Sweet Romance10 min read
Wrong Call, Right Mess
ButterPicks20 views
I never planned to make my life a drama, but a one-and-a-half-year-old and a phone had other plans.
"Kailani, who's that?" Samir asked across the screen, voice calm as always.
My niece—Kailani—had grabbed my phone and, with the kind of certainty only toddlers can own, announced into the camera: "Daddy!"
I froze with a piece of stinky tofu halfway to my mouth. The phone tilted; Samir's face filled the screen, looking like he always did in photos and in memory—neat, controlled, impossibly handsome. He blinked once and his mouth bent into a small, unreadable smile.
"Kailani, who's daddy?" Samir asked again, as if testing.
"Naturally... yours." I answered flatly. My voice didn't shake. It was a heartbeat of nonsense that landed just right.
"Remote shot? Late bloom?" Samir said, amused. His tone was the kind that made people doubt whether he was teasing or calculating.
"Kailani, say 'Papa'." I crooned, sweeping the child into my arms as if conducting a scene.
She crowed, "Pa—pa!"
Samir laughed soft and slow. "How many daddies am I now?"
The woman in the corner of his video—Antonia, the new girl from his morning—looked surprised and then smiled politely. "Samir, who is this... child?"
"A neighbor dialed the wrong number," Samir said, folding his hand into a casual shrug even though his tie was a little loose. "No harm. I'll take you both to the juice shop on the fifth floor later—Kailani likes orange."
"Samir is very thoughtful," Antonia said. Her voice was syrup and everything in my chest iced over.
I held Kailani and let the crocodile tears form. "You abandoned us because you wanted a son," I sobbed into the camera, the performance polished from practice. "You didn't even stay for our test-tube daughter."
"You're crying?" Samir's eyes were still frank. He didn't look angry; he only looked as if he were listening to a very small, very private complaint.
"Kailani, it's okay," I cried harder, and the child echoed.
On the other end, Antonia shifted. "Samir, I—"
"Hang on," Samir said, and to me he added, "Get some rest. I'll come pick you both up after you finish."
"Kai—" Kailani started.
I clapped my hand over her mouth. "No more 'Daddy.'"
Samir smiled and asked, "Does that tofu taste okay?"
"It's fine," I said, and spat the tofu into my bowl like a defeated general.
"Eat more then," he said, and I felt like I had been wrapped twice: once in shame, once in something like warmth.
Half an hour later, the bell next door chimed. My mother, Betty, peered out and called, "Jasmine? Come open the door!"
"Coming," I lied. Maxwell, my brother, had asked me to watch Kailani. He was at a late shift, or that's what he always said. So here I was, trashy hair, stinky tofu breath, and a niece that thought the world was all snuggles.
The figure at the door was polished: Samir Devine, breath of autumn and a tie gone casual. He crouched and Kailani rushed to him, arms flailing.
"Daddy!" she cried.
"She took to you fast," my mother said, delighted, as if Samir were an old family friend rather than the man who had left me with cold messages and fewer explanations.
"Samir, come have some watermelon," she said. "You saved my life earlier."
"It was nothing," Samir said, and he sat like a king among the broken chairs of my living room. He fed Kailani watermelon—patient, gentle, giving small pieces as if the world were made of careful rules.
When my mother left to cut more fruit, Samir looked at me, solemn and almost shy. "You didn't tell me you had a brother."
"It's Maxwell," I said. "He's chaotic."
"Isn't that an understatement," he said.
He was quiet for a beat, and then blurted, "Do you want to talk?"
"My life is a mess," I said, not sparing any color. "You were worse."
Samir's dark eyes softened. "I was ashamed then. I thought you loved the idea of me—the version that tags along with your fiction. I think...I misunderstood you."
"You couldn't even return my calls for two months," I said, crossing my arms.
"I tried to call," he said, bewildered. "But that day—"
That night I found our old messages in my dodgy old phone. Red exclamation marks had been piling up on his side, and I realized he had fired off messages that never met my screen. I had sent a dismissal to one of his colleagues, and somewhere between lab notes, pride, and a misfired blacklist, we had been split in two.
Three days later, he texted a heart and I nearly dropped my phone. "Accidental."
"You're on your knees for the heart?" I texted back childishly.
"Stop it," he wrote, "or come downstairs."
I went. Samir had been standing on the sidewalk for a long time, cigarette between fingers, wind cutting his jaw. He handed me his coat. "It's cold," he said like a grown boy.
We drove in silence; "Natalie" played, and when the chorus came he kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that stole the grays right out of a bad sky.
"I can't let go," he whispered. "Can you?"
I looked at him. "I can't promise perfection."
"Then promise to try."
"I will." The words tasted like a truce.
