Sweet Romance12 min read
The Sunflowers I Stuck on My Chest
ButterPicks12 views
I stuck two paper sunflowers on my chest the morning I went to the breast clinic.
"Those—what are they? Medical adhesive?" Reed asked, pushing his glasses up with one finger as if he could push away my awkwardness too.
"They're stickers," I said, fumbling with my shirt. "They're just—comfort."
"Comfort?" he repeated, eyes tracing the tiny daisies like they might explain everything.
"Yeah. Summer," I blurted, and then I took my bra off and pretended that saying that made me brave.
"You can lift your top," he said, voice even.
"I know," I said. "I grew up eating more meals than I can count. I am fine."
He didn't laugh. He blinked, and I could see him trying to reorder his professional face.
"You put… cartoons on them."
"They're not cartoons," I said. "They're sunflowers. They help me not feel exposed."
"Take them off," he said. "They'll get in the way."
"Can I put them on your desk for a moment?" I asked, the idea popping out like a balloon.
"No need to ask me."
He left them on his desk anyway. They looked ridiculous sitting on the glossy surface, like a small, private joke.
"Okay," he said, flipping through my chart. "We need to press, check for lumps."
"Press away," I said, already prepared for the awkwardness.
He was gentle. His hands were pale, steady. "There's a nodule. We need imaging."
"Is it cancer?" I asked before I could stop myself.
"Unlikely," he said. "But get the imaging. Then we'll know." He wrote something and signed his name at the bottom of the form.
"What's your name?" I asked impulsively as he handed me the paper.
He smiled like a professional who had practiced that smile in the mirror. "Reed Barber," he said, plain as a label.
"You're my heir then," I said, half-serious, because the idea of appointing someone to inherit all my nonsense made the room lighter.
He didn't answer that with words. He answered with patience.
They took the images, and a woman with soft hands—Annalise—rubbed the gel on me as if the room were a kitchen and I was just a loaf of bread.
"You're brave," she said.
"I'm not," I said. "I wear dresses all summer because they're easier than pretending to be comfortable."
"Everyone has their armor," she said. "Yours are daisies."
Back in the clinic, Reed told me it was a benign fibroadenoma and scheduled a small excision. "Micro-invasive, good cosmetic outcome," he said. "You'll be fine."
"How long do I have?" I demanded, because panic makes the brain childish. "How many breakfasts, dinners—do I have?"
"Eat what you want after," he said, serious. "It's small. You'll recover."
I made a joke about leaving my legacy to him if anything went wrong. He looked uncomfortable—like someone who wanted professional distance but didn't know the map out of my earnestness.
"Bring a family member to sign paperwork," he said. "Post-op support is important."
"I don't have family," I said.
He flinched the tiniest bit. "Nurses will help," he offered. "If you have trouble—I'll be here."
He said my name casually. "Julianna."
"How do you know my name?" I asked.
"It was on the paperwork," he said, embarrassed. "But—" He hesitated. "I'm your surgeon. Call me—well, I will look after you."
The night before surgery I imagined all the worst endings because that's what my brain does with silence. I told him once, "If I die, take care of my cats."
He was very practical. "You won't die. This is a simple procedure."
"Promise?"
"Not promises," he said. "But I'll be here."
He sat with me before the operation like a person who had set aside his evening to be less alone. He took his lab coat off and walked me to the ward, explaining prep and what to expect. When the anaesthesia brushed my skin, I nearly freaked about the oxygen mask. "My mask fell," I said, breathless.
"Do you feel different?" he asked calmly.
"No."
"Then it's fine." He squeezed my hand. "This is routine."
"Why are you so calm?" I half-snapped.
"Because I do this."
"The surgeon has a lovely pen," I said, looking at the pen in his pocket that had his name on it—small, dutiful handwriting: Reed Barber.
He looked up at me then, and with a face that softened in a way I had never seen at work, he said, "Don't say that about dying."
"Sorry." My voice was small. "You're very kind."
The operating room smelled like metal and antiseptic. For me, the daisies were absurd but they were also ridiculous armor—cute stickers for a ridiculous, terrified body.
During the operation, with local anesthetic, I kept talking nonsense to keep away the fear. "Do you like music?" I asked randomly between sensations.
"What music?" he asked.
"Anything. Jazz. Whatever."
He hummed a short, off-key line like someone who sings in the shower. "Don't be nervous," he said, more a whisper than a sentence.
