left him. I had been the one to end it.
His voice lowered. "I'll stay with you."
After surgery the drugs were foggy and wrong. I woke burning with fever dreams and blankets slipping. A warm hand pressed the sheet back over me without complaint. I murmured, half-asleep, "Shut the air off. It's hot."
A crisp voice said, "Who is Shut the Air?"
"A very handsome man," I mumbled.
"Is he your new boyfriend?"
"We went to a hotel. Ate midnight fries. Did exercise."
Foster glanced, lips flat. "You did what?"
"Appendicitis is a sport now," the nurse said, amused. Foster's face stayed neutral. I watched him, and heat rose like a small flame inside me.
Outside my curtained bed, Mateo Frank—the friend who had called himself my "dad" in front of nurses and cried like he meant it—was making a scene. He flew in with chicken boxes and tearful proclamations. "My dear! I thought I lost you!" he boomed, then caught sight of Foster and tripped over his own show.
"Was that the doctor you stalked in your lock screen?" Mateo teased, loud and delicious. He knew me too well.
"Stop," I hissed, embarrassed.
Mateo planted himself like a comic guard. "Foster, you must be tired. Sit down."
Foster checked my incision with careful hands, rewrapped the gauze, tucked the blanket under my chin, and dabbed my dry lips. He was clinical and gentle at once—his fingers steady like a surgeon's scalpel and tender like a parent's hand.
"Say it straight," he told me softly when I reached and grabbed his sleeve. "If you have anything to say, say it."
"I can't breathe well after anesthesia," I lied. "Come closer."
"I'm working," he said.
I shifted and moved my hand up, sliding along his white coat. He didn't move away. He bent over me and our lips nearly touched.
"Don't test me," he said, then, impossibly, he kissed me.
I blinked. The kiss was clean and quiet and left me dizzy. Mateo clattered the curtain back with a head and interrupted us. "What's happening in there? Are we playing kissing games?"
We both froze. Mateo shoved the curtain and then did what he always did—made the whole thing less awkward by being funny. He left, promising to fetch a night nurse, then stalled with a grin: "Make it long, doctor."
Foster's face hardened for a second. "No touching water on the wound," he said, more to me than to Mateo. Then, almost as if he didn't want to leave, he added, "I'll stay tonight."
I wanted to cheer. Mateo put on an exaggerated bow and left with glee. The room folded down to me and Foster.
"Feed me a chicken wing," I said.
"I don't eat chicken in the middle of the night." He laughed, and the laugh was a small thing that made my chest ache. He smoothed my hair with the finger he seemed to always have available.
"Do you miss me?" I asked, sudden and stupid.
"A little," he answered. "But don't test me."
We slept with our hands linked. Later, as a nurse rolled me to the bathroom, I realized I had a catheter and felt my cheeks burn. I muttered, "Don't touch that bag."
He didn't argue. He cleaned me and handled everything like he had always handled the worst things—without drama. I watched him, and my throat tightened until he pressed a white rabbit candy into my mouth.
"Because you like it?" I asked.
"Because you are mine," he said simply.
The next day Mateo convinced me to put on a light makeup the way he'd taught me. "We will make him fall at once," he declared. The plan was ridiculous and sweet. Foster came in between cases and fed me wonton soup like a hen with careful ladles. He lost patience at my joystick calls during our mobile game and then let me have the last kill. I called him small brother as a tease; he lifted a brow and promised to carry me through every season.
"Don't make me the clingy one again," he said, and kissed my dimples.
Everything smoothed and then cracked. A man named Axel Brooks arrived the evening before I left the hospital. He wore too much black, a silver lip ring, tattoos that crawled like ivy over his arms, and the air of someone who thinks a private life is a collection to be owned. He said he was a tattoo artist who "just popped by" because our studio had a new hire. He brought cake and stayed way too long.
Foster watched him. His fingers tightened around my hand, and I saw it—jealousy like a small animal desperate and alive. His voice was low as he asked, "Who was that?"
"A helper," I said. "My assistant. He does tattoos."
"He has familiar lines," Foster muttered, looking at Axel's exposed skin.
"I didn't know his chest was planned like a shrine," I said lightly. "He's a professional."
Later, when Mateo had stepped out to help with the luggage, Axel offered to drive me home. I accepted only to be polite. Inside his car the windows dimmed and his manners shifted from playful to predatory. He took my phone from me with a laugh, and I realized then how small I was in his plans.
"Where to?" he asked, and the watch of the parking lot flashed across his knuckles.
"Just home," I said.
He smiled as if he had a private map of my life. He clamped the back of my neck and leaned down like a predator. "You left me at the studio the first night," he said. "You walked out and I watched you go. I was hurt."
"You?" I gave a half-laugh that died. "You are strange."
