Sweet Romance11 min read
Ten Years, One Promise, and the Parachute
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I remember the sound of a basketball against sun-warmed asphalt: the dull, impatient thud that announced his arrival before he did. He called my name for the third time before I bothered to lift my head.
"Sullivan," I said, jogging the last few steps. I held a bottle of water like a talisman.
He was standing in the middle of the court, the late sun cutting a hard line across his jaw. He frowned in that precise way that had once meant everything to me and now meant nothing.
"What are you thinking?" he tapped my forehead with his knuckles, casual and light like it was a joke. The gesture landed on my temple and I pulled back.
"You don't need to do that," I said.
He smirked, tipped the empty bottle onto the crown of my head, and squinted down at me. "Hold it."
I blinked. "You are ridiculous."
He left without another word and the bottle clinked to the ground. I picked it up, smoothed the flat plastic, and reminded myself of the thirteen-year debt tattooed on my memory—the time a donkey kicked him in the head to save me, and he spent a month in the hospital with his memories shredded like thin paper.
"You saved me," I told myself over and over. "So I owe you ten years."
That promise had a countdown. Today was the last day.
Later, under a sky the color of old pennies, I handed him his jacket. A girl from the basketball club—Adelaide Blair—pushed close, voice syrupy.
"I'll babysit him tonight," she said, and I folded my hands as if nothing mattered.
"He'll be late," Sullivan said without looking at her.
My throat tightened because tonight was my birthday and he had once promised to be there. I let the thought go. Ten years was almost over; a decade owed could be collected or forgiven. I wanted to be free.
"You promised," I rehearsed in my head. I didn't say it aloud.
He'd saved me when we were children. He'd been my knight, insisting he would protect me forever. That boy—who declared himself a hero and called me his princess—was buried under a scatter of lost memories after he got kicked. He forgot entire stretches of his childhood, and with that forgetting he lost the self who propped a ladder for me, who would have let a donkey bruise his brow to spare mine.
Sometimes I wondered whether the person still living in Sullivan's body was someone who kept that old pledge in mind or someone who thought the pledge was a relic. Now, at dawn and dusk, he struck me with small cruelties because he could. The sickness of being taken for granted had settled in me like a stone.
"Why didn't you answer my calls?" he demanded one morning, grabbing my wrist in the open hallway so everyone could see. "Why are you ignoring me?"
"Maybe I was bored," I said. "Maybe I wanted to try what my life is like without you in it."
"You better not regret it," he said, voice tight with a smile that made my bones chill.
I didn't answer. I had practiced being indifferent for a week, like a dress I was learning to wear on cue.
"You're not alone anymore," someone whispered.
It was then I realized the rumor mill had turned my silence into scandal. A classmate's laptop had gone missing; a girl in our year accused the last person to leave class—me—of being the thief. Adelaide commented lazily in a group chat—"I saw her leaving with a large bag." Someone else took that and made a story: Kalani is hiding something, she said. Sullivan, who had always been my shield and my tormentor, posted, "I wasn't with her." The message spread like spilled paint.
"You're spreading lies," I told Sullivan when I confronted him down a narrow stairwell. He looked at me like I had asked him to invent the moon.
"Did you forget I broke my head?" he said abruptly. "I don't remember everything."
"Some things you won't remember," I snapped. "Some things you refuse to remember."
He grinned, bitter and small. "So go on then. Walk away if you want. But don't be surprised when you come crawling back."
The sting in those words was a midwinter cut.
The thing about a promise is that it isn't always an obligation. Sometimes it is a convenient shackle. I had told myself to honor his life-debt only out of gratitude and a childish faith that if I obeyed, he would owe me his kinder self in return. I was tired of waiting for a boy who had been allowed to leave his kindness on a distant shore.
Later that week, after the group chat had erupted and the accused girl had dragged me to the advisor's office, I found an ally where I hadn't expected one. Everest Gustafsson—my senior, my lab partner, the man who smelled faintly of engine oil and good coffee—sat with me and read the messages as if they were a puzzle. He was quiet in the way a tide is quiet.
"You don't have to do this alone," he said. "I'll say what needs to be said."
"You're not part of this," I said.
"Maybe not. But I can't watch someone I like get blamed for stupid things because a boy thinks it's funny." He lifted a brow. "And I like you."
His voice was steady. His attention was not theatrical; it simply was. He was a lifeline, not a life debt. He drove me to silence in a car that hummed like a trapped animal, and sometimes we pretended the world outside us didn't exist.
"Let's go somewhere," he suggested one night, very gently. "Just for a while. Away from the watchful eyes."
We ended up on a runabout that smelled of new tire and possibility. He didn't announce how he lived, didn't show off his silver spoons. But pieces of his life bled through—the quiet car keys, a practiced hand on the wheel, a laugh like low lightning. He said, "I like flying. Sometimes I drive until I don't know where I am. It's a good way to forget."
"Do you want to forget me?" I asked.