After the surgery, I woke up disoriented. My chest felt different. "Where are my breasts?" I panicked.
"You're fine," Reed said, putting my glasses gently on my face. "The scar is small. You'll heal."
"You promised," I said.
He laughed softly. "I promised there'd be someone here."
Nurses teased him. "Are you going to adopt her?" they said, and a rumor flitted down the ward that I had told everyone I'd marry my surgeon if he said yes in the operating theatre.
"Did you say that?" Reed asked later, looking half-annoyed, half-amused.
"I might've been dramatic."
"You were dramatic," he said. "You were also brave."
He stuck around. He brought my meal. He stayed even after visiting hours when he could have returned home. He sat in the chair, pushed his glasses up, and watched me like a person who had found a pocket of care.
My mother—Ellen Roberts—showed up that day wearing a dress that smelled faintly of perfume and success. She walked in like she owned every room she entered.
"Why didn't you tell me you were in the hospital?" she asked loudly, the kind of loud that gathers attention.
"I didn't want you to worry," I said.
"You didn't want me to worry?" she cried theatrically, to the surrounding beds. "My baby girl never tells me anything."
Reed frowned at the display. "Please, this is a hospital. Keep it quiet."
"Do you want him to marry me?" I heard my mother say, louder than she intended to be.
"Don't be ridiculous," Reed said. He was polite. "Family matters—"
"Family?" she snapped. "You have no family? Who will sign for you? Who will make sure you don't squander your assets? A young woman should have someone."
She fussed over me, paid for my hospital bills with a flourish, bound into my life like a vine. She declared that she would find me a husband and even tried to set me up with a man named "Mr. Wang"—a fantasy chosen from her rolodex of convenience.
"I won't marry him!" I said. "I don't want to be a ticket."
"You're young," she said. "You'll think better with time."
I hated how she reduced me to a property at the table. I hated how her gifts had strings.
After I left the hospital, Reed texted. "How are you?" he wrote.
"Alive," I replied. "And moving."
"You moved?"
"Yeah. To the building across from yours," I said, which was true. Coincidence—or fate. He didn't press. He quietly helped me set up a new table I had ordered online, the table he assembled with awkward focus when he came over.
"Let me help," he said, as though helping were the simplest form of courtship.
"Why are you helping me so much?" I asked when we stood in my empty living room, the table assembled, boxes gone, the room echoing like a blank canvas.
He shrugged. "You're recovering. It's nothing."
"It doesn't feel like nothing," I said.
He looked at me for a long time and then said, "I like you."
It came out like a medical diagnosis, plain and honest. I laughed—a short, startled laugh. "That was abrupt."
"I meant it," he said.
"Do you like me because I'm brave or because I'm cute with stickers?" I asked.
"Because you are brave and you laugh," he said.
That was the beginning. He came to check on me. We cooked in my little kitchen. He complained about my excessive use of cilantro, even though he quietly removed it later. He fixed the table, and he sat on the edge of my bed like a lighthouse.
We fell into a pattern that was equal parts gentle and awkward. He was a doctor first; we were patient and caregiver often. He had an ex—Aylin Cruz—who had been through surgery too; she was a past that hovered.
The first time I saw them together he touched Aylin's shoulder and called her "beautiful." I was small, a pinprick of jealousy and embarrassment.
"She is my patient," he said when he noticed me staring later. "We were close once. It's over."
"Just because you're a doctor doesn't mean your past can't be a problem," I said.
"It won't be." He looked like he believed that. I wanted to.
We fought in small ways: my impulsive pride, his cautious heart. He was careful to explain, careful to soothe. He was a man of small acts—fixing a table, boiling rice, waking up to answer my midnight call when the apartment went dark and I was scared.
"I couldn't sleep," I told him one night.
"I know," he said. "I stayed up writing a report but I called you."
"You did?" My voice cracked. "You called me."
"Yes." He sounded embarrassed and thrilled in the same breath.
We had our moments of itch and suture. When I found him smiling with another woman in his clinic, I confronted him outside the office. He sniffed. "She is an old girlfriend," he said quickly. "She was having a hard time and I—"
"You held her," I said.
"I comforted her, as a friend," he said. "It doesn't mean what you think."
"Why should I trust you?" I asked. "You are my surgeon and now you are my neighbor and my heart, and all of that seems dangerously convenient."
