Sweet Romance13 min read
Under the Silk Tree, I Brought a Ring
ButterPicks11 views
1.
"I'm Brody. Thank you," I said to the class when my turn came.
A silence sank like a stone—then sharp, hesitant claps started from the second row by the window. They were three clear beats.
"Was that... am I clapping badly?" the girl asked in a small voice, eyes darting.
"It was perfect," someone called, laughter wrapping the room, and the timid claps turned into a tide.
She sat straight, books stacked on the desk, a phone cornered beneath them. There was a tiny, childish pride in her eyes. It smoothed something in me I hadn't noticed was rough.
"If I'm in the same class for three years, that's not so bad," I thought.
"You're Brody?" she mouthed later; when our gazes met, there was a flash of recognition and something like mischief.
Her name was Freyja. That was what her classmates called her, but the way she wrote her essays—each one displaying the same precise, bright voice—made her a label in the teacher's eyes. Her handwriting sat like a small signature on the white page.
"You like the tree on the playground, don't you?" a boy whispered once after class.
"The silk tree? She sits under it every P.E. period," another said. "She studies there."
She did. Every time she looked toward the basketball court, I felt like the world tilted a degree. I wanted to play better, to be someone worth glancing at back.
Then someone started the rumor: she was seeing Hans.
"Hans? The guy with the knee scar from the last game?" I scoffed inside. "Is she really that blind?"
I kept away on purpose. Maybe I wanted her to correct whispers, to come and laugh them off beside me. She didn't notice my coldness. Every Sunday before night study she'd place a drink on my desk—cheesy fruit teas, grape little cups—and walk away.
"芝芝莓莓," I wrote in my phone when I couldn't be bothered to remember her real name. It was small, private, only for me. She should know that later.
2.
"Freyja," I heard her call my name that autumn afternoon at the school auditorium. She had her hand on the back of a chair, face flushed.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"My period started and—" she started, voice dropping. "I stained my pants and the chair."
I peeled my school jacket off and wrapped it around her waist. "Hold this. I'll be right back," I said, and ran.
"Don't make it a thing," she muttered when I returned with sanitary pads and packets.
"Of course it's not a thing," I answered as I handed her the bag. She took it with shaking fingers, cheeks burning a hot red.
That night, months later, when she called me from across cities because she had cramps, she said, "Brody, can you stop by the pharmacy? Bring me ibuprofen and the long ones? We ran out."
"Okay," I said, and I did more than that. I brought hot cocoa and a stupid switch game, because I wanted to be there while she lay curled on the couch.
She was small when she leaned into me, thumb fumbling the controller, hair whorls showing when she tipped her head. "Relax," I teased, fingers finding her wrist because I wanted to be the hand that calmed her.
She froze. The switch slipped. I whispered, "It's okay. I'm just holding your hand."
"I have my period," she said softly.
"I know. I just wanted to hold you."
She slept early that night, breath slow against my chest. I lay awake, replaying earlier years—how I had sent a shy note through a friend once and received silence. I thought she had refused me. I thought my heart should seal itself off.
Then I saw a photo on a social feed: Hans Fernandez with another girl—Everly. My lungs filled with a slow, bright air I misread as relief. Freyja was not with Hans anymore.
"She was the fuel all along," I admitted to myself on the plane back to where I grew up. I told my parents I wanted to move. I asked the company for a transfer. I wanted the possibility of one more try.
3.
"Your mother and my mother talk too much," Monika told my mom when we had dinner. Freyja's mother had a way of folding worry into jokes.
"I like her," my mother said. "When will you propose?"
"Not until I'm ready," I said, but I had already set the first small plans in place. I took out two rings from the nightstand drawer later and rubbed them between my fingers until the metal felt warm.
On the day I meant to propose, Freyja sat knitting fingers around the neck of her guitar. "You should come with me to the market tomorrow," she said.
"Sure," I said, but I already knew the next few months would be full of push and pull, commute trips and awkward hand-holding in grocery aisles.
"You're so good at being good in front of my mother," she teased in the hallway. "Why bother pretending sometimes? You must have paper inside."
"I am always good," I said. She poked my ribs.
"Stop lying."
She kissed me in the cold—soft, immediate. I kissed back because she smelled like laundry and something small and wild. "Don't go yet," she murmured.
"I'll be back tomorrow."
"Promise?" Her voice cracked on the last syllable like someone testing an old string.
"I will," I said.
4.
We married young, mostly because both our mothers insisted on it and because moving in together felt like a logic that was hard to argue against. The first year we learned each other's small patterns—how she hummed to fall asleep, how I snapped the lid of a jar three times to make sure it was sealed.
