Sweet Romance13 min read
The Birthday Crystal, the Bell, and the Thing He Could Not Keep
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I remember the table like a small stage: paper hats, a cake with candles, laughter that pushed the ceiling up. I breathed in the warm coffee and icing smell and blew out the candles like it could erase the ache I had been carrying for months.
"Make a wish," Daniela laughed, shoving the remaining candle stub in my direction.
"Done," I said, smiling with everyone around me. My hands still held the little plate, but my heart felt remote.
When the gifts began, the room got louder. Daniela bumped me with her shoulder and said, "Don't worry, Avi, mine's cheap. I'm a poor thing."
"You're not poor," I teased, and she handed me a small spiral notebook. I hugged it like it was priceless.
They were all warm and silly and generous except for one person who matters most in this kind of story: Elijah. He was supposed to be the leading man in my life that evening. He stood there, a careful smile, and handed me a small bag.
"Happy birthday," he said.
When I opened it, the bag held a plain cardboard box. The box held a small glass crystal ball with a cheap wooden base. A price sticker peeked from the bottom. Thirty-eight dollars. The cardboard box creaked.
I remember the room slipping like a stage curtain. Faces blurred. I clutched the tiny crystal ball with fingers that started to hurt. The base's rough edge dug into my palm, and I tried to fashion a polite smile.
"This is my present?" I asked, softer than I intended.
Elijah's face went hot for a second, like someone had pressed an ember to his cheek. Daniela stood up quickly and said, "Avi, he knows you like crystals. He saved up, he—"
"He paid my tuition for Cataleya," he said, before Daniela could finish.
I stopped smiling. "You bought me thirty-eight dollars' worth of something," I said, lifting the crystal ball, "and you paid her two thousand for school. Do I not even deserve to ask?"
Cataleya's fingers twisted in her lap. "I will pay him back," she pleaded. "He told me to say he used his card. He... he didn't have the cash. He used a line of credit to help me."
Elijah's hand closed around my wrist then — not gently. "Avi," he said, voice dry. "You don't have to make this into a scene."
"What sting me," I said, voice thin, "is that you're giving your care to her. I'm your girlfriend. Doesn't that mean anything?"
For a heartbeat we stood like that, a ring of faces looking at us. Elijah's face went cold; the warmth shrank out of his eyes.
"Maybe," he said, as if testing the word, "we're not right for each other. If you want to break up, I won't stop you."
I had heard that phrase before and bent every time. But this time my chest hardened. "Fine," I said. "Then let's break up."
He blinked like he'd expected me to plead. I left while the air in the room folded into something heavy. Outside, the night had turned wet and gray.
I had no umbrella, no phone, no cash. My breath made small clouds in the air. I thought: I would call a taxi if I could. Then a car pulled up—a dark, confident SUV—and the passenger window rolled down to reveal a man with a messy charm and a smile that said he knew how to break rules.
"Well, if it isn't our campus beauty," he said. "You look like a drowned song."
He had gold-rimmed glasses and a grin like a dare. His name was Axl Hughes. He smelled faintly of minted candy and mischief.
I started to refuse his offer, but Elijah rounded the corner in time and ran toward me. Axl slowed the car and smiled at him.
"Elijah. Fancy seeing you here," Axl said, too bright.
There was that old pain tightening again when Elijah saw the woman in the passenger seat leaning forward in a dress that wasn't meant for the rain. Elijah's jaw clenched.
Axl's grin widened. "Where to, lady? Lick of rain won't suit you. Let me drive you home."
I thought the way out was to take any help and pay the fare. I didn't want to stand in the rain and taste the remainder of my life. I accepted, saying, "I'll transfer you."
When the car smelled of warm air and fabric softener and a little arrogance, Axl threw me a small box. "Happy birthday," he said. "No time to wrap."
Inside: rainbow candies. I laughed, a small, disbelieving sound, and popped one into my mouth. It tasted honest—sugar and something imported.
The next morning I found Elijah waiting at the cafeteria like he always did, with two breakfast trays. He was cocooned in a thrifted white shirt that fit his thin shoulders. He reached for me, as if to take my arm.
We spoke. "Avi, I didn't mean it," he said, voice small. "I'll make it right. I'll get you a gift, I'll—"
I answered quietly: "We already ended it. You said it first."
"Autumn keeps coming and I can't... I can't stop wanting you," he said.
