Sweet Romance15 min read
The Fifty-Second Confession and the Chestnuts
ButterPicks15 views
I wrote his name on the confession wall every week for a year.
"I like you, Jaxon," I would post, neat and identical each time—same punctuation, same silly heart.
"Don't mind her, she posts the whole campus," Ariel would say and laugh.
"Fifty-one down," I whispered to the plaster behind the wall the night before my fifty-second.
Then he answered me on the wall, and I felt my chest break and then burst like glass.
"Diana, can you please stop posting on the wall about me every day? Do you know how annoying you are? I don't like you. Even if you keep putting me up there I won't like you. Please stop bothering me."
I stared at the sentence until the letters trembled. The stomach in my chest dropped. I felt the hot flush of humiliation—public, neat, exact.
"Diana, Jaxon replied on the wall," Ariel said the next morning with a giddy grin. "Come see."
I opened the wall and read the reply again.
"Do you know how annoying you are?"
I wanted to rip the wall down by hand. I wanted to scream. I wanted to be anywhere but under that bright, public humiliation.
"He's a jerk," I told myself out loud. "He's a dog." I said things I had never said before. I told myself I would never, ever like him again.
My phone buzzed then. It was a QQ message from a small, scrubby account I used for work: StingPocket.
"Hey, sis, wanna duo?" the message read.
I had met StingPocket half a year ago in a ranked match. He had watched me carry and then stolen the enemy nexus when everyone else fed. He sent me friend requests and messages that were a little too flattering. I accepted. I used that account to take orders for game boosting. We were partners of convenience—me the freelance carry, him the loud admirer.
"Play. I’ll take a quick order," I typed, strapping on an old headset without the voice changer I sometimes used.
"Five-floor pick Li Bai?" a teammate asked in champion select.
"Fine, be the jungler," I snapped.
"Female? Why didn't you say?" someone snarked.
"Because being female doesn't make me bad at jungle," I said.
StingPocket toggled voice on and off all through the champ selection as if trying to measure the sound of me. He never said anything until we started.
"You're really good," he said quietly the first time I stole a kill they tried to hog. "Play like that and they will shut up."
I didn't hear my voice on the mic that night because I had forgotten the voice filter. Later, StingPocket sent me a private message.
"Why did you kick me?" he asked when I left the room.
"You said I sound bad," I typed back, irritated.
"I never said you sounded bad," he answered. "Someone pulled at me in lobby. Sorry. Let’s play next."
The next match, the player in the second slot—"Hulu" on his avatar—teased, "You two doing a show?"
StingPocket's mic flickered, but he didn't speak until we were deep into the game. Then his voice was a steady anchor.
"Blue, Diana, blue," he called. "Take that red, go help mid now."
He was attentive and oddly gentle. He gave me the better blue, the better items, the last hit in a team fight. When the match ended, he had given me a win bronze and a warmth in my chest I couldn't place.
"Why'd you go quiet just now?" I asked him later on QQ.
"Someone was calling me," he said. "I didn't want to cause trouble."
"You're impossible," I wrote and then logged off for dinner with Ariel.
That day in the mess hall curly-haired Jaxon—tall and impossibly composed—walked by with a girl in a pale blue dress, Francesca Berry. Francesca was everywhere: graceful, smiling, the dance department's darling. Jaxon had that quiet, clean way of moving that used to look like light to me. I stiffened.
"He came? With the dance major?" Ariel hissed.
He did sit near us. He talked a little and then left. He left Francesca there and walked away again. The girl beside him whispered at some point and looked toward me with a thin smile that tasted like salt.
"That's the girl who keeps posting on the wall, right?" someone nearby said loud enough for me to hear. "She’s bragging on the big wall and embarrassing herself."
I felt people looking at me. I felt the sting of small hands tearing down my confidence. I left.
That evening my bite of pride wanted to fight. I refused StingPocket’s message to duo. I refused everything. I told myself I had had enough.
But later that night he messaged me again.
"Can I log on to your main?" he asked. "My roommate needs to see I have a CP."
"CP?" I replied, puzzled.
"Game partners," he wrote. "Just say we’re partners."
He promised me two thousand in-game credits if I helped him. He sent me a rare skin. He called me "sis." It was ridiculous and warm pivoting at once. I agreed, thinking it was a small game bet.
