Sweet Romance13 min read
Three Years of Drafts, One Night Finished
ButterPicks14 views
I have always been half a beat slow.
"You're up late again," Coleman said without looking up from his papers.
"I—" I stammered. "I was finishing a line."
He still didn't look at me. He never looked at me like he used to.
My name is Kamila Clement. I live in a house that holds too many memories and too much silence. When my mother and my stepfather had the accident, I didn't cry once in front of anyone. I saved my tears for the dark, for when the house was empty and the walls didn't have to watch.
Coleman took over the family business after the accident. He is efficient, cold in the way a knife is cold, and precise. He calls me small-eyed wolf when he needs to be cruel and has no patience for me when my voice lags a beat behind his. He thinks I am slow. Sometimes I am.
But I have a secret.
"Are you done this time?" a comment on my update blinked on the screen.
It has been three years since I started writing my confession letters online. The first one exploded. People used my words to confess for them; lovers texted me with thank-yous. Couples who used my lines wrote back and said they married. Babies were born. Messages arrived: "We used your line and she said yes." I read every one, and I kept on drafting.
My cursor blinked on the sentence: you could take a little loss and fall into my hands… It blinked and blinked.
"Tonight you have one line?" an old follower harassed on the feed.
"Sorry," I typed slowly. "A little tired."
"Not original," came the next reply, boxed in like a small stone thrown at me.
I rubbed my temples. Even my fan "Blake Bowling"—he had been loyal—sat in the chat and jabbed at my slow edits.
By ten I had typed, erased, and saved ten small words. My eyes were heavy. I clicked away from the screen and walked to the kitchen. The living room light was on.
Coleman sat on the couch with one leg crossed over the other, papers spread like leaves. He'd never been a late-night creature; his hours were gears and meetings, not late lights and webs. Yet tonight he waited.
"Kamila, what are you doing up?" His voice was quiet and a little tempting, as if a stone had been worn smooth.
"To—see—if—" I almost said the words wrong. "—if new inspiration struck."
He watched me like a hunter watches a small animal.
"Bathroom," I said, because my voice stalls more in front of him than anywhere else.
He let me go. When I walked past, he hooked the hood of my pajama with a finger and drew me back.
"Button undone," he said.
I stumbled and fell onto the couch. He leaned close. I smelled pine and paper. His shirt fit him in strange, flattering ways; one button almost gaped. He tucked the button back for me, his fingertip grazing my jaw.
"Don't blush," he said.
I tried to deny it and failed. He went back to his files.
That night, I went online and the comments were a festival. My old lines still sat at the top of the thread. People had used my first confession to change the courses of their lives. My own draft sat unfinished. After three years of practicing, I was still rehearsing the last sentence.
"Finish it," Blake urged.
"Three years," another person wrote, "and still single."
I sighed. That night I kept typing and deleting. I wished the words would keep pace with the beat inside my chest.
The next morning, I made a plan: I would catch Coleman before he left. He had meetings, and he would be at the golf club. I dressed up thinking maybe he would notice me, and maybe that would give courage to my fingers.
At the club a woman stepped out of the breeze like a black bird. Gillian Estrada introduced herself with a smile like a blade.
"You are Kamila, right? I'm Coleman's secretary, usually. It's nice to meet you." She wore a deep dress with a pearl pin and eyes that slid over me with thin intent.
She started asking questions fast. Too fast for me. "Does he ever bring other women home?" she asked. "Does he wear boxers or briefs?"
I blinked. "He—rides horses," I answered because that was a safe thing to say. Coleman looked over and asked me about "boxers or briefs."
"I—wear what?" I said, and then I realized how wrong that sounded.
Coleman snapped his head. "I'm a boxer man. Keep your eyes to yourself," he told me. He said it to Gillian with a flatness that felt like a whip. She smiled into her drink and backed away.
Later she asked me to deliver a gift for her to him. "You're sweet," she smiled. "When we're family, I'll take you out."
I held the gift like a foreign animal. When I came to the rooftop bar to find Coleman, I walked into a scene where he sat like a king among men. He took the gift and laughed like a man who had been flattered by something simple. He called it "for me?" with soft hunger.
I fumed. I erased the line I had prepared to add to my confession. I wanted to be the one who made his heart flip, not the messenger.
At the bar, she tried to curry favor with the crowd. She leaned in, talk layered with jokes and hints. Some man went to touch her shoulder and the glass of red spilled across the man's pants. Everything froze.
