Sweet Romance11 min read
Who Falls First: The Bet, The Kiss, and the Pitch
ButterPicks15 views
I texted my mom before eleven and wrote, "11 pm, going to sleep." I meant it. I also meant to be the obedient girl everyone expected at noon—white dress, simple hair, polite smiles. But I am terrible at staying the same person twice in one day.
"I told you to call him 'Mason, the scholar,'" Mom said at lunch like she was arranging heirlooms. Vivienne Estes's eyes sparkled like she'd already gifted me a wedding dress. I smiled the way I always do when my world tilts—between theater and defense. "Yes, Mom. Of course."
He arrived like a photograph from someone else's life. In a plaid shirt, heavy bangs, thick black frames—he looked like the grown-up version of the neighbor boy who taught me how to tie my shoelaces. "Mason Durham," he said, polite, a little awkward, his voice dry as tape.
"Hi," I said. I had rehearsed "Nice to meet you" and "Thank you both for arranging this" and all the right lines. I wore them like armor.
"You okay, Gwen?" Leonor Belyaev, Mason's mother, asked softly when his expression tightened as if remembering something. He sniffed once, looked at my wrist where a temporary tattoo peeped, and the look on his face made my stomach do an old, small-jagged flip.
I lied and pretended I wasn't old enough to notice that he looked like he had choreographed very specific plainness for his mother's sake. I lied that everything about him was just fine. He held his fork like a man made of habit. He said "Good evening" and "It was nice meeting you" and then he left in twenty-eight seconds, keys in hand. He said, "Sorry, I forgot something," and for twenty-eight seconds I watched him leave and wondered how the person who had once promised he would come back to my birthday could be a man who could vanish like that.
That night, Kaelyn Fontana dragged me to a bar anyway. "You can't spend a whole semester stuck in that recital of shame," she said.
"You mean bring your crown?" I joked, hair down, a black wave I usually only let out for effect. I smelled like lipstick and wrong decisions.
Mason was there, but that wasn't the same Mason. He had an earring, an open collar, a face that looked both dangerous and lit up, like someone who had practiced being reckless and found it fit well. He approached me like a storm approaches the shore.
"Did you pick me tonight?" he teased, flicking a beat of my hair with a grin.
"I came to win a stupid bet," I told him. "There are things I can always win."
He smiled, amused. He pinned his eyes on me like he could read the lines of my life.
"You said earlier you were going to sleep," he said, holding his phone up like a tiny judge.
My texts were on the screen: "11 pm. Sleepy." The room leaned in. Kaelyn whooped. "You can't do that," she sang. "You can't—"
"Little sister," Mason said, the word wrapped in a crook of his mouth, "are you trying to seduce someone else?"
"Don't call me that," I snapped. "I don't know what you mean."
He pushed me away casually, like putting a book back on a shelf. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't choose you."
People laughed like waves. "She lost! She lost to Mason!" someone shouted. The humiliation flared hot and red and I wanted to crawl under the table. I bit my lip so hard I tasted iron.
I lunged, fingers curled into his collar. "Why didn't you show up for me? You promised." My voice broke on the promise.
He flinched—then said my childhood nickname in a voice so soft it hurt. "Gwen…"
There was a pause, dangerous and wide, and then he kissed me. Not a polite peck; a sudden, clumsy, press-that-left-everything-trembling kiss. He deepened, the sort of kiss you practice in a mirror to shock yourself into feeling real.
I pushed him away. My cheeks burned. "You said you didn't choose me—"
"I didn't choose how I am around you," he said, and there was a crooked honesty inside him that stunned me. "But I can't lie either."
The next days were a rinse-and-repeat of startling shapes. He could be oddly tender—fixing the sleeve of my jacket in the morning, ruffling my hair like some overprotective big brother—or wholly unbothered, like the guy who shrugged off my jokes. He told me men who were good at hiding their pasts often had the quickest smiles and the coldest pockets.