He and his roommate were pleasantly loud that night. "Sister!" the roommate who called himself "GourdSeven" bellowed and my friends heard and teased me for days.
The next time I went to bed there was a message: "I like you. Can you be my girlfriend?"
My heart hiccupped. I laughed it off and told him to stop. He didn't stop. His messages multiplied—sweet morning messages, odd little worries about his roommate's questions, small gifts in the game that held meanings I didn't yet understand. He bought me a rare skin once—white bridal Qiao—then asked me to try it on. My face burned as if I had been seen in a private dressing room.
"StingPocket," I typed one night, "why are you like this?"
"Because I like you," he wrote simply. "Call me Bao?"
"Bao?" I echoed. "You want me to call you Bao?"
"Yes. Bao."
I could feel the slow, inevitable easing of something in my chest. It made me dizzy and stupid and tickled.
Yet real life kept dragging me back. Days later I found chestnuts waiting at my door with a strange note. The delivery boy was Jaxon, doing a part-time job. He handed me the brown paper bag with his hand trembling a little.
"Your chestnuts," he said.
I took them and wanted to throw them at him and also thank him forever.
"Working part-time?" I said, because you always pretend the first thing is the right question.
"Scholarship," he said. "Family."
Something tightened in my throat like an apology I couldn't give. I carried the chestnuts upstairs like a trophy and texted StingPocket.
"Some guy named—" I typed. "You sent the chestnuts?"
"Yes," he answered. "I wanted to make you smile."
"Who are you?" I asked, suddenly. "What's your real name?"
"Ask tomorrow," he wrote, and then went silent for the night.
He sent me a comic book when I complained about stomach ache. He sent medicine when he saw me pale during a lecture. He started showing up at odd times, in the quiet places where I smelled like old paint and charcoal. He was careful, as if he handled me like something fragile.
One afternoon he walked up to me in front of a dozen students and pulled me by the wrist.
"Could you listen?" he said, quietly strained. "Please."
"I'm not your friend," I said, "I told you to stop."
He clutched my wrist like someone who had been holding his breath too long. "I did not post that. The wall answer—someone posted that in my name. I thought it was funny until I realized who it hurt. I posted an apology and want to fix this."
I looked at him. He seemed tired. There was a small red map of capillaries under his eyes. He reached up and called me "sis" in a voice like it had been polished for months.
My chest, traitor that it is, skipped.
"I prefer 'Diana,'" I said in the end. "And I want you to post every day until you reach fifty-two. One more will be the proof."
He looked at me as if I had asked him to climb Everest. "Okay," he said. "Fifty-two."
What I didn't know then was that the worst part of the story wasn't the rude message on the wall. It was the person behind it, humming a tune of hatred and small victories.
Francesca—I should have known her smile had teeth when she watched me eat. She had been the one to create that awful post, to pretend to be Jaxon's friend and then write cruel words that read like a blade. She faked messages, she showed screenshots, and then she watched the tumble of gossip. When the truth came out, the confession wall administrators posted an apology: a lazy shrug and a plea for forgiveness. It wasn't enough. People wanted to know who had framed me.
On a weeknight the wall's moderators held a meeting in the campus auditorium because the incident had spun into a scandal. I went because Ariel told me to go with her, and because my brother Cooper insisted he would come and keep an eye on me.
They called us all: the curious, the angry, the protectors, the gossipers. The auditorium filled like a jar filling with sugar, every seat crammed. Phones clicked to record. Someone shouted, "Where's she?"
"Let her speak," someone else demanded.
The moderator cleared a throat, then handed the mic to a tall girl from the wall's admin team. She said, "We have consent to reveal the identity of the person who impersonated Jaxon on the wall. We did a digital trace."
"And?" the crowd called.
"In the name of campus safety and truth," she said, "we ask Francesca Berry to come forward."
A whisper moved through the crowd like wind across dry leaves. Francesca appeared from a side aisle, pale in her pale-blue dress.
She should have looked contrite. She looked like a queen interrupted—annoyed but still ready to cast a spell.
"You did it," the moderator said, voice calm. "You used campus admin methods, a stolen letterhead, and a friend's phone to post a humiliating reply under Jaxon Kuhn's name. You admitted, in messages we have copies of, to being jealous. That is the truth."
Francesca put her hand to her throat as if someone had slapped her. "This is ridiculous," she said, voice brittle. "I was only exposing a pretense."