I laughed because the joke the host told landed wrong in me. Coleman turned and asked me why I laughed. I walked away, but a stranger came and tried to buy me a drink. His voice was practiced; his stories had worn edges.
"She looks like my first love," he said to me. He called me "miss" and offered a drink, and I wanted only to go home. Coleman came up behind him, and put a hand on my shoulder.
"She's my sister," he said quietly, and the man retreated like a dog. Coleman stood a shade closer when he spoke.
"Are you okay?" he asked me.
"Yes," I lied.
When the man left, I took another sip of my orange juice and kept myself small. The world around me moved too quick. Coleman observed me like a man folding a delicate origami figure.
That night at the bar, he sat beside me and reached across to take my hand. He said, "I've booked a room. Come home with me to rest."
I protested but then smiled and let him guide me into the car. He sat so upright. He was different when we were alone.
When we reached the hotel, he told me gently: "If you're tired, sleep."
I started deleting the confession letters on my phone. I wanted to throw away three years of drafts all at once. I was ready to stop then and there—to say the last line or to burn it all.
Coleman stood behind me, and his shadow leaned over the screen. "You're deleting?" he asked with a small smile.
I tried to lie. "No."
He took the phone and logged into my account with a single calm sweep. He opened the folder called "Confessions." His face did not change when he found my three-year archive. He read one, read two. Then he looked at me with a slow smile that carried a quiet hunger.
"You've been writing for three years?" he said.
"Not...for you," I stammered. "Not...for—"
He raised an eyebrow. "You're lying," he said, like a person gently accusing a child.
Panic lit my hands. I tried to press the keyboard but my fingers quivered.
"Type it," he said.
"What?" I whispered.
"Type the last line. If you don't finish this draft, you won't sleep tonight."
He set a gentle pressure at my waist that seemed to lock me into place in front of the laptop. His voice was so quiet then it moved like a tide. I started typing in the heavy, clumsy way I always did: "I...like...you."
When the words landed in the document, Coleman smiled as if the sun had crept out from a cloud. He was both pleased and possessed.
"You've been stealing these words on purpose," he murmured.
"I didn't—" I tried.
He lowered his face and kissed my temple. I couldn't breathe.
That night, his hands became my clocks. He let me write and then watched the letters return. When my eyes thinned and the letters blurred, he caught my chin between his fingers and told me stories of when I was small and slow and perfect. His touch was patient and then a little rough.
"Finish it," he breathed. "Say it."
So I did. I wrote "I...like...you." I pushed the return key like a small victory. He read it aloud and said it back to me like a benediction.
The next morning, two things changed. His eyes stayed on me longer. And my nightmares came back with new edges.
I started therapy because the past had parts that did not fit in a tidy box. In the dark of a hypnotic one, I saw a small girl in a concrete room. A boy sat beside her and promised to run, and he did. He pulled on a string, climbed a window, left his friend behind. Men came. The dream cut off and the shape of it stayed. I woke with blood in my head and a taste like metal.
When I told Coleman, he became something I did not expect.
"You will not stop therapy for me," he said once, standing in the doorway.
"Don't control me," I said.
He looked surprised and then hurt. "I was trying to protect you."
"Protecting me does not give you the right to decide my body," I answered.
He lowered his gaze, and for a little while, we danced around the edges of trust.
One afternoon, Gillian came into the apartment and asked Coleman for a minute. She leaned her face close. "He's mine," she said too loudly. "He needs someone by his side, someone perfect."
Coleman shut the door softly and invited her to sit. The two of them spoke. She said things about hearts and favors and long service. She implied things about what he owed her. She called me "abnormal" behind her hand.
Coleman listened with a smile that turned ice sharp.
"Do you think she is abnormal?" he asked with a disarming calm.
Gillian blinked and then set a thin smile. "She is not normal in talk or reaction. How could you like that?"
He let the comment rest in the air like a coin. Then he began to count—softly at first, then louder. He listed each time she'd been late. He measured favors. He weighed red wines. He spoke and the room shrank.
"You're asking me to marry my money and my time," he said slowly. "You want both my heart and my checkbook. You want me to be yours and my company to be yours. That is not how I run things."
"The work—you don't mean—" Gillian said, trying to find purchase.
He flicked his hand. "No. I mean you are asking me to be small. You cannot have both. Either you want money or you want a partner."
Her hand trembled. "I—I've been loyal. Four years."