But life isn't only kisses. There were small earthquakes—my apartment, my mother, Maxwell's unstable romance, and a little girl who believed in improbable men.
One afternoon, a bouquet for my birthday sat on the table. There was a card from Samir: Sorry I missed today. I open it and the smell of cut roses reminded me we were trying.
We had been trying in small ways. He came over often, helped with Kailani like he owned the routine. He hugged my mother a little too naturally, and once he made tea for Maxwell and the man hadn't known what to do with that kindness.
"He's very...here," my mother said one evening, biting into a slice of watermelon. "He comes often."
"He isn't mine," I muttered.
"Maybe he wants to be," she said simply.
There were moments he broke me down. "Why didn't you tell me about the miscarriage?" he asked in the car once, voice fragile.
"You left," I said. "You blocked me."
"I thought...I thought you'd prefer not to involve me. I was hurt, and I lashed out."
"Pain doesn't justify cold," I said.
"Then don't tell me to be cold anymore," he said, a simple request like a child.
We argued properly for the first time in a long time. It felt like two people learning how to not be selfish at the same time.
"I was writing," I told him. "I was always writing. Words were oxygen."
"You put stories between us," he said. "I hated being a character."
"You were a man with too much logic," I snapped. "You wanted explanations, I wanted feeling."
We realized then that our fights had always been the same wind, pushing us apart, and we got tired of the same storm.
"I want to be around," Samir said. "Not because of guilt. Because I like being with you."
"Do you like being with a messy home?" I shot back.
"Especially that part," he said, eyes soft. "The stinky tofu, the clumsy life, the way Kailani holds you like treasure."
The turning point wasn't sudden. It came as a small thing—Samir stayed to fix a leaking faucet, and pulled a face at my mother's stubborn insistence. He cooked dinner one evening, clumsy with spices and careful with the salt, and I found myself laughing when he burnt the rice.
We slipped into a domestic rhythm—the simplest, slowest kind. He'd bring pastries; I'd write and groan; he'd read a page of my latest mess and call out where the plot failed. We bickered and made tea. We let the smallness of days form a private shelter for mistakes.
"Do you think about our old time?" I asked him once, while Kailani slept on the couch, drooling on a teddy bear.
"Sometimes," he said. "Mostly, I think about how to do better."
"Better how?"
"Listening," he said. "Not assuming."
"That seems tiny but it matters," I admitted.
"It matters a lot," he said.
There was a misunderstanding with Marco, a well-meaning man my mother introduced at one point—the kind of man who showed up with carefully chosen gifts and a resume like armor. Samir teased until Marco withdrew with dignity. The fight wasn't between men; it was about the past—old resentments and the messy records we kept of each other’s slights.
"You sabotaged him," Marco said to me privately once, hurt in his voice.
"I didn't," I said. "Samir just...appeared."
"He made a scene," Marco said.
"He made me laugh," I said. "And he was right. You didn't fit."
Marco left, and I realized then how much Samir cared—not only in big moments but in the small ones that made me feel safe.
There was a time I thought of leaving the city, of writing myself into a book that had no obligations. But Samir wanted to be part of a living room, a child's scraped knee, a hot pot.
One day Maxwell returned unexpectedly. He'd been gone on a long gamble. He looked rough around the edges, like a man who had been carrying debts and memories. He also looked relieved to find the little household functioning.
"Thanks for watching Kailani," he muttered, embarrassed.
"You're welcome, Max," I said.
Samir sat up with a toast in his hand. "To Max's return," he said, formal, and then winked. "And to small heroes."
We laughed. Maxwell huffed but stayed.
The months slid by. Samir started leaving small notes in my books. He once turned up at my writing group and applauded for reasons I couldn't quite fathom. He defended me to an editor who insisted my plot needed "more stakes" and he argued my emotional truth was the real stake.
"You're biased," I told him. "Of course you think that."
"Maybe I'm biased," he replied, smiling. "But I'm also honest."
If the world had a scoreboard, our wins were petty: a repaired lamp, a bowl of soup at midnight, a quiet text that said "Are you awake?" and didn't require reply. We learned the art of tending.
There was a night when I found his old page of notes. There was a list titled "Why Leticia." I laughed until I cried.
"You kept this?" I asked.
"I always kept you," he said.
The crisis came when an old rumor surfaced—someone had posted mean things about me online, claiming my writing success was bought, that I was unworthy of praise. The comments were needles. I felt foolish and exposed like the night I cried into the tofu bowl.
Samir didn't shout. He found the poster, wrote a calm, precise rebuttal, and then did something small—he printed out the kind reviews I had, taped them to a board in my room, and placed a candle next to them.
"People will say what they want," he said. "We'll keep making things anyway."
