Sweet Romance12 min read
The Paint That Kept Me: A Story About Favors, Bad Promises, and a Portrait
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"I watched him kiss her in the middle of my birthday party."
That sentence sits in my memory like a bruise. I was twenty then, wearing what I thought was a brave smile. The room was full of people I knew by name and some I did not, but Vaughn Black stood out the way a storm does. He had taken my teenage years — the years I trailed after him — and folded them into a neat, unremarkable paper plane. He launched that plane in front of everyone the night his latest conquest arrived.
"Congratulations," he said to me in that old, mocking tone. "Wishing you all the best."
"Thanks," I answered, because what else do you say when the person you have loved since childhood uses your party as a stage?
He didn't meet my eyes. He kissed Amira Bolton like the world had shrunk to her lips. People cheered. Someone filmed with their phone. I laughed. I learned then that laughter can disguise pain better than silence.
When he posted a picture of a sky-dweller watch on his feed the next week I knew he had succeeded again. He had that way: start a show, spend a fortune, sweep a girl into his orbit and then move on. I had been his accomplice for years. My name was Delilah Vogt, and for a long time my entire role in his life was to make the performances possible.
"Did you see his post?" Brooklyn asked me the day after. Brooklyn Yamashita, my roommate and the loudest soft place I had. "He looks so proud of himself."
"I saw," I said. "I helped him get that bouquet in the rain last month."
"You what?" Brooklyn blinked and then started laughing. "Delilah, why are you a martyr for a man who can't be bothered to notice you?"
"Because I thought that if I could make him happy, that would make me… visible," I said. My voice sounded foreign.
"You visible to him, maybe," Brooklyn said. "Visible to everyone who needs an assistant."
That sting lasted longer than Brooklyn's laugh.
When he called me that night I answered because old habits are heavier than new ones. "Hey," I said.
"Delilah," Vaughn breathed. "You won't believe—"
"—who?" I cut in, even though I knew. "Is it the girl from your class, the one with the floral dress?"
"Yes. You remember? You helped her study last semester." His voice was small and triumphant both. "I couldn't have done it without you."
"You didn't have to tell me that," I said. "You could have figured it out yourself."
He chuckled. "She asked me out. It went well."
"That's great, Vaughn."
He hesitated. "Actually—"
"Yeah?"
"She's coming out. I wanted to tell you first. I'll make it up to you. Next time we'll all hang out."
"Fine," I said. He hung up.
I looked at my phone glow against my palm and felt the familiar tug: a small pain, like a bruise pressing in. I had been the person who booked rooms, wrote ribbons, bought roses, stood in the rain to get the only cake she wanted. In exchange I got a smile and a thank-you, and sometimes a closeness that smelled faintly, objectively, like friendship.
Three years back we had arrived in this city together — the bright, gray metropolis where we were supposed to become young and certain. Vaughn and I were friends, we said. I became the friend who made declarations happen. He fell in and out of love like a leaf drifting on water. I kept paddling in his wake.
"Why don't you stop?" Brooklyn suggested one late night. "Make yourself someone he has to lose."
"Because losing him would feel like losing a part of my childhood," I admitted. "He was the one who chased off the bullies in the alley. He traded me a sandwich when my lunchbox ripped. He is the one who held me because I cried when we left home."
"You are romanticizing a man who uses you as a prop," Brooklyn said.
"Maybe," I whispered.
The other man came into my life like a quiet drawing. Fabian Farmer first appeared in my inbox as the man who had my student ID photograph. The school's "confession board" — a messy feed of paper and pixels — had my unmasked photo and number plastered all over it. Someone found my ID two months after I lost it when I helped Vaughn reserve a venue.
"I'll return it," Fabian said when we met in campus café. He was tall, with quiet hair and thinner hands than Vaughn's. He had the kind of face that looked as though it had been carved out of paper by careful fingers.
"Thanks for bringing it back," I said. "You didn't have to go to so much trouble."