He frowned with a motion that was gentle and deadly. "Have I paid you then? No. Have I made you a partner? No. Are you consistent at work? No."
She went white.
He took a calculator and clicked through a list of her errors, aloud, with the sterile calm of someone delivering a verdict.
"Because of one gift you sent, the market reacted. You cost the company money. We do not tolerate missteps like this. Your salary will be docked; you will lose your bonus; your role will be reassessed. If you step beyond your station again, I will make sure there is no station left for you at this company."
She tried to look hurt. She tried to lash back with personal poison. He smiled and kept speaking.
"Do you respect my sister? Did you apologize to her? Do not insult my family or call her names while you are under my roof."
At every sentence, people in the room shifted. The conference room filled slowly as managers drifted in, and they watched. They watched the way his voice sharpened like a blade with no blood. They watched as he explained to them how loyalty and business were distinct.
Gillian's eyes burned. She'd expected a favor, a private word, a reward. Instead the public room became a stage where her social currency vanished.
"I am sorry," she said. "I meant no harm."
"You will restore the funds you cost and apologize to the board," he told her. He signed a letter on the table, slid it to the head of HR and watched her mouth open and close for a moment.
Heads turned to him when he asked who else had doubts about the work done on the last project. One by one the managers spoke and confirmed errors. Gillian stood there shrinking as the room exposed the chain of mistakes she had disguised with charm and spin.
"It is not about me being unforgiving," he said finally, softly, watching her closely. "It is about being fair to every stakeholder."
Her face finally crumpled. People in the room whispered, cameras in phones began to lift—this was a story now, and the way she had tried to put herself between him and decency unravelled in public.
She cried then, a wet howl of anger and fear. Some whispered sympathy, but many turned away. Her colleagues who had once smiled at her now saw the seam of her kindness and knew the truth.
She was a bright woman with a talent for performance, and the room found her performance ended.
"I am sorry," came out like a rag when she finally tried to speak. "I...I erred."
"You will tender your resignation," he said. "And you will retract your comments about my family."
She stumbled into the hallway like a person unstitched nightly.
The punishment was public. It was measured but humiliating: a reassessment of her role, the docking of pay, the forced apology and the resignation letter posted in HR's file for all to see. Some of Coleman’s senior partners added notes about trust and boundaries to the HR file. That was the end of Gillian's place at the company.
Around the room there were reactions like ripples. Some managers applauded slightly—quiet, precise claps like fallen leaves. A few aides recorded the scene. Phones glinted with the glow of social networks. People shared the story with small hits of gossip like coins into a jar. By dinner, the talk of the humiliation spread across the floors.
Gillian left the building with eyes rimmed red. She didn't cry like someone who had failed; she thrashed like someone who had been stripped of the mask she'd worn for years.
The punishment burned a line under what was allowed. For me, it taught a simple lesson: jealousy and cunning are no match when someone is willing to sit steady and speak the truth.
It was public. It was a slow, careful reveal. And the crowd watched her change from the predator to the prey.
After that, things at work altered in another direction. People were kinder, perhaps embarrassed by how quick they had been to judge. My colleagues began to approach me with small offers of help. A young programmer, Grey Ishikawa, asked me if I liked movies and invited me to one. I agreed, and I felt like a new person, like someone who finally had permission to be seen.
Weeks later, when Gillian's name stopped echoing in the halls, something worse happened. I was picked up on the street by three men in a van and taken to an empty warehouse. They were smooth and cruel. They wanted money. They wanted negotiation.
I kept my head in the hands that bad men have. Diesel Esposito stood at the edge like a shadow, Lorenzo Clapp and Colin Leroy crouched like guards. Their plans were clumsy but determined.
They left my phone but not my fear. The warehouse smelled like rust and old mistakes. I sat in a chair and my breathing shook like a bird caught in a window.
"Call your brother," Diesel told me. "Tell him to bring cash."
I tried to think. My fingers moved slow and my mind turned to the habit that had saved me before—I used the words people expected me to use, slow, careful. I told them I had money. I wrote a ransom note with my fingernail on the doorframe and tried to make believe.
I had a memory then, of a boy in another concrete room telling me: when I leave, shout. The memory made me do something impossible. I pretended to sleep, watched their movements, and when Diesel left his phone on a table, I shouted, "I think I can get out. The window—"
It was only a lie, but one of the men left his post. The boy from the memory had left a hole in the plan. I seized the moment and ran, small feet slapping on cold concrete. Men chased me and I called out like I had been taught.
