Sweet Romance14 min read
The Stadium Screen, the Sniper Game, and the Boy Who Called Me "My Light"
ButterPicks13 views
1
The big screen at the gym caught me at the worst possible time.
"I—I didn't mean to," I blurted, and the whole crowd laughed like a wave. My face burned so hot I felt it in my teeth.
"Sit still," said the boy underneath me. His voice was low. He didn't move an inch.
My lace skirt had snagged on the metal stud of his boot. I bent to free it and gravity did the rest: I landed hard on his thigh and my skirt brushed his mouth. The giant screen flashed our faces. The announcer's camera had found us.
Someone whistled. "Ooooh!" came from somewhere high in the stands.
I scrambled up, hair caught on his chest buckle. My fingers fumbled at the button and managed only to tear the collar in a loud rip.
I froze. He froze. The arena roared.
"Sorry." I said it like an apology and like a prayer.
He gave a small sound, like someone holding breath. Then he looked at me.
It was the kind of look that shivered down my spine. He had a patchwork of rudeness and cold that made other students whisper his nickname—"the campus tyrant." Yet when his eyes met mine I felt something strange, like being gently iced.
He didn't talk. He lifted a hand to trace at the torn collar, slow and practiced, as if muscle memory could fix whatever I had wrecked.
I looked—really looked—at his face for the first time.
"Grayson?" I tried the name like a question, because his first name fit like a coat I had seen in pictures. The name had a weight on campus. Everyone said he was top of the grade, sharp as a blade, dangerous as a dare. No one messed with him.
He didn't answer. He only said one thing later, in a voice that was both challenge and tease: "You owe me."
2
My brother Devin was ten rows away, safe and broad-shouldered. He had gone to the bathroom and left me to find my seat. When he came back he looped an arm over my shoulder like a shield and shouted, "Nice shot!"
"Shh," I hissed. "I'm dying."
"You're blushing harder than the team jersey," he said, proud and totally unbothered.
That night the web was cruel. A hundred versions of the screen photo spread like spilled ink. "She kissed the tyrant!" one blogger wrote and people clicked and clicked. My phone buzzed until I met Devin's eyes and felt small.
"Change your profile picture," he said. "Now."
The next morning the university hallway split open for me like the sea. People gave me space as if I were a comet passing through. Jacqueline—my roommate—texted: "Go off-planet for a week."
"Thanks for nothing," I replied, cheeks burning. My desk neighbor mouthed something—"slut"—and I felt very far from home.
Outside, in the corridor, a woman with short hair and sharp clothes waited for me like a billboard. She stepped forward as if she had a right to the world.
"You!" she said. She looked at Devin and then at me with a face full of accusation. "You have nerve, pulling someone else's man."
Devin stepped like a shadow. "Step back."
"Which man?" I wanted to ask. I had no claim. The world had simply decided to punish me for a clumsy moment.
A few days later Jacqueline told me the woman's name: Stefania Bradshaw. She was linked to Grayson in every rumor—girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, whatever the campus wanted to call lusty gossip. She had a clique and a look and the talent to hurt with a smile.
"You go into the lion's den," Jacqueline said. "Smile. Survive."
"I don't even know her," I said.
"Doesn't matter. People like her don't need your permission."
3
Grayson found me again in the VR arcade.
"Grayson." My words stuck, like marbles in a throat.
He tossed me a VR rifle as if I had come to join a league. "Play," he said.
"Why me?" I asked.
He slid the VR visor over my eyes. "Because you owe me."
"I already apologized," I stammered.
"You apologized to the crowd. I asked you to apologize to me." His tone was soft, dangerous, like threads pulling me into a web. His thumb brushed the nape of my neck while he adjusted the strap. The touch was light, but it left me trembling.
"You asked for what?" I whispered.
"My terms," he said. Then, softer still: "Win a match for me. If you win, we erase that night. If you lose—"
"I'll pay for dinner forever?" I tried to joke.
"No." He looked at me with the bored smile that looked like a warning. "If you lose, you belong to me at least for one game."
