Sweet Romance13 min read
The Orange, the Voice, and the Watch
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up to the cicadas arguing with the sun, my room a small oven with the window shut tight. "Callie, are you up?" my grandmother's voice drifted through the thin floorboards like a promise. I rolled over, hair tangled, and peered at my phone. Eight months had passed since the final exam that felt like both the end and the beginning.
"Did you sleep through the world?" I muttered to myself, dragging a hand over my face.
"Callie!" my grandmother called again, softer. "You come down and help with the dumplings."
I pushed my hair back and sat up. The face I saw in the mirror was the same porcelain smoothness I'd always had, but something in me had loosened—the kind of looseness that comes when you stop trying to keep everything perfect for strangers on a timetable.
Downstairs, Grandpa Raul Arroyo was trimming the potted plant on the balcony. "Your plant's blooming," he said when he saw me.
"It's beautiful," I said.
"Eat first," Grandma Diane Johansen chimed, holding up a bowl. "Your favorite—water chestnut."
"Thanks." I smiled and ate. Small rituals stitch the days together: a bowl, a laugh, the press of sun-warmed hands.
At noon I texted Jett Dawson, my old neighbor and friend from elementary school. "KTV tonight?" his message blinked.
"Just woke up," I typed back. "Yes."
When night came, I changed into a red camisole and denim shorts. The outfit felt like an apology to the girl I used to be and an invitation to the one I wanted to become. Grandpa Raul frowned at the waistline from his chair. "Where you going dressed like that?"
"Out with friends. I'll be back by eleven," I promised.
"You hear that? Be home by eleven," Grandma Diane warned, but my feet already carried me down the street.
I arrived at the KTV late. The receptionist eyes swept me up and down like a judge. "Underage, sweetie."
I flashed my ID. "I'm eighteen."
"Oh, sorry," she said, embarrassed.
I pushed the room door open. Colored lights cut across faces; the scent of cola and cheap perfume hung in the air. "Callie!" Jett waved me over, his grin a relief. Two of our old classmates were there, and in the far corner, a boy I didn't recognize at first sat like someone half-asleep, hair tousled and eyes half-lidded. He looked familiar—like a picture you can't put your finger on.
"You're late. Took a nap on purpose?" Jett scolded without heat.
"I did," I said, sliding onto the couch. I felt eyes from the corner like tiny taps on the skin. He looked up for a second, and my heart gave a small, traitorous skip.
"You singing tonight?" Jett demanded, handing me the microphone.
"Fine. I'll do one."
I picked a song and let the melody catch me. The room grew quieter as my voice slid through the chorus, and when I looked up, the boy in the corner had his attention on me the whole time. There was a small mole near his left nose that I remembered like a bookmark.
"Who was that?" someone asked later.
"Eladio?" Jett guessed.
Eladio Morris. The name arrived in me like a photograph shaken into focus. He had been my classmate once upon a time, the boy who had shown up mid-semester and quietly taken the role of my partner in class responsibilities. We had been rivals for nothing and friends for everything.
After that night, Eladio added me on social media. The screen showed a message: "Callie Matthews? Accepted." I stared at the white bar like it was an open door I had been too clumsy to notice.
He didn't message for a while. Later I told my sister Raquel Stephens about it over video, and she teased me. "You two will be something, I can feel it," she said and laughed. "Don't mess this up."
Days passed like bread cooling. I listened every night to a voice anchor on an app—VoiceMuse—whose English readings smoothed my insomnia like hot tea. The voice was low and warm, and it became a part of me. When I noticed the account hadn't posted in days, I worried. When a fake "VoiceMuse" popped up, hawking scams, I felt protective as if someone had picked at a scab.
A month later, I took the subway back from my sister's and found myself jostled. A hand brushed my thigh—no accident. I looked up, ready to shout, but a boy in a cap offered me his hand. His eyes were the same dark, deep things I'd seen in the KTV corner. "Here, swap?" he said.
I moved to his spot. "Thank you," I whispered.
"You're welcome," he smiled. "I'm Eladio."
"Eladio?" I said, my voice thin with a joy I'd kept secret.
"Small world." He smiled politely, like a private radio station only a few of us could tune.
Later, late at night, I added him on WeChat. He accepted quickly. His profile had photos of the university gates—Southbury University—and the caption: finally close to you. I read it and felt like the universe had slipped and let me see a little of the thing it had been hiding.
