Sweet Romance13 min read
The Contract, The Cottage, and the Relentless Big-Tailed Wolf
ButterPicks16 views
"I don't have time to be anyone's heroine," I told myself as I tied the single elastic around my hair.
"Kamryn," Colette said from the doorway, peeking at my apron. "You look like you fell out of a romance novel."
"I teach five-year-olds, Colette. I live inside crayons and nap mats. Romance novels would steal my sanity."
"You still need a husband," she said with the kind of grin that has ruined many of my quiet plans. "My friend Boris says his cousin's friend's son is perfect."
I laughed. "Boris says a lot of things."
"Just meet him," Colette insisted. "If nothing else, you'll have a picnic."
"All right," I said. "Just a picnic."
The park smelled like sea salt and coffee. I sat on a stone table by the bay, rocking my sneaker, feeling like the simplest version of myself.
"Hello," a deep voice said.
I opened my eyes. He folded into the seat across from me as if he'd always belonged there.
"I'm Kamryn Moretti," I said.
"Declan Bird." He bowed his head like it was a proper thing to introduce yourself with. "Nice to meet you."
"You're a little late."
He blinked and smiled without apology. "I wanted to make you wait so you'd notice me when I arrived."
"Is that a military tactic?" I teased.
He was thirty, tall enough to hide a cathedral behind him, and his posture suggested he had worn uniform shoes for years. He said, "I am active service. I travel with my pride. My parents retired from the same world. They wanted me to meet someone."
"I am twenty-six," I answered. "I teach kindergarten."
"Perfect," he said. "Do you want to test something?"
"What?"
"We could try a small experiment," Declan said. "What if we were married by tomorrow? Would your parents be happy?"
My mouth opened. "That's fast," I managed.
"They're asking for grandchildren," Declan said, grin steady. "My parents do too. This would solve the noise."
Colette had loudly vouchsafed him. It felt like a trap I was willing to step into. "Okay," I said.
"Tomorrow, nine at the registry," he replied like a man booking a table.
"I'll be there," I said.
We signed the paper the next morning. The woman behind the counter joked and took our photo. Her kind voice pushed us forward like a train with a schedule.
"Congratulations to the new couple!" she sang.
Declan looped his arm around my waist as if we had been a couple for years. "My wife is shy," he told her.
I wanted to blush and protest, but the moment felt safe under the warm sun and the small, happy laugh shared between strangers.
"Only three rules," I whispered later, tugging his sleeve. "We stay married on paper so our parents quiet down. We do not interfere with each other's lives except for family matters. And we do not... change things."
"Agreed," he said. "But we will live together. So they will believe us."
"My dorm is safe," I argued. "We have twenty-four-hour security."
"You will move in," he decided.
I moved in. The apartment was a three-bedroom with light like honey through blinds. He called it his. I called it a place where my toothbrush could sleep. The first night, he slept in the spare room. I took the main bed and felt oddly like an intruder in someone else's picture.
"Come back to the living room," Declan said softly one night after dinner. "Let me show you where the tea is."
He led me through his parents' gardens on the first visit. They sat in the flower arbor, looking calm and golden.
"Kamryn," Declan announced to his mother and father, "this is my wife."
"Call me Helen," his mother replied, and she reached over to take my hand with an ease so familiar I wanted to cry. "Try this tea. It is from the first picking."
His father watched us like a lighthouse. He asked the question every parent asks, meant to test me but framed as curiosity. "Is this what you wanted? Are you sure?"
"I like him," I said. "I do."
Helen smiled and pulled a small jade bangle from a box. "This is ours," she said. "A family piece. Wear it. Be safe."
I let her slide it over my wrist. It was warm and heavy, and for a moment I felt like I belonged.
We took small, polite steps into a life that was moving faster than I expected. Declan kissed me one night on the sofa when I fell asleep there, the light from the TV making silver paths on the carpet. He apologized with his hand still on my cheek and said softly, "I didn't mean to scare you."
"It was fine," I said. "You went to the bathroom for an hour."
He laughed helplessly. "I had to—my head was full of pictures of you."
He left for the week to return to duty. We messaged like timid birds. One message came that Saturday: "My parents miss you. They asked if you could come by this weekend."
I went, because Helen was warm and the food tasted like home.
She handed me a large bottle with a conspiratorial wink. "This will make both of you strong," she said. "Drink a cup at night."
