Sweet Romance14 min read
The Confession Mix-Up That Locked My Heart
ButterPicks16 views
I never believed in tarot. I thought it was cute chaos—cards and pretty words that make your head buzz for an hour and then dissolve with your next cup of tea.
"Eve, don't be dramatic," I told her as we sat in a cramped tarot shop with incense and string lights. "If one card says 'act' I won't rush to confess to anyone."
"You'll see," Eve said, tapping my hand. "Three cards. Just three. And if the last one says 'now,' you have one week. One week, Kylie. That's all."
"Okay," I laughed. "If the cards say now, I'll buy you lunch every day for a year."
The tarot reader flipped the last card and looked right at me with a tiny, serious smile.
"Next week," she said. "If you don't speak, the line fades. You won't get a second chance."
I wanted to roll my eyes. I wanted to believe we were both just giggling at the shop's mood lighting. But something about the way Eve squeezed my palm on the walk back made my head buzz differently. Alejandro Michel—my year-above crush, the calm senior who had rescued me from a bad group project, the one who always had an extra pen—felt closer and more terrifying.
"This is ridiculous," I told myself that night. "Just go. Lock him in a study room. Confess. Run away with dignity if things go wrong."
I borrowed a study-room key from campus facilities like a bewildered adult performing a heist. I charged my phone, practiced my lines under my breath, and poured half a cheap bottle of wine into a paper cup to steady my hands.
The library was quiet at midnight. Well, quiet except for the faint hum of lights and the occasional click of a keyboard. I slid the study-room door closed after me—heart pounding, palms sweating, words lined up like soldiers.
Inside was not Alejandro.
"Open the door," a voice said, low and bored.
I froze.
"Who is it?" I whispered, my heartbeat loud in my ears.
The door swung open and a lamp snapped on. The face that met mine was not Alejandro's gentle smile. It was Hunter Brooks: tall, sharp, his jaw like a blade, and eyes cold with amusement. I tried to disappear into the floor.
"Oh," I managed. "I—I'm sorry. I thought—"
Hunter's mouth curved. "You thought you were with Alejandro? Cute."
"I—I'll go," I stumbled. "I'm so sorry. I drank—my phone died—please don't be mad."
"Relax," Hunter said, but his voice had a level of dangerous playfulness I couldn't read. He stepped into the light, and everything about him looked composed, practiced. "You're the one who locked me in?"
"I—yes. I wanted to confess to someone else and I locked the wrong door. I'm an idiot." I tried to laugh it off. "Embarrassing, right? I'm so sorry."
Hunter's expression flickered. Then he did something unexpected: he smiled like a private joke. "You like Alejandro?"
"Yes. He—he's steady, he saved me in sophomore year from the worst internship stress. He reads code like breathing. He's everything I can't be."
"Then why lock me in?"
"I panicked," I said. "I thought I'd run out of time. The tarot—"
"Huh." He hummed, amused. "Right. Tarot." Hunter closed the door behind him with a soft click and crossed the room to the desk. He picked up a marker and, for a full beat, stared at it.
"Okay," he said out loud, as if making a decision. "Say whatever you wanted to say to Alejandro. Say it to me. I want to hear."
My brain short-circuited. "No, I—"
"Say it."
I swallowed.
"I like Alejandro. Actually, I like—" I almost said his last name before bile rose. "I like Alejandro's way of solving problems. I like—" My voice shook. "I like his kindness. I like the way he carries his books. Will you—will you—"
"Say it," Hunter urged.
So I said it. Line by line. Sentence by sentence. Words I had rehearsed for hours escaped and landed awkwardly in the room. The confession had the clumsy sincerity of something being confessed for the first time in the world.
When I finished, the room was silent. His face was unreadable.
"Open the door," he said finally.
I twisted the lock. The door burst open and light flooded in. He faced me and then, out of nowhere, his lips brushed my forehead as if sealing a secret.
"I accept," Hunter said in a voice that made my knees wobble. "For tonight, you're mine."