The truth is the issue had been clear long before the crystal ball. Elijah was a tidy kind of man—orderly and polite—and he'd kept many tender things for himself. But he gave them to others when the price to keep a pride was low and the reward high. He had loved not me but the notion of having my admiration and the comfort of being admired.
Axl kept appearing like comic relief and a constant. He appeared in the oddest places: the mall where I worked a day handing out flyers, at the shop where I drifted past jewelry counters. Once I saw Elijah standing under bright shop lights, offering a pink crystal bracelet to Cataleya. My stomach dropped.
"Just a bracelet," Axl said beside me. "A thousand would not buy what you mean to anyone I know."
"And who are you to say that?" I snapped.
"I'm on your side," he said simply, as if that explained everything. He bought a more expensive bracelet in the glass case—his own money—and handed it to me as if it had been meant for me alone.
I bought it. My credit card beeped as the numbers went through. I thought: I'll buy my own comfort. I would not let anyone decide what I was worth.
"You don't have to prove anything," Axl said later as we walked out. "But I'll stand by you."
When Elijah misread my distance for cruelty and asked aloud why I was with Axl, I answered, "I don't need to report to my ex who I spend time with."
I walked away with a bell that jingled against my wrist, the new chain I had bought myself—elaborate and slightly ridiculous. It rang when I moved. Elijah left with a look like someone who had watched a red flag unfurl in front of his face and realized.
There were small, tender things between Axl and me that softened the months—silly gifts, sunlit drives to little towns, his hand steady when I was unsure. He sent me stickers, he stole my favorite pastry from bakery windows, he recorded songs badly to make me laugh. He was not merely a hero; he was a constant fumble of warmth.
Then winter came. Snow fell in feverous silence. I caught a cold and woke to the door being knocked. Elijah stood there, hair damp from the wind, trying to be earnest.
"I brought your porridge," he said. "I thought—"
"Don't," I told him. "We broke up."
Outside, a small drone hummed like a curious insect and dropped two banners: "Dear goddess," and then "Close the window, big wolves about." Axl had sent congee and a note. I ate. The congee warmed like a small midnight fault line coming together, and the small kindness felt like shelter.
After that, things moved in ways that would make both of them—Elijah and Axl—arrive at a kind of reckoning.
Axl was everything a story says the "bad boy" will be—loud, messy, and loyal in a way that made me uncomfortable—but he was also the one who dived for me when a hot tea flew across a restaurant. I was the target of a female's rage; Axl leapt between us and took the scald on his neck. I watched him accept the pain with an embarrassed grin and then push the glass back to the woman with a theatrical flourish.
"Finish him," he said to her, pushing the cup forward with an insane, protective pride.
She did, and the man she poured on found himself soaked and humiliated instead.
Later Axl took my hand like a small child and said, "I enjoyed absorbing injustices for you today. You can say thanks by not punching me."
When the semester slid toward exams, Axl took me on a small road trip to B City, where we were exploring a little and laughing at every wrong turn. We were two exhausted people doing something simple and absurd—toys to the world.
Then the explosion happened.
One second the morning was sunlight and old radio songs; the next second the world broke into a million bitter pieces. There was a sound like canyon thunder. Fire swallowed the street like it had been a ripped seam.
Glass shattered. Concrete exploded. Everything that had been normal became noise and pain.
I remember Axl leaning across me, hands over my ears as if sound could be stopped with skin and fingers. His forehead cracked open against the dash; blood painted his skin. People screamed. The SUV moved, then froze.
Darkness took me.
When I opened my eyes again I was in a hospital bed, tubes and beeps and the small terrible light. Axl was there with his cheek scraped and his hand in a brace. He was more real in that moment than any promise or plan.
"How many fingers?" he asked, hold three up like some ridiculous test.
"Two," I breathed, and then, weaker, "Who are you?"
He grinned like a man relieved of a long quarrel. "I'm Axl," he said, "and forever your idiot."
When Elijah came, he knelt on the cold tile beside my bed with eyes hollow and hair long because he'd been crying into his pillow for days. He tried to apologize—again—and I felt some muscle inside me close like a door.
"I'm sorry," he said, hands trembling. "I was wrong about a lot of things. Please, I—"
Axl's face went a color I had seen only in storms. He stood, and in the small hospital room a tension rose.
"You have ruined the idea of 'sorry' for me," I said to Elijah, soft but firm. "But that's not what I am judging tonight."
Axl looked down and let out one small, sharp laugh. His hand slid into mine and squeezed, a steady anchor.