He gave a small, crooked smile. "It annoyed me. Plus, I like knowing who I'm drawing."
"You draw?" I asked.
"Yes. I'm Fabian. I teach as an assistant in the art department." He put the student ID down very deliberately and then, as if he were settling something in his chest, said, "Have you eaten?"
"No," I said, because I thought it rude and because I had no good reason not to.
"Eat with me," he said simply. "I will not take no for an answer."
We sat and he pushed a bowl of kung pao towards me. "You don't like spicy, do you?" he asked, watching.
I tasted a piece and spat it out before I could stop myself. He reached to catch it as it came out of my mouth. His hand, when it closed around the mess, trembled very slightly.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine." I felt hot in my face.
He rinsed my mouth with water like he had been taught to care for an animal. "I'm sorry. I should have asked."
"I'm okay. Thank you, Fabian." The word felt different on my tongue than it had when I said Vaughn's name. There was care in it, a soft practical attention.
"You know," Fabian said one afternoon while we painted by the marshes, "I don't usually like crowds."
"Neither do I," I said.
He looked at me very directly. "I think you paint with your eyes closed sometimes."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you see things without wanting them to be what they are. You make effort be invisible."
"That's poetic," I said, and Fabian's shoulders twitched as if he had not meant to be poetic, only honest.
Friendship slid toward something slow and patient. Fabian taught me color and light. He taught the small mechanics of mixing paint the way someone might teach you how to breathe less noisily. He would reach and put a streak of color on my canvas and then guide my hand, or he'd tie back my hair when paint dripped near my neck.
"Delilah," Fabian said one evening when the sky was the color of bruised fruit, "you're always using your hands to help others. Let someone use their hands on you."
His voice had neither force nor finish, just a steady insistence.
"Like who?" I asked. I was afraid to say the name I still sometimes whispered to myself.
"Like me," he said, and there it was: a small, ridiculous admission that would become everything.
He was not flashy. He did not chase girls with watches and noise. He gave me pocketed kindnesses — a jacket when I was cold, a warm cup when my hands shook after a long day, a smile that settled into his face like a sun coming up. He had the habit of doing the small things that meant the most. Once, when I complained that my hands smelled like paint, he handed me a towel and then, very naturally, kissed the scent away.
"You're ridiculous," I said breathless. "You make me want to be obvious."
"Good," he said. "Be obvious to me."
That was one of my first heartbeats with him: when he kissed the paint off my skin instead of looking away. Later, when winter nipped, he draped his scarf over my shoulders without asking. When I woke one morning with a crick in my neck, he brought me tea and set the cup in my hand with extraordinary care. "You talk less when your neck hurts," he noted, and his eyes softened.
There were moments — at least three — when I thought my heart could not survive the happiness. One afternoon, he finished a portrait of me when I was supposed to be the model. He set the canvas on the easel and smiled. "I only do that for people I care about," he said.
Another time, while we watched a film in a near-empty lecture hall, he leaned his head on my shoulder and sighed in a way that made the entire room feel like a secret. "You make boring things feel like home," he whispered.
"Stop," I told him. My face hurt from smiling too much. "You are going to ruin my professional indifference."
He reached over and tapped my nose with his paint-stained finger. "Good," he said, as if that were an achievement.
Vaughn noticed the change. He always noticed, but his version of noticing was different — more like staking claim than seeing clearly.
"You're not supposed to be mine anymore?" he asked one rainy night when I did not pick up his call.
"I didn't say that," I answered.
"You never do say what you mean," he complained. "You're always… polite."
"I'm allowed to be polite," I snapped back, because I had learned how to be kinds of brave. "I have my life."
"You are my friend," he said. "Friends come to my plans."
"Friends have boundaries," I replied.
He griped like someone wounded by rejection. "I can change," he promised. "I can be better."
"Then be better while I'm watching," I said, and walked out.
We stopped speaking for a while. The silence felt like a release. I painted more, learned a new way to look at color, and practiced being with someone who noticed me without using me.
