Sweet Romance12 min read
The Handchain I Could Never Lose
ButterPicks10 views
I never thought a handchain could hold so many promises and so many lies.
The night Felix first knocked on my door, moonlight laying thin on the floor, he smiled like the sun had never set on him. He smiled like he belonged to the world.
"Elizabeth, are you dating someone?" he asked with that tilt of his head that made my heart slide the wrong way.
I closed the door a fraction. "What are you talking about?"
He stepped forward, calm as always, and then his hand landed on my shoulder hard enough to bruise.
"One is not enough," he said, teeth clenched. "You get to have all the attention? Is that fair?"
I tasted iron in my mouth. "Felix, let go."
He didn't. He only leaned closer, face shadowed. "You're mine."
I remember the panic then and the bitter, ridiculous loyalty that tied me to my mother. After she married Victor, I had to pretend. After she smiled and packed our boxes, I had to pretend.
When we first moved into Victor Coleman's house, Felix opened the door with the perfect smile. "Sister," he said, and he helped with our suitcases. Mother beamed. "Oh, how polite," she said.
But only when the adults left did I begin to see the cracks.
"Don't touch my things," Felix said one afternoon when I reached to touch a trophy in the cabinet.
He was different—cold as winter glass. He stared at me as if I were a stain on his shirt.
That was the day I decided I knew what he felt: not love, not sibling protectiveness, but something tight and carven into him, a possessiveness that made the space around him a no-go zone.
"I don't like you," he said once outside the classroom when he found me near the wrong desk.
"Then don't," I answered.
He laughed without humor. "You don't understand, Elizabeth. You don't know how many people would kill to have your life."
In school, Felix was a golden figure. Girls followed. Teachers trusted him. He never showed his claws in public. But he could charm a room and then turn to ice when no one watched.
One afternoon he stood in a circle of girls and deflected a confession with gentle hands and a soft refusal. He wiped another girl's tears with a practiced motion. Then he saw me.
He walked toward me with that same smile half unfinished. "Do you need something?"
"I forgot my key," I said.
He took something from his pocket and let it drop. The key hit the floor with a loud clap.
I bent, and he turned away.
Someone asked him later, "Did you accept?"
He smiled. "I don't go for small things."
At night he came to my door and said softly, "Stay away."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I can break you." His voice was a whisper.
The first time he knocked on my door at midnight, I had not known what to expect. He said, "Sister, are you dating?" with a smile like a challenge. In the same breath his hand grabbed me and he pressed me into the wall.
"Is one boyfriend not enough?" he spat, like a boy who had practiced cruelty.
I pulled away and left the house to breathe.
At school, the rumors started slow. Someone stuck things into my desk. Someone called me names. People wrote "fox spirit" across my textbooks. Felix watched, and never intervened.
When a girl began to draw on my desk during class, I lost control. I grabbed that girl by the collar and dragged her outside.
"Please," she cried. "I can't—we're sorry."
I pushed her against the railing. The whole floor watched.
"She's afraid of heights!" she sobbed. "Please, don't push me!"
The dean separated us. I did not let go. When I saw Felix in the crowd, he frowned as if the world was a problem in need of his solution rather than a place where someone could be hurt.
He looked at me then, an unreadable fold on his mouth. "Are you happy now?" he asked after.
I stared like I had been punched. "Do your worst."
He stepped closer, voice low, and smiled as if the world were a stage. "You're finished."
I was finished for a while. People called me "crazy." But no one dared mess with me.
Then Sebastien Burks, the class president, sat beside me one afternoon and offered, "Do you want to be in my group?"
I looked up. "Why?"
He shrugged. "Because Sena (he always called me Sena) sits alone and it's weird. Want to go home together?"
"I'll walk with you," I said.
That afternoon, Felix appeared when Sebastien came to the door to walk me back. Felix paused at the porch. "We are neighbors," he said smoothly.
"Then you go together," Sebastien smiled politely.
"Neighbors," I echoed, and walked away. Felix watched me like a man learning how to use a new tool.
In class, if Sebastien spoke to me, Felix materialized minutes later. It felt like living under a net. When I tried to get closer to Sebastien to create distance between Felix and me, Felix changed. He began to trail us, a shadow that made my skin crawl.
When my bracelet—my mother's bracelet—went missing on a camping trip, I freaked out. Felix offered to come find it. I didn't want him. He followed. We argued. I fell into a hole and thought I would break. He left me at first, but then came back with laughter and fell into the hole himself.