My horror trickled into adrenaline. "No, I'm so—this is a mistake. I meant Alejandro. I'm so sorry."
Hunter's eyes darkened. "You meant Alejandro. Right. So you don't mean me."
"Yes. No. I'm—"
He laughed, soft and intimate. "Then let me take the photo."
I shook my head. "No. Please. I need to go."
He stepped forward and his palm landed gently at the back of my neck, not rough but not gentle enough to calm me. "Come on," he said. "Baby steps. Smile."
He made me pose. He made me laugh. He clicked his phone. A flash, a tilt, the camera's merciless evidence. I left dizzy, backpack heavier with humiliation than with books. I imagined the photo, imagined my cheeks flaming across campus.
The next morning the dorm room erupted.
"Kylie! Spill!" Eve cried, circling me like a hawk. "You did it, right? You confessed?"
I shoved my face into a pillow. My phone buzzed with dozens of friend requests and messages—one name after another with little hearts and exclamation points. I opened the gallery on Hunter's unlocked phone and saw the image: me, frozen, smile twitching, nestled next to Hunter's broad, mocking grin.
"You idiot," Eve whispered, and I knew her tone had switched from conspiratorial to worried. "Where did he post it?"
Hunter posted it to a student confession wall with a caption: "She's mine. Back off." Men in the cafeteria smirked. Girls in my dorm texted about how bold "the new couple" looked. Alejandro—Alejandro Michel—texted me that night with a worried, calm, careful note.
"Are you okay?" he asked. "I saw the post."
"Thanks, Alejandro," I wrote back. "I'm fine. It was a mistake."
But I wasn't fine. Because of course the wrong door had led to the wrong person. Because Hunter—hawk-eyed, dangerous, invulnerable—had decided to make a spectacle. Because a rumor seed had been planted and the rumor spread with the speed of wildfire.
"Now you have to make him call it off," Eve insisted. "You created this, Kylie. Fix it."
I tried. I sent a message to Hunter: I'm sorry. That was a mistake. Please take it down. He replied, not like a villain, not cold, but with a casual, maddening possessiveness.
"Don't worry," he wrote. "We can make it look real."
I panicked. "Make it look real? No."
"Then help me," he said. "Play along. Let me at least enjoy it."
I told Eve I couldn't face him. She reminded me the tarot had set a deadline and that I had wanted to act. She also reminded me she could not be relied upon to give good ideas and was adamant that I needed a plan.
We made one: make Alejandro jealous so he'd ask me to break up with Hunter. If Alejandro made the move, I could claim it was all misunderstanding, no one would blame me for that, right?
I stalked Alejandro in the library like a small, determined shadow. The plan was ridiculous and cowardly and perfectly me. But every time Alejandro flashed his soft, immediate smile, the courage dissolved. He was warm and articulate and kind. I couldn't push that person into ending something for me.
Hunter noticed. "Running errands for someone else?" he asked one night, taking a seat across from me in the student union.
"No," I lied.
"You're hiding," he said simply, and then softer: "Say it for me. Say you're mine."
I froze. "I—" I couldn't. It felt like asking a scholar to ignore logic to follow a rumor. "I can't pretend. I won't."
He smiled and then let me go. "Fine," he said. "But don't pretend to be free if you aren't."
Days blurred. I tried to play the "mistake" card with Hunter, but he refused to let it stay a mistake. He turned our public "couple" into a curated show: he called me "my girl" at lunch, he shared silly pictures, he texted me to tell me where he'd sit in the library. My life, once mundane and private, became a staged thing he could move like a chess piece.
And the campus loved the spectacle.
One evening at the basketball court Hunter did something I hadn't anticipated: he played, and he played like a god. The whole crowd roared when he sank a three-pointer. Then, catching my eye over the whistle of the game, he smiled that crooked smile and gestured for me. He wanted me to come sit at his table like the honored girlfriend. He dubbed me "my wife" jokingly and his friends cheered. I felt like a wind-up toy wound tighter every time he looked my way.