"Exposing? By making someone humiliated?" someone yelled.
She smiled, small and sure. "He liked me first. He would have chosen me."
"Who told you that? You fabricated it," Cooper said from the front row with a flat voice that made people glance. He stood like a rock where I'd dragged him—my brother, not a thing to be trifled with.
Francesca's smirk cracked. "You don't understand—"
"No," the moderator said, and that was when the room changed. "You do not get to decide who loses dignity. You posted using fraud. You are banned from campus events pending disciplinary hearing. You will apologize in person to Diana Okada and to Jaxon Kuhn. This is public."
Her face lost color. The auditorium's lights caught the gleam of phones raised; someone had already started a live stream. Around me people murmured—shock, satisfaction, the hunger for spectacle.
Francesca's change came like a collapsing house. Her eyes flashed disbelief. "You can't—" she said. "I didn't—"
"Say it," the moderator insisted.
Francesca laughed, a thin, sharp sound. "You all believe her. The wall, the posts. Diana, the whole campus loves you now—"
"Enough," Ariel shouted. "You made my friend miserable."
A ring of students closed around Francesca as if the circle were a judge. Someone in the back yelled, "Tell us why!"
"My reasons are mine!" she snapped. "He was going to be—my future! He smiled at me at rehearsal—"
"Jealousy is not a license," someone said.
Phones fluttered like moths toward a light. The live stream had comments pouring in: shame for Francesca, jeers, a chorus of "expose her" and also softer messages calling for calm. Francesca's voice changed then. The triumphant mask slid off and revealed panic.
"Please," she whispered. "Please, I'll apologize. I—I'll withdraw from classes. I'll leave campus. Happy now?"
"Apologize to Diana," the moderator said.
Francesca turned, and for a breath the whole auditorium looked like a stage set to show why cruelties matter. She met my eyes.
"You..." I started. She had tried to ruin fifty-two weeks of clumsy honesty.
"I thought she was... I thought—" Francesca stuttered, and then she tried denial. "You are making a show!"
"Your show is the harm you did," Cooper said, voice cold. "You stole a part of someone's year and tried to pretend it was a joke."
She swayed. Someone filmed her and shouted, "Tell her why you posted that!"
"I was jealous!" she cried then, raw and sudden as if the word had been carved from stone. "He talked to me. He smiled. I thought he liked me. I thought you were in my way. I wanted him to know I existed. I—"
The crowd had been leaning forward like a single animal listening. It backed away in pieces. There was astonishment, then whispers, then a soft, cruel applause of exposure. Phones rose. People took photos. Someone shouted, "Stay away from Diana!"
Her face changed in a sequence—confidence, then astonishment, then denial, then a cracking sorrow. The attempt to steel herself failed. She covered her mouth with both hands, and then the hands fell away. For a terrible, bright second she looked like a girl the rumors had broken.
"Why don't you just say you're sorry?" someone urged.
"I am sorry," she began, but the words were brittle. "I am—"
She hiccuped and then collapsed into a chair like a puppet with cut strings. Her breath came short. A few students hurried to her. There were murmurs then about mental health and consequences. Her roommate—whom I had never met—stepped forward and knelt.
"It's not worth it," Ariel said to me, voice small. "People like her think fame is everything."
The moderator read out the consequences: disciplinary suspension, withdrawal from the dance showcase, restriction from representative groups, a university record noting fraudulent conduct, and public apology obligations. The disciplinary board would consider expulsion. The live stream comments boiled—some wanted public shaming beyond campus, some demanded privacy for the collapsing girl.
She stood up in a rush, like someone waking from a nightmare, and pressed a hand to my chest.
"Diana, please, I—" she begged, voice cracking into a pleading tremor. She wanted to be forgiven in the way bullies ask for clemency after their masks fall off. "Don't make me the villain. Please."
People around us murmured. Phones were pointed like eyes. A girl from the front row threw an accusation.
"You planned it!" she shouted. "You wanted the whole thing to happen so you could play martyr. You wanted him."
Francesca's face registered every stab of the crowd—guilt, betrayal, humiliation—she had wanted to humiliate; now it was her turn. The tide of the room rolled a new current. She had started the harm. Now she had to face it.
"Please," she stammered to me again. Her voice had become small enough to be swallowed by the carpeting. "I will leave. I'll withdraw. I will—I'll issue a public apology now, on this stage."