"Call me brother," he said later, and then he helped me climb out.
When he was hurt in the collapse, I realized he wasn't an unkillable villain. He was fragile. At his hospital bedside he told me about his mother.
"She did it on purpose," he said of an old scar. "She was drunk and she hit me with a bottle."
I touched his cool hand and something shifted.
"Don't go," he whispered. "Don't leave."
I held his hand and failed to be cruel.
He recovered. He changed in some ways—gentler at first. He began to call me by my name instead of "sister." He offered to teach me. He was still dangerous, but he was more complicated.
When Sebastien offered to pretend to be my boyfriend, I accepted. "Please," I said. "I can't keep living like this."
Sebastien's face turned the nicest pink. "I will do anything."
Our staged romance bloomed in the open. People stopped whispering. Felix's posture hardened into something like longing. He watched with a face like carved stone. I had traded fear for the warmth of Sebastien's small, honest kindness.
But then it all blew up.
At a KTV a crowd sang and someone—Cataleya Burns—wore the same perfume Felix did and flirted like it was a sport. I couldn't stop myself. I left. Sebastien followed and gave me his jacket.
Later that night, at a small street corner, Felix said quietly, "He likes you."
"Why do you care?" I said.
He smiled in that old way and asked, "Do you like him?"
"None of your business."
That night he pressed again and I said the only truth I could bring to light: "I'm your sister. You can't—"
He froze, then left.
Guilt sits like ash. In the years before I moved away, the guilt burned me. The past I had helped construct—the bullying and the lies—had shaped me. I had been both victim and perpetrator.
My old shame caught up with me when the bully of my past, Enrique Semyonov's friend, resurfaced. The boy I had once been a part of hurting, the token of my worst mistake, was back. It changed everything.
One night the past attacked me again. I was caught by old enemies, dragged into a narrow alley, humiliated and beaten. When they pushed me to the ground, breath stinging, I heard a familiar voice.
Felix.
He arrived like a storm. He tackled Enrique with an animal focus, fury wrapped in his fists. I watched his hands move with a practiced violence that I felt both terrified and grateful for.
He held Enrique down. The man begged and cursed and then pleaded. The street echoed with the thrum of the motorbike and the sounds of the small crowd that had gathered.
When it was over, Felix stood, dusted off, one side of his face bruised. He said, "Get out of here."
For a long time, we walked together. We learned to occupy a narrow peace. He taught me to trust again in small measures. He held my hand the night my mother died in a car crash. I left with my biological father. Felix gave me back the handchain—my mother's bracelet—recreated by memory. "I made it," he said. "I couldn't find the old one, so I made the same."
I held it like a ticket to the past.
Years passed. I left to another city, to a distant life. Sebastien and I reconnected someday later and we were good for a time. He loved me properly. But love can get complicated; people get selfish, or shaded by their parents' petty demands. We parted.
Eight years later I returned for a wedding. Cataleya had become someone I could tolerate in adult life. The reception was bright and warmed by fairy lights.
Then life gave me a strange, hot twist. At a car repair shop I saw a man in overalls bent over an engine. He smelled of oil. He looked like a man who had beared the weather. I recognized the shape of his shoulders first and then the scars, faint but visible. I approached and said, "Felix?"
He looked up and said nothing. "Do I know you?" he asked, like a stranger pretending not to know.
"Elizabeth Powell." I said.
He shrugged and let the engine speak for him.
We kept running into each other. He kept saying little things, "Your car is fixed," or "Don't smoke too much." I learned he had a new life as a mechanic. He had traded textbooks for grease and callused hands.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked one evening under a small street lamp.
"Why would I?" he said, but his eyes broke like glass.
When the wedding rehearsal went wrong, I ran. Sebastien had tried to pin me down with a ring again. He had tried to promise the future in public, and I didn't belong to that future. I needed something else. I needed the boy who had once smashed a bottle to save me, who had once broken rules for me. I needed the man who had kept my mother's memory.
I ran into Felix outside the reception, smoking like a bad habit.
"You're beautiful," he said, as if he could not help himself.
"I'm getting married," I blurted out like a confession.
"To him?" Felix tilted his head. There were so many ghosts in his voice.
"Maybe," I said. Then I did something I had not done in years. "Will you marry me instead?"