I started to learn Hunter's edges and his odd tenderness. He tugged my hair out of my face during a quiet late-night walk and, with an absurdly careful voice, asked about my medical history like a concerned parent.
"Do you have food allergies?" he asked once, scanning my grocery list like a general.
"I do," I said. "I can't drink beer—makes me dizzy."
"Then don't," he said. "And don't be stubborn trying to impress people with beer."
His ease unnerved me. He paid attention to details nobody else noticed—the way I blinked when concentrating, the nick on my thumb from a childhood skateboard accident. Small, exactly matched notes of a man paying attention.
I practiced my confession again—this time not for Alejandro, but as an inner negotiation. Was I allowed to be moved by Hunter, even if my heart had first fluttered for Alejandro?
And then Gwendolyn Carpenter arrived.
She came like a storm in designer clothes and smelling of expensive decisions. Gwendolyn introduced herself as someone "connected," as someone used to things being arranged. She told me plainly one afternoon, "Hunter is mine. Back off and save yourself the humiliation."
I laughed at her upfrontness, because how would someone like her know me, or my choices? But then, a week later, a message arrived: a photo. A photo of Hunter and a woman in a half-sleeping embrace, a risky image captioned with a rumor that could topple everything.
My stomach dropped. Hunter called immediately.
"I didn't—" he started, voice tight. "Kylie, don't go anywhere. I'll explain."
"Where are you?" I asked. "Show me where you are."
"Hotel 7," he said. "Do not leave. Do not let her move."
My friends and I drove to the hotel. My hands shook so much I could barely hold my phone. Eve squeezed my fingers until they hurt.
We walked into the hotel lobby like a small army of normal people. Eyes tracked us. Gwendolyn sat at a corner table like a queen. People in the lobby paused to watch; a few took videos. Phones tucked into hands like talismans.
"You're making a mistake," she said, when Hunter stepped forward with a quiet fury. "You should have accepted that night. You should have been grateful."
Hunter's parents appeared then—something I hadn't expected. A tall man and a composed woman in quiet luxury. They stood back, their presence tilting the energy. I realized this was not only Hunter's private fight: it had become a family matter in the most public of places.
"Stop," I said, voice low but steady. "If you have evidence, show it. If you don't, stop smearing someone's life."
Gwendolyn's smile hardened. "We have proof. We have photos."
She produced a printout and tossed it onto the table. There it was—an image of Hunter with a woman, intimate in bed, the same photo she had sent me. People lined up like a crowd at a stage show. A man at the front took the photo and put it up on the lobby's TV screens with a flick of his phone; the image bloomed. Gasps rippled outward.
"Watch," Gwendolyn said. "He will not deny it."
Hunter went very still. For a heart-stopping second I feared for him, for us. Then he stepped forward, and his tone cut like a blade. "Those are altered," he said. "She Photoshopped the images. She set a trap."
"That's impossible!" Gwendolyn cried, but the lobby was listening. People murmured. Hunter's father watched with a tight face that hid a thousand decisions. Hunter reached into his coat and pulled out his phone, then handed it discreetly to Emmett Campos, one of his friends.
"Emmett, pull the metadata," Hunter said. "Check the EXIF. Check timestamps."
Emmett, who had the calm of someone who knew my boyfriend better than the accuser did, tapped into the photo's details. "Look," he said, voice steady. "This file shows edits. The photo's properties reference editing software that wasn't used by this hotel. There's a mismatch in pixels where the lighting was painted in. That—" He pointed at the edge of the image where the shadow around Hunter's shoulder failed to align. "She mounted a composite."
Gwendolyn's face froze like a mask that had cracked. "That's not possible," she whispered.
Pablo Green, another of Hunter's friends, took a step and accused, "Why would you ruin a man's reputation for... for what? Money? Revenge?"
