Sweet Romance11 min read
You and the Spring Wind Were Both Passing Things
ButterPicks12 views
I remember the day my father told me we were rich like it was a strange joke he finally decided to own up to.
"There's something I need to tell you," he said at lunch, his face blank as always.
"Okay," I replied, pretending not to care. "What?"
He pushed a stack of documents across the table with a single flat hand. "You're not poor, Aubree. We kept it from you."
"You're joking." I laughed, then I didn't. The papers smelled of official ink and money. There were property certificates, a bankbook thick enough to be a small book.
"You could have told me earlier," I said, voice smaller than I meant.
He shrugged. "I wanted you to grow up your own way."
I opened the bankbook. The numbers made my hands tremble.
"Why now?" I asked.
He sighed like someone older than his years. "I drank too much that night. Regret got loud."
I laughed then, some brittle sound. "Nice reason."
Those papers paid for a café in a month.
I opened the shop because I liked the idea of a plain place where people could sit slowly. It became popular in a way I never expected. People posted pictures of the blue bird toothpick holder and a latte with foam art that looked like a small wave. I told myself it was comfort; I told myself I was finally living.
And then one night, at a karaoke room with Haley and two other friends for Haley's birthday, I saw him across a crowded lounge of male models.
"He's here," I said and then immediate quiet fell over me like a cloth being dropped.
Haley looked at me. "You mean Gabriel?" she asked.
"Gabriel," I said.
There are faces you remember because they haunt you in a good way. Gabriel Clapp was one of those faces for me—clean, white shirt, the kind of person who looked like he belonged in light. I had loved him for five years without getting close enough to touch the idea.
"We should get him," Haley said, half laughing.
"I'll take him," I said.
My voice did something I hadn't planned. It had been years. Five years of chasing that clear gaze, of one awkward confession and one retreat. I wasn't proud. I was drunk enough to be bold and cowardly at once.
"Gabriel," I said when he sat down beside me, "can you kiss me?"
He looked at me for a long second like a question. Then he smiled—a soft, almost pitying smile—and said, "All right."
"All right?" I echoed, close enough to hear his breath.
He kissed me like a polite overlap of warmth and sorrow, like someone who knew what was fragile.
When he let me go he said, "If you're paying, make it more than a kiss."
I shoved a wad of cash into his hands as flashy as the night. "Then kiss me more," I demanded, badly drunk.
He laughed once, the sort of laugh that brushed away my bravado and replaced it with something gentler.
"Fine," he said. "Several times, even. Otherwise, I owe you a bad conscience."
That night he left with me.
The morning after, I woke in his arms and panicked about memory and money and what I had done. He was there, awake, more awake than I have ever seen him look.
"Do you remember?" I asked, fingers searching the curve of his jaw.
He smiled that wry, soft smile and said, "Maybe."
"Gabriel," I whispered. "I will—I'll pay you. I can help you."
He looked at me like I was a book he had read and couldn't quite believe had become the story he held. "I need a lot," he said simply.
"Okay," I said. "I can pay. I'll pay you whatever you want."
He took my hand, pressed it, and then let go. "Day rate," he said. "Just for a day."
"What?"
He glanced at the money, at the small life I thought I could buy. "This will cover one day."
I froze. I had shoved thousands at him, thinking it would be enough to buy closeness and claim a small dream. He smiled, almost ashamed. "For a day," he repeated.
I laughed, the sound more like a sob. "Then be my day for many days."
He allowed it. He came to stay.
At first, it felt like a dream I had bought in pieces. He stood behind my café counter in his white shirt, attracting crowds without trying. Women came just to watch him hold a cup. He was quiet in ways I loved, small gestures of attention that hit me like fireworks.
"Do you like the coffee?" I asked once, chest tight where the memory of him sat.
He looked at me and said, "It's good because you are proud of it."
"That's not an answer," I scolded.
He smiled. "It's true."
He would make food at my apartment, chop onions with a quick, practiced motion, then hand me a plate and insist I eat. He would wrap his scarf around my hands when the wind was wrong and then smile when I looked at him.
"You've changed," Haley whispered one afternoon, watching Gabriel wipe the counter.
"Because he is kind," I said, as if I were proud to hold that like a shield.
It was simple but that simplicity felt heavy. We became a kind of couple the public liked to look at: I the small woman with a bright café, he the pale-boy who fit into light. The rumor of how we came together—what people imagined—didn't interest me. He was with me.
He didn't move beyond certain lines. He kissed me with care but did not let us cross into something he could not keep. Once I tried to test that thread. I faked a sprained ankle in the bathroom. He rushed in, careful, cradled me, then left the room like a gentleman who had been taught restraint.
"Why won't you—" I began, stupidly.
He looked at me and said, "I don’t want to make you sorry you remember me."
"Sorry?"
He inhaled as if the word tasted bad. "I won't let the next thing you remember of me be something I couldn't stand to give you."
"What, then?" I asked.
He looked down, eyes unimaginably calm. "I will hold you. I will keep time with you. I won't steal what you deserve."
I nodded. "That's not much."