He blinked like the world had slipped.
"I will," he said, and the hand he put in mine shook.
In front of the streetlamps, with the city's hum like a lullaby, he dropped to one knee. "Elizabeth Powell," he said, voice small and raw, "will you marry me?"
"Yes," I said.
People cheered in the distance like an audience returning, but the applause belonged to us.
But the past does not forgive easily. The old bullies of my youth were not done. When Enrique Semyonov and Jaina Berger tried to show up to the wedding, they brought with them the rot that had once swallowed me whole. They thought their sins were buried.
They were not.
At the rehearsal brunch days before my unplanned proposal, a call came through from Jaina. Her voice trembled.
"Elizabeth," she said. "I should tell you something about Felix."
I listened, because something about her voice seemed to tremble with fear.
"Back then," she said quietly, "my brother and his friends—Enrique—said things to me. They lied. They told my brother that you—" She shuffled the words and dropped them like stones. "They said you were assaulted. They made accusations that made people believe violence belonged to you."
My stomach turned.
"You mean—" I started.
"Enrique's story was a lie." She said. "They were the ones who hurt others. They created their own myths to get people to punish other people."
My pulse quickened, and then a slow, cold burn rose through me. I had kept silent for long enough. I had carried guilt long enough.
I decided to act. I had evidence now—names, dates, messages. I had witnesses who had not been brave before. I took the stage at Cataleya's small wedding-related banquet, hands steady.
"Everyone," I said, voice clear. "I need to tell you the truth about what happened years ago."
I could feel the room tilt. Sebastien's face was a stone. Cataleya's eyes widened. Enrique and Jaina were at the back; they had not expected the thunder to come so soon.
I told the story clearly, slowly. I told the truth about the alley and the lies set into motion. I told how I had been both coward and cruelty's accomplice at times. I told how Enrique had once attacked me with a group and how Felix had intervened.
"Where did you get this information?" someone asked.
"I have proof," I said, and then I turned to the projection slides I had prepared in silence. Text messages, photos, a recording of Enrique admitting his acts, a message from Jaina that had been written in panic and regret.
"Here," I said. "You can see and you can choose."
People leaned in. Someone recorded. Someone started to clap.
Enrique tried to laugh it off. "You're making this up!" he said.
"No." I stepped forward. "You told Jaina to lie. You told others to lie. You hurt people and thought you could vanish into the crowd. You are not gone."
Felix stood beside me. He had not planned this moment either, but his presence steadied me.
Then came the punishment scene—public, relentless, and satisfying in a way that was not about cruelty but about justice.
It began with whispers. Then people looked at Enrique with new eyes. One by one, the guests pulled out their phones. Someone recognized his face from an old news clip about a bar fight—something Enrique had tried to hide. A woman at the table spoke up, "He blackmailed me in college—I never had the courage to speak."
The floodgates opened.
"Enrique," I said, voice now like flint, "you beat people and spread lies. You used fear to get what you wanted. Tell them why you left my school."
He tried to stumble, to spin some new lie. People interrupted.
"Why did you make Jaina's story believable?" a former classmate shouted. "Why did you hurt people?"
He sputtered, searching for lofty words, but the room had changed. Faces that had once leaned toward him stepped back.
Jaina stood frozen, then broke. "I'm sorry," she mouthed, tears streaking mascara down her cheeks. "I didn't mean—he forced me to—"
"Forced you to what?" someone said.
"To lie," she whispered.
At that moment, Enrique's mask came undone. The room surged like a sea. Someone recorded as he tried to flee. He could not. A group of men—the kind who had once been cowards—blocked his way.
"Enrique Semyonov," said one of them, "do you deny you beat people and lied to break a girl's life?"
He could not deny it. His throat bobbed.
I watched him shrink in a room that had watched him bully me, that had cheered his bravado. Now, under fluorescent lights and phone cameras, his arrogance cracked.
He turned white. He tried to back up. "I—I was young," he stammered. "I—"
"You were cruel," said a woman whose textbooks had been carved by his friends. "And now you will be seen."
People gathered. They pressed their phones forward. Someone took a picture and uploaded it to the group chat. Within minutes, a dozen people had shared the post. The comments filled with memories—names, faces—of his wrongdoing. The social feed began to compile a ledger of the life he had tried to hide.