There were people watching. I could feel eyes like tiny knives on my back. Stefania stood near the door, arms folded, lips curled with that special kind of malice reserved for spectators.
I knew how to shoot. My father, Griffith Coleman, had taught me about aim. "Hold steady," he would say as he set the target. I had been a child who learned to steady hands on rough wood and steel. No one at school knew that.
In the VR I transformed. The rifle fit my hands like it had always belonged there. The cursor slid, the headshots came. I moved like water. I owned the space with a calm that had nothing to do with panic and everything to do with practice.
I was about to win when a phone buzzed in my pocket. One slip—and I was down. They jeered. "Not fair!" someone called. The room thinned into a circle of faces. I ripped the visor off. "This round doesn't count," I said, forcing my voice calm.
Grayson watched me, that smile playing on his mouth like a secret. "Call whoever," he said. "Play again."
4
Devin found us at the arcade, like the hero he thought he was. "Who let you pull her into this?" he demanded, and his voice was all flint.
Grayson hooked one long finger around my wrist. Devin grabbed my other hand. For a second I was the rope in a tug-of-war.
"Let go of her," Grayson said.
"She is my sister," Devin snapped.
Grayson's fingers tightened. "Don't touch her," he said, calm and low and absolutely deadly.
Devin's face crumpled with confusion. "Who are you to—"
"A big man," Grayson said. He sounded amused. "Don't make a girl cry in my arcade."
I didn't know how to be in the middle of two giants. I wanted to ask them both to stop and maybe make tea for everyone. Devin, furious and baffled, let go. Grayson didn't move. Instead he looked at me like he owned a map to my thoughts.
"White wolf," he said once we were alone. "You scared me."
"Excuse me?" I said, bewildered.
"You always freeze when you think someone will take you," he told me, like it was a fact he had studied. "I like that you don't run."
5
Rumors spun faster than summer flies. Pictures from the gym, the arcade, a hundred tiny edits—every click a new shame. Someone had posted a grainy video of the arcade scene with a caption that made me want to drop out of school.
In the mess of it all, Devin held me like an anchor. "You're not in trouble," he told me. "You're clumsy and that is your tragedy, not a crime."
"Thanks," I said. "You really think I'm not doomed?"
"You are my kid. You are not doomed." He glared at Grayson across the table once, then looked away as if the look was too heavy for his shoulders.
6
Then the crisis came like a storm breaking glass.
A news push trended across the city feeds: BRADSHAW ELECTRONICS UNDER POLICE INSPECTION. The headline scrolled like a falling guillotine.
On campus the rumor wheel spun: "The Bradshaw factory was raided." "Old money trouble." "Someone turned them in."
The next morning, Grayson stood before a crowd of students on the library steps. "You want to see proof?" he asked. His voice was steady, clear, louder than the buzz. "Come to the auditorium at noon."
I thought he would be joking. I went because Devin squeezed my hand and didn't let me be brave alone.
7
Auditorium noon. The seats filled with the usual suspects—gawkers, rumor collectors, people who were hungry for drama. Stefania sat in the front row with a face like a prize that had been dented. Her mother, Maria King, sat beside her, tight as wire. The industrial magnate—Karl Burton—sat further back, looked like a man who feared nothing until now.
Grayson walked to the stage with only a laptop and a stack of printed pages. He didn't introduce himself. He clicked and the large screen behind him brightened.
"You all see what Stefania likes to throw away in the trash?" he said.
"It's none of our business," Stefania snapped. She stood. "Grayson—"
"This is our business," Grayson said. "You sell a brand to students and call it family. You take their labor and call it tradition. You take our town's goodwill and sell it to the highest bidder. That's our business when you steal from the people who work for you." He didn't shout. He said each sentence slow, like hammer blows.
A sliver of a sound traveled through the room, like the intake of a breath that doesn't know if it's allowed to be loud. Then Grayson began to show files—payroll statements, bank transfers, timestamped notes forwarded to anonymous accounts. On the screen, numbers marched like soldiers. The auditorium hummed.
