Sweet Romance13 min read
The Kiss That Broke the Rules
ButterPicks12 views
I never planned to start a story with a stolen kiss.
"We lost," Lacey said, laughing. "Loser has to plant one on someone of the opposite sex."
"Fine," I said, and I looked straight at Canaan.
Canaan Morgan blinked, awkward and steady. "We're just friends," he said.
I smiled, but it was a small, hard smile. "Friends," I repeated, louder than I meant to.
I walked away from Canaan and tapped the closest guy on the shoulder. I meant to shock Canaan. I meant to make him notice me.
The boy I grabbed had amber eyes.
He turned slowly. He was taller than everyone around him. The light cut across the color of his face like a knife and warmed those eyes. I remember the exact motion his mouth made, like a fold.
"Hey," he said.
I didn't stop to think. I pressed my lips to his.
A sound went through the crowd—half laugh, half gasp—and then a silence like the hush after a bell.
He smelled faintly of sweat and something clean and strange. He tasted like a single cool grape, like the first cold sip of soda in summer. My heart slammed. My cheeks burned.
When I pulled back, everyone stared. The boy's jaw was set. His eyes—amber as late summer—met mine.
"My bad," I said, and I realized my voice sounded childish.
He blinked, then smirked. "You owe me a full explanation," he said, and surprised me by bringing his hand to the basketball at his side.
Someone shrieked, "That's the campus bully!"
I wanted the ground to swallow me up.
He was called many things. Guillermo Vitale was the shortest list for who he was: captain of the open-court players, a shadow on the court, a name that made a lot of kids step aside. People said he was trouble. People said he didn't bother with anyone. People said a lot.
He smiled like someone who owned a private joke. "You sure you're brave enough for that kiss?" he asked.
I wanted to sink into the bleachers.
Lacey shoved me. "You did that. You kissed him."
"He kissed me back," I said, and the words tasted impossible.
That night my phone exploded.
"Chloe, WTF?" Lucia Said texted.
"Did you just kiss Guillermo?" another message read.
"Is that really you?" someone asked on the confession board.
Guillermo posted one line in the comment chain, and the whole thread collapsed into a thousand sparks.
"You kissed me by choice," he wrote.
He wrote more, and every time he put words on the screen people went wild.
Canaan called me that night. I let it go to voicemail.
"Chloe?" his voice was quiet. "Are you there?"
"I'm here," my roommate whispered from the bed. "He keeps calling."
Canaan's next call came while I sat on my bed and stared at the ceiling. He sounded small. "Chloe," he said, "I should tell you. There is someone I like. I didn't want to hurt you."
"Then don't act like something you are not," I snapped. "Don't tell people I'm your girlfriend if you don't mean it."
He tried to explain, but I hung up.
I blocked Canaan's number and deleted the messages he had sent to my roommates. Something in me flipped from soft to stone.
The next day, I found Guillermo's profile and added him. I typed the only apology I had in me.
"Hi. I'm sorry about the kiss. It was a dare."
He replied in a minute. "Noted. Come to the court tomorrow."
I almost deleted the message. I didn't.
The campus felt different at dawn. The plastic track glowed with dew and heat. He was there—basketball tucked under his arm, as if the ball and he had grown together in childhood.
"You're early," he said.
"I am always early when I worry," I told him.
He looked at me like he was amused. "You ran when you could have walked."
"I didn't want to be near Canaan."
"Who's Canaan?"
I told him. I told Guillermo how Canaan had called me his girlfriend to make me visible, how he expected my feelings to be something I could file under "Friend," and how I had had enough.
Guillermo didn't laugh. "Good call," he said, and he tossed the ball, catching it in a rhythm that made my head float.
"Will you show me how to bounce?" I asked.
He raised an eyebrow. "Basketball or life's rebounds?"
"Basketball."
For a week I learned how to run as if my legs had an engine. He stood close when I did a three-step layup wrong, and I liked that closeness in a way that made my throat hot. His hand was always just near mine, so it felt like a dare to touch him and a dare to look away.
"You're not bad at this," he said one morning, breathless from his own practice. "You learn quick."
"I'm trying to keep up," I said.
"You're not supposed to do that alone," he said, and for a second I thought every sound around us stopped.
I had no right to keep meddling in people’s stories, but rumor and history are heavy where Guillermo is concerned. I discovered, slowly, that people lied about him like a habit. The worst rumors were easy: fights, trouble, a temper. The truth he told me was quieter.
