Sweet Romance17 min read
The Night I Came Home Drunk and Found a Eighteen-Year-Old in My Life
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"I can't believe you stuffed a duffel like that into the hallway." I said, slurring just enough to make my point weak and theatrical.
Tyler didn't even blink. He closed the bag's zipper with a soft click and looked at me like he owned the quiet in the apartment, like he owned the seconds between heartbeats. "Bubble gum," he said.
"Bubble gum?" I scoffed and made a face. "Wholesale?"
"Personal," he answered simply.
I stared at the pile of rubber-wrapped things and then at him. In my head the first obvious sentence formed and failed to be spoken. "How old are you?"
He smiled in that way that made everything around him tilt. "Eighteen."
I remember the exact point my plan to teach a mouthy teenager a lesson dissolved: it was when he tugged at the duffel, lifted it like it was nothing, and stepped into my living room as if he'd lived there a year.
"Who are you?" I asked again. My words grazed the edges of a laugh and a sob because I had drunk myself into delicate honesty.
"I'm Tyler," he said. "Tyler Simon. Your—" He paused like he tasted the wrong word. "My father's friend asks me to stay with you."
"My father's friend?" I echoed, picturing a legitimate, sensible older man. "Why me?"
Tyler's dark eyes were blunt and open as a door. "Because you owe my dad a favor." Then he added, as if reading the room, "Also, because your apartment was closer."
I coughed and pretended annoyance. "Great placement, universe."
He crouched on the edge of the coffee table and watched me with the focused patience of someone who has seen a performance a thousand times and knows how it ends. "You're drunk," he said.
"Am I?" The jar of liquor on the table laughed under the lamplight. "Maybe a little."
"Sit," he ordered. "I can help."
"Help?" I said, and meant to sound indignant, but his hand reached for me and steadied me. "Don't touch—" My foot slid on the rug and then he caught me. He smelled like clean air, like motor oil and spare sheets drying in the sun. He set me down on the couch with gentle efficiency and I thought for a ridiculous second that I trusted this stranger.
"You have a lot on your table," he observed, looking at the empty bottles. I flinched.
"That is a lot of understatement," I said. "It's a lot of avoidance."
He put his head slightly to the side. "You don't look happy."
"I'm an actress," I offered like that should explain everything. "June Seidel."
"You don't sound like someone who believes their own press release."
He was blunt and ridiculous and somehow honest. "What's your room?" he asked.
"I don't have one," I answered, because my life lately had been borderless. "I'm staying."
"Good." He found a small first-aid kit and water and sat nearby, watching me as if I were fragile and enormous at the same time. "Drink," he insisted, tipping the glass to my lips. "Don't argue."
I spat a little and cursed him for being so sensible.
When I sobered up enough to think, when Tyler was in the bathroom and the shower steam sounded like a private ocean, I padded to the bedroom door to apologize for waking him.
He was there, standing in the doorway with a duffel open on the bed: in the middle of shirts and socks, a small neat square of items that made my face go hot. "This is—" I looked at a pile of wrapped rubber and other compact boxes and tried to make my voice small. "What are these?"
"Bubble gum," he said, the same innocent tone. He picked one up and held it out. "Do you want one?"
"You're eighteen," I said, meeting the simplicity of his eyes with the complication of mine. "I'm older than you."
"So?" He laughed, open and soft. "Age doesn't have to mean anything."
"Please don't be forward." My voice shook. I was meant to be the boss of someone else for once; I wanted the power of being older and wiser. He laughed like he found that charming, and for a second I disliked how easy he made people like him.
"Okay," he said finally, folding a shirt with too-much-care. "Sensible. Are you hungry?"
I handed him the phone and waved to make it clear I was useless. We ordered food. He ate like a neat boy and made a face when I attempted to feed him. He told stories that made me laugh, the kind of stories where you can't tell if the teller is trying to joke or sell the moment as an absurd truth.
"You really are a problem," I told him later, when he refused to sleep on the couch. "You will ruin my plan."
"What's the plan?" he asked.
"To teach a teenager a lesson," I admitted, half embarrassed. "To be the stern older sister."
"You picked a bad night for that." He tucked the blanket around me like an old habit. "You were crying in the dark and you smelled like regret."
I wanted to be furious. I wanted to fix the way my life folded in on itself because of a broken love called Mark Brennan. But Tyler's presence was a slow kind of repair, like someone rearranging a room by putting the heavy things down first.
"You're not my kid," I said.
"No," he agreed. "I'm not. I'm your guest."
"You sure you can be my guest and not be a little chaos?" I asked.
He smiled and his front teeth were too even. "Chaos can be organized."