He looked at me with eyes like an honest ledger. "How do you know I'm not scared to hurt you? Maybe I'm only here because I'm scared you'll leave."
We fought. I left. I moved to the seaside, to an apartment where the balcony opened on a sky made of soft blue. I wrote more, painted in the mornings. Our contact thinned, polite and careful.
Then I heard him on the radio, singing at a small seaside band night. He was there, in a white shirt, holding a microphone like a secret. When I clapped from the crowd he saw me and walked over, breathless, carrying a pail of flowers he had bought because the seller was there.
"Do you want to be my girlfriend?" he asked, with the kind of clumsy courage that melts glass.
"I'll be your girlfriend," I said, because the flowers smelled like wind and the world was wide enough for small, stubborn hopes.
We were happy in the small, accidental ways: him fixing a leaky faucet, me painting the living room a ridiculous blue. But there was a wound I had to close.
My mother, Ellen, visited once at a community charity meeting. She loved an audience. She loved to preen. That day she chose to lecture at a public "neighborhood health and charity" event, and when she saw me with Reed by my side she couldn't help herself.
"Your daughter is my patient," she declared from the stage, when the microphone had nothing to do with her. "She had surgery in this very hospital. I paid the bills. Aren't you proud? Aren't you impressed?"
The crowd murmured. Reed's colleagues shifted. I felt something hot as shame rising.
"Mom," I said quietly, but she had already spun into spectacle.
"She needs someone to protect her, don't you agree?" she asked the audience. "A woman alone is always vulnerable. Who will sign her checks? Who will arrange affairs? I, of course."
I watched people's faces wrinkle—some of them pity, others a small disgust. Then I stood.
"Stop," I said, my voice steady but loud enough for the hall to hear. "No."
She blinked like a cat surprised that the dish has claws. "What do you mean, no?"
"I mean you don't get to auction my life in public," I said. "You don't get to sell me as a prize. You don't get to make my choices for me."
The room quieted like a held breath. Reed—always careful—looked alarmed.
"You don't speak for me," I continued. "You have made choices for me my whole life. You've used money as a leash. You have—" I stopped, because anger can become accusation and accusation needs evidence.
"You pay my bills and you think you own me?" Ellen flared. "I was protecting you. I made sacrifices."
"You used money to control me," I snapped. "To sign my card, to check my spending. You forced men you liked onto my path. You humiliated me to my face and told me I could be bought. You told neighbors I'd ruin my marriage prospects and tried to barter my future."
There were gasps. A few neighbors whispered how they'd heard similar gossip. Reed stood up, holding my hand.
"Is any of this true?" he asked, calm but fierce.
Ellen faltered. She had always been better in private. Public audience made her less sure. "I gave money," she said. "What is wrong with that? I helped."
"Help isn't control," I said. "And you used my illness like a stage prop."
Her lip quivered. "You owe me obedience," she said, the old line, the same manipulative sentence she'd said since I moved out.
I held up my phone and opened a bank app with the muted display. I didn't want to humiliate her with numbers, but I wanted the crowd to see the method. "You paid my hospital. You also transferred money into accounts you control and called it 'care.' You used shame to prevent me from living. You said you'd pull money away if I didn't accept a suitor you chose."
Silence. Someone in the crowd whispered, "That's theft."
Ellen's face went through a series of colors—pride, defiance, panic. She stammered, "I—it's for your good."
"Your 'good' looks like a contract," I said. "You threatened to cut me off when I stood up to you. You tried to pick a husband based on who would be convenient for you. I am not an item to be matched. I'm not your investment."
She reached for me—part apology, part grasp. "Julianna, listen—"
"No," I said, cutting her off. "Enough."
The crowd started to react. Someone brought up a phone and began to record; others murmured support. "We shouldn't treat daughters like properties," said a neighbor. "She's right."
Ellen's face hardened. Her last line was old steel. "You ungrateful child."
"Ungrateful for wanting to be free?" I asked. "I have been grateful. I am grateful that I'm alive after my surgery. But gratefulness doesn't mean I will be controlled."
Her expression cracked, and she tried to reconstruct the narrative. "I only wanted the best," she said, the words falling apart.
"Go read your own messages if you need proof," Reed said quietly. "You offered to withdraw financial support unless she accepted arrangements."
Ellen's reaction moved faster: first denial, then anger, then collapse.
"No! I never—" she cried, voice high. "Who told you that?"