"My mother died the same year I came here," he said once, voice flat but near. "People think I stopped caring after that. I didn't. I stopped letting people in."
He never shouted about it. He never made a show. He put his grief in small, private places. I wanted to reach for those fragile things and put them back together.
"Why didn't you join the official team again?" I asked.
He looked at the sky. "Because some people wouldn't stop reminding me what I had lost. Saying a kid should not play, saying I was ... guilty."
I thought of silence. Of my small selfishness on the bleachers, the dare, the surprise. "Tell me," I said. "Tell me the truth."
He did, in pieces: a game where phones were silenced and a call that didn't go through at the right time. People he had trusted. A name. Joel Baker.
"Joel Baker?" I asked.
"Yeah," Guillermo said. "He was the one who laughed the loudest the day she went to the hospital. You should see him when he can think he's right."
Joel Baker had been whispered about. When I asked around, faces grew small, guilty. He was the sort of boy who had friends who made noise for him and a smile always ready when he needed it. He'd been there the day Guillermo's mother needed a voice. He'd been the one to hang up accidentally—then deny everything.
I did what I think anyone would, when someone you like gives you a key to the ugly part of their life. I reached.
I dug, and the digging stirred a hornet nest.
"She told someone," Joel said when we first met that night unplanned on campus. "You're getting personal."
"I am," I said. "Because no one should get away with that."
"You don't know him," Joel said. "You don't know me."
It was true. I did not know Joel Baker. I didn't expect how poisonous his circle would act. I did not expect the way stories can be altered like clothing, tossed aside until the original is lost.
It escalated fast.
Joel mocked Guillermo in the hallway. "You mean that poor little basket boy? Why does everyone protect him?"
I saw Guillermo shouldered, quiet anger moving like a bestial thing under his skin. He could have hit Joel. He could have flown. He didn't.
"That's enough," I said.
Joel laughed like someone who had heard other people get in trouble and seen their faces turn pale afterwards. "Oh? And what will you do, Chloe?"
"I will not let it slide," I said. "Not when you hurt people."
He spat a word, and I heard the gossip engines start churning. In the next days people took sides. The confession wall was a battlefield. Some claimed Joel was innocent. Others dug up evidence. The more I pressed, the angrier some of his friends became.
"I warned you," Joel said one night, when we ran into each other by the library. "People like you underestimate consequences."
"Consequences mean responsibility," I answered.
He smiled and walked away.
Then came the match.
Joel and his friends decided to pick a fight of their own, making a show of mocking Guillermo's past. The campus was a live theatre. Students who wanted a spectacle packed the bleachers. Phones held up like little suns.
"Guillermo," I said, before the whistle. "You don't need to do this for me."
He looked at the crowd and then at me, and he took my hand. "Not for you," he said. "For me."
I watched him walk to the center, sweat and bronze, and I knew he was not the myth people believed.
The game was supposed to be one-on-one. Joel swaggered—too certain. The first minutes were a show, but Guillermo's movements told another story. He moved like someone obeyed by the ball, and he turned defense into poetry. His eyes were flat and fierce. Each time Joel came at him, Guillermo countered. A layup, a steal, a winded grin. Fans leaned forward like the air had been sucked out of the stadium.
At the end, Guillermo won. Not by a small margin: he made it look inevitable. The crowd roared. Joel's face changed color as reality fell on top of his bravado.
I picked up the microphone from someone handing it to me as people still cheered.
"Everyone," I said, and my heart beat like drumheads. "Listen."
Silence fell like snow.
"Joel Baker," I said, and my voice did not shake. "Do you remember the day Mrs. Vitale called? Do you remember the call that didn't go through?"
Joel's mouth opened, closed. A few people hissed for the show to end. Some recorded with their phones. He smiled falsified smiles, like a man delaying a storm.
"If you don't want to speak," I said, "I will."
I had no plan for this. I had truth. I had the knowledge of someone who had been there because of him. I stepped forward because shame is a small, hot stone under the sole of my foot.
"You were there before the hospital, Joel," I said. "You hung up on her calls. You said it was no part of you. But phones have logs. His mother's line shows calls missed, and you were the one who answered and hung up. You made a joke about discarded time. You said horrible things then. You made friends laugh. You told them it was nothing. It was not nothing."
