Sweet Romance12 min read
You Kissed Me, Then the World Broke Our Set
ButterPicks13 views
"Will you take the kiss?"
"Don't be nervous. Close your eyes."
I should have known better than to trust a crew that called me Cinderella for my eyeshadow skills. I am Matilda Dudley, a small-time stand-in who spends more nights awake drawing commissions than sleeping. Somehow, a viral makeup imitation caught the attention of a real actress—Esperanza Dunlap—and I ended up on a big set as her body double for a close-up love scene opposite Gage Wallin, the nation’s reigning idol and the youngest-ever Best Actor.
"This is my chance," I whispered to myself, fingers still sticky with stage glue. "No money? Fine. This is a dream."
I thought the dream would be a neat, quiet job: lips meet, camera cuts, everyone goes home. Instead—
The mattress under us groaned and then collapsed.
Someone shouted. I flailed. My hands, meant to be gentle and professional, clamped at Gage's jaw instead. I bit. Hard.
"Ow!" he hissed, and blood—bright, theatrical—spattered my fingers.
Kimberly Henry, his manager, stormed in like a storm front. "What on earth did you do? How could you bite him?"
"I'm so sorry," I said before I could stop it. "I didn't mean—I've never—I'm a stand-in, I don't—"
"Do you know what this will do to the shot?" she snapped. "Do you know what this does to Gage?"
"Give me the ointment," he said then, softer than I expected.
"I'll put ointment on your lip," I blurted, fumbling with a cotton swab as people fussed. I watched him from the corner of my eye. He was quiet, the kind of quiet that wasn't empty. When I nearly smeared the salve, he turned his head away.
He drew close, a shadow over my face. "Come to my room tonight," he said, low and almost private.
My brain short-circuited.
"That's…not appropriate," I managed. "Though—I'm, well, I could, I mean, you're an actor, you should—"
He tilted his head. "You were here to put wound care on me. What are you thinking?"
I turned beet-red. "Nothing! I—I'll be professional. I can be professional."
"Then be professional and come at eight," he said and left it at that.
I should have run.
Instead, like a thief stepping into a jewelry shop, I crept up the corridor that night and knocked on his door. He opened in a white robe, a book hanging from one hand.
"Matilda?"
"To—apply medic—" I stumbled.
"Close the door," he said. He watched me fix the ointment on his lip. When I fumbled, his hand steadied my wrist and he murmured, "You're doing fine."
By the time I left, it was after midnight. We had almost made it through without incident except for one absurd mistake—me stepping on a robe tie and tripping us both, collapsing the cheap nightstand and sending a flash of paparazzi cameras into the doorway.
"Who is recording?" Kimberly demanded when she burst inside, then saw both of us on the floor. "Get out! Get out of my house!"
Gage grabbed my arm to help me up. We tangled and fell again. The mattress groaned for one last time and gave. Photos flashed. Somebody shouted, "Scandal!"
The next morning, my phone buzzed with notifications like a beehive. The top headline: "Gage Wallin's Private Life in Ruins; Scandal Rocks Production." They'd caught the angle that made us look intimate. My face burned. The feed was full of spiteful comments, and people had identified me by name: "stand-in Matilda Dudley." Someone uploaded nine images—us on that mattress, the robe slipping, the ointment on his lip. Viral in sixty minutes.
Kimberly took me aside, eyes sharp as knives. "You need to cooperate. If you don't, your account will be eaten alive."
"Cooperate how?" I asked, dizzy.
"Play girlfriend," she said. "We make it a short PR stunt. Fans empathize with 'grassroots girl with heart.' Gage splits in a few weeks. We'll control the narrative."
Gage, one slow blink after hearing the plan, said, "We'll say we're dating. We'll script the split later. It's PR. It will be over in a month."
They treated me like a prop on a set I had once admired from afar.
"How much?" I whispered.
"Five thousand for the appearance. Extra for anything with contact," Kimberly said, as if she were negotiating a vendor. "Sign the NDA. We'll handle the rest."
I signed.
"You're my girlfriend now," he said one night when we sat on his couch, watching a movie I didn't remember. "You're Mine. Not a prop."
"You're serious?" I squeaked.
He smiled, small and honest. "Not a prop."
We staged the romance. I learned the choreography of fake intimacy. "Smile like this," he'd say, and my body would obey. But the real moments began to carve into me without permission.
"Matilda," he said one evening, when he slipped a jacket over my shoulders because I mentioned being cold, "you should put that scarf away. You give away too much."
"Do I?" I asked, heart thud-thud.