"You're my anchor," she said one afternoon when the light caught the dust motes in our living room.
"No," I told her, "You're the storm and the calm."
She laughed. "I'll take both."
At night she would lie on my chest and play Zelda on my stupid switch. Her fingers were clumsy and tender. Once, reaching back to steady her, my hand brushed the small scar on her wrist where she had once fallen from a tree. I pressed my thumb to it like a benediction.
"Do you remember the silk tree?" she asked.
"Every day," I said. The memory of that tree had a scent to me—green after rain, a place where a thousand teenaged promises had been whispered.
5.
Time can be a kind thing. We moved into a small house not far from their old school. My parents had moved to the countryside and left the city apartment to sell or rent. I took a job in a smaller branch, a choice that made Freyja laugh.
"You're giving up the city for me?" she squeezed my hand.
"For you," I said.
Not long after, a post appeared on my feed. Hans Fernandez and Everly Coppola—smiling at a cafe. I scrolled, then felt old anger like a winter chill. I didn't know why it hurt. Was it that Hans had once been an instrument for rumors that kept the two of us apart? Or was it that any measure of his happiness before mine felt like a personal slight?
"Do you want me to call him?" Freyja asked. We were folding laundry on a Sunday.
"No," I said, surprising both of us. "No, not really."
6.
There are moments you don't plan for. One afternoon, Monika came over with a heap of tangerines and a look like she had been simmering on gossip.
"He's in town," she said, almost apologetically. "Hans. I saw him at the square."
"Why?" Freyja asked, though her voice was small. "Is he here for work?"
"Who knows," Monika shrugged. "He looked... different."
"Different how?" I asked, because the family's radar is always asking to be enlisted.
"More polished," she said. "And he seemed... proud of himself."
Pride is a dangerous enemy. The idea of Hans—once a minor rival in school—growing proud made blood move differently through my body.
"Let's not make him a ghost in our lives," I told Freyja. "If he's here, that's on him."
7.
The engagement was quiet. I meant to ask her under the silk tree where we first learned to need each other, but the weather didn't cooperate. Instead, I asked in our tiny living room, candlelight guttering, the guitar propped in the corner like a second couch.
"Freyja," I said. "Will you marry me?"
She pretended to be dramatic. "Do I have to think about taxes and in-laws?"
"I’ll take care of taxes," I promised.
"Then yes," she said. "Yes."
She cried a little, but only because she couldn't stop smiling. We told our families. Monika folded her into a hug the way mothers folded sweaters.
8.
Then the call came on the morning of a rehearsal dinner. It was a simple message: a mutual friend had sent a screenshot of a chat. It showed messages from Hans trying to contact Freyja in the months after he left her. The messages were not apologetic. They were transactional—questions about favors, about favors he owed someone, cold and clinical.
"Why are you showing this to me now?" Freyja asked in the kitchen. She touched the screen like it might break.
"Because it matters," I said. "It matters how he left you. It matters what he did."
"Do you want to do anything?" she asked, voice small.
"I want you to be seen for what you are—not for the rumor he used to make you. I want him to be seen too," I said.
9.
I planned a small, public correction. I invited both families, a handful of old classmates, and a few neighbors to a casual coffee at the town square—under the old clock tower where people walked by and where echoes carried. I planned nothing violent. I planned truth.
On the day, the square hummed with late spring. People sat on benches. The café's outdoor tables smelled of espresso. Monika arrived with tangerines; Emma—my mother—folded her arms and offered me a look that meant "do right."
"He's been reaching out to use her," I said to a small circle of those who knew the history. "Not to apologize. Not even to reconcile. To ask for favors he never bothered to ask for before."
Someone in the crowd recognized Hans Fernandez's silhouette and nudged another. Within minutes he stood two tables away, Everly at his side, a careless smile pasted on.
"Brody," he said, surprised that I was speaking out in a place like this. "This is a public square."
"It's ideal," I said. "People remember things here."
10.
I had printed the screenshots. I laid them out on the table like evidence: timestamps, the cold messages. I watched a color leave his face as the café's table of watchers leaned in.
"That's not fair," he said first, trying to laugh it off.
"Fair?" I asked. "Look at the messages, Hans." My voice didn't shake. "They're not about you missing someone. They're about you using someone."
"You're twisting it," he snapped, then lowered his voice. "You have no right—"
"Enough," Monika said loudly from the side, sharper than his retort. "You broke her when you left. You don't get to come back polished, asking favors, like nothing happened."
The crowd shifted. Voices began to murmur.
"She was hurt, Hans," a classmate called out. "You walked away."
"I had reasons," he insisted, but the words sounded small.