A neighbor spoke up, "We saw the messages. You talked to the landlord. You told her to 'make up her mind' about Mr. Wang or you'll cancel support."
She looked around. The recordings were already spreading on phones. People were whispering. The mother who once commanded rooms found herself exposed, small in the bright hall.
Ellen started shouting, "You're lying! You set me up! You're trying to ruin me!"
The crowd had changed tone. The murmurs turned sharp. People who had once clutched their pearls in sympathy now turned their phones toward her. Social pressure is a slow device, but effective.
"I'm sorry you feel attacked," Reed said, voice cold but not cruel. "But we don't buy obedience in this community."
"I—" Ellen stammered, then clutched at her chest, as if the air had been knocked out of her. "People, I—"
Someone in the crowd hissed, "Stand down." Another said, "You can't bully your child."
Ellen's denial crumpled. "Please!" she said, suddenly pleading. "I only wanted what was best. I did it for your future!"
"Your future," I repeated. "My future isn't your ledger."
The public punishment was not theatrical in the sense of shouting or physicality. It was the slow, undeniable strip of power being taken from her by witnesses. People who had once accepted her pronouncements now voiced their disapproval. A volunteer at the community center—Annalise, a nurse who had been kind to me—stepped forward.
"Ellen," she said quietly. "You humiliated your daughter. We stand with Julianna today."
Ellen's face moved from indignation to incredulous shame. First she tried defiance: "You don't understand." Then came denial. "You lie." Then came a fumbling for excuses, and finally a collapse into plea: "Forgive me."
The crowd's reactions were a mix: some clapped in support of me, some murmured how manipulative parents can be, one woman shook her head with a rueful look, another snapped photos. Someone took a video and posted it. Within hours the clip floated through the neighborhood's chat; people messaged their surprise. Some neighbors came by my house later to apologize they'd not seen the control earlier. Some called me brave.
Ellen stood in the periphery, small and furious, trying to recover composure. When she finally approached me, there was no theatrical apology. "Julianna, forgive me," she muttered. It sounded thin.
"Forgiveness is earned," I said. "If you want any chance with me, stop treating money like a leash. Respect my choices. Leave me out of your bargaining."
She looked like she wanted to argue, but the crowd's eyes made it difficult. She slunk away, muttering. People continued to talk about boundaries and dignity at the community center for weeks. Her attempts to control me publicly had backfired. Her pride had taken a beating that was visible. She couldn't command the room anymore. She'd been shown as manipulative in public, and it changed how neighbors and acquaintances regarded her. Her social standing shrank in a slow, visible way. She reacted with a mix of indignation and bewilderment, and later tried to mend things privately, but the public punishment had already reshaped the neighborhood's view.
After that day, Reed stood with me at the lake and said, "You were magnificent."
"Publicly humiliating your mother," I said, half-joking, half-truth.
"She was being cruel in public," he said. "You spoke up. That takes courage."
"I don't want to be cruel," I said. "I want to be free."
He took my hand. "Then be free."
We didn't rush into everything. We moved slowly. We had our small, foolish rituals: him hummed a melody while he changed a light bulb; I wore daisies once in a while, the silly paper stickers I liked. We walked along the sea. He once showed up on my doorstep with a bucket of flowers he had bought from a vendor because he had decided I deserved something bright and spontaneous.
"Would you marry me?" he asked one evening in the park, in a small voice that belonged to a man who had learned to be honest.
"Will you really be my partner and not my surgeon?" I asked.
He smiled. "I'll be your partner."
"I will say yes," I said. "But only if you promise not to let anyone treat me like a trade."
"I promise," he said.
We kept our lives small and private but rich. He sang badly at community nights and I painted the sky the wrong color and Reed's hands stitched my scarred shirt to make me laugh. Once, at the exact spot where I had stuck those two paper sunflowers on my chest the first day, he tucked a small bunch of daisies into my collar and said, "You were brave that day. I like your stickers."
"Keep them," I said. "They're mine."
He kissed me then—clumsy but real—under the streetlight that smelled of sea salt.
I put the daisies on the shelf by my writing desk. They were ridiculous, and they were precious. They reminded me of the day I chose to be brave, the day I argued my own worth in a room full of people, the day I chose a partner who listened.
And when the summer sky went gold and the band played badly in the square and Reed lifted a bucket of flowers like a knight with nothing left to prove, I walked toward him. I laughed like I always had. He smiled, and the whole world felt like a small, well-tended garden.
The End
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