The months after the hospital blurred into care, paperwork, and a thousand tiny kindnesses. When I recovered enough, Axl took my hand in front of the same small window where the drone had hung its silly banners. He opened a velvet box the way he had a thousand times with a dumb grin, but his eyes were like iron.
"Will you marry me?" he asked.
It felt true, not merely theatrical. I let my hand rest on his. "Yes," I said, and the bell on my wrist chimed like an agreed secret.
But the story would not have been complete without a reckoning that I had been craving—public, sharp, and un-ignorable.
It happened three weeks later at the Student Union ballroom, after the fall semester's fundraising assembly. Elijah had been tapped into running sponsorships and had been publicly visible, a face that people still liked to admire. Cataleya had come as a guest and had been given a table near the stage. The university had invited many alumni and donors; the hall was full and humming.
They asked me to sit on the dais with a small welcome speech—someone who had worked with student projects. I agreed because I was ready, in a way, to stop flinching.
Elijah was there, nervous and glossed over with a smile that did not reach his eyes. Cataleya sat nearby, cheeks that had learned how to look hurt and fragile. The crowd chatted; lights washed over faces like a tide.
"Ms. Sandberg will speak now," the moderator announced. "Please welcome Avianna."
I stepped forward. The microphone felt heavy. I looked out at the sea of faces: friends, students, professors, and the parents of Cataleya who had been alerted to the event. My heart thumped a slow, fierce rhythm.
"Thank you," I began. "I didn't prepare any notes, so I'll speak plainly."
There is a kind of courage that blooms when you stop protecting pride and start demanding truth.
"Two months ago," I said, "I celebrated my twentieth birthday here with friends. I received a gift that night that made me think carefully about value. When someone gives a token worth thirty-eight dollars and uses that to hide the fact he has helped someone else with two thousand, the problem isn't the numbers. The problem is choices."
A polite cough slid through the crowd. I held my gaze on Elijah for a long moment. He reddened. Cataleya bit her lip.
"This is not about money," I continued. "It is about who we prioritize when the moment matters. It is about what we give freely and where we keep our gifts." My voice steadied with each phrase.
Then I pressed play on my phone. Daniela had recorded the private conversation without either of them seeing. The room fell into a small, sharp silence as voices came through the speakers: Cataleya's hurried apologies, Elijah's soft assurances to keep things secret, the plea for help. The audio was not malicious; it simply proved what friendship had suspected.
Cataleya flushed and tried to speak, "You can't—"
"I can," I said, raising my hand so people could hear. "Cataleya, you said my phone was with you that night. Daniela's recording shows you praising the idea you'd be taken care of. You lied when you said you had only randomly liked a friend's post."
There were murmurs. Some turned to stare; others pulled phones out, because modern cruelty is often modern witness.
Elijah's face went white as snow. "Avi," he stammered. "I—"
I shook my head. "You didn't set boundaries then. You danced on the edge of a thing you should have cut. You thought you could keep your pride intact while letting someone else pay your human debts. That hurts. It hurts the person you said you loved."
His eyes shone with a rawness I had not seen before—hurt that tasted like discovery. He tried to stand but his knees wobbled.
Then I did the part of the reckoning I had been building toward. I asked Daniela to stand and place the photo of the mall counter beside the stage. It was a picture of Elijah handing Cataleya the bag, the bracelet still in the plastic. I asked the parent of Cataleya—present in the audience—to come up.
Cataleya's father walked up, steady and large, and stopped about three feet from Elijah. The room smelled of formal perfume and the faint oily kindness of stage lights.
"Excuse me," he said, voice low and terrible, "my daughter told me many stories about how generous certain students were. I came tonight thinking to say thanks to the university for caring so much. I did not come to discover that the man I thought a gentleman had behaved poorly."
He held out the tuition receipt that showed the transfer Elijah had arranged. He turned it so the lights caught the numbers. The crowd leaned in.
Cataleya's mother moved closer and whispered, "We were ashamed to know she accepted money without telling anyone. But we are more ashamed now to see how she misled others."
Cataleya's face crumpled. I kept speaking, but my words were now an arrow: "Elijah, you made yourself small out of pride. You hid. You gave help to a junior and then minimized it to an object for your girlfriend to accept. That is selfishness. You honored neither relationship."
"That's not fair!" Elijah cried. He swung his hands, the way someone reaching for a cliff's rope might. "I wanted to help. I did not—"
"You wanted to feel generous without being inconvenienced," I said. "You wanted praise without cost. And when you were caught, you tried to keep both."