She read the apology with hands that shook. It sounded hollow at first until her voice broke and the words rang with the reality of someone who had been caught.
"I took part in a cruel act," she said. "I fabricated messages. I am sorry. I am sorry to Diana Okada and to Jaxon Kuhn. I am sorry to the community for the pain I caused."
There were a thousand reactions: a few claps, a few sharp hisses, a lot of phones recording. People argued in the crowd about whether her apology was sincere; some said it would never erase what she had done. She was escorted out by campus security afterwards, shaking and pale, while the cameras on phones kept rolling.
It was a punishment of exposure, humiliation, and consequence. People who had once cheered her on stepped away like the stage had dissolved. Some laughed; others looked ashamed. Later that week she withdrew. The hashtag with her name trended for a day, and then the internet moved on. Consequences were not dramatic enough for every hurt, but they were a public moment of accountability.
After the auditorium, students turned to me with a softness I didn't know I wanted. "Are you okay?" they asked. Ariel hugged me as if our bones were sewn in the same cloth. Cooper walked with a hand on my shoulder, steady as a tree.
Jaxon—StingPocket—was quiet. He had sat in the last row watching everything like someone who'd been walking around with a secret ache. When he came up to me afterward, his face was raw and ashamed.
"I tried to stop it," he said. "I didn't know. I should have seen the signs."
"You posted apologies," I said. "You are still buying a confession, every day until fifty-two."
He nodded, and then smiled the way he never smiled for others. It hit me like sunlight through rain.
"I won't stop," he promised. "I can't. Not now."
There were moments—three that kept me awake for nights—that made my heart tumble in a way romance books tried to train into me, but real life did better.
The first: He had always been composed, but once, when a flyer for a dance show with Francesca's smiling face drifted by us, he reached over and wrapped his jacket around my shoulders. "You're cold," he said, though the day was warm. No one else had ever done such a small, private kindness while the world watched. He didn't smile then, but his eyes crinkled, just once. Ariel whispered, "He hardly ever looks like that," and the world shifted.
The second: I dropped a sketchbook in the library. Papers scattered; someone had trampled a corner. He crouched down, hands gentle, and tucked a folded page back into my palm. "You left this," he said. His fingers brushed mine. The contact was tiny—a question and an answer—and I found my breath held for too long.
The third: He called me "sis" in a playful way during a sleepy midnight duo, then, later, in my brother's presence, he used it like a key. "Sis," he said, and my brother scowled, but Jaxon said it like a nickname that had been polished into affection. He pulled me nearer in front of Cooper, as if staking a claim in a quiet, respectful way, and Cooper did not move to block him. He looked at Jaxon with a new, amused hardness. "You better be good to her," Cooper said. Jaxon's hand tightened where it rested on my shoulder, and I felt the world narrow to that small, fierce hold.
We had other fights—the stupid arguments of people who were learning how to be honest. He wasn't perfect. He had kept StingPocket's identity secret, and when I discovered the overlap between his main account and the gamer handle I loved, I felt the betrayal sting. He had been both the cause and the cure. When I confronted him, he admitted everything.
"I didn't want my reality to complicate your love for the online persona," he said. "I wanted to earn you honestly."
"That's not your choice to make," I snapped, and then my voice shook. He listened and then looked at me with a quiet I had only seen when he concentrated on a problem set. He said, "I will work for you. I will be counted every day."
He began to post every day on the wall. Some days his pieces were short and silly. Some days they were long and earnest. He wrote about coffee, about dark paint stains, about someone who carried a sketchbook and liked burnt chestnuts. He owned his mistakes in a way that made me angry and oddly proud. He used the wall to do something bold and silly and impossibly intimate: to admit his clumsy love.
We reached the fifty-second day. I had been stubborn, keeping my Silence like armor. He came to the campus gate with a paper bag: warm, brown, the chestnuts steaming into the cold afternoon.
"You said you would make me stop being a dog," he said, smiling. He looked nervous, fingers worrying the edge of the bag like a man about to pull a splinter out of his palm.
"Off key," I said. "You missed a day last week."
"I have been counting," he said. "Fifty-two today."
There were cameras again—students, cameras from the wall admins, my brother watching like he was approving a treaty. He stepped closer. "Will you let me try to make you laugh every day?" he asked.