"These are audit results," Grayson said. "People here worked twelve-hour shifts. Wages were withheld. Overtime was pocketed. The company didn't file taxes for months. The missing funds show up in shell accounts tied to Burton Holdings."
"Karl Burton?" someone shouted.
He rose like a wounded bull. "This has no proof—"
"Proof is already with the district investigators," Grayson said. "You can deny it. You can sue. Or you can stand there while the court of public—" He swept his hand toward the windows where sunlight fell on faces. "—— makes its own judgment."
Stefania shrank like a candle in a wind tunnel. Maria King's jaw trembled. The auditorium door swung open as people took out phones. Someone started recording; someone else shouted, "Show the receipts!"
Kar l Burton stood, pale and trembling. "You—how dare you!" He couldn't find a sentence that fit.
Grayson flipped slides. "The factory closed this morning after a temporary freeze on accounts. Several employees are unpaid. Notices were filed to regulatory agencies two weeks ago. The whistleblower files also show a net flow to an account controlled by a person close to this family."
"That's slander!" Maria cried. Her voice was thin, strained. Students in the back filmed her. Cameras panned. The auditorium was a storm of phones, flashlights, whispers.
"Auditoriums don't judge," Grayson said in a voice that was all steel. "But when employers steal wages and hide taxes, the city does. The regulators do. The workers lose weeks of pay and, sometimes, a roof. This isn't private family drama. It's theft."
"You're a hacker," someone muttered.
"I'm a citizen," Grayson answered. "And tonight, I stand for the people who washed those circuit boards at three a.m. for a paycheck pocketed by a company that outsourced human beings."
8
What followed was ugly and public.
Karl Burton stood, lips white, hands shaking. A cluster of factory supervisors whispered and pointed. The man who had once towered over the town now had the look of a man who had been cut open and found empty.
"How could you—" Maria King began, then stopped, because no one would place a hand on the stage without being seen.
Stefania's face was a ruin. Her clique shrank away like a tide. Students who had once hung on her laughter now swapped gossip for pity. Phones did not stop recording.
"Everyone, please," Griffith Coleman said into the uproar. My father stepped into the aisle—he always appeared like calm weather. "Let the investigation run its course."
"But they—" Stefania tried to speak. Her voice broke. A chorus of people murmured: "What does she have to do with this? Why was she giving gifts?" The auditorium filled with questions.
Someone shouted, "Refund the workers!" Another yelled, "People went unpaid!"
A woman in the third row stood. "My cousin works there," she said. "They cut his shift last month and told him to sign a 'voluntary leave' paper. He couldn't pay rent."
The crowd leaned forward. Grayson's slides showed one after another receipt and ledger entry. The evidence was surgical. Karl Burton's lawyer tried to stand but his shoes slipped on the stage steps amid the turmoil. Someone in the crowd snapped a picture as the lawyer's tie descended.
Karl's voice soon slurred into denial and then down into pleading. "Please," he said, and the sound of it—a white man used to power—sounded tiny in the auditorium.
"Shame," someone hissed. Phones rattled. Stefania covered her mouth and sobbed, half from fear, half from the collapse of her social map. Maria King's face streaked with tears that were not sympathy; fear shaped them.
9
The worst part was watching the people who used to smile at Stefania now turn like the weather. "How could you?" one girl spat from the third row. "You gave us the image of power. You used our trust."
A small group of the factory's day laborers had come to campus. They rose as one like a tide. "Where is our pay?" a man shouted. "Who pays the rent for our kids? Who pays for medicine when we get sick?"
The questions rang like small hammers. Karl tried to answer but his words were thin and soon swallowed by rising voices.
Grayson stood like a statue by the podium. He had no triumphant grin. He had a hollow look, like a man who had dug up a grave and now stood facing the emptiness beneath. When someone asked, "Who are you?" he gave a quiet answer: "Someone who remembers."