She sniffed. "So what? Maybe he's lying. Maybe he owes me—"
"You accused him of assault," Hunter's mother said, voice smooth and icy. "You have no proof and you come here flinging false images in a public place."
A hush fell. Phones hovered. Someone began to record. The lobby crowd, which moments before had leaned into scandal like moths to a flame, now leaned butting into a different tension—an exposure of deceit.
I looked at Gwendolyn. Her composure wavered. "You can't—" she began.
"Stop." Emmett's voice rose. "We have your messages threatening to go public if you didn't force his 'acceptance.' We have your hotel key swipe logs showing you entered the room alone. We have security footage from the hallway."
The lobby TVs flicked to grainy security footage. There, on loop, was Gwendolyn walking to the room, then walking away. There was no second person entering after her. The footage lined up with the metadata. People around us began to whisper, incredulous.
"You planted it," Hunter said, the words barely moving his lips. "You staged the scene and then manufactured the image. Why attack him?"
Gwendolyn's face turned red-hot. She tried to plead, to argue, but the evidence kept surfacing. A friend of hers—someone who'd helped with the manipulation—texted, accidentally on a group he created, and the texts popped onto the screen. "Run the composite," read one message. "Make sure the shadows match."
That was the last thread. The lobby exploded with noise: gasps, laughter, curses, people pulling out their phones to film Gwendolyn's unraveling.
"Please," she said suddenly, voice small. "I needed something he would take seriously. He ignored me. He avoided me."
"You didn't need to ruin him," Hunter's father said, and his voice had an old-world quiet gravity that made people shrink. "You could have spoken to me. But you chose this."
Hunter's mother, who until then had stood like a statue, stepped forward. She lifted a hand and then, in a gesture that stunned everyone, slapped Gwendolyn across the face so hard the sound echoed. The slap cracked like thunder. Phones recorded; the moment seemed carved into slow motion.
"You will not hurt my son," she announced, voice cold. "You will not threaten our family."
The lobby's mood changed. Gwendolyn staggered like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She clutched her face in shock, then anger spat out at her like venom. "You have no right!" she screamed. "You don't know—"
A dozen people stood, not to help her but to watch; some booed, some cheered. Several called out for security. A cluster of students crowded closer, voices layered: "She hired people!" "She faked it!" "We saw the messages!"
Finally, police—called earlier by someone in the crowd—arrived. They took statements and collected the manipulated files. A security guard escorted Gwendolyn into a sit-down, and two officers began asking straightforward questions about the photo origin, payments, and threats. Her face shifted from anger to denial, then to panic, and finally to collapse.
At the center of the storm, Hunter stood still, his hand on my back, grounding me. "You did the right thing," he said quietly into my hair. "You came. You didn't let her destroy my name."
People around us watched the whole scene unfold: the slap, the confession, Gwendolyn pleading, then sobbing and the cold click of official procedure. Clips of the event were already circulating on social apps, but the narrative had turned: the would-be saboteur had been exposed.
Gwendolyn's demeanor broke in stages. She went from composed to angry—"You won't humiliate me!" she demanded—to frantic—"It was my boyfriend's idea!"—to pleading for forgiveness with a voice that cracked—"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please don't—"—and finally to collapse, head in her hands, crumpled, the lobby audience watching with a mixture of triumph and pity.
"How did it feel?" a young woman in the crowd shouted. "Do you like being famous for lying?"
Gwendolyn looked up as if a stranger had called her name. For a second she opened her mouth to retort, then shut it. Her knees weakened. Those who had been her social allies that afternoon now filmed her with a callousness that felt like a mirror.
Later, when the police took her statement, she claimed insanity, that she had been desperate, that love had made her do terrible things. The officers exchanged looks. The university's disciplinary committee launched an inquiry. Social media lit up with opinion pieces and threads denouncing manipulation and praising those who had exposed the fraud.
I stood on the edge of the crowd as the scene wound down, feeling stunned and a little sick. People nodded to Hunter with new respect. His parents approached us with downturned eyes and, awkwardly, apologized for the spectacle. They thanked me for standing by their son.