"I was twelve when my father left," he said one slow night. "We lost everything. For a while, my mother and I couldn't even afford the basics. I promised I'd make something of us."
"Did you think you'd become this?" I asked, thumb tracing the words on his old library card he kept in his wallet.
"No." He wrenched a laugh. "I thought I'd be a scientist. I thought I'd be stable. Then people keep moving, and you keep doing what keeps you alive."
He told me about nights pulling late shifts, about hospital visits and baking bread for his mom to sell, about nights learning to code in the back of an internet cafe because the library closed at eight. Each confession was an ache that rearranged the way I viewed him.
"Why didn't you come back to the birthday?" I asked. "You promised."
"I did come back once," he said. "I tried. I took a clumsy chocolate I made myself. You threw it away thinking it was trash. I couldn't explain then. I couldn't fix it then."
I flailed between mortification and memory. "I remember a kid throwing something. I remember being so mean. If I could go back I would—"
"Then let's not waste any more time," he said. His hand found mine. He felt unbearably safe, and at once, dangerously significant.
He was not a playboy pretending to be cold for fun. He was a man who learned to be careful, to arrange himself like armor, to rehearse blandness like everything would be easier that way. And yet he kept kissing me in the middle of arguments and stealing my jacket like a thief who had no shame.
"You're stubborn," he told me, one morning as he tied my hair back for me. "You won't let anyone else take me."
"Good," I said. "Don't let anyone else have you."
When the startup crisis hit, everything crystallized. Mason and three others—Ewan Harris, Isaac Marshall, and Patrick Kaiser—had been scraping money together to run a small tech project out of a dorm room and a rented netcafe. They'd patched servers with ramen money and pushed code past midnight with their fingers made of coffee.
"Annika Browning can get you funds," Ewan said, big and awkward and worried, the way a big brother worries in a children's playground. "Her family firm invests in early-stage teams."
Annika was the woman from the bar who'd leaned too close like a hawk. Tall, sharp, in control. She was everything my hairdresser warned me about when he told me to "avoid closed smiles." Her offer sounded like a halo: funds, connections, a promise.
"Meet her," Mason said. "Just meet her."
I did. She looked me up and down in the light of her private room and said, "You are not the foundation for him to build a life. You are—how do I put this—an indulgence."
That night in Annika's office she leaned in and said, "Gwen, you can be useful. Learn a thing. Or get out of the way."
"I am not going to let my man be used as an investment vehicle," I said. Maybe it was brave. Maybe it was stupid. "If he chooses you, I will step aside."
Annika's laugh was knife-smooth. "He'll choose me if I offer his team aim and capital. I'm not a villain for wanting to invest. I'm a partner."
"You think love is a liability?" I shot back. "You think values are a line item?"
She smiled then, colder than the air in a server room. "I think business is business."
The deal dangled before them like a live wire; Mason was tempted. He could draw a line from chaos to stability with her money. He could pay the bills and make their product live in the world. But I could see that every time he looked at me, a little of that business fizzled—he tensed like a man holding two weights.
"Maybe the world and I are the same problem," he told me. "Both ask to be handled, not indulged."
Then I made a mistake that carved memory into the wrong shape: at a bar, someone slipped something into my drink. I remember a hand that felt disgusting, and then a fog like a blanket lowering.
"Hey—" a voice cut through, Mason's voice, colliding with the edges of my haze. I fumbled for it, found him, and then there were bodies, fists, and the terrible sensation of being saved by force.
"I—" I sobbed when I woke in the hospital, IV in the arm. "I'm sorry."
He held me. "Do you know why I almost smashed up that bar?" he asked, voice raw. He had bruises along his jawline. "Because my first instinct was to make you safe with my own hands."
"You could have gotten into trouble," I whispered.
"I would get into trouble a thousand times to keep you alive," he said. "Don't you dare apologize for being hurt."
After that, I was raw and embarrassed and furious. Mason became absurdly protective. "You will not go to bars unannounced," he commanded.