"Not you. Just the idea that things are fixed." He looked at me with that measured calm that had surprised me into trusting him. "You could come with me."
The next morning there was a parachute company on the outskirts of town, a plane, and a man with a smile like a dare. "You sure?" Everest asked as he buckled me in. "Because once you jump, you can't take your fear back."
"I want to try," I said, and the world opened like something already made for falling.
He strapped himself to me and when the plane door opened and the wind wanted to swallow everything, he leaned close, breath warm at my ear.
"Hold on to me," he said.
I had never felt safer to let go.
"Will you be my girlfriend?" he asked later, in the hush after we landed, when the parachute was folded and our shoes were dusty with sky.
"Do you... really mean it?" I asked.
"Yes," he said simply, then kissed me like he meant every small, certain thing he promised.
There were three moments in those months that would latch themselves into my chest and not let go: the first was when he turned his back to a crowd and laughed, a private, soft thing that belonged only to me; the second when he slipped his jacket onto my shoulders when I shivered, and his hand lingered for the space of a breath; the third when he touched my fingers with a gentleness that suggested the possibility of restitution, not debt.
Still, Sullivan's shadow did not leave quietly. He was reckless in ways that were dangerous and theatrical. He would push and then watch to see how I moved. A thin cruelty lived behind his amusement now—no longer the clumsy heroism of the child I wanted to remember.
The trouble came to a head one cold afternoon by the lake.
Someone had started a rumor that I had stolen a laptop. Students lined the path in a cluster of curiosity and heated opinion. The basketball court nearby hummed with the last echoes of practice. People pointed, mouths moving like marionettes. Sullivan stood on the edge of the crowd, dripping and wild-eyed, as if the lake had stripped him to his bones. He had been swimming in the freezing water, reckless as an animal.
"You're not satisfied, are you?" I called out, because I wanted him to stop pretending.
He lunged forward as I approached. His voice went raw. "You were never mine to be so proud of. You came and you left when you weren't convenient."
"What's this about, Sullivan?" someone shouted. Cameras—phones—lifted like a field of small, blinking stars. There were at least thirty people watching, people who knew every small detail of our story and had opinions on how it should end.
"Did you enjoy the attention?" Adelaide said loudly, leaning forward. "Do you even know what's going on?"
"Stop," I said. "Stop talking."
The crowd leaned in. I felt like a bead of mercury, all surface and no heart.
"You lied about me," I said to Sullivan. "You told people I wasn't with you. You let them believe I took something. Why?"
His face folded; he looked like a different animal. For a moment there was something like recognition in his expression, then a hard, masking laugh.
"To watch you squirm," he admitted, low and terrible. "Because you owed me. You still owe me. You were never supposed to leave."
"The ten years is up," I said, my voice clear as a bell in the cold. "I gave you that time because you saved me when you were a child. I did what I promised, Sullivan. I put up with your games until today."
He stepped closer and I slapped him.
The sound cracked like a branch. People gasped. Phones recorded. For a breath he was stunned, hand to cheek, eyes wide and wet.
Then he laughed, a small, feral noise. "You think a slap changes anything?"
"I think it changes this," I said. "I think standing here and letting you smear me, watching you decide when I am believable and when I'm ridiculous—it stops now."
He staggered back, anger painting his face so vividly that the crowd went quiet at the edges, waiting for the next act in our private performed tragedy.
"She's lying," he said suddenly, voice shaking. "She always was. You all saw her with that bag—"
"Did you see her?" someone asked from the back.
"No—" he faltered. The truth is slippery when you haven't rehearsed it. "Maybe I didn't. Maybe I…"
"What you did," I called out, loud enough that the people closest to us heard, "was say to everyone that you weren't with me that day. You could have said we walked out together. You said no. Why?"
He couldn't find an answer. Denial gave way to anger, anger to panic. The spectators shifted. Phones were held up like evidence. A murmur ran through the crowd—shock, gossip, the delicious cruelty of watching someone fall.
"You owe me!" he yelled, voice breaking. "You owe me everything! I saved you!"
"You can't turn kindness into a chain," I said. "I did not owe you my life. I gave you ten years because I thought that was fair. But I am not your debt."
"I—" His face went through things: smugness, then disbelief, then a quick, ugly denial, and finally a collapse into pleading. "Kalani, please. I didn't mean—"
"Don't call me Kalani," I said, the name tasting like a relic I refused to touch. "Call me Kalani when you can mean it."
The circle around us leaned in then, because the rawness made them decide sides. Someone whispered about how he had once been sweet, how he had been the kind of boy who would put himself between a wild animal and a smaller creature. The memory softened some faces. Others saw only the man before them, and he looked small and frantic. "Say sorry," a girl demanded. "Say you're wrong."
He tried to salvage it, the words flowing out in a wet mess. "I didn't mean to—I'll tell them. I'll say she was with me. I will—"
People watching shifted from curious amusement to the onset of judgment. A boy I recognized took a step forward and said, "You can start by saying you're sorry to her, in front of everyone."