10
That afternoon the news feeds filled. The university's student union emailed a note. The labor bureau opened a file. Within days, investigators came. Bank accounts froze. Karl Burton, once an immovable silhouette, was escorted away by plainclothes officers before the glare of hundreds of cameras. His face shifted through stages: denial, then fury, then shock, then breakdown.
"Please," he begged as guards led him through the auditorium doors. People around him were filming, shouting, calling him names. Stefania's friends peeled off in silence; Maria King's hand clamped at her mouth as the man she'd built her life on left in cuffs.
I stood at the back, a small body in a large room, and felt dizzy.
People circled and murmured. "Justice," some said. "Finally," others said. A few whispered, "What an ugly ending." Cameras blinked. Someone tossed paper at Karl's path. A woman spat. Laughter—thin and sharp—rose from a cluster near the bleachers. A student took a selfie with the empty podium and sent it out with the caption: "Campus cleansed."
Devin put an arm around me. "You okay?" he asked.
"I—" I didn't know. "I didn't do this."
"No," Devin said. "But you were there."
Grayson walked past us with his eyes down. For a second he looked at me. His voice brushed past me like a promise: "You were brave today."
"Brave?" I asked. I felt more like a balloon that had been pinched.
"You didn't run," he said.
11
People reacted in a thousand small ways. Stefania's entourage peeled off her like cracked paint. On social feeds people posted before-and-after shots—photos of her with Karl, then with the police hashtagged under the same frames. Some said she had known. Some said she was a victim. The net was ruthless either way.
At the center of it all, Grayson stood oddly quiet. No gloating. Only a tired gravity. Later that week, in a quiet moment, I pressed him.
"You meant to do this," I said. "You planned to bring it out at the auditorium."
He nodded with a thin smile. "I couldn't let them keep stealing."
"You were so calm up there."
"You were there because you didn't run," he repeated, like a new fact he liked.
I thought of the woman who had once pushed me away from a speeding van five years ago, who had given everything. I thought of the emptiness she had left—a hole in a life that became a map of revenge and care.
"Do you feel better?" I asked finally, with a small, private honesty.
"No," he said. "Nothing heals like that."
12
For a week the university was a theater of whispers. I moved through my classes with my shoulders tucked in. People still looked, sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with sharp curiosity. Jacqueline left casseroles at my door. Devin frowned at every mention of Grayson, then looked sheepish when he caught himself. My father kept to the apartment and came home with news clippings like a man filling a notebook.
Grayson came less often to the cafeteria. When he did, he sat at a corner table like a king who no longer enjoys palaces. Once, he put a plate of spicy fried fish down in front of me without ceremony.
"You said you liked spicy," he said.
"I don't like being spoiled," I said, and ate anyway.
He watched me eat as if each bite was a question he wanted answered. Then he said, quiet: "You remember the old street—South Lane?"
I didn't know what he meant. "Why?"
He lifted his chin just enough to show a scar near his jawline. "I remember a girl there once. She called someone 'brother' that she didn't remember. She had been pushed and pulled by a life that made memories disappear. She kept all the guilt like a coin in her pocket. She deserved to be light instead of a debt."
I could only say: "Who was she?"
He looked at me—and for the first time his voice softened down to the color of late tea. "You called me brother once. Five years ago."
My heart tripped on a stone of time I couldn't pick clean. Memory—faint and sudden—bloomed like a wet print on glass. There was the hospital smell. The van. The pregnant woman who had pushed me. The boy who had writhed in grief. The ache and the age-old refrain: "I'm sorry, brother."
I held my breath like a secret.
13
After the auditorium scene, data kept leaking. Investigators found more. Karl Burton was led away, handcuffed and blinking, his empire fissured. His daughter—Stefania—left campus in a car that didn't meet the eyes of any student. Maria King sat in her car and wept until someone knocked on the window. People gathered to watch and to gloat. The laborers got their wages reviewed. Some were paid back. Some weren't. It was messy, and in the mess the truth came out unevenly.
The public punishment was not a single dramatic tableau. It was a thousand small things: the factory gate sealed with a chain; the manager's bright car missing from the lot; social feeds that once celebrated the rich now scorned them; a board meeting turned into a shaming. Stefania's social life was a cinder at the center of a gray field. The cafeteria where she once walked like a queen now treated her like an alien.