"That's terrifying."
"Then I'll do it terrifyingly well."
He stayed. Days blurred into getting-up-for-work and Tyler making coffee as if he'd always been my roommate, and the awkwardness softened into small sweet cruelties. He would pour water in a way that made me think he knew my favorite things and then deny it purposely.
"You're a terrible liar," I said once.
"I learned," he replied, and the way the word "learned" sat in his mouth felt like a secret being divulged. "From an early age."
There were moments where his gentleness broke through like sunlight. The first was small and sudden: one morning I was shivering by the window, and he took off his jacket without asking and placed it around my shoulders.
"You're going to catch cold," he said.
"I'd rather catch you," I said before I could stop myself, and he laughed like I'd struck gold.
"Don't," he said, and then he kissed my forehead.
"That was practical," he whispered, and I loved him for his practicality.
The second moment: I tripped on the curb and he caught me by the waist with a steadiness that flattened my panic. He pulled my chin up so I would look at him, like I was his favorite book and he was going to read it aloud. "You belong here," he told me, so soft the words could have been a lullaby.
The third: I made a stupid joke on set and everyone else smiled politely. Tyler came in between takes, leaned against the doorway, and when I met his eyes, he grinned. "You always practice perfectly, just for me," he said. I blinked and felt the private warmth of being seen.
My life had been full of men who were transactions. Mark Brennan had been one of those—good-looking, ambitious, and ruthless. He'd left a map of my failures everywhere. But Tyler was a small, relentless correcting force. He was not a rescue; he was a willing cargo of soft attention.
Then the world tilted.
My agent, Delaney Byrd, burst into my dressing room like a woman with a clarion.
"June," she said, slamming a stack of printed pages onto the vanity. "You need to sit down."
"I am sitting down," I pointed out.
"Not for ten seconds—" she panted. "This is a crisis."
"Is it publicity?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
She handed me a phone and the screen filled with red. "They say your apartment is a party scene. They say the boy who lives there is not his father’s son—" She made an incredulous sound. "They accuse you of buying scandal to get sympathy. They used a picture of you with Tyler and captioned it: 'Actress sleeps with teen for sympathy.'"
"That's ridiculous." My stomach folded in on itself. "Tyler is—"
"Who?" Delaney demanded. "He's eighteen. He's a student. This is a mess."
The posts were poison, the kind that moves with a hunger. Within hours, the smear went from local gossip to trending headlines. Comments bubbled up like acid. People drew their own conclusions with savage speed.
"We can fight them," I said.
Delaney's face was hard. "We will have to fight them legally. But there's another problem: Mark Brennan."
The name felt like a sting. "What about him?"
"He's back," she said bluntly. "And he's very interested in getting the girl from his past who didn't wait for him."
Of course Mark was back. Mark Brennan had always been like a weather system—arrive, bleed the sun, and then go. He called me, not a pleading call but a demand pressed into velvet. "Come back," he said. "You can have the role. This would be a bounce-back. We can repair the narrative."
"He wired the smear?" My voice was low and incredulous.
"It looks that way," Delaney said. "There are traces through marketing accounts. The timing matches some of his people. He benefits if you are desperate and his 'generosity' wins you back."
The world felt very cold then. Tyler sat on the bed, arms folded, listening. He didn't speak until the lawyers had left and Delaney had gone to negotiate, and the apartment was quiet enough to hear a match strike two blocks away.
"June," Tyler said, steady, "do you want me to stay?"
I looked at him. His face read like a promise and an instruction. "Yes," I said.
"Good." He set a hand on my knee and rubbed, like a child drawing a compass. "We do this together."
The smear was just the beginning. Mark Brennan's return to the city was not humble. He had influence—producers, a string of PR accounts, and the kind of fanbase cultivated through meticulous self-branding. He had never forgiven me for stepping away from his orbit when I had been younger and, if I was honest, naive. He thought in investments and outcomes, not in people.
Delaney arranged a takedown strategy. Lawyers, ceiling-high document towers, and a list of defamation suits scrawled like battle plans. "We will name names," she told me. "We will force platforms to reveal IP addresses. We will find the source of the feed."
All of it felt cinematic in the way that only real disaster can be cinematic. I went on camera once with a short statement and then retreated. That night, a crowd of gossip hunters arrived at Tyler's school; their presence made the campus dangerous. Tyler came home bruised and furious.
"They followed my classmates," he said. "They camped outside dorms. They texted parents. Some of them—" His chin tightened. "Someone tried to hit me."
"I will sue them all," I snapped, suddenly feral in a way I hadn't been since Mark—God, Mark—left me.