Sorrows rearrange a man's face; he was now flustered, raw, and finally real. The audience had stopped murmuring and were listening like a court.
I had more. "And you, Cataleya, you used someone's kindness when it suited you, and you shaped a story that gave you an advantage. You turned a friend into an accomplice in your comfortable life."
There were boos—low and then louder—and people around unfurled their phones. A few recorded. Someone near the back hissed an opinion into the room. The atmosphere changed from polite to charged. This was public, as the rules demanded.
Cataleya stood, lips trembling. "I—I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know how else to get help."
"I will not minimize how desperate people can be," said Elijah's professor, who had come to the event. "But the way you both handled it has betrayed trust. I will be taking this to the student council and the dean. This behavior—this hiding—cannot be rewarded."
He was not merely speaking judgment; he had the authority to make things happen. The atmosphere sharpened.
Elijah's mother—who had arrived—cried out from the audience. "Please, someone," she said, voice thin. "My son doesn't know how to apologize otherwise. He is ashamed."
The crowd's voices rose in a suspiral of anger and sympathy. Some students started to clap in disapproval. Others recorded and uploaded the video. The university event would be trending within an hour.
Cataleya could only stand there, as if the room had turned to ice and she had been the last thing unaccounted for.
"You're not only losing trust," I said quietly, to both of them, "you're losing your right to privacy in the ways you had used it to hurt others. People will know, and you will have to answer."
Elijah's face dissolved. He fell to his knees and covered his face. That's the point where some people will cry in front of the cameras—the guilty theater of remorse.
That was not all. The dean stepped forward and announced formal inquiry into misrepresentation of donations, a review of volunteer assignments given to Cataleya, and a sanction that would publicly record the misuse. In short: consequences. The crowd circled like witnesses as the dean explained the penalties.
The worst part of the night for them was not the penalty itself—it was the way the neighborhood of people who had admired Elijah shifted. Students who had once praised him for being a quiet, tough leader now looked at him differently. Sponsors who had been inclined to lend their names reconsidered. Parents who had put their children in groups with him were awkward. The sting of being socially exiled arrived faster than any formal letter.
Elijah tried to stand and speak to me but the room's temperature had changed. He looked small and lost in a way that pricked like a winter wind. Cataleya tried to weep, but the sound was thin and brittle.
When it was over, the hall emptied in stages like a wound being licked. The story unfurled across campus, and phone screens carried the clip of me pressing play. Some applauded; some whispered that I had been cruel. I had not wanted cruelty. I had wanted truth.
It was justice that the punishment matched the offense: public exposure, formal inquiry, social consequences. It was the kind of punishment that doesn't overturn a life—but it changes the view other people have of your life. For them, it would sting for a long time. For me, the relief was a subtle, clean thing.
In the weeks that followed, Elijah tried to apologize properly. He wrote a letter that started with admission and ended with a request to speak later. I read it, folded it, and placed it on a shelf. He visited the hospital once, then less. He tried to help with small, guilt-baiting items—old study guides he found online, practice exams—but I did not accept what felt like hush-money for dignity.
Cataleya moved campuses by the end of the year. She sent a message once—"I'm sorry"—and then went silent. People who once whispered about her new clothes now whispered her name with less warmth. She had her own life to rebuild.
Axl and I married in a small ceremony three years later. He was hardly perfect—he made foolish jokes at the worst times and was terribly stubborn in ways that could finish a night with an argument—but those were the parts I had learned to love. He would occasionally finger the little bell on my bracelet and say, "That sound saved you once. I like that it knows your movement."
At graduation, Elijah came to the ceremony. He moved with a new caution. He caught my eye briefly, and in that look I saw a man trying to patch together what he'd lost. Not all stories of regret end in rage; many of them end in small, private attempts to be better. He worked; he apologized when needed; he learned to be more honest about himself. But he paid a price: trust is earned slowly, and sometimes public humiliation is the shape a lesson takes.
The little crystal ball remains in a box in my closet. Sometimes, when I pick it up, I remember the way the cardboard seemed to mock me on my twentieth birthday. Sometimes I laugh at how a tiny object could hold so much—not worth, but proof of a moment.
Axl still teases me: "You keep the ball to remind me you once put up with thirty-eight dollars for a present."
"Keep it," I say, looking at the bell on my wrist that rings like a small honest bell. "The bell brought me here."
We fold the memories gently now. The punishment happened in the light of a thousand small screens and in the hall that had once cheered. It was public, thorough, and messy. It changed things for the better, if slowly, for all of us.
The End
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