"Reason?" Everly said from beside him. "Then explain why you messaged asking for tickets and a phone number, then ghosted for months."
His shoulders twitched. The smile had fled entirely. He tried denial. He called names. The patio filled with a dozen witness breaths.
"Who told you?" he demanded, looking at me.
"Your messages told us." I handed a printout to the nearest person. "Read them."
A woman read aloud a line. "—'Can you get me the contact for the manager? I need a favor.'"
There was a slow, rolling silence. The café's regulars stopped stirring their coffee. A child on a scooter glanced back.
He shifted colors—first a flush, then pale. The change was visible: the smug man from the photos folded like paper.
"It's not like that," he blurted. "I was in trouble."
"Trouble doesn't make you act like that," Monika said. "It doesn't give you the right to use someone who trusted you."
People had their phones up now, some recording, others watching with a hungry curiosity. The feed started. Comments rose in the tiny audience like insects.
"Please," Hans said, voice dropping to something that wasn't bravado at all. "Please, Freyja. I was young. I made mistakes. I'm sorry."
He looked at her—really looked—and his eyes staggered, like someone who had fallen from a height and needed to grab a ledge.
"Sorry doesn't cut it," Freyja said, and the strength in her voice was a quiet storm. "You weren't sorry then. You used me. You left without a word because it suited you."
"You're being dramatic," Everly snapped, but her voice lacked commitment now. A few in the crowd glowered.
"What did you expect?" Hans's face broke into a new emotion—fear. He tried to step forward, to touch Freyja's arm, but she stepped back. The distance between them that used to be small enough for whispers was now an ocean of echoing judgment.
"I—" He tried another angle. "You ruined my reputation with the team. I had to protect—"
"Protect?" I said. "By abandoning her? By letting people say whatever suited them? You never once thought of her."
There was a pause, long enough for a pigeon to land on the rail and then fly off. Around us, pockets of conversation bubbled. Some people murmured, "I knew it," others, "He always looked arrogant." A teenager recorded the scene with glee and uploaded it; the little live tag popped up and red viewers counts rose.
His expression moved through a sequence I'd seen before in other people's collapse: first smugness, then disbelief, then denial, and finally panic. He was very small now, a man whose scripts had been removed.
"Please," he tried again, voice cracking this time. "This is private."
"It's public because you made it public," I said. "You came back expecting favors, expecting the past to be a doormat."
"But—" He looked to Everly, and her gaze slid away as if she had been burned. "Everly?"
She gave a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I don't know you," she said to him in the middle of the crowd, and the words were like shutters slamming.
A woman two tables away stood up. "He always thought he was above consequences," she said. Others nodded. The murmurs turned to a chorus of small denunciations.
I watched him shrink. Everly's hand left his arm. He began to beg, a desperate cadence I had only heard in movies.
"Please, I can explain. Give me a chance. I didn't—"
"Give you a chance to do it again?" Monika's voice cut sharp. "Get out, Hans."
He stumbled, as if pushed. He left with Everly, face a ruin of color, mouth moving, words dissolving into the square's noise.
People watched him go. Some clucked. Someone took a photo for the local group chat and posted, "Remember where you stood."
He tried to call back twice. The second time, I put my phone on speaker so a dozen more could hear him ask for forgiveness. He promised to call his mother, to explain, to apologize, to pay restitution for things he couldn't admit to. The promises were thin.
The next day, the messages had been screenshotted and shared. The day after, there were more. Someone had recorded his tumble from pride to pleading, and a dozen classmates shared the clip with captions that did not imagine forgiveness.
He returned to town a handful of times after that, quieter, avoided, face downcast. He sent one public message to the group chat—"I was wrong"—but in a town that keeps memory, the echo of his earlier greed didn't disappear. Friends stopped answering. The basketball coach told him there was no place for him on the team. His job prospects pinched when managers met eyes and looked away. He began to be a man with fewer doors.
11.
The public humiliation satisfied something small and important. Not cruelty. Not vengeance. It was the righting of a ledger.
"Was that necessary?" Freyja asked later when we sat on the park bench beneath the old silk tree. Leaves draped like a curtain. The place held our first shy glances.
"It was," I said. "You deserve to be defended, but more than that, you deserve to be seen as you are."
She leaned her head on my shoulder. "You always have been both of my things," she murmured.
"Not always," I said. "Once I was dumb and quiet. I let rumors speak for me. I even walked away."
"You came back," she said.
"I did," I admitted. "And I'm here to stay."
We sat and watched a kid kick a ball and miss. A dog chased a squirrel. The silk tree shook out a rain of tiny blossoms and the scent reminded me of old afternoons. I thought of the rings in my pocket, of the proposal I had almost made at its roots.