He took my hand and squeezed. "No," he said. "We'll do this where it hurts. Publicly."
That phrase humored me: fight Mark publicly. It was a small, childlike desire. But Delaney had a plan, and the plan involved the one place Mark could not control: a fundraising gala for a charity that was intimate rather than industry—an event where reputations were currency and where Mark's backers would be invited. It would be perfect because Mark would attend with his new publicist and certain influencers who couldn't afford to lose face.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yes," Delaney said. "We will go there. We will bring evidence. We'll let people decide what they see. And we will have Tyler there with us."
"Me?" Tyler blinked. "Why—"
"Because they need to see the truth," Delaney said. "You will be the witness."
When the night of the gala arrived, the ballroom glittered like a held breath. The press line snaked, photographers flashing like tiny lightning strikes. I wore something deliberately simple—a dress that didn't scream for attention but would read calm in photographs. Delaney had a file fat with receipts, bartered invoices, emails with campaigns traced back to a nexus of Mark's acquaintances.
Mark appeared on the arm of a man whose smile was casually filthy. He wore the charm of someone used to doors opening. He waved at cameras and his PR director poured a little wine like ritual. He was the kind of man who could make trays of people laugh and then leave the room smelling of victory.
We seated at a long table. Tyler sat beside me like a quiet guard. He had that look—calm edges, one hand gripping mine—like he had never once planned to be a hero but somehow became the most available one.
Delaney rose and asked for a few minutes. She did not speak at length; she did not need to. She opened the folder on the table and slid a glossy, undeniable printout across to the journalist at the end of our table. It was a litany: invoices, bank transfers, IP information. Alongside the dry things she had, she had audio—recordings of Mark's people discussing the release.
"How did you get these?" someone asked.
"Legal work," Delaney said, serene. "We filed a subpoena. We had help."
The room pivoted from polite conversation to curiosity. Flashbulbs found our table like hungry moths.
Mark lectured me the week before about how to manage a relationship visibly. "Keep it tidy," he'd said on the phone. "People like a story. Make it pretty, June." That memory made the hair on my arms bristle.
Delaney pushed play on her phone. The audio was not theatrical, just the clipped voices of late-night plotting. "He'll bite," one said. "She's vulnerable. Let's push a narrative—'desperate for attention.'"
The journalist who had been at our table—an editor I'd met at a charity lunch years ago—leaned forward. "Do you have connecting evidence?" she asked.
Delaney nodded and slid forward a spreadsheet with IP addresses. The journalist's face drained as the columns traced a path directly to shadow accounts that funneled into Mark's network.
"You mean these are paid posts?" someone murmured.
Paid posts. Sponsored smear campaigns. Words looped into accounts choreographed like a sad orchestra. Mark's smile thinned as the room realized the campaign had not been spontaneous anger but manufactured narrative.
"Mark," Delaney said softly, and now her voice carried. "Can you explain the financial traffic on these accounts?"
He smiled in that practiced way. "No," he said. "I can't. I have no control over a thousand internet strangers."
"Except the transaction records show otherwise." Delaney's tone was clinical now. She had the lawyer's patience. "We have receipts. We have bank transfers."
"That's not true," he snapped, and he was capable of snapping with a smile that had wounded me before. "You—what are you doing here?"
"Replacing rumor with fact," Delaney answered.
I stood, an odd motion that made everyone look at me. "Mark," I said, and it surprised me how steady my voice was. "You started a smear campaign that targeted a student and an actress. You wanted to buy back 'the girl' by making her small. You used false allegations to push her away. And you hired people to make that happen." My throat burned on the words, but I kept speaking. "You thought you could manage how people thought of me. You thought pain could be an investment."
Mark's face was a contraption of control trying to hold a leak. "You were mine," he said in a whisper that only I could hear.
Tyler's fingers tightened in mine. He had that look—like a boy on the cusp of falling in love and deciding to anchor himself to the seabed. He stood too.
"We have banking records and witness testimony that tie this campaign to your network," Delaney said. "This is legal. This is public. We are prepared to file today."
Mark's mask fractured into a dozen thin lines. A jacket collar popped up like a crest. "You want money?" he sneered. "You want a settlement? We'll settle."
"No," I said. "We want the truth. We want the apology. We want retraction. We want the platforms to remove the content. We want the people who sent death threats to stop. We want you to stop weaponizing someone's life."
"You're asking me to apologize?" The cruelty was bad enough to make people in neighboring tables look up.
"Apologize publicly," Delaney said. "And sign a retraction. Or we will file."
He was composed for a breath, and then he schemed. "You will look bitter if you force me into public humiliation." He tried to smirk. "People will say it's drama."