But the past has weight. On a cold night during the end-of-year exhibition, Vaughn came streaking into the gallery like a comet with a tantrum. He followed me through the rooms, looking smaller than he once had, and when he reached the center he did something neither of us expected: he publically accused me of betrayal.
"Delilah," he said loudly. "You were my accomplice for years. You promised to be at my side. You helped me when I needed you. You promised—"
"You promised me what?" I asked, stepping forward. My voice stayed calm though my hands trembled.
He strode up to one of my canvases as if he owned the space, turning it so the room could see a painting of me under the marsh reeds. "This," he said. "She used me. She used me so she could be noticed by other people. She colluded with that teacher." He pointed, sharp, at Fabian, who stood a few feet away with a cup of coffee in his hands.
People quieted. The gallery, full of students and visiting parents and professors, felt like a courtroom. I saw the old films of him staging confessions flash across folks' faces. Someone in the back whispered, "He always liked a show."
"Vaughn," Fabian said, stepping forward. "You are making a scene."
"She's a traitor," Vaughn said. "Delilah, tell them. Tell them you were always taking my favors and turning them into your life."
I had not expected to be attacked in public, and I didn't expect the space of silence to fill with so many opinions. But I had expected better of myself. I had practiced saying no to being small. I had scheduled courage like paint sessions. So I wiped sweat from my palms and looked him dead in the eye.
"You have a habit of believing you own people's stories," I said. "You think because you helped build the stage, you own the play."
"You owe me honesty!" Vaughn shouted.
"I owe you nothing," I replied. "You owe the people you've hurt apologies. You owe Amira truth. You owe the girls you've used something real."
A murmur ran through the crowd. Someone clapped — not because Vaughn's accusation was true, but because the spectacle had finally met its rebuke. A woman near the door recorded the moment with her phone. A teacher who had watched Vaughn use other people to reach his own ends put a hand on the small of my back.
"Stop," Amira said suddenly, pushing through the little cluster that had gathered. She looked at Vaughn with a coldness that made the room shiver. "You told me you loved me. You told me you wanted me. You painted a story, Vaughn, and I was a character in it. Then you burned what you wanted when you were bored. How is that love?"
Vaughn's face went through six stages in the space of a breath: pride, confusion, denial, anger, shame, and then a small collapse into crying. He tried to speak, hands flaring.
"That's not—"
"Isn't what?" Amira demanded. "Isn't real? Isn't honesty? Isn't cruel?"
People were watching. The gallery lights made Vaughn's tears look like oil spills. He tried to make a joke, haggard and wrong.
"This is—this is a misunderstanding," he stammered.
"He's a liar!" someone hissed from behind me. Another voice shouted, "He always was!" A student opened his phone and the livestream began; within minutes half the school tuned in.
Vaughn pushed forward, face red, trying to reclaim the center stage. "Delilah, you were my friend. You promised—"
"I promised to be your friend," I said. "Not your scriptwriter. Not your backup audience. Not your emotional valet."
He went from arrogance to plead within seconds. "Please—" he said, voice dropping to raw. "Please, Delilah. We can be what we were. Forgive me. I'll change."
Fabian's voice, quiet and steady, cut into the tide. "Vaughn," he said, "stop making this about himself."
"Make it about what?" Vaughn spat. "Her? You think she was doing this to you? You're the intruder."
"Delilah is not a prize," Fabian said. "She's a person."
The crowd had grown hungry for drama, but the hunger turned sour. People began to speak up. Former girlfriends who had been spectators to Vaughn's antics stepped forward, faces hard not from violence but from the furious calm of those betrayed.
"You played us all," one woman said. "You wrote stories about us like you were creating art, and then you blamed us when we couldn't perform to your liking."
Another laughed once, a brittle, terrible sound. "This ought to be the end of his director days," she said.