"Maybe not," he said. "But it's all I can give."
Weeks went by. I paid him. He stayed. We made a sort of life out of small things: shopping for groceries, arguing over which jam was better, letting the sunlight cross the table at breakfast like a blessing. His being there felt like a miracle I had finally afforded.
Then one night—small and ordinary—his phone rang at 2:10 a.m.
He shot up like the sound of thunder had split the room. The color drained from his face. He grabbed his jacket and was gone.
"Gabriel, what's wrong?" I begged, fumbling into my coat.
"Don't come," he said without turning. "Go back to sleep."
"I can't," I said. "I'm not letting you go alone."
He hesitated, then looked at me with a gentleness that made my heart bruise. "Put shoes on."
We took a cab. He led me into the hospital like someone tracking a familiar ache.
"Is it someone close?" I asked in the fluorescent waiting-room light.
He didn't answer until later, when an exhausted doctor came out of the emergency unit and said, "We did everything we could," and then, "There is still consciousness."
He ran into the room and later came out wearing a quiet grief I had never seen before. He moved like a man who had been built from careful pieces and just found the seams.
"Who—" I couldn't say it aloud.
He led me to the bed. There was a woman on the stretcher I recognized from old gossip photos—an older woman whose name used to be mentioned in school with low voices. She was paler than the moon.
"Do you know her?" I asked.
His voice caught. "She took me when my parents were gone."
"She—"
He nodded. "Her name was Veronika. She was… she was foolish and brave. She kept me in school."
"You said she was someone else," I whispered.
He looked at me, something like shame flashing and gone. "They said I was her kept boy. The rumor made everything a lie people liked to tell."
"Did she—did she help you?" I said.
He laughed short. "She bought me a future. She gave me a place to sleep. She wanted to be a mother."
"She wasn't your… lover?" I asked, remembering how cruel kids' rumors had been.
"No," he said firmly. "She raised me."
We watched as he sat with her, holding her hand like a child who had found his anchor. When she looked at him, something in her eyes closed over like giving up a battle. She smiled at me, once, weakly.
"Thank you for loving him," she mouthed.
It broke me and did not surprise me. Then she went quiet. She died that morning.
"I bought the plot," Gabriel told me that afternoon, as if inventorying the last of things. "She had no one."
"You were doing all that—" I said, the truth settling into me like cold water. "All the money—"
"It was never for myself," he said. "It was to keep her alive. She thought she could pay off fate with patience."
We sat together on the curb outside the hospital in a silence I could not name.
"Why did you never tell me?" I whispered.
He turned his face to me then, the corners of his eyes wet. "Because I was selfish and scared. Because I wanted you to keep liking me as I had been before the truth wore down what I could give."
"You mean the disease," I said.
He nodded. There was a small, honest fear in his voice I hadn't heard before. "It's stomach cancer. It's advanced."
The world pivoted then. All the little tender things he had given me shivered into new significance. The day rate, the grocery shopping, the bedtime whispers—they were all laced with a fragility I could not buy away.
"Was there any chance?" I demanded.
He was patient with me as always. "No doctor promised me much. I didn't want to spend your money on a war with a losing tide."
"That's not your decision to make alone," I said.
He shrugged as if weight were nothing he could hold. "I didn't want to haunt you with this all your life."
That night he told me his story.
When he was a child his parents died and fortune vanished. Veronika had found him in the street and taken him in. She had worked hard to keep him in school. She was a woman who gave him the things she could afford. She was a quiet sort of saint—silly and stubborn in the way of anyone who loves one thing with too much devotion. She loved one man for many years and got nothing back but the habit of care. In her later life she had used what she had to care for him.
"She told me once," Gabriel said, smoke curling between us like confession, "that maybe the son she lost long ago would be me."
"She lost a child?" I asked.
"She told me about a boy she could not keep," he said. "She thought I might be what was missing."
He was crying then, not loudly. I had never seen him let go like that.
"Did you ever call her mom?" I asked.
"I tried once," he whispered. "I said it out loud when she slept. I'm not sure she heard."
He smoked then, the first time I'd seen him smoke. The cigarette made me feel like the room tilted.
"I will never tell anyone to forgive me for what I did," he said, voice low. "I used you. I'm sorry."
"You were not cruel," I told him, truth like an offering. "You were honest, eventually."
He pressed his forehead to mine. "I wanted to give you a memory that's warm, not ruined by my failing. I wanted you to remember a boy who loved you in small soft things."
After the funeral, he came home to the apartment we shared. The days were a litany of quiet—medicine schedules, short walks, afternoons of making food together. He bought little things at the supermarket to make the house feel like theirs. He avoided hospitals with a stubbornness that made my heart lurch.
"Eat," I said one night, pushing a bowl to him.
"I don't want you to watch me wither," he answered.
"You belong to more than your choices," I said, angry and tender. "You belong to yourself."
We held on to a fragile routine. He pretended to be okay more than he was. He coughed into his hand and lied about busyness. He refused major treatment. He refused, in a way that rooms could not hold.