The van tires screamed outside. A policeman's light finally cut the night. Coleman was there in a storm of motion—he had found me because he refused to let me stay a small shadow. He hit the man who raised a hand to me. He ran into the night like someone who had been sharpening his anger for years.
They took me to the station. I sat behind glass and watched my mother sob and watched Coleman talk to officers in a voice that brooked no nonsense. The men were arrested. Coleman was booked for delivering his own sort of justice—he had swung a metal bar. In the end the law took its path, and the men went away.
For weeks I did not speak. The doctors and therapists helped me stitch the edges of the nightmare back together. I lived in small steps—eating, moving, remembering safe days.
Coleman rarely left my side. He brought me soup, sat across from me in long meetings about my recovery, and held my hand as I learned to use speech without fear.
One evening, after a long day of tests, he sat across from me and asked, "Do you want to stop being slow if you can?"
I looked at him. "I want to be able to answer without being afraid."
He smiled a smile that was half soft and half sharp. "Then we will keep trying."
I went to therapy. I worked with a doctor who used careful, patient methods. I practiced. Speech is like a river; it will carve a path if water keeps moving. I learned to let words out without testing them first in my head for a week. It was clumsy. It was terrifying. It was also mine.
"Why did you go to all that trouble to find me?" I asked one night, when the night was soft and the house had forgotten how to be large.
"Because I was a coward the first time," he said. "When you were small and those boys hurt you, I should have been there sooner."
"You were there," I said, thinking of the boy who had watched me walk home and the man who had kept a place in his life for me.
"I wanted to be better," he said. "I still do."
The world started to color a little brighter. At work, my colleagues stopped whispering. Grey helped me with my commute schedule. Kaylin Beasley and Hilary Rasmussen invited me to coffee and asked me to teach them about discount codes because they had seen my presentation and were honest in their praise.
Then one morning Coleman took me to the twenty-second-floor restaurant. The skyline looked like a city laid out like a map. He held a small velvet box. He told a story about his father who had once wanted someone to protect me and someone to love me well. Then he asked me to marry him.
I thought of numbers—the way my heart had learned to count beats after nights of terror. I thought of three years of drafts and how he had read them and sat inside them like he had a right.
"Yes," I said.
We married in a simple way with a meal and a ring. I learned to be braver, to answer faster, to let laughter bubble right out.
Later, at the dinner, Coleman joked about the one ring that had been left on the side table when an argument once got loud. He told the story, and we laughed. My past no longer hunted me.
Months after, I still woke sometimes with the taste of fear. But Coleman would hold me and whisper safe small things into the dark.
He had once told me in the bar, when I had laughed at a bad joke and felt guilty, "If you ever think of leaving me, shown for the world, I will—"
"I will stay," I said then, and I meant it. I had a slow heart, but it beat for him.
Now, when I sit at my laptop, the confession letters have a different shape. I stop being the writer who hid her feelings behind clever lines. I write with my real voice.
"Remember when you hid your drafts?" he asked once, fingers on my chin.
"I do," I said.
"Good. Don't hide anything anymore."
He smiles then, the precise man with the soft hands.
We made space for each other. I taught him the small patience of living with someone slow. He taught me how to stand in a room and let people see me without fear.
On lazy nights he will joke and make me laugh: "Boxers or briefs?"
"Boxers," I answer automatically now.
He smirks. "Good to know."
The last draft of my confession letters—finished in a soft voice and published with care—reads like the slow beat of a life that finally found rhythm. It says nothing about speed. It says everything about staying.
At my graduation, I looked at the sky and thought about the boy in the concrete room and the man who came back for me. My mother kissed my head and said, "You are brave," and I let the words soak in like sun.
That night, Coleman fussed and smoothed my dress before dinner. He had a purple mark on his eyebrow that he refused to hide. I laughed and told him he was ridiculous.
"You're my always," he whispered.
"No," I corrected. "You're my patient."
He kissed me. The city below blinked like the punctuation at the end of a long sentence.
I closed my laptop and saved the confession that had taken three years to finish.
"Good work," he said.
"Thanks," I said.
We ate cake and the world kept moving. He held my hand like the steady thing it was.
And on the bedside table, the small towel with the rabbit ears of my old pajamas lay where he couldn't miss it. I reached over and tapped it.
"Some things you will never be allowed to wear again," he teased.
"Then keep them," I said. "They are mine."
He grinned. "Everything's yours."
And for the first time, I believed him.
The End
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