"Only one person gets to notice the details about you," he said, as if reciting an old rule he had finally broken himself.
The first time he smiled at me in public without duty behind it, my chest betrayed me by fluttering like a trapped bird. The second time he took off his sunglasses to watch me laugh and didn't put them back on, I felt like I might combust. The third—the most private—was the night he came to my studio and, after a quiet dinner he cooked, opened a small box and placed a ridiculous party hat on my head. "Happy studio anniversary," he said. "I know how much you love a surprise."
"Why would you do that?" I asked.
"Because you're mine," he said again, more softly.
My life swelled. Gage was not a man-sized rumor anymore; he was my reality—hands warm at my waist, a bedtime text that said "Sleep well" and a voice that said, "I'll be back by morning." He actually kept his word.
Then the world slid.
At a promotional event, a man who once had been named Daxton Koehler stepped into the room with a casual arrogance. He'd been a boy I knew from earlier days—Daxton and I had been childhood neighbors; we'd dreamed and failed and moved on in different directions. He was then a singer who had not quite made his wings. He smiled at me and said, "Matilda."
"Daxton," I said, trying to keep it neutral.
He was wearing a costume of charm and knew the habit of the room. He'd come with an agenda—his agent and a producer were already hovering, subtle puppeteers behind his smile. That night, later, someone—in a move that would define a season—caught me in his doorway with a phone call recorded and photos taken.
The next day's headline: "Matilda Dudley and Daxton Koehler Spotted Together." The internet roared, and pushed a malicious narrative: "Matilda is the clingy fan complicating Gage's life" and "Was Matilda cheating?" The hashtag trended.
Everything I've ever been hurt by rewound.
I called Gage. He came to me, driven, furious in a way that made the cameras buzz into a whole new kind of electricity.
"Don't," he told the reporters that blocked the studio exit. "She didn't."
When the first reporter shouted the malicious question about me, Gage said, "She is my girlfriend. I believe in her." The microphones danced. People gasped. My phone filled with cruel messages. Some were even praising Gage. Kimberly, however, was silent in that moment, as if she'd never expected the star to shield his prop.
I wanted to disappear. But he called me later with a single, simple voice message: "I'm coming to save you."
He did more than save me. He took the heat, published a video claiming our love was real, took phone calls from me even while he was in meetings, and then—quietly—began to uncover the edges of the trap.
"Who benefits from making you look bad?" he asked over a bowl of instant noodles at two in the morning. "Who had access to that angle, that night?"
"Daxton," I said, and the name tasted like rust in my mouth. "And—" I swallowed. "Kimberly. I heard her on a call; she played a clip. She said she would rather burn his star than let anything scare it."
He heard the tremor in my voice. "Show me."
So I did.
I gave him the files I'd saved, the voice memo of a man saying things that weren't his to say, the sliver of evidence that suggested a planned hit.
Gage's face narrowed. "Good. We need audiences to see the truth at once."
"How?" I asked.
He smiled, the kind that rearranges the world. "Publicly."
"We go public," he said, plain as night. "We will make them all watch the same footage. Then we will test their faces when the lie collapses."
He staged a press conference.
On the appointed evening, the hall thrummed with industry people, media, and a crowd of reporters who smelled a storm. The lights were bright enough to make sachets of powder glow. I was behind him on the stage—a small figure in a big world—but I wasn't staged like before. I stood there as his partner and not an extra. He introduced me, face steady.
"And tonight, I want to show you something," he said. "Some things happened to Matilda that were fabricated. We have evidence. We will show you exactly how it was done."
A murmur went through the crowd. Someone recorded. Phones held out like lighthouses.
He played a clip: an edited montage of messages, dispatches, the very voice memos wherein Daxton and Kimberly planned the angle that would smear me. It was cold, clinical. When the recording ended on Kimberly's voice discussing "destroying the loose thread," the lights in the room felt colder.
Daxton, who had been invited unknowingly to be present in the crowd, sat there at first with a poker face and then with slow horror. He mouthed something to Kimberly. Her expression shifted: from smug, to startled, to denial.
"No," she said, stunned, trying to get up. "You can't do this. You can't—"
"Why?" Gage asked, and his voice was small enough to pierce.
She tried to laugh it off. "This is a misunderstanding. We only did what's needed for exposure."
"You're accusing a woman of being a temp of your strategy," he said, each word a metronome. "You recorded your own plots? You recorded my colleague explaining the plan? Did you think we'd never play it?"
The lights focused on them. Someone in the back whispered, "She orchestrated this."