He dragged me to a house that wasn't a house but a private compound with no passersby. I fought and then froze when his eyes flicked to my belly where the new tattoo peeked from under gauze.
"You'll make me immortal," he whispered, and then the door was locked.
I felt like a trapped animal. My phone vanished into a fish tank. He showed me a slideshow of my photos, editing them into intimate frames and pasting his face where Foster's had been. He had been the invisible member of my fan club—the one who collected my photos and built a private mythology around me. He said he had spent a fortune on me. He said he had given money, bought posters, asked for nothing but the right to look.
When the police burst through the curtains, I almost laughed from shock. Officers formed like a net, and Foster ran in ahead with his coat flapping and a fury I had only once before seen—when he had been a boy and had had a mother who yelped at him in the night.
"Axel Brooks," Foster said, calm as a scalpel. "Step away."
Axel did not move right away. He smiled like someone at the center of the world. "Does she like me or your candy better?" he asked with sick humor.
Foster didn't answer. The officers cuffed him, and he flailed just a little. Then he stopped as cameras started clicking, neighbors peering through peepholes, and a swarm of feeds flew like birds into the net.
The arrest was only the beginning. There had to be proof, rope, and a long undoing. For the public punishment, the city held a press assembly two days after the arrest. The room filled with fluorescent light and the kind of hunger the internet gives form to—reporters with phones, a few of the fans who had called Axel "Little Guardian" stunned into silence, and the live feeds that made a wooden podium a stage.
"Today," the lead detective said, "we are releasing the evidence connecting Axel Brooks to the network of fake accounts that manufactured false relationships with Iliana Gibson and that arranged the attack on a third party in order to frame Dr. Foster Watson."
A hush, thick and televised, fell. Screens behind the podium scrolled images—Axel's tattoos, clear photos of the modified collages, messages he sent promising money for silence. The slideshow included an overhead shot of the hospital siding where camera footage showed Axel installing small cameras and peering through my tattoo studio's windows at odd hours.
"These are not fantasy artifacts," the detective said. "They are a plan. They are a trail of intent."
Axel stood against the back wall. He stepped forward, expecting the cheers of friends, but instead a cluster of his online worshipers watched on their phones, faces gray. The crowd's mood shifted as each photo and timestamp was displayed.
"You thought you were invisible," Foster said into the mic when the cameras were on him. "You thought no one would look where you looked. You were wrong."
Axel's lips twitched. He moved through the stages Foster had predicted: arrogance, surprise, denial, brittle laughter, and then a slip into panic. "You can't—" he tried. "Those photos—those are edits, fake edits. She came to me, she liked me, she posed."
"No," a woman from a fan forum said loudly, and murmurs hummed around the room. "You P'd photos, made people think they were private, and you sold them. You stole someone's face to sell a story."
"They're not private, they were offered to a community," Axel protested, young and wiry and suddenly so very ordinary. "I loved her."
"You called yourself our moderator," one former fan called, voice breaking. "You told us you were a woman helping other women. You faked an identity to be close, to control. You pawned the hurt like trophies."
Cameras fed the faces of those who once praised him: their voices now sharp with betrayal. A tabloid journalist raised a phone and said, "You asked people to send in money so you could visit Iliana. You set traps. You installed cameras. You used a stabbing to manufacture drama. Why?"
Axel's eyes became raw. He dropped to a whisper, "I wanted to protect, to keep her. I—"
"From whom?" a woman shouted. "From life? From the people who love her?"
The live viewers in the auditorium began to clap—not the clapping of encouragement but of release, a cleansing sound that was part jeer, part relief. A fan I recognized as a former moderator stood and read messages Axel had sent to her: controlling, possessive, and full of the slow creep of an obsession that becomes a prison. She described how she had become uncomfortable and then silenced when he moved from private affection to violent acts.
Axel's face changed; the bravado melted and left bone. He looked at Foster with something helpless and small. "I didn't mean to—"
"You did," Foster said, voice steady. "And you thought you could make everyone believe anything you wrote."
The crowd's phones rose. Someone started a chant: "Exposed! Exposed!" It spread like a wave. People around Axel took pictures. Someone livestreamed his thin-souled grin as he sat with handcuffs, and comment sections hatched new contempt. His social media accounts hemorrhaged followers. Sponsors immediately cut ties. People who once whispered his praise now typed burning disbelief.
"You thought public love could be stolen," Foster told him, and the words were soft enough to be merciless. "Love is not an object to collect."
Axel's reaction changed again: after the denials and the falling, he tried to bargain. "Please," he said to the cameras, to the crowd, to us. "I'm sorry. I can fix it. I can—"
"Fix what?" a woman asked. "The people you hurt? The trust you stole? There's no fix for a knife."