That night, the room smelled of wax and paper. I held his hand and for once didn't think about the future like a cliff I might fall off. We were building a bridge with tiny bricks.
Summer turned the days bright. Kailani grew chubby and talkative. I started calling Samir by a nickname he hated, and he pretended to be offended, and then laughed.
"Why are you still here?" I asked once, climbing into bed.
"Because I like the sound of you reading aloud," he said. "Because you make me laugh. Because there is this—" he tapped the side of my head, near where the stories lived, "—and I like being included."
I cupped his face and felt the steady breath. "You left," I reminded him softly.
"I left wrong," he said. "And I'm trying to make it right."
Words can fail when they are big, so we tried with actions. He sat with me in dentist chairs and pretended to understand my clutter. He told my mother jokes that made her snort into her tea. He coaxed Maxwell into a job interview by promising to show him the ropes.
We had a small, perfect catastrophe when Samir decided to learn how to make sticky rice and ended up covering the kitchen in flour. Kailani thought the white dust was snow and made a miracle of it on the floor. My mother, Betty, declared it "the best disaster" she'd seen.
And then one evening, under the thin haze of streetlights, Samir took my hand and said, "Leticia, will you consider moving in with me when you're ready?"
The question was not heroic. It was ordinary and terrifying and exactly the sort of thing that could ruin everything if wrong.
"Let me think," I said, sounding like the coward I sometimes was.
"Take your time," he said.
I did. I thought about the way he pressed his palm against my head when I cried, the way he checked the locks, the way he was patient with Kailani. I thought of my mother, who had already folded Samir into family. I thought of Maxwell, who still kept secrets.
Time, that slow healer, nudged me. I opened the door. I let him in.
We didn't sign contracts or stage grand proposals. Samir lived where he wanted to live—between the pages of my days and the muddy shoes on my doorstep. We fought, yes. We forgot birthdays and we made up by making soup. We learned that love wasn't fireworks every night; it was water on plants and remembering to bring an umbrella.
On a rainy Tuesday, Maxwell came home with stories and apologies. He had been trying, struggling at work, and had found peace in small tasks. He hugged me like he hadn't hugged me in years.
"Thanks for taking care of her," he said to Samir, throat thick.
Samir only smiled. "She's family to me."
The worst morning came with a rumor: that Samir had once badmouthed my work through a colleague. Someone twisted a story and made a small, ugly thing bigger. It hurt, like a slap I hadn't expected. I stormed through our kitchen, my voice cracking like porcelain.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I demanded.
"I didn't say that," he said, patient as always. "But someone did twist words. I should have told you first. I'm sorry."
"I'm tired of being tripped by small knives," I said.
He stepped closer. "Trust me. You know where I stand."
The public storm blew itself out because Samir, tidy and deliberate, waited out gossip the way you wait out a rain shower—by keeping the house dry and the kids warm. Maxwell's friends saw the truth eventually, and the rumor curdled to nothing.
We learned too about the dangerous silence between people. That silence had nearly ended us once. We promised to call more, to be honest faster, and to bring up small hurts before they grew teeth.
One snowy December, he brought movie tickets for the re-release of an old romantic film—the one from our early days. He had kept a ticket stub, and when the lights dimmed in the theater I put my head on his shoulder and felt like the world narrowed to that one ticket.
On our street, the grass still seemed greener on certain mornings. Samir would sometimes look out across it and say in that lazy, careful voice, "The grass looks nice today."
"You're quoting me," I said once—because he had said that to me in a different life, and the phrase had become a small joke between us.
He smiled the smile that said he knew me better than I sometimes knew myself. "Maybe," he said. "But it's true."
On the anniversary of the first wrong call—Kailani's accidental "Daddy"—we sat on the balcony and ate stinky tofu like no one else judged us. I looked at Samir, at the child sleeping with a stuffed bear, at my mother humming, and thought that life could stitch itself into something warm.
"Why did you come back?" I asked him quietly.
"For a lot of small reasons," he said. "Mostly because I realized I couldn't live with the idea of you being unharmed and ungathered."
"That's a good reason," I said.
He twisted my hand around his finger. "Also because the grass is green today," he added.
I laughed, and the sound felt like forgiveness. "You love making me groan."
"I love making you laugh," he corrected.
Years from now, when I think back to this messy, ordinary time, I'll remember the wrong video call that began a thousand right things. I will remember a little girl who called three men by different names before breakfast. I will remember my mother's watermelon breath and Maxwell's clumsy apologies. I will remember a man who learned to stay.
"If anyone asks," Samir said one evening as we locked the door together, "tell them the story of a wrong call that led to a right life."
"I will," I said, and that was my promise—to the small, to the real, to the day the grass looked green and a child called him Daddy by accident.
The End
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