"And they'll know you tried to buy it," Delaney replied. "Already the receipts point to sponsored campaigns. Your PR director's assistant was in touch with the accounts."
At that phrase, a woman who'd been Mark's casual supporter at a few industry parties stiffened. Her smile fell away, and then she tossed her head like a clever animal.
"Are you serious?" she said aloud. Her voice traveled.
At that moment, phones were out in a slow, choreographed wave. Socialites, journalists, and fact-searchers clicked. The ballroom's mood shifted from luxury to accusation like a stage change.
Mark's face went white. He started to speak but the room roared with a sobering new hunger for truth. People moved from polite interest to moral theater. An acquaintance turned her chair away. A sponsor cleared his throat as if he felt suddenly unclean. The cameras leaned in.
"Mark," Delaney said in a voice sharper than the hotel's crystal, "apologize. It will be cleaner for you."
He made a sound like a lion trying to cough up a furball. "You're extorting me," he said.
The man on his arm—the one who'd stood so close—gasped and stepped back like he'd touched too-hot iron. "This isn't good," he muttered. Heads in neighboring tables turned. A long-time patron of the charity stood and walked slowly toward our table.
"I gave money to this event because I believed in redemption," she said loudly, addressing the entire room. "If you use this stage to manipulate, I withdraw my support."
"What?" Mark tried. He waved like a drowning man.
Phones started to stream the audio and the screenshots even before the gala's manager had a chance to intervene. It was as real and immediate as a heartbeat. People at the tables whispered and then began to murmur into their phones.
Public humiliation is not a single second. It is a slow erosion: a hand that takes a name card away, a sponsor who sends his PR man to talk to you like you're diseased, a friend who steps back and down into the night and disappears. Mark's composure cracked into little shards.
He went through the exact human reactions I had been warned about in the instruction manual of being betrayed: first an arrogant, contemptuous stance—Charles, a man who'd coached him in charm—then a flash of panic when a benefactor stopped smiling, then the hollowing out of denial, and finally the violent plea.
His face flamed red, then went damp as a hand flew up to hide his mouth. "I never intended—" he started, and stopped when Tyler rose.
"You started it," Tyler said quietly. "You used people like props. You put a student's safety in jeopardy. You used money to buy a private army of ugliness."
Half the room saw Tyler speaking and the other half saw an industry titan on the verge of ruin. When Tyler said it, there was no swagger. There was only an even, sharp truth. He sounded like a judge.
"Mark," a voice said behind Mark—an influencer he'd once bedazzled—"explain this to your followers. Why fund harassment?"
"I didn't—" Mark's voice collapsed into a wheeze.
Matthew, the man who'd been Mark's companion for the evening, looked suddenly very small, very public. He reached, uselessly, for Mark's arm and pulled. "We should go," he muttered.
"It's too late," someone snapped. Their words had teeth. A streaming reporter leaned in. "Do you deny these records?" she asked.
Mark's eyes rolled like coin. "I—" he began, but his mouth dried. "I don't recall," he lied.
The lie was heavier than the truth in that room. People who had been on his roster saw something they'd suspected and didn't want to speak aloud: that Mark's charm had always been for sale, even to the very people who warmed his circle.
A group of young students—apparently volunteers for the gala—stood up and walked to the front. "We don't want a rumor factory at our charity," one said. "We volunteer because we want to help people. We aren't publicity props."
The audience changed. Seats grew inconvenient. Phones took pictures.
Mark capitulated in the worst way possible: he adopted the expression of a man watching his own name short-circuit. He tried to salvage it with a few words—"I'll issue a statement"—but the sponsors began to murmur and distance themselves. One prominent donor, a woman whose money could break careers, stood and said, "No. This event will not host liars."
People began to stand and whisper into phones. The live feed picked up Delaney's file and the journalist's nods. Within minutes, the story spread across social channels with a velocity that stunned Mark into silence.
At the height of his agitation, he made the face of a man realizing his bed was on fire. He moved through stages like a mannequin: first denial, then fury, then bargaining, then pleading. He begged to go home. His PR man tried to form a ring of calm. His supporters had the look of people watching a small volcano erupt where they'd left their picnic basket.
"Please," Mark said with a voice that had been trained to make men fold, but now it only made him seem tinny. "I'll say I'm sorry."
"Not good enough," Delaney replied. "Make it live. Sign the retraction. Remove the posts. And pay reparations for the accounts you funded."
His mask shattered. He fell into a cadence of denial and tears that flipped like a bad channel. "You don't understand," he whispered, "I—"
"Do you understand your victims?" Delaney interrupted. "Do you understand that you hurt people to build your life?"