The wind smelled like paper and burnt sugar. I could have told him no. I wanted to be harder. I wanted to be someone rational and measured. But then he looked at me in a private way, and I remembered nights where his messages had been the only warmth I let near my ribcage.
"Okay," I breathed.
He reached up and brushed my hair back then, a motion so small you might miss it. He touched my forehead for a moment and then leaned in and kissed me like a punctuation on a letter he'd written for months. It was both clumsy and perfectly measured.
"One kiss in exchange for the fifty-two posts," he said, smiling.
"That's a bad bargain for you," I muttered, and then smiled.
His hand closed around the paper bag with a little more confidence. "One chestnut for every confession," he joked.
"That's ridiculous," I said, but I took a roasted nut and it was hot and sweet on my tongue.
Later, at my parents' house, he met my mother and a neighbor my family used to visit when I was small. He called me "sis" again in a flustering, playful way, and then—without waiting for protocol—he leaned and kissed me on the cheek like a boy with a secret and a dare.
I had wanted revenge at one point—courtship, humiliation, a punishment for the person who had treated me like a joke. The punishment happened in the auditorium. It was public and messy and felt oddly like a small justice. But what stayed with me was his steadiness and the way his smile turned rare things into sunlight.
In the end, I did something stupid and brave. Francesca had gone; her files in the campus admin system listed "withdrawn." The wall posted an official reconciliation thread. I read it and then closed my phone. There were people telling me to seize the moment, to never forgive. There were others calling me cautious and wise.
I thought of the thirty-one nights I'd written his name in neat letters on the wall like a ritual. I thought of the way he had reached like an apology across a cluttered room. I thought of how his hand had found mine when the auditorium went quiet.
On a small couch with my brother asleep on the other side of the room, chestnuts cooling between us, he pulled me close and whispered, "Thank you for not letting me go."
He pressed his forehead to mine. "You are not my obligation," he said. "You're my choice."
I laughed then, a half-soft, half-sane sound, because of course that was exactly what I wanted.
"Fifty-two," I whispered back. "And maybe more."
He smiled then, and it was the kind I had seen once in a game when everything clicked. The kind that seems to promise good things.
He kissed me again, brief and warm. He smelled like late-night coffee and the hand soap he'd used, a smell that knitted into memory. We laughed at how small any dramatic thing felt beside the honesty of two messy people trying to be good.
"Promise me," he murmured later as we sat on a bench by the wall, the confession posts dimming like stars.
"I said I wouldn't make promises," I replied.
He kissed my knuckle instead. "Then keep trying."
I looked at the paper bag beside us, at the small pile of shells, and thought of the wall—fifty-two printed lines of confession, a public stub of proof, a paper trail of work and apologies.
"I will keep trying," I said.
He smiled the smile that had become ours. "Good."
We walked away then, hands barely touching at first, then holding like a bridge. Behind us, the confession wall glowed softly in the night, a little monument to the worst and the best of what people could do.
I looked back once, then forward. He murmured something about chestnuts and silly posts. I laughed.
The fifty-second post remained on the wall for a long time: Jaxon, who had written his truth in little bursts, who had asked, who had stumbled, had learned to be more real. Francesca's name faded in the campus news; consequences were meted, and the auditorium remained a place where things could be true and blunt and public.
The last thing I remember that night was the smell of sugar and the warm weight of his palm in mine.
"Tell me your name," I said later when I let him cook dinner with my brother in the cramped kitchen.
"You know it," he said.
"I know 'Bao,'" I teased. "But you—"
He shrugged. "Call me Jaxon. Or call me StingPocket when you feel like being ridiculous."
"Only if you keep buying chestnuts," I said.
"Deal," he said, and kissed me on the forehead like we'd signed contract with our lips.
That night I wrote a new post on the wall of my own: simple, nothing fierce. "Fifty-two. I will answer next time. — Diana"
It wasn't a surrender. It was a step into something messy and warm. The wall glowed beneath the moonlight, and somewhere else a small headset waited, and a small account called StingPocket pinged my phone like a little drumbeat.
The confession counted days. The chestnuts cooled. The boy called me "sis" and "Diana" and "my stubborn one." I loved that he could be both impossible and soft.
Fifty-two confessions later, I found I could forgive a lot of small things because the person who had tried so hard to be right for me was sitting on the couch, thumb worrying the paper bag, and looking, finally, at me.
The End
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