Vaughn's denial disintegrated. He looked around as if he expected someone to hand him a script that would tidy everything. Instead, he found eyes that had recorded his cruelty and turned their backs. The room, which had been waiting for a spectacle, turned instead into a council of witnesses.
A professor whom I respected — Fraser Wilson — cleared his throat. "This behavior is unacceptable," he said. "If he wants to apologize, he will do it privately and sincerely. He will not make this department his confessional."
Vaughn sagged. He had been used to applause; now there was only a catalog of claims and a record of his misdeeds played back on other people's faces. He tried to form words; they were thin and inadequate. He tried to reclaim control by creating humor; it collapsed into bitterness.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked me, finally small and raw.
"Because I am tired of being a footnote," I said. "Because your show always needed someone to hide behind. Because it's time for you to face people you hurt."
He began to beg then, and it was awful and real. "Please," he said. "Please don't tell people I'm a bad person. Please, Delilah."
The crowd's reaction was a mixture of lack of sympathy and satisfaction. Some people applauded; others shook their heads. A student who had once been one of Vaughn's annotated fans spat, "You used us the same way." Someone else filmed him silently weeping. The energy in the room was complex — not gloating but a necessary unmasking.
He fell apart in front of everyone. That is the punishment his pattern required: not a jail or a sentence, but the dismantling of his performance by the people he used to enchant. He lost his authority. People who once gave him favors withdrew them. The girls he had once dazzled now turned away. Vaughn tried to reclaim our friendship afterward, texted me until my phone buzzed with exhaustion, but the public unraveling made private recovery a harder road.
The punishment lasted not as a single blow but as a slow erosion. Students refused to be recruited for his elaborate confessions. He found his ideas ridiculed instead of adored. The university's art club wouldn't let him host a show. I watched him try to rebuild and sometimes succeed in small ways, but the advantage of charm, which had weaponized him for years, dulled under visibility.
After that night, I began to own my labor. I was done booking his venues. I answered invitations when I wanted to, not because he had asked. I let myself be seen without him as a stage manager. And in place of his storms came Fabian's steady weather.
"Why did you stay?" he asked me once, when we stood on the wetland boardwalk and watched the reeds sway.
"Because I thought he was my story," I said. "Because he was the memory I clung to."
"Then let the story go," Fabian said. He took my hand. His palm was warm and steady. "Let's make another one."
"So we did."
We married in a small kitchen we could afford. The walls smelled of garlic and oil and the little domestic things that prove life is real. We had a child and a life that was architected from daily small mercies. My mother, Maxine Cash, called him "a quiet, good man" and kept saying how lucky I was.
Years later I got an email. The subject line had no words, only an attachment: a portrait of me. The brushwork was familiar and rough at the edges — the kind of painting that had once made me feel seen and then charred. There was no signature, but I knew whose strokes could cut like that.
"Fabian," I said, holding the picture up.
He inspected it and then frowned. "He painted this," he said slowly. "He still thinks he can take what he wants."
"Maybe he remembered," I said. In the quiet of our kitchen, with a pot simmering and our child's laughter in the other room, I felt no tug of regret. I felt only a strange, small mercy.
Fabian flipped the portrait face down and then returned to chopping vegetables. "Don't let ghosts remake you," he said.
I smiled and kissed him on the paint-streaked cheek. "I won't," I promised, because this was the truth.
Years passed. I got another note — from my mother this time: Vaughn's grandmother had died. I tried to call him. The number rang and rang, then cut. A year of silence answered me. I understood; after the public stripping of his illusions, people rebuild or they fade. I did not seek him out. The portrait in my inbox sat on the fridge for a week like a message that needed no reply.
One afternoon, when the child was napping, I traced the painted lines with my fingers. That portrait had a tenderness I could not deny; it also had a claim. I slid the image into a drawer. I kept living. On the refrigerator magnet, above the portrait, I pinned a small watercolor Fabian had done of the marshes where we used to sit.
"That's the life I chose," I said aloud, and Fabian, from the sink, answered me without looking up, "Good."
The End
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