12.
"Will you be there forever?" she asked after a long moment.
"For as long as you'll have me," I said. I took the rings from the pocket and placed them in her hands. "I almost asked here, but the rain held off. I thought the moment should wait until we were sure."
She laughed, breathless. "You planned a public scandal and you almost proposed under a tree? You're dramatic."
"I always was," I said, trying to sound casual.
She slid one ring onto my finger. "Then wear it. Don't lose it like you misplaced your patience once," she teased.
"I'm not losing anything," I promised, and this time the words felt like an oath.
13.
Our wedding was small. Monika made dumplings. Emma Masson fussed about the tablecloth. Kynlee Flores—our oldest friend from school—sat in the front, eyes bright.
"Remember when you clapped at my introduction?" Freyja whispered to Kynlee during the ceremony.
"Of course," Kynlee said. "You were the loudest hand in the room."
The silk tree watched from the photo we had blown up and pinned to the wall. We danced badly and perfectly, and the day passed into the safety of memory—one of those days that will live and be pulled out like a favorite book when we are older and shorter of hair.
14.
Months in, life sagged into beautiful routine. She would call me from work sometimes, "Bring home something sweet?" and I would, and I would make something crooked but edible. We went back to the old school once, sat under the silk tree. The bench was worn by years of knees and books.
"You look older," she said, tracing the faint lines at my eyes.
"So do you," I answered.
We had a habit: when either of us was hurt—small things—one would say the safe word, "Silk." It meant hands, steadiness, quiet. "Silk," she said one night when I burned the stew.
"Silk," I answered, and we both laughed because even burnt stew could be redeemed by that word.
15.
The town kept living. Hans moved away after a winter and a rumor that he had been turned down for a job because he couldn't be trusted. People still passed him in the grocery store sometimes, but they did not meet his gaze. That was a kind of justice that allowed life to go on and people to heal.
"Do you regret how it happened?" she asked once as we watched a rainstorm from our kitchen window, thumbs circling the rim of cups.
"No," I said. "It needed to be done."
"Still," she said, "I'm glad you were gentle with me afterward. You didn't let the public fix me. You let me rest when I needed it."
"I will always let you rest," I said.
She bit her lip and reached over to squeeze my hand. "You remember the first time you called me '芝芝莓莓' in your phone?"
"I do," I said with a grin.
"You were ridiculous," she said.
"So were you," I answered.
We laughed, and the house filled with the small bright noise that had always meant home: the kettle boiling, a distant truck, the soft hum of the refrigerator. Outside, the silk tree shed one more layer of blossom onto the pavement.
16.
One evening, I opened a small drawer where I had kept two boxes for years and slid one into hers. She looked at the ring and then at me, like she was finding a word for an emotion.
"You kept them?" she asked.
"I kept them," I said.
She slid the ring on, quietly. "I love you," she said.
"I know," I replied, because by then it was a fact that did not need proof. But I kissed her anyway, because facts are better with a ceremony.
We walk sometimes at night near the old school. We pick up little stones and place them into the pockets of our coats. I still feel like a kid sometimes, watching her watch a basketball game from the side, smiling at the small things she loves.
Now, years later, when people ask how I decided to move back, I say simply, "For her."
When they ask what I would tell my younger self, I say, "Be braver. Say it. Stay."
On a shelf in our bedroom is a photograph: two young faces under a silk tree, a promise that once trembled like sap. I take the rings out sometimes and roll them between my fingers, listening to the faint "tick" that the ring makes against the desk like a tiny pulse.
I put one ring back in the drawer and lock it with the smallest key. That key sits under the little ceramic bird we bought at the market. If anyone asks, I say it's a superstition. Really, it's a habit: some things are small rituals that hold a life together.
Tonight, as I shut the drawer, the kitchen clock clicked. In the living room, the switch lay where she had left it, two controllers cocked like absent hands. The house smelled faintly of lemon and laundry and the guitar that waited in the corner.
"Do you remember the silk tree?" she asked from the doorway, voice soft.
"I do," I said, and I added, "I put the ring in the drawer, and the tree keeps a memory of us. If anyone ever wants to know which story this is, they'll find the photograph on the mantle and they'll know."
She walked in, and I closed the drawer slowly. The "tick" of metal on wood was small, precise, and I could hear it like a heartbeat.
"Goodnight," she said.
"Goodnight," I answered.
We drifted into sleep with the switch humming low in the next room and the silk tree's shadow reachable on the wall. The ring slept in the drawer under the ceramic bird and the photograph watched over us, proof that some moments keep a life from slipping away.
The End
— Thank you for reading —