We started to talk, first stilted, then warm. He told me how he'd created an account on the audio app because someone's sleepless post had moved him. I didn't know then that the voice that soothed me was his, disguised and softened because he thought my attention shouldn't be forced. He wanted to help. He wanted to do small things.
"How's study?" he asked one evening.
"Tolerable," I wrote. "You?"
"Constant," he replied. "Lab work."
"Sounds exhausting. Rest."
"I will when I finish this project," he said. The message felt like a promise.
The translation competition at our university came up. It was a way to win money and maybe a scholarship. The topic I chose—technology—made my head spin. I asked Professor Pierre Hayes at Eladio's suggestion for help. He said to come by his office.
That morning I found him in a small room stacked with papers. "I can help you, Callie," he said kindly, leafing through my work. When I looked up, Eladio was there, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, sorting through a teetering pile of articles.
"You came with me?" I asked.
"Professor invited me to help," he shrugged.
We talked about the text for hours. Afterwards Eladio walked me to the dining hall. "Your campus meals are better than mine," I said, surprised.
"Come by more often," he said like he meant it.
"Will you?" I teased.
"Maybe." He had a way of saying maybe and making it feel like an affirmation.
He started to come to Southside more often. He'd bring me oranges from my hometown—the fruit my grandmother called sun-kissed ships. "Home taste," he said once, handing me a paper bag full.
"You didn't have to," I told him.
"I wanted to," he insisted, and the word landed like a leaf on still water.
There were other people who tried to be a part of my life. Clifton Curtis—older than me, a family friend—brought me presents and cooked. He had been there since I was small, like an established moon. I felt safe with him, but I didn't confuse safety with the warm combustion that happened when Eladio smiled.
Then there was the night that changed everything. My roommate Inger Keller burst into the room, storming like a small storm. "He's at Dele Life," she said, eyes fierce. "Malcolm's with a girl on the dance floor."
"Malcolm who?" I asked.
"You remember him? Leafy hair, student council? Malcolm Morales," Inger spat the name like it tasted acidic.
We went, breath wild, into a bar I didn't usually enter. The lights throbbed. The bass vibrated bone. I spotted Malcolm on the floor with a woman pressed close to him, hands where they shouldn't be, expressions that were too intimate for someone else's voice.
"Inger, do you want to talk?" I asked softly, but she had a different script.
She walked in like a comet, straight toward them. "Malcolm!" she called. The girl and the boy both looked up, startled.
"Em... hello?" Malcolm stammered, caught between embarrassment and performance.
"You promised we'd go to basketball with friends, remember?" Inger's voice was small but sharp. Tears began to rise in her eyes—anger and hurt braided.
"That's not—" Malcolm began, frantic.
"You told me you were with friends. Who is she?" Inger demanded.
The girl, flushed with the heat of the dance floor, looked confused but didn't step back. "I'm just—"
Malcolm grabbed at Inger's wrist. "Don't be dramatic. It's nothing. Please."
People in the bar noticed. Conversations stuttered. Phones came out like moths to light.
I stepped closer. "Let her go," I said.
He shoved me back—an ugly, stupid push—and I crashed into a table. A glass shattered. Pain flared across my arm. Blood smeared like a punctuation mark. The room inhaled.
Inger pushed him away and shouted, "You piece of—"
At that moment, something hot and surgical took over me. I moved forward and slapped him—not once, not twice, but three times, each landing like the definition of all the hurt he'd caused. The music seemed to dip, and the bar's hubbub turned into a halo of attention pointing at Malcolm.
"How dare you?" Inger screamed, voice layered with a grief that made the room fall silent.
Malcolm's face changed as if the light had been switched on. His smugness cracked. "What are you doing?!" he barked.
"You lied," Inger spat. "You lied in front of everyone."
The crowd buzzed. Someone recorded. Phones rose like metal flowers. I felt the heat of the moment, not because of the adrenaline but because I had come to a line I would not step back from anymore. This wasn't about me, not really. It was about her dignity and the small indignities I'd tolerated for years.
"Get out," I told him.
He laughed too loud. "Oh please, you're overreacting."
"Overreacting?" Inger's voice was sharp. "Come here and say that with everyone watching."
The bar held its breath. Malcolm's eyes flicked to the recording phones, to the faces leaning in like predators. The smile drained from his face.
"Don't touch me!" he said, desperation like a new suit he hadn't grown into.
Someone shouted, "Call the bouncer!" A handful of people clapped, a handful booed. The tide had turned.