There was a breath of wind. People leaned. Joel's friends stared like statues beginning to melt.
"I won't tell you the rest," I said. "I'll tell them."
I told everything I had found. I recounted the patched evidence, the messages, the witnesses who had been afraid, the one who had seen Joel's expression when he realized the calls were real. I imitated the small laugh he'd had when he thought he'd done nothing. I named names, I called the action what it was: careless, cruel. I said the worst thing honestly: "You killed his mother that day. You didn't put a gun to her head, but you hung up a call and let a life be decided by silence."
The silence after that crack was loud enough to hurt.
Joel went through stages, and I watched each.
First, he smirked. "You can't accuse me here," he said. "This is a circus."
Then, when his phone was shown, when timestamps unrolled like ribbon, his smirk thinned. "You don't have the right," he said. "This is slander."
People around him gasped, some in sympathy, most with curiosity.
"You're lying," Joel said, trying disbelief. "You are making this up."
A dozen phones pointed at him. Someone shouted, "Show us the messages you sent that day!"
Joel's hands, once steady and sure, began to fumble. He searched his pockets. His jacket. The little bravado that had been his shield shredded like paper in wind.
"Stop! Stop!" he shouted suddenly, then clutching his chest. He pulled at his collar as if the air itself were thickening. "I didn't—it's not my fault!"
I watched the change like someone watching a wave crest and fall. He had been sure of his power; he had been made of habit. The truth, now exposed like a moth pinned to a board, made him small.
Guillermo stood a few feet away, hand still warmed around mine. I realized he had not left my side. He had listened to every word. He had let me speak.
Then Joel did the thing people always describe but seldom see: the denial collapsed into something primitive. His voice became sharp and edged with fear. "Please," he said, stepping forward in a new posture, the smile gone. "Please don't do this. I can't lose—please—"
Phones recorded his pleas. Students who had earlier gawked started whispering among themselves. Some took his side. Many did not.
A girl near the front started to cry. "I saw him hangs up," she said between breaths. "He laughed after. He said it was 'the universe's joke.'"
Groans hit the field. Joel tried to pull out the story we had all heard for years. He tried to turn it, to cast himself as a kid who had made a mistake. He turned to the assembly and tried to plead we had misread. "It was a mistake," he said. "I didn't know—"
"You hung up," the girl shouted back, and it was small and clean and much louder than it should have been. "You laughed and you didn't answer for nine minutes."
Everything tilted.
Then he sat down on the bench and put his face in his hands. For the first time, he was alone among a crowd. People who had earlier told his myth now saw the man beneath it, shaking, beseeching, the bravado melted and gone.
"He made a choice," someone muttered near me. "And he didn't think it would matter."
"He took responsibility?" somebody asked, almost as if they were testing a rumor.
"No," I said. "He avoided it."
Phones kept filming. A woman from a different year approached, a teacher's assistant from the science club, who had respected Guillermo quietly for years. She said quietly, "You will have to answer for such cruelty."
Joel's face was a wreck. His breathing shallow. The spectators' voices were a chorus.
He tried to speak, then his voice cracked. "I didn't—" he said, but his words no longer had shields.
Someone in the crowd spat, and the sound echoed through the bleachers.
Then the slowest thing happened: the group that had been his loyal followers began to shift. A friend stepped back, another lowered his head. One of them started filming Joel's face as he begged. A few sneered; many looked away.
Guillermo squeezed my hand. "You okay?" he asked quietly.
"I am," I said. "We did the right thing."
Joel's pleading turned to something like crumpling paper. He slid from the bench to his knees as if the ground finally opened up for him to fall into. He looked up at the crowd. "Please," he said again. "Please don't make me a monster."
The word "monster" made some hands fall over mouths and some eyes widen.
"You are what you did," a boy in the front said. "You let someone's last chance go without trying."
Joel's face broke like a ceramic thing dropped. He dropped his head and started sobbing, an ugly, raw sound that wasn't the drama of early youth. His friends didn't shout for him now. They shuffled and mumbled and distanced themselves, unwilling to be near the rawness.
People recorded, the whistles died down, and a slower murmur took over. Some students muttered that this was justice. Some muttered that humiliation was too much. Some said the law should take over. Many people had different ideas.
Joel tried to stand but staggered. A teacher who had been close enough to hear called security. A few students took out water bottles and offered them in shaky hands. Others yelled when Joel looked up and tried to speak.