It looked like a grandparent's secret remedy. I hid it in the back of the cupboard like it was a small treasure.
When Declan returned for rest, the apartment felt like it had changed. He was colloquial and comfortable in a way that surprised me. He cooked. He cleaned. He would call me his "little rabbit" in private, and I would push him away with my knuckles on his sternum.
One night, Helen unveiled another plan. She knocked on the door unannounced, hugging each of us, then she pressed her hands together in the way mothers do when they wish on something out loud.
"Have you both taken your tonic?" she asked.
We laughed, but then Declan poured two glasses. "To our family's health," he said.
The tonic tasted like blueberries—sweet and strange. The next hour unspooled in slow, colorful ways I wasn't prepared for, like someone had wound a spring inside my chest.
"Declan," I said later, flushed and breathless. "What was that?"
"Helen's old remedy," he said, voice quiet. "Maybe it's just... very wholesome."
Days passed. We learned the boundaries of living together and the tender places where lines blurred. Once, in the quiet of the night, I woke to be pressed against him, my arm thrown over his ribs. I pretended to be asleep while his breath ruffled my hair—both of us unwilling to move.
"Say my name," he whispered once.
"Declan," I replied, softer than I meant to be.
"Say something kinder," he said.
"I will," I said, but I didn't know if I could mean it yet.
Then came Li.
"Hello, Declan," she said like a person who had come back to a stage. "I can't believe this is happening."
She was beautiful in a careless way, the sort of beauty that had history behind it. She laughed like glass being slid across a piano. I bristled and curled inward, uncomfortable with the way Declan's eyes flicked toward her.
"Who is this?" I asked later.
"She used to be someone I knew," Declan said. "It's over, Kamryn. She reached out and said she needed to talk."
I felt a cold like rain. He had told me he was careful. He had promised simplicity. Yet here she was, pushing at our door.
"She and I are nothing," he said, defensive. "You have to believe me."
"I believe you, for now," I told him. "But I need time."
He promised reforms. He tried to soothe me with small things: bringing me cheese late at night, showing up at my workplace to meet my colleagues, learning to buy the right shampoo. His friends teased him. "You are a changed man," one of them joked.
Then the truth leaked in like light.
One afternoon at the park, Li arrived wearing a smile and a plan. She placed herself directly in the path of our lives, as if she had always belonged there by right.
"Declan, please," she said to him quietly while he shifted his feet. "We can be honest about what we are."
"There's nothing to be honest about," he said, but his voice trembled. He told her to leave. She laughed like she was winning something.
The next weeks became a ledger of small betrayals. He would call and say he was meeting "a friend," and I would later see messages that suggested more. He lied. He did not lie blatantly at first—he omitted at the edges, he bent light. I hated him for what he hadn't done: he hadn't told the truth.
One morning I packed up and left.
"I can't keep pretending anymore," I told him. "If this was a contract, consider it annulled."
"You mean it?" he asked, panic whispering the words.
"Yes."
I moved into my own apartment that I'd kept empty for years. I set my boxes down with a thump like a punctuation mark.
He followed, all apologies and pleadings, but I would not be a soft place to land. "Don't follow me," I said.
He had friends who said things like, "Make it up to her." He had family who said, "Win her back." He had a stubbornness that was almost religious. A week later, he came to my school gate and waited while my classes ended. He said, "Let's talk."
"No," I answered.
"One last chance," he begged. "I promise I will be different."
"I can't live inside a promise alone," I said.
So I left. I took a week and went home to see my parents. It felt like stepping under a safe roof.
That is when the story took a turn none of us expected.
I was at my mother's kitchen when the phone rang. Declan's number flashed on the screen. My mother, practical and blunt, answered with the same warmth she reserved for neighbors.
"His name is Declan?" she repeated. "Bring him. We will talk."
He arrived with Helen and Gabriel, carrying gifts, jangling like a man with a script to recite. My parents were kind but direct. "Children rush," my father said. "But you are adults now. Make your own choices."
I wanted to be stubborn. Instead, I found myself sitting with strangers who were not strangers at all.
The next day, we planned a small wedding among our parents' insistence. Somewhere inside the noise and the food, I found room to listen to what my heart might want.
Li saw all this as a reopening. The woman who had once called him to confess her ache showed up at my house like a wronged queen demanding an audience.
"What do you want?" I asked her, calm as a stone.
She smiled too widely. "I want him, Kamryn. I thought we had something that mattered."