"Why?" I asked, hands curled into the fabric of his shirt. "Why wouldn't you try?"
"Because I don't want you to spend your life on me," he said. "Because my body is not the kind that will listen. Because I wanted to spare you the memory of me fighting and losing."
"You didn't decide that alone," I said, voice breaking.
He had already decided. There was a small resignation in him that was painful to be near. Sometimes at night he would say things that sounded like apologies and other times like confessions.
"I want to be selfish now," he told me once. "Let me be selfish. Let me taste simple happiness for once."
So we drank two cans of beer and walked to the market and bought more than we needed. We cooked and ate so badly and loudly and we kissed like people who had memorized each other.
"Did anyone else ever do this for you?" I asked between bites.
"No," he said simply. "Only you."
That night we promised—silently—to be ordinary together as much as we could.
One morning he collapsed in our kitchen. His face went pale and somehow small.
"Call an ambulance!" I screamed, and the sound of my own voice surprised me.
At the hospital the tests came back swift and cold. The doctor said phrases that belonged to someone else’s script: "late stage," "metastasis." Gabriel looked at me with a smile that made me want to throw things.
"You knew," I said, the accusation like acid.
He nodded. "I told you some things."
"Why didn't you tell me everything?" I demanded. "I would have sold the café sooner. I would have given you—anything."
"It wouldn't have changed the outcome," he said. "I didn't want to make you offer up your life to me."
I thought then of all the times I'd watched him hold himself away as if some border existed he could not cross. I felt something close to fury, but under it lived a deep, aching grief.
He stayed with me at home those last weeks. He wrote less. He touched my face often. He made small lists of things he was glad we'd done: the blue bird toothpick holder, the photo of us under sunset, the moment in the supermarket laughing over jam. He would write them down and ask me to read them with him.
"Promise me you will…" he would start, but never finish the line.
"Promise you what?" I would ask.
He smiled like someone caught in the middle of a secret. "Promise me you'll be kind to yourself."
I wanted to scream back that I had already been unkind enough to love him. I wanted to be selfish in return and say, "Stay." But he had written the shape of an ending in his eyes.
One morning I woke to the sound of a phone that didn't belong to us. The police called me with hands that sounded too official. "There's been someone found in the park," the officer said. "We need you to identify."
I ran and later stood beside a cold sheet and a face I could still feel in my fingers. He lay there peaceful as sleep, his white shirt buttoned, his sleeves neat. There was a note folded, handwriting neat and slow.
I read the letter he left me in the park as if each word might be a bridge.
He wrote that he was sorry, that he'd been cowardly and brave in bad measures. He wrote the story of his life and told me that he loved me in a way that made me want to break and heal at once. He wrote about Veronika and how steadfast she had been. He wrote that he chose to leave because he did not want to take from me. He wanted me to remember the warm parts and not the struggles.
When the police asked if I recognized the handwriting they asked softly, as if it mattered. It always mattered.
At the funeral I held his hand and felt the space he left. People whispered things and I let them because the center of me felt hollow. I wanted to scream at the world for taking a person who had given me so much.
Afterwards I sold more than I had planned. I found the money I needed for final expenses, for quiet things. I read his letter again and again until the edges of the paper softened.
Three years later I met someone at a market—a young man whose hair was black and whose smile mirrored the light Gabriel used to wear. He wore white shirts. He had the same light in his eyes.
He walked up to me and said, "Hi. I'm Dwight Mustafa," and I felt the old, foolish ache. He was not Gabriel. He could never be. He was bright as an imitation, and for the first time in years I recognized the difference between what was a love and what was a memory.
"Do you like jam?" I asked him on a whim.
He blinked. "Yes?"
We shopped at the same little market we once had. He was kind but thin with insincerity. He was a counterfeit and I treated him with polite distance.
On what would have been Gabriel's birthday, I wore a white dress. I made a dinner, drank a beer, and when Dwight asked why I had cried and laughed at the same time, I kissed the top of his head and said, "Gabriel, goodbye."
He didn't understand. He scowled and stormed away, like a man who thinks he is owed responses.
I went home and changed my phone wallpaper from a photograph of us kissing at sunset to a cartoon of cats on grass. It was a small, absurd thing, and I did it because Gabriel wanted me to live—really live—and because I needed new colors in my head.
Sometimes at night, when the apartment is quiet, I take out the blue bird toothpick holder and set it on the table. I pull out the old letter and read a single line that always makes me both laugh and cry: "I hope when you remember me, you keep the warm parts."
I smile then, because I did. I will.
I learned from him how to love someone as hard as you can without burning the world down. I will keep the memory of a kind man who took care of the last of his debts and who left wanting me to be free.
He told me once, his voice soft against my ear: "Don't let my leaving stop your loving."
I put the letter away and boil the kettle for coffee. The café is still there. The blue bird sits by the register. People still take pictures under the same light. I know now how to make jam without overcooking it.
Outside, the city keeps moving. Inside, the kettle sings. I pour another cup and think of a boy who wore white shirts and gave me a last lesson: live and love. Not always because someone asked you, but because you deserve it.
The End
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