"You're the one who can call me a lot of things," I said, my voice steady. "But if you think you can hide in the dark and kiss someone else's hand and pretend it was nothing—"
He stepped forward, face red. "You don't know anything," he hissed.
"I know enough," I said. "You think the world is small enough to hide in your pockets? You think people won't see?"
He sputtered denial, words sliding into each other. "It's not what—she's my friend's cousin—it's ..."
"Save it," I said. "You took someone's trust and turned it into bait. You lied to her. You humiliated her."
"You can't—"
"Look," I said, and for once I let the world's cheap theater become a stage. I took his hand and ripped off his wristband—his student council wristband, the very symbol of the role he had played in public. The crowd gasped.
"Do you remember last month's fundraiser?" I asked, watching the color drain from his features. "How many people praised you? How many called you respectable?"
His face was grading from a confident crimson to a muddy gray. "Stop this," he whispered.
"I'm not stopping," I said. "Not when you treat people like props. Not when you make promises you don't intend to keep."
Someone in the crowd laughed, then another. Phones dotted the room like a galaxy—people filming, some shouting, some whispering. "She hit him!" "Who's she?" "Is she his girlfriend?"
A girl posted the clip within minutes. Notifications rose.
Malcolm's smile made a final, brittle attempt at survival. He tried to justify, to recast the event as a misunderstanding, but each defense only made him look smaller. "You're making a scene," he said, voice cracking into pleading.
"This is a scene you made first," I replied.
He tried to reach for Inger again. She put her palm up like a shield and shook. "Get away," she said. "Get away from both of us."
By then, on the bar's screen, someone had cast the clip large. His voice trailed off from sound to static. Friends of his looked between him and the audience, and you could see loyalty evaporate like dew. He'd been good at acting; but acting in private isn't the same as being a person in public. His classmates, people who respected him at meetings, avoided his gaze. A man near the door smoked and remarked, "He looks like every man who thought himself clever in the back rooms."
Malcolm's jaw trembled. "Please—" he began. Tears—ridiculous and sudden—streaked his cheeks. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the floor, the kind of theatrical break that used to win sympathy in movies but here felt raw and feeble.
"Please," he said, voice more broken than I'd ever heard. "I didn't mean— I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
The crowd reacted with a mix of scoffs and stunned silence. Someone snapped a photo; another patted the bar counter in derision. A woman in a floral dress clapped sarcastically. "Bravo," she said, and the laugh spread like a net.
He crawled toward Inger—no dignity, only raw pleading. "Forgive me," he whispered, tilting his head up like a supplicant to a god he had offended. "Forgive me, please."
People recorded. Someone shouted, "Say it on camera!" He did. He repeated the words, the sentences losing shape with every syllable. He tried to put his hands together as if in prayer. No one moved to help him up. His friends stood like museum pieces—hands in pockets, looking away.
"I want to leave," he said finally, the coward's final claim. "Please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
No one carried him out of the bar. He left on his own two feet, feet trembling, the doors swallowing him like an animal pushed out of a sanctuary. The cameras were still rolling.
Later, the clip hit the campus feed. Comments rained like pebbles. "I saw him." "Karma." "That's what you get." Others speculated, but the common thread was clear: Malcolm Morales had gone from respectable to ridiculed in a hum of fiber optic justice. He had been unmasked, and the unmasking was public, messy, and everlasting.
Afterwards, Inger sat with me under the streetlamp outside. She held my hand like a lifeline. "You didn't have to..." she said.
"I did," I said. "I couldn't let you go smooth into being lied to."
"Thank you," she whispered.
We walked home with our dignity patched but bruised, and the city smelled like rain and cheap perfume. I could feel the clip already making its rounds; the world had a way of magnifying humiliation now into fame. Malcolm faded into a chorus of regrets. He was still a person—capable of sorrow and error—but in that Friday-night theater he had been dismantled in public, and something in the air changed.
After that night, things between Eladio and me knit closer in repairs instead of confessions. He brought me tea when I had my stitches cleaned. "You didn't tell me about the bar," he said gently.
"I didn't want you to worry," I said.
"You could have told me." He looked at me as if the world contained a single accusing light and he wanted to shelter me from it.
We had small rituals. He would walk me to the gate and hand me a paper bag of oranges. We shared study time in the library, leaning across crowded tables, exchanging definitions and gentle jokes. He helped me translate technical terms until algorithms became friendly words.