"You had something," I said. "You had a memory. You don't have a claim."
She tilted her chin. "Not everyone plays fair."
"Neither do you," I answered.
That snapped something. She stepped forward and tried to talk to Declan in front of everyone. The small gathering became a stage. Voices rose. Helen, his mother, shot daggers.
"Leave," Helen said simply. "We don't want this kind of trouble."
Li laughed, pushed, and reached for Declan in a way that made the room gasp.
"Stop it," I said.
Her laugh froze. Pride turned to surprise. She tried to bargain. "I love him," she said to the room. "He belongs with me."
"Not if he does not want to," Declan answered, steely.
"Enough," I said. "You will leave now."
But she did not leave. She raised her voice. People started to watch. The moment was a tangle of looks and phones being drawn out.
I made a choice then. I would not be quiet. I walked to the living room, pulled open my bag, and set my phone on the table. I tapped the screen. A small video began to play.
She looked at me as the room hush fell into place.
"Play it," she demanded.
I did. Her soft words from a month before played out in sharp clarity. She had spoken to a younger man in a cafe, making plans, saying things that suggested she would wait until his life was free. She had said she would make him come back. The recording kept rolling: messages she had sent me to arrange being at places that pulled Declan out of the house. She had outed herself—little tricks like scheduling meetings, comments meant to create jealousy.
She shifted, then turned obstinate. "That's edited," she said.
"It's not," I replied.
"If it's true, then why—" Her sentence dissolved. Her face was still arrogant for a second—then the arrogance cracked.
The small crowd—family, neighbors, the gardener Boris standing awkwardly by—looked at her like she'd become an animal.
Phones were out. Someone said, "Is she really doing that?"
"Who recorded it?" Helen asked calmly.
"I did," I said. "Because I thought Li wanted to steal what wasn't hers. I wanted the truth in public."
She went through the motions like a falcon being turned—first smug, then dizzy. "You can't—" she began.
"Why not?" I asked. "You've pushed and intruded for months. You planted moments, called and asked for secrets. You made yourself the shadow between us."
"That's not—" she denied, eyes wild. Her foot tapped an angry rhythm.
A neighbor pointed his camera at her. "Look at this," Boris muttered. "People will want to see."
She laughed once, a brittle sound of someone losing a bet. "This is slander! You can't do this!"
"We can keep going," I said. "We have every message, every arranged meeting. We have witnesses."
She tried to step forward, hands out, to claim sympathy. She fell silent as the room turned formal—things like a trial in a town square. Someone whispered, "She signed receipts. She bought train tickets."
Her face began to drain color. "No," she whispered.
"Yes," Declan said. "Don't speak for me."
The crowd was not silent now. They murmured and took pictures. Some recorded. A woman clapped once, like a sound cue. "Good for you," someone said, and it turned into small applause.
She started to beg.
"Please," she said suddenly, a rawness where iron had been. "Please don't do this. I— I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"
She sank into a chair. In front of twenty people she looked smaller than I had seen her in all our years of conflict. She curled like the end of a broken thread.
"Don't follow me," I said. "Leave us alone, and don't try to make trouble again."
Her voice crawled into a whimper. "I didn't mean— please. I won't come near him again."
A chorus of cameras clicked. People whispered and moved aside. Some shook their heads. Others, shocked at the fall, took videos and uploaded them. The neighbor who had been stern stood by the window, phone raised. Helen breathed out and said softly, "Let us be."
She left that day the way a rumor does—fast, messy, leaving a shadow for a little while. Later, townsfolk would say she had been humiliated in public. Later, she would ask forgiveness. Later, there were texts of apology and gestures of regret. The scene lasted far longer than the few frantic minutes in a living room. Her arc had followed the arc required by small towns and social media: from arrogance to exposure, to denial, to gasping collapse, ending in pleading. People had clapped, some to cheer our courage, some because they loved a spectacle.
The aftermath was a quiet settling. Declan and I took slow steps. We had the wedding a month later, small but true now in the way that had nothing to do with signatures and everything to do with the bedside where he had once almost died for his job.
That came later—after a night under humming hospital lights, after needles and monitors and a hand small and warm kept on his. I had sat by him until the nurses asked me to rest. He had been shot on a mission at the docks and brought back with a wound less than an inch from his heart. For three long days, the doctors told me not to expect miracles, and then, because my breath kept time with his for hours, he opened his eyes.
"Do you..." he whispered. "Did you say what you would?"