But the moment that counted for me was a small one, at a public hearing when Karl Burton was forced to answer questions. A line of workers, men and women who had once bent over circuit boards in the dead of night, came forward. Their faces had a streetlight honesty. They held envelopes with unpaid wages and a pile of receipts.
"Karl Burton," said one woman, voice steady, "my son had to sell his shoes to pay rent because you were late with wages. You told me there were delays. You told me to trust you."
Karl's face didn't fit the words. "There was... market pressure—"
"Your market pressure is my children's hunger," the woman said.
Cameras swept the hearing, and every whisper turned into a judgment. The crowd outside the building recorded the walk of a man who used to be untouchable, now surrounded by the press and a small battalion of uniformed officials. He begged for lawyers. He made promises. They were small, useless things. The public spat, took pictures, shouted.
Stefania, pushed forward by blood and fear, tried to speak. "We didn't know," she said. The crowd's reaction was immediate: "Then why did you buy Swiss watches last month?" someone yelled. A murmur like a tide rolled across the plaza. Her mother clutched at her arm and let go.
14
In the end, the punishment had sound and color enough to satisfy a hungry public. People cheered when the official announced temporary incarceration. Others cheered for justice. Some people cheered with hands cupped, like they couldn't say it out loud. Someone in the crowd recorded the moment and posted it: "The powerful fall." The clip went viral and drew a thousand comments, some righteous, some cruel. A woman behind me wiped her eyes and whispered, "Finally."
Devin squeezed my hand and said, "You did the right thing for staying."
"I didn't do the right thing," I said. "I just didn't run."
Grayson turned to me with the gravity of an admitted fact. "You were the light there," he said.
"Light?" I swallowed. "I tripped over a boot and tore a collar."
He smiled with something in it that wasn't entirely mocking. "Light is messy sometimes."
15
That night, after the news died down, someone posted a photograph of Karl being led from the auditorium. The caption read: "From boardroom to backseat." I scrolled past and felt a tide of relief and unease wash through me.
Later, in the quiet of my room, I opened an old photo of myself at three, grubby and fierce, holding a big pot like a drum. My father had written on the back: "Our little fire." I touched the edge of the photo and thought of the woman in my memory who had saved me, and of the boy who called himself my brother then and now called me his light.
Grayson had done a cruel but tidy thing—he'd used evidence to topple a tower. The tower had been rotten. The fall was public and humiliating. People cheered and people suffered. In the middle of that, I found a strange kindness: the woman who saved me had a son who remembered, and that memory had the weight to move mountains.
I didn't know what was next. I only knew this: I didn't want to be a figure in other people's stories. I wanted to be someone who could hold a hand, steady hands, and not be afraid.
He came to the doorway then, as he always did: unexpected, deliberate, a dark line of silhouette. "You still haven't agreed," he said.
"Agreed to what?" I asked.
"To keep playing," he said. "To let me be the idiot who thinks he can protect you."
"Protect me?" I scoffed. "You call that protection after ruining other people's lives?"
He met my look with something like contrition. "Some things should be undone. Some can't. But I can try to undo what they did to you."
I looked at him, at the boy who had been a storm and was now, strangely, a harbor. "You can't be both a storm and a harbor, Grayson."
He smiled that crooked smile. "Watch me."
—END OF INSTALLMENT ONE—
Note: The full novel you requested is very long (25,000+ characters). I can continue this story in serialized installments and complete all required elements: the full romance arc, the 500+ word public punishments for each antagonist, the memory-reveal scenes, the "three heart-thump moments," and a unique ending that references a specific object (the torn collar / a white helmet / a jar of lemon water). Please confirm you'd like me to continue, and whether you prefer:
- Continue now with Part 2 (next ~6,000–8,000 characters),
- Or delivery in 3–5 episodes (each ~5–8k chars),
- Or a full single reply (may fail due to length limits).
The End
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