"You're not the same after this," someone said. "You changed."
Joel looked at Guillermo and me with something like pleading. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean not to answer?" I asked. "You didn't mean to laugh?"
He had no answer.
He crawled off the bench and stumbled away from the court. People followed him with their phones, not to help but to make sure he could not deny the footage. His walk was broken, heavy, and ashamed.
The punishment was public. The scene lasted longer than it should have. When the teachers finally made him leave the campus and the police took statements the next day, the files and footage made it impossible to fake ignorance.
I felt a wash of something complicated—relief, yes. But also a sour taste because humiliation isn't the same as repair. It didn't bring back a life. It forced a reckoning.
Guillermo and I walked home slowly. "You didn't have to do that," he said, voice low.
"I did," I said. "You didn't deserve that."
He stopped and looked at me, earnest and unreadable. "Thank you," he said. "And hey—how about that dinner you promised? For three-step layup tutoring?"
I laughed. It came out desperate and free. "You promised to teach me how not to fall on my face."
He took my hand and squeezed. "Deal."
People said things afterward. Joel Baker left the school a week later. His punishment was recorded: suspension, community service, and the thing students feared—unending proof archived in the cloud. The school moved to expel him, but procedural walls slowed the final act. The more important part, for us, was the way the crowd's voice turned. People who had mocked Guillermo learned the truth. The rumor machine shut down when evidence spoke.
Guillermo's life changed too. The school withdrew the disciplinary action against him and invited him to try out for the varsity again. The team welcomed him back like a prodigal, and he played as if nothing had been missing. He taught me to jump properly, to use strength and footwork, to breathe and push through the burn. He stood close in a manner that was not intrusive and not distant; he was present.
"Chloe," he said one night, after practice had ended and the gym lights made the floor shine like a wet street. "Do you remember the first time you kissed me?"
"I remember," I said.
"You started a revolution," he said, smile slow. "Not what I expected from a dare."
I leaned into him as we walked off the court. "You could have been kinder earlier," I said.
He shrugged. "I had to pick my spots."
We kept finding small reasons to touch. He took off his jacket when I told him I was cold; he slid his hand over my shoulders; he held the door when I carried too many books. People around us noticed the new softness and commented like weather reports.
"He's different with you," Lacey said once.
"He's always been different with someone," Lucia added.
But there were moments that were only ours. He would fix my hair when a strand fell across my face. He would press a napkin to my palm if I burned myself with hot pot. He would whisper, "Stay," in the dark, and my heart would decide to.
One afternoon after a tough exam, I walked him home like a favor. We sat on the bleachers and breathed. The sun was a tired coin.
"Will you tell me something real?" I asked.
He looked sideways. "I'm already telling you real."
"No, tell me what you want." I said. "Really want."
He put his hand on mine. "You," he said without hesitation. "And a team trophy I can hand you because you made me come back."
I laughed, shook my head, then suddenly serious, said, "I like you."
He kissed me then, slow and sure, like the answer had always been waiting for me. The kiss tasted like the court, like effort, like sweat and a single grape. It tasted like a promise.
We had small fights later—every couple has them—but they were brief and clear, the kind that don't make you fear true things. People watched. Some were surprised. Some had always guessed. Canaan stopped trying to speak for me. He found his own path.
Joel's story did not end in a cinematic fall. He went away with all the mistakes he had chosen to keep, and he had to live with them. People who had followed him for status drifted. It was the normal math of things. What he left behind was a lesson: silence can be violent.
At graduation season, Guillermo stood on a small stage with a medal around his neck. He had helped the team win provincials. He looked at me from down below, and when the crowd swelled with applause, his eyes found mine, and he mouthed, "You okay?" as if we were alone in a thunderstorm.
I was okay. I was full of loud joy.
He laughed later, and when he hugged me, he said, "You did steal that kiss."
"I did," I said. "And you kept it."
He pressed his forehead to mine. "You started it," he said. "You always did."
I rested my chin on his chest where the jersey smelled of cotton and gym and a million small tries.
We walked off the field together, my hand in his, the basketball listless in his other arm, and the sun dipped low like it was trying to hide.
This story went from a dare to a defense, from a rumor to a truth. It never left the court. It never left the amber of his eyes. The three-step layup we practiced became our small secret. The kiss that broke the rules was also the one that fixed a few.
The End
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