"Since when do you command me?" I snapped, both because I wanted to be angry and because I wanted him to want me to obey.
He smiled like a cat with a map. "Since I cannot bear to lose you to someone's selfishness."
I stayed. I started helping with the startup. I read everything I could about DAU and GMV and retention funnels until my eyes hurt. Mason laughed when I first said DAU aloud. "You sound like a marketer," he said.
"Fine," I said. "I'll sound like a marketer. We'll take investors seriously. We'll make them say yes without selling our souls."
We burned midnight oil. It became me against everyone who had once said I was a shallow college girl. Isaac, Ewan, Patrick—they tested me. At first, skepticism leaked from their faces like cold. Then it folded into respect as I reorganized our pitch, rewrote slides, designed user journeys with a fierce, ridiculous energy.
"You're serious," Isaac said one night, rubbing his temples.
"I am," I said. "I can help them see why the product matters. And if that fails, I'll find another way."
When the emails came back with good news—"We will invest…"—we all laughed until our throats hurt. I called Mom and pretended I was composed. She cheered like I'd won a scholarship. Mason stood behind me with pride like a father at an exam.
Annika heard we had other offers. She swung back harder. She tried to threaten our lead investor with insider gossip, whisper campaigns, and ultimatums. She began to smear names in halls and on feeds. It escalated.
So we planned a public reveal.
We organized a press day with the incubator. Investors, journalists, analysts—Annika's people included. She came in polished, smiled like a queen, and waited for the stage.
"Good afternoon," I said, my voice steady in a way that surprised me. "We're here to talk about product, not people."
Annika's smile didn't falter. "Of course," she said. "Transparency is everything."
I had prepared evidence, but what I wanted more than evidence was to peel the veneer. I had conversations recorded—times she offered to 'help' Mason with a marriage promise if he gave her a seat at the table. I had emails showing her threatening to pull coded lines unless Mason agreed to specific terms that would hand her more control than was fair. Ewan had footage of a meeting where Annika belittled our team's contribution in front of junior staff, telling investors: "He'll be happy with crumbs."
I set the first note playing.
"At 3:14 p.m., you wrote, 'A formal commitment would remove the emotional clutter. Marriage or contract—whichever seals faster,'" I said. Voices in the room murmured. Annika's mouth thinned.
She stood. "That's a misinterpretation," she said, smooth. "You cherry-pick sentences to create a narrative."
"That was you," I said, and then another clip turned on—the audio of her calling Mason "a useful asset" if he "cleaned up personal distractions"—louder now, undeniable.
She reached for the control remotely and the audience reacted like someone had opened curtains to sunlight.
"You're twisting context," she snapped. Her voice was rising. "You can't—"
"You asked him to commit in advance of funding," Ewan said. He stood, giant and terrible and ready. "You said you'd pull funding if he didn't acquiesce."
"That's a private negotiation," Annika hissed.
"It becomes public when it borders on coercion," Isaac cut in. "When you insist on personal guarantees for business terms, you're not an investor. You're a manipulator."
Someone in the back of the room started recording. Phones rose like wheat. Journalists exchanged looks.
"Why would you do this?" Annika asked suddenly, her face losing control like a mask melting in heat. "He's a match for exposure. He has a pretty face. Investment is business; I'm doing what I must."
"You're doing what you want," I said. "Not what the business needs. Not what a team deserves."
She glared at me, then at Mason, then at the room. "You think you own morality?" she spat. "You think you're pure?"
"I think teams deserve to be free of threats," I said. "You threatened to use love as a bargaining chip. You hurt people."
Suddenly, her manner cracked. The polished armor fell away. The investors who had been leaning into their notes before now got up one by one. "This is not the kind of partner we seek," said one in a soft, formal voice. "We fund sustainable teams, not pressure tactics."
"Annika," a woman investor said, "we discussed leverage. We did not discuss coercion."