"You were brave," his father said quietly. His mother squeezed my hand briefly, then excused herself.
Hunter leaned close. "You shouldn't have had to do that," he murmured.
"I couldn't just watch," I replied. My voice was small. "I couldn't let someone destroy him."
He kissed my forehead then, slow and certain, the way a man makes a promise without words. People around us applauded in that strange, collective way an audience does when a show ends. But this wasn't a show. What happened in that lobby would change how people talked on campus for weeks.
The rush of adrenaline faded. I felt hollow and heavy and oddly cleansed. We walked out together into the afternoon sun. Phones buzzed with new notifications. Some students cheered; others whispered; some simply stared.
Hunter's father stopped me at the curb. "Thank you," he said again. "I was wrong about some things. Your courage matters."
"Can we go back to normal?" Hunter asked, sounding tired.
"I don't want normal," I said, surprising myself. "I want honest."
"Honest?" he repeated. "Then say it."
I looked up at him, the man who had been a rumor, a threat, a comfort, and—improbably—my safe place. "I didn't mean to like you," I admitted. "But I do. I like you."
Hunter's face flooded. "Then we're staying together," he promised. "And I'm not pretending anymore. I showed a stupid post but I won't stage anything to keep you. I'm done playing games."
We walked back to campus hand in hand. The world felt peculiar and bright as if someone had rearranged the furniture in the sky.
Weeks later, when people teased me in the cafeteria—"The bully's girlfriend?"—I simply smiled. Alejandro kept his distance but stayed kind whenever we crossed paths. He passed me in the corridor one afternoon and said, casually, "Good luck on finals, Kylie." I smiled back because I liked him; he had been a safe, quiet light in my life. But my heart? It had been rerouted.
Hunter and I built small rituals. He texted me where he'd sit in the library. I brought him snacks for late-night study sessions. We argued over silly things—who used too much toothpaste, whether a spill could be cleaned with just water—and made up by doing ridiculous, tender things like swapping jackets in the rain.
And the tattoo? He went and got my name etched on his waist—an impulsive, ridiculous, beautiful thing. He showed it to me once while we were hiding behind a row of books in the library, just before everyone filtered in.
"You're dramatic," I told him, but I touched the ink.
"Keep it secret," he said, eyes laughing. "Don't make a scene."
"Too late," I said, because secrets rarely survive college for long.
On graduation day, long after tarot cards had been shoved back into their velvet box and rumors had died down, I sat with Hunter and Eve on the campus roof where we once planned confessions with wine and ridiculous certainty.
"Remember the tarot?" Eve asked, nudging me.
"I do," I said. "I remember the cards said act or lose it. I acted. I just didn't expect I'd lock the wrong door and find the right person."
Hunter wrapped an arm around my shoulders and drew me close. "You locked the door," he said into my hair. "And I opened a new one."
Eve laughed. "The tarot owed you at least one correct reading."
I looked down at my hands. The rooftop wind smelled like late spring. A thought flickered through me—how flimsy and strange fate can be, a tarot deck one night, a wrong door the next, a slanted photo and a humiliating spectacle after that. The crooked path had been messy and public and absurd.
But at the end, in a lobby full of witnesses and a row of blurry security camera frames, the truth had what mattered: evidence and courage and people who chose to stand with you.
I tightened my fingers around Hunter's and caught his eye. He smiled in the way only he did—for once, not a show, but a simple, steady promise.
"Let's get coffee," he said.
"Only if you pay," I teased.
"I will," he answered, and added, quieter, "but only if you'll be mine—no tricks, no edits."
"No tricks," I promised.
And the tarot deck? It sits on my dorm bookshelf now, face down. Sometimes its cards feel like props, sometimes like the first little push of a wind that started everything. Either way, when I pass it, I touch the edge of the box and remember the night I locked the wrong door—and the one right thing that came from it.
The End
— Thank you for reading —