He sank into pleading. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I just wanted to be with her." Now the words were a child's, unconvincing and thin.
Around him, the crowd's faces were a palette of disgust, pity, and a strange fierce satisfaction. A few shouted, "Lock him up!" Others snapped photos. A mother in the back crossed herself. A former fan walked up close to Axel and spat—soft, and dangerous in the way it severed whatever bridge he thought he had.
Axel slumped, and the cameras captured the trembling at his lips. He pressed his hands to his face and then, with a sudden and ugly self-interest, sought to shift blame to the community, to my mother, to anything that might let him go. People booed with a sound like rain; his pleas were drowned.
The detective announced charges, including illegal surveillance, assault, and online harassment. The public watched as the small empire Axel built of fake identities and stolen images crumbled into spreadsheets shown on screens. Sponsors sent statements, his followers left comments like closing doors. A young woman who had once looked up at him shook as she testified—her voice steady, the kind of brave that is learned in pieces.
Axel's collapse reached its final stage the moment the judge read bail conditions at the arraignment later that week. Cameras crowded the court steps, reporters shouted, people lined up outside to see the man who had turned a private life into a narrative of obsession. When the judge pronounced that he would be denied bail—because of evidence of tampering and the danger he posed—Axel's face finally broke like silk pulled to shreds. He went from the actor of his own life to the small, naked thing in a glass box.
"You're an actor in your own film," Foster told me later in the car, hand on my knee. "And the audience decided the ending." He kissed my temple.
In the months that followed, Axel got what he deserved. He faced not only legal consequence but public stripping—his online fan communities turned on him, his galleries were defaced with messages demanding he be forgotten, gallery owners refused to work with him, and his friends—those he had convinced of his soft side—began to distance themselves publicly, a collapse that seemed to hurt him most. Once the online prosecutor of his identity, a woman who once cheered him, posted a long thread with screenshots of his messages asking for silence, and in the comment storm people began to name those whom he had targeted secretly. His name trended not as a hero but as a cautionary tale.
I told the story often, in clear words for police and for press. Each telling took a weight from inside me and placed it where it belonged: in the record. Foster stayed—sometimes feeding me soup, sometimes making sure the locks were secure, sometimes returning to the hospital and then coming home to sit beside me and fold a piece of candy wrapper into a star. He left me the small paper stars he'd made when he was a boy—his way of turning memory into something gentle.
We rebuilt slowly. Mateo slept on the couch, and helped me manage both the store and the PR. He cracked jokes that rimmed the wounds with light. Foster bought a small fridge for my lotions and another for his medical supplies, and gradually the home looked less like an accident scene and more like ours.
One evening, months after the arrest, we walked to the little tree where I had buried a jar of paper stars as a child. Foster knelt. The halo of streetlight turned his profile gold.
"Do you remember the wish we made?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "We wanted to find someone who would give us candy and stay."
He smiled, hands steady. "I stayed."
"Why did you—" I stopped. The memory of him as a child, the white rabbit candy, the folded stars—everything linked him to a tenderness I had felt before but only now could name. "Why did you come into my life like that?"
"Because I thought you were the only one who could understand the small things," he answered. "The small things are important."
He came home permanently a week later, carrying with him a folding bed and a set of pots. He organized my crumpled receipts and set up a space for his books and his stethoscope. He said, "I'll stay because you are mine in ways that are not a trap."
We told the story to family. My mother came to the house once, with her usual sharpness, and left quieter than before. Foster's parents arrived awkwardly sweet and then thrilled to have a daughter-in-law who was loud and messy and full of color.
We married in a small ceremony with a ridiculous cake and laughably sentimental vows. Foster's mother put a gold pendant around my neck and called me "sister" in a voice that shook.
"Remember the candy-star wish?" Foster murmured during the reception. "We both whispered it."
I leaned against him then, warm and sure. The years ahead would have hard pieces, but the small stars were still with me, and Foster's hands were steady.
Axel's public fall remained the vivid edge in the background of our life—a lesson in how the internet could delude and how the law could be slow but finally right. He learned, in the public rooms where his deeds were displayed, that worship is fickle and that cruelty leaves scars that other people see.
City news did a piece on "online fandoms" where the reporter said, "Love online is easy to manufacture, but real life is full of obligations." I watched it with Foster, Mateo asleep on our sofa, and tasted the sugar of the candy he'd given me. He leaned over and pressed his forehead to mine.
"One thing I promised when I scrubbed in," he said with the slight smile of a man who has seen danger and decided still to hold hands, "was that I'd stitch things clean."
"I know you will," I said.
He pulled a tiny paper star from his pocket and tucked it into my hand. "For every scar," he said, "a sugar star."
We laughed and kissed. The city hummed, feeds refreshed, and the stars folded into our life like the small, stubborn truths that stay.
The End
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