Enrique's expression shifted from defiance to pleading. He moved through the stages: "You're overreacting," then denial, then eyes wide with panic, then whimpering. He begged for mercy. "Please," he said. "Forgive me. I didn't mean—"
Noise swallowed him. People called out, "Shut up!" "You don't get to ask for forgiveness now." A woman snapped a photo and held it up. "Smile for your future regrets," she said.
Jaina tried to cover her face. "I didn't know what to do," she cried. "I'm sorry."
The guests did not let the moment dissipate. They wanted a demonstration that cruelty had consequences. Someone who had been wronged stood and told Enrique how his lies had turned a classroom into a circus, how a girl's life had been nearly ruined. Another who had been bullied by his friends recited details of the attacks.
A teacher, who had been silent before, stepped forward. "We had complaints," he said. "But we were afraid. The school didn't act. We will now."
Someone called the authorities. Enrique sank to the floor, surrounded by a crowd that no longer looked away. People filmed his face as he finally faced the mirror of many witnesses. The live feed of the banquet went viral in local circles by midnight. Comments tore him apart. Old classmates confronted him, telling stories of injuries and of days spent in fear. No one applauded his apologies.
Felix watched all of it with a hard, steady gaze. When Enrique's bluster crumbled, when he went from menace to supplicant, people who once whispered in hallways became judges in the court of public memory.
That night, people took pictures and sent them to the parents of those who had been bullied. The thread that had held the silence together braided into a rope that exposed Enrique. He was left standing in public humiliation, his reputation shredded.
It was not vengeance. It was accountability.
After the scene, I stepped outside into the quiet. Felix's hand found mine. He squeezed once. "I never wanted this to be your burden," he said.
"You saved me once," I replied. "You saved me again."
We married months later in a small, messy ceremony—no grand hall, just the people who had stayed. Sebastien smiled and clapped the loudest. Cataleya came and nodded, eyes a little shy. Jaina did not come. Enrique's name did not appear on any list.
Felix held my rebuilt handchain to mine before the vows. He had made another, this time with extra links for the future.
"I'll guard this like it's the whole world," he said.
"I know," I said, and his mouth softened for a fraction.
We learned to live with the messiness. He learned to trust gentleness more than strength. I learned to speak up when shadows stretched on the floor. We never pretended to be perfect.
Years later, when I walk past a small mechanic shop and he leans on the hood and says, "You look tired," I laugh. "Go fix the car."
He grins, hands already dirty, and comes back with a hot coffee.
In the little house we share, a handchain sits in a small wooden box on a shelf. I wind it on my wrist each morning. It's not just metal. It is proof that people can change, that every small kindness matters, and that when the past comes back to knock, you can face it together.
"Do you remember that night with the rain?" I ask sometimes.
He nods. "You kissed me."
"I kissed you first," I say, because it's true.
He smiles like he once did as a boy and then the smile fades into something older and kinder. "You saved me too," he says.
And sometimes when the world watches and waits, we say their names out loud so they cannot be forgotten.
---
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
- Elizabeth Powell → Surname Powell，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Felix Pinto → Surname Pinto，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Victor Coleman → Surname Coleman，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Sebastien Burks → Surname Burks，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Cataleya Burns → Surname Burns，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Jaina Berger → Surname Berger，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Enrique Semyonov → Surname Semyonov，是否亚洲姓？ 否
- Franziska Gross → Surname Gross，是否亞洲姓？ 否
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？ Sweet Romance with Revenge elements.
- 甜宠：列出3个心动瞬间
1. Felix arriving at the hospital and gripping my hand: "Don't go." (he shows raw vulnerability and care)
2. Rainy street proposal when I ran from a staged engagement: "Will you marry me?" (unexpected, intimate)
3. Small daily moments: he brings coffee after fixing a car; dirt-smudged hands that I still reach for.
- 复仇：坏人是谁？ Enrique Semyonov and accomplices. 惩罚场景多少字？ 公共惩罚场景约700+字（详述人群反应、坏人情绪变化、围观者反应）。 多个坏人方式不同吗？ Jaina's guilt and Enrique's public shaming are different: Jaina breaks down and apologizes; Enrique experiences public exposure, humiliation, and social accountability.
3. 结尾独特吗？ 提到了哪个故事独特元素？
- 结尾提到了手链（handchain）和修车铺、雨夜吻等独特元素，能够辨识为本故事的结尾。
The End
— Thank you for reading —