Around us, the room reacted: a woman who had once called Mark a friend dropped her fork; a columnist who'd admired him scribbled on his pad furiously; a server exchanged a glance with a co-worker that said plainly: we are seeing a man exposed.
Mark's reactions morphed sharply across the room's attention. First he tried to charm his way out—an old reflex—then he blustered, then he denied, then he looked at the floor and begged. Each stage was met with new consequences: a friend left the room; an influencer muted his feed; a donor sent a terse message to the board.
At the end of the night he left under a thin rain of cameras and whispers, no longer the king of polite salons but a man whose audience had turned its head. For a few minutes, he begged in the street, his hands out, his face raw.
He got what he had been banking on avoiding: a public exposure that stripped him down.
Mark's final state was not physical arrest or a courtroom scene. It was worse in a way: he was unmasked in the court of his peers. He was left without endorsements and invitations, the currency of a small industry turned to dust. He tried to bargain for mercy and found an architecture already built against him: the community had shifted. The very people who had benefited from his charm removed their support.
People took out their phones and recorded him. Some laughed, some cried, some shook their heads with calm contempt. A line formed where he stood, not lines for help but for witness statements. The man who had once distributed patrons and influence was now pleading for a retraction he had once orchestrated.
He appealed directly to me at one point—standing a few feet away in the drizzle, under a streetlamp that made his eyes look watery and small. He said, "June, we can fix this."
I looked at him, at the arrogance dissolved, and gave him the only kindness he had earned: a single, cool refusal. "You started a war," I said. "You could have stopped it. You didn't. You weaponized my life." My voice was steady. "I will not make you the hero in my story."
He fell into a deeper kind of pleading. He begged for my mercy, for my silence, for a sentence that would make the world forget. It did not come.
"Mark," Tyler said softly from behind me, and when he said it his voice carried a protection so old it felt like his lineage. "Leave."
Mark staggered away then, a man crumpled in the rain, watched by people who had been deceived into supporting him. He learned, in the worst of ways, that power built on the ruin of others was thin and brittle. The audience turned from him as if a foul odor had been revealed, and with each turned back, his ability to bully life into a story of his own died a little more.
On the drive home, Tyler drove in silence, his hand finding mine across the car console. I realized I had not given him a title yet. He was nothing official; he had no credential. He had only been a presence that night—constant, small, better than the safe illusions I'd been sold.
"You did well," I told him, leaning my head against the window and watching the city wash by.
"She did better," Tyler corrected, and squeezed my hand like he wanted to say more but didn't need to.
We survived that night. Mark's reputation frayed; the industry had to re-examine who it favored. Friends who'd been complicit made quiet apologies. The smear content vanished like paper burned by a moral match. The people who had run it retreated. And in the end, the cost Mark had to pay was not solitary imprisonment—he suffered public, slow erosion of the kind that would be felt in the months he had planned to bask in fame.
The house of cards collapsed and the crowd watched the pieces fall.
When the dust settled, life returned to its more ordinary routines. The cameras moved on to other curiosities. Agencies closed and opened. I returned to sets and to scripts. Tyler resumed classes and late-night motorcycle rides. We learned each other's rhythms. He nudged me awake by habit, and I pretended I hated it and moved closer.
We had stolen moments that became our small archive: a towel thrown over my shoulders, a hand on my lower back when we crossed a crowded room, a carefully pressed kiss at a company's party that made staff look twice and the photographer get a worthy shot. He laughed at my jokes, then tried to be serious about them. He guarded his tenderness like an amateur with a priceless vase.
There was a night, after everything had quieted, when I woke to find him hovering in the doorway with a chipped mug of tea. He stepped in without knocking before I could protest.
"Why are you awake?" he asked.
"Because the world is loudly quiet," I said.
He set the mug beside my bed and sat on the edge. "June," he said softly, "I don't want to be a chapter. I want to be your story."
"I'm not sure I can be that brave," I whispered.
"Then be brave for me," he answered. "I don't want fame. I don't want charts. I want you."
I laughed at him, at his bluntness, at the absurdity and beauty of the words. "You're ridiculous," I said.
He reached up, thumb hooked under my chin, and kissed me like he was placing a promise. "Ridiculous is fine," he said. "Try me."
We were ridiculous together in the best way: an improbable pair—a woman who'd been shaped by industry and a young man who loved fiercely without calculation.
And some nights when the city felt like an indifferent ocean and the world seemed to be rewriting histories that didn't include either of us, I would look at him sleeping and feel an enormous gratitude for the small, stubborn person who refused to let me drown.
The End
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