He looked at me then, the pleading in his face raw. "Please," he said. "Please, Kalani."
I had expected to waver. I expected some old habit to make me forgive him because the old Sullivan was always absolved by my pity. But the feelings that used to bind me had been measured and found wanting. I had forgiven once out of debt; forgiveness born of self-respect tasted of something else entirely. I could not be a harbor for his storms.
"No," I said. "I'm not taking your apology as payment. I'm not your ledger. You will stand here and you will watch people see you as you are. You will watch them decide you are cruel. You will watch your choices break your comfortable stage."
He went from denial to panic to begging. The crowd's reaction changed from curious to sympathetic to outright disdain. Someone started recording; others took a few steps back; the basketball players abandoned the warm glow of their practice and watched like judges at a show trial.
"How dare you?" Adelaide hissed. "How dare you treat her like this?"
I had the attention now, the scene was public and perfect for a reckoning. I told the story—briefly, not for melodrama but for truth—the nights I'd sat sick after he drenched me with water in the sun, the times he'd given my lunches to someone else with a laugh, the many small humiliations that became a steady tide.
"They don't have to hear everything," someone said. "It's private."
"Private?" he laughed then—a sharp, empty sound. "I made it public."
The change on his face was slow at first: disbelief, then mortification, then the attempt at redirection, finally the collapse. He couldn't smile his way out of it. He couldn't bully his way out. The crowd's mood turned unmistakably: once amused, they were now watching a fall.
When he finally tried to apologize properly, the plea was thin. People around us murmured. A girl behind me whispered, "Look at him—he's always been cruel when he feels exposed." Someone else nodded. Phones clicked. The world had become a jury.
Sullivan's reaction kept shifting like lightning. At first he tried to deny: "No, I didn't—" Then he tried to pretend he was acting: "It was a joke." Then anger flamed: "You think you can shame me?" And finally the heaviest: "Please, don't do this." His voice cracked. The denial wore away into a flayed, naked plea.
"You wanted me to be grateful forever," I said. "You wanted me to be small and obedient because you were owed. I won't be your owing."
He sank to his knees as if the ground could hold him better than the crowd would. That private sorrow was suddenly public. Some people hissed; a handful clapped, a cruel reward for the spectacle. An older professor who had been passing by stopped and looked at him with a gravity that made his throat work. I watched the man I had once loved become a lesson.
Afterward, the crowd dispersed. The rumor that had branded me as a thief lost steam; the evidence could not be found. People who had once whispered about me now whispered about him—how carefully he could disassemble someone else to make himself feel powerful. That public unmasking was, for me, a release. It didn't end everything; it only began the long work of reorienting a life.
Everest's hand found mine as we walked away. He squeezed gently. "You were brave," he said. "You don't owe him anything."
"Do you think he'll change?" I asked, because there was a tiny, foolish corner of me that loved the idea of rehabilitation.
"He will see the consequences," Everest said. "That's the start."
Months passed in a way I never expected: not a montage of tidy healing, but small, discrete improvements that added up like stitches across a wound. Everest taught me to skydive, and in that sky I learned how to let go. He kept his promises. He did unreasonable things—like folding my favorite scarf into his pocket on a cold night or bringing me coffee without asking—because he simply wanted to.
There were quiet nights where I would think of Sullivan and the boy who'd been a knight. I forgave him the man he became because forgiveness is not forgetting; it's an act of moving on, not a pardon of what was done. When we spoke later, months after that day by the lake, his voice was smaller, surprise and regret riding it.
"Do you want me to apologize?" he asked once, names like open wounds.
"No," I said, and that felt honest. "Apology is for mending. I don't want to mend the thing that was meant to bind me."
Everest and I learned each other in simple acts. He did not drag me into a glittering future; he walked beside me into one. He showed me that being loved need not be a ledger. He was not a rescue; he was a partner who loved me because I was me, not because I had saved him or owed him anything.
In winter, Sullivan's provocations cooled into a guarded distance. People who had watched his meltdown spoke less now. He found himself smaller in the eyes of many, forced to reckon with how his privileges had let him wiggle out of responsibility before. That reckoning was not romantic; it was rough and quiet and, importantly, public.
One crisp morning—months after the lake—I found a parcel at my door. Inside was a folded water bottle with a note: "Top up." It was the old, ridiculous hand of the boy who had once poured water on my head in a silly joke. I laughed, a wet, surprised sound.
Everest leaned over my shoulder and read the note. "What is it?"
"A relic," I said. "A very small relic."
He wrapped an arm around me and kissed my temple. "Keep it," he said. "So you remember you chose the sky."
At night, when the parachute was folded away and the world settled into the hum of ordinary things, I would look at the little bottle on my desk. It was a small thing, full of complicated history. Yet now, it was ordinary. It meant that I had the right to my past and to my future.
And that was the last gift of the ten years: not a debt repaid, but a life reclaimed, sometimes with the sound of a slap by a frozen lake and sometimes with the quiet lift of a parachute into a dawn I chose.
The End
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