"Yes," I said. "I said I'll be here."
"You mean it?"
"I mean it."
He squeezed my hand, a slow, brave pressure.
"Then promise me," he said, voice small. "Don't change your mind."
"Never," I said.
We married quietly in a small hall. Li had left town to be judged by herself. The parents—my own, Declan's—sat close like anchors. There were speeches that made me cry and food that tasted like safety. Declan, broken and brave, vowed in a voice that cracked, and then, steady with a promise, he pledged to guard what had nearly been lost.
Afterwards, we threw a little party. People clapped. There were friends who had been cruel in kindness—Bonded by the hospital nights now, their teasing became a balm. Helen sat and smiled, a mother who had taught a man to be brave and a woman to accept kindness. My father told a joke that made Declan laugh until his chest hurt.
And sometimes, in the quiet, he told me, "You were so brave in that room. You showed people the truth."
"You were brave," I said. "You were hurt."
We mended things in slow, careful stitches. He learned to answer a simple question directly. I learned to tell him my fear. We built a small life of warm breakfasts, of tea in the afternoon and barricades of honesty at night.
Later, at the wedding banquet, a crowd gathered. Helen watched Declan and me light the last candle. Phones were still out now—people loved a happy ending as much as they had loved a scandal.
"Life gives you strange gifts," Helen said, elbowing me.
"Like tonic that tastes like blueberries and sets the world a little off-balance," I said. We laughed.
Declan caught my hand across the table and held it. "I'm going to try never to let you go."
"You already had to pull yourself up out of me once," I said.
"I know," he said. "And I will always be pulling in the other direction."
People cheered. Some clapped the way people do when a small drama is finally calm. We smiled and ate and moved forward. I liked the simple domestic things: washing a plate together, finding a sock in a jacket, listening to his breath when he was asleep.
One day, some months later, Li - who had sought to cause us pain - came back to the town timid and small, now truly ashamed. She asked for one meeting at the square in front of the community center. She came into the open, hands trembling, and said, voice barely a thread: "I was wrong. I want to apologize."
The town watched curiously. This time, there was no show of smugness. The villain had been humiliated before. Now she had to be accountable, not spectacular. She approached Declan with her head down.
"I didn't understand what I had," she said. "I wanted him. I tried to take what belonged to others. I was cruel."
Declan stood straight, not unkind. "People hurt," he said. "We forgive, but we remember."
She fell to her knees in front of a small audience—neighbors, the bakery boy, two of my teaching colleagues, a woman with a stroller, and Helen who had a look of cold fire in her eyes. Her reaction moved through the motion the town now remembered: smugness extinguished by shame, a spasm of denial, then collapse into pleas.
"Please," she whimpered. "I will do anything. I'm sorry."
Phones pointed, some recording the broken apology. People murmured. A few clapped, not for humiliation but for the strength it took to show all that was ugly and say sorry. I watched Declan and thought of the long night in the hospital and the way life had scrambled us into place.
He touched her shoulder—gentle, not forgiving—then turned to me.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I'm better," I said. "Because you were brave."
"I was scared," he admitted, "but you were braver."
We walked home with hands laced like a small fortress. Outside the glow of porch lights, Helen laughed quietly and said, "You two make a good pair."
We did. The rough edges didn't disappear—there were days of stubborn silence and nights of clumsy apologies—but we had built a life that kept the important things in the middle.
Once, when I worried that the speed of what we had done was reckless, Declan put his thumb to my palm like a promise.
"I choose you," he said. "Every day."
I nodded. "I choose you too."
And when people asked about the great public moment that had toppled a week of lies, I would smile and say, "Truth has a strange way of finding a room and filling it."
At night, sometimes, when the sea wind eased and the city's noise settled, I would wind the watch my grandmother gave me. I would listen to its tick and know that time is a faithful thing; it moves on, steady and eventually kind. I kept that sound like a secret between our two beds.
We didn't fix everything. We didn't pretend everything was simple. But we learned to speak, to stand up, and when necessary, to show the whole room the truth.
"Do you want coffee?" Declan asked once, years on, as we folded a blanket.
"Yes," I said.
He slid a mug across. "To us?" he asked.
"To truth," I said. "And to your mother and her ridiculous garden tonic."
He laughed, soft and certain. "To being brave enough to tell the truth."
I smiled and drank, the taste comforting like returning home.
The End
— Thank you for reading —