It was like watching dominoes fall. Her phone chimed with texts from other partners withdrawing. Her PR team looked like a flock trying to decide which way to fly. Someone recorded a firm voice saying, "We cannot be associated with manipulative practices." The words landed like hammers.
Annika's face shifted from anger to panic to denial in a painful, public cascade. "I have always been ethical!" she barked, the sound hollowing in the room. "You don't understand my methods."
"You used a private promise as leverage," I said, calm, louder, and the room listened. "You weaponized affection in exchange for capital. That is unacceptable."
For a minute she tried shame. She tried the old tactic of claiming she was only protecting money. She tried to cry—too late; the cameras had already caught the tremor, the shaky smile planned and now gone.
She collapsed into a chair, hands shaking. The journalists swarmed like reporters at a train wreck. Phones flashed. Investors stood, some shaking their heads, some murmuring about ethics committees. People talked about her doing this pattern of behavior with other founders. A few juniors stared, covering mouths with hands.
Annika's eyes went to Mason. For the first time, I saw fear there, the raw fear of someone losing their professional standing, their cache. She mouthed something—maybe apology, maybe bargain—but it landed as white noise.
"You think the room will forget?" she said faintly. "You think a few words will ruin me?"
"It isn't 'a few words,'" someone said. "It's patterns. It's a boundary we will not cross."
Annika's rage finally diffused into pleading, but the room had moved on. A press release leaked within an hour, and by night the story had five different takes and a trending tag. The incubator issued a short statement condemning coercive tactics and affirming "respect for personal autonomy."
Around her, people whispered, filmed, and turned away. A few snagged her on camera pleading. Her team watched their equity value shift in their phones. She tried to collect herself into a posture of dignity and failed.
The worst humiliation was not the cameras. It was her sudden realization that everyone she had relied on for power was stepping back. "I can still buy my way back," she told Mason later in a corridor as journalists clamored. Her voice was thin.
"You can't buy trust," Mason said quietly. He had that look people get when they are sorry but certain. "You can buy influence; you can't buy redemption."
"Why are you siding with her?" she demanded, confused and wounded.
"I am not siding with you," he said. "I am siding with my team and my life."
She slumped, a queen deposed, as investors distanced themselves. The public punishment was not violent but it was thorough: boardchairs rescinded, reputational articles trended, partners issued statements. Annika's offers were revoked. She was left publicly exposed, more by the room's collective refusal to be complicit than by any single blow.
I watched her there, emptied and furious and human. The crowd that had watched her climb and then fall murmured and filed away. Some recorded a selfie of the moment, voices whispering, "Serves her right." Others shook their heads and said, "Good. Finally."
Mason came back to me without a single apology because he didn't owe one to the woman who'd tried to stake a claim on his life. He owed me his respect, his honesty, and the will to fight the right way.
We threw ourselves into building the company. There were more nights in that office than in our beds. We argued, we patched servers, we begged, we negotiated. We celebrated small wins with handshakes and tired smiles and a bouquet of supermarket flowers. Customers who had originally laughed now wrote to say how our product mattered. We built retention over months, talked DAU and GMV in the same breath, and we learned to measure the quiet numbers that meant real impact.
On the day we announced the official angel round—without coercion, without deals on the side—Mason took my hand and led me to the small rooftop garden of the office. Balloons were released behind glass, petals fell like confetti at the entrance, and the office team—our ragtag, loyal crew—cheered.
"You knew how to make it happen," Mason whispered, leaning to kiss me like a seal on a medal. "You made us believe."
"In the end," I said, breathless and alive, "we counted users, we counted nights, and we counted on each other."
He smiled, crooked and foolish in the best way. "You kept your promise to learn DAU," he teased.
"I kept my promise to keep you," I said.
We stood under a thin scrape of sky, petals blowing around us, and felt something settle. Not perfect. Not complete. But ours, made by bones and stubbornness and a messy, glorious refusal to take one another for granted.
The End
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