"Why are you so good to me?" I asked once. We were sitting in a quiet corner of the reading room. The afternoon light drew soft rectangles on the page.
He didn't answer at first. "Because you were kind to me when I came here," he said finally, almost like surprise. "Because you were...a place."
"A place?" I repeated.
"A place. You were steady." He tapped the table. "And because I've always—" he stopped.
"Always?" I pushed.
"Since we were kids," he finished, and the confession slid out soft as breath.
I felt it then: a heat, a slow bubble that had been building, unnoticed until it was undeniable.
We were ordinary and extraordinary, two students leaning into evenings like bridges. Later, in the hospital when he had gastroenteritis, I went to see him with a pot of thin congee and a stack of borrowed books. He was pale but smiling at me as if my presence was an antidote.
"Let me feed you," I said, half teasing.
He raised one eyebrow and said, "You want to feed me?"
"I told you once you'd do something kind for me," I said, and he accepted the spoon.
Simple moments like that—a spoonful of congee, a shared book, a phone call that ends with 'sleep tight'—sewed us together in ways that words couldn't. He asked about my translation progress. I asked about his lab. We spoke of our small, secret, mundane things: the watch I'd seen in Raquel's drawer, the VoiceMuse account that had soothed my nights, the crystal hairpin my grandmother had given me for my birthday. Every object became an emblem of the life we were building.
There were jealousies, of course. Rex Wilson, the student council president, was kind and generous. He had taken an interest in me that made the hair on my arms prickle. "You okay?" Eladio asked once when Rex had texted me a compliment.
"I'm fine," I said. "Rex is just...friendly."
"Keep me posted," he said, softer than the words required.
One evening, standing with Eladio under a library lamp, he said, "Callie, I don't want to be just someone who helps with your homework."
"What then?" I asked quietly, because the thought of losing this—my friend who'd wrapped his warmth around me—hurt.
"Someone who grows into the person you like," he said. His breath fogged in the air like a tiny comet. "I want to try."
My lungs forgot how to move for a second. "Try what?"
"To be yours. If you'll let me."
The world narrowed to his face. I had rung the same bell in my chest for years and had never let anyone listen. "Are you serious?" I asked, because the question allowed me time.
He smiled like it was the only answer, like words had been waiting to be born. "Yes."
I laughed—part shock, part relief. "You make that sound dangerous."
"Dangerous how?"
"Like you might change my life," I said, and it was not a complaint.
"Good." He reached for my hand, and this time the touch didn't feel like testing. It felt like choosing.
We moved forward slowly, the way careful things should. We kept our promises to the people who had held us—Grandpa Raul who called every day, Clifton who still brought care packages, my sister Raquel who teased and then supported, my roommates who shrieked at romantic ambiguity and defended me with loud fervor.
Months later, the fake VoiceMuse account was uncovered. Eladio had been working quietly behind the scenes. He had been under attack—someone tried to impersonate him and profit—but we found the imposter and exposed them. Justice felt small and moral, but it restored something tidy to the world: the voice on my night feed was his, raw and patient, and not a product to be sold.
At the award ceremony for the translation contest, I stood with my paper trembling. I had won second place—enough to nod at the scholarship committee, and enough to tell myself I could study languages into a real life. Eladio sat in the back, his hands in his lap, proud like a secret. When I looked at him, he winked.
After the ceremony, in the quiet of the campus courtyard, I took out a tiny crystal hairpin—my birthday gift—and held it up. "Maybe this is a bribe," I joked.
He laughed and leaned close. "Maybe it is. But I'll take it."
When I walked home that night, the air was cold and clear. I put the hairpin into the front pocket of my coat. I thought of the oranges in his paper bag and the watch in my sister's drawer. I thought of the audio that had once been a stranger and was now his voice. I felt something like gratitude—large and rounded. We had stumbled and we had learned. People had been cruel and been kind. We had been small witnesses to each other's faults and mercies.
I slipped the hairpin into a drawer in my desk when I got home. "For safekeeping," I whispered. The hairpin lay there among pens and an old ticket stub from the first movie I saw with Raquel. It gleamed like a tiny lighthouse.
Before sleep, I picked up my phone and opened the VoiceMuse playlist. Eladio's voice filled the room, reading something mundane and beautiful. I smiled and turned the volume low. It was mine to keep now, his care folded into every line.
"Good night," I said aloud, though no one needed to hear.
"Good night," his voice said back, recorded but alive.
And for once, the cicadas didn't argue with the sun. They listened.
The End
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