Daxton's face changed over the next minutes in a terrifying progression. First, he looked arrogantly unfazed. Then, as the timeline of guilt and motive had been laid bare, something like panic sparked. He stood, voice shaky, "I—it's not like that—"
"You're lying," Gage said. "You set her up to make yourself relevant. You never cared who you hurt."
The crowd's mood turned viscous. A woman who had been watching with a neatly composed smile spat, "Shame on you."
People murmured and turned their cameras towards Kimberly. The microphones pushed forward. She tried to turn it into a negotiation. "We did what was necessary for the business. The plan was to—"
A reporter cut in, voice like wire: "You framed a woman for your client's gain. You admitted it in that recording."
Kimberly's hands trembled. "I—this is being taken out of context."
"Where's your context?" another voice demanded. "You recorded yourself plotting what you later call out 'out of context.'"
Around them, the world cracked. Staff whispered. Someone from a rival agency filmed the scene live. "This is the moment," someone breathed, and the hashtag began to trend before the first callout column could be posted.
Daxton's expression crumpled last. The name he had carried as a kind of armor felt suddenly inadequate. He had been the schemer who wanted to paint himself as a victim, and now the mask fell.
"You were on my side once," I said, quiet but in the microphone. "You were my neighbor. You sat with me while we drew plans for the future. I didn't ask you to betray me."
He flinched.
"Isn't that the cruelest part?" I asked. "You pretended to help keep me relevant and instead set me on fire."
Daxton's hands went to his head. He tried to speak, to say something measured, but the words scrambled into nothing. He tried, "I—Matilda—"
The room's reaction was electric. Cameras zoomed into his face as if to magnify every micro-expression. "Come clean," Gage said. "Tell them why."
For minutes that stretched like elastic, the crowd watched as Daxton shifted through shame, denial, anger, and finally, breaking. He kept trying to protect himself, to blame the producer, to—at last—beg for forgiveness. "Please," he pleaded, voice thin. "I didn't mean—"
"Please stop," I said, and the microphone carried my small voice. "You had a choice. You chose the lie."
People around gasped. Some began to applaud. Others whispered about contracts and collaborations. An older woman stood up and shouted, "How could you?"
Kimberly attempted to salvage her image with a practiced performance: she looked contrite, wept on command, and promised reforms. But the video looped. The proof was the proof.
Daxton—his star sputtering—sank. He moved from arrogance to profanity to pleading. At one point, he made a move to reach toward me as if to beg me to understand. The cameras caught the movement and turned it into a thousand tiny accusations.
By the end of the hour, there were statements circulating: sponsors withdrawing, producers saying they'd open investigations, a line of callers asking tough questions. The crowd outside pressed with banners and phones. Strangers shouted at Kimberly's car. The rumor mill spun at top speed. She tried to call her PR allies, but the calls went to voicemail. The audience that had once relied on her came back like wolves—she had underestimated how quickly the industry can cannibalize its own.
Daxton's reaction was messier. Unlike Kimberly, whose network made calculations, he was alone. He tried to compose himself for a staged apology, but his voice broke. "I was desperate," he said, finally. "I thought the plan would help me. I never wanted things to go that far."
"You're ashamed," someone in the crowd said. "You should be."
He slumped. People recorded. People hissed. A table of interns who'd once been his fans whispered that they'd never been asked for forgiveness; they'd been used.
After the press conference, the fallout came fast. Sponsors publicly cut ties. The director of the short film Daxton had been shooting released a statement disowning any association. Kimberly was investigated. The agency task force called an emergency board meeting.
The most savage thing, perhaps—worse than contract losses—was what the crowd did. They turned on them such that even their public contrition felt hollow. On social media, there were threaded videos of their previous smiles, juxtaposed with the make-up of the conversation at the conference. "How could you?" ran the top reply. Someone made a compilation of Daxton's early, kinder moments and contrasted it with the moment he plotted.
And then, in a small, quiet flash that media missed, Daxton came to my studio. He sat in a chair, looked like he'd been through a storm and the rain had not yet stopped. He tried to explain. He tried to salvage the last strip of dignity. I listened, numb.
"This is for you," he said, and his voice was hollow.
"No," I said. "No, it's for you. You have to live with what you chose."
He left. I wish I could say I felt triumphant. I didn't. I felt exhausted. Vindication tasted like lead. But there was a part of me that had been seared into being: the Matilda who would not be set on fire.
The aftermath shifted the rest of my life. Gage held my hand and let the world watch. He fought with me against the smear, and he was not afraid to stand in the light for me. Kimberly's career crashed; not with a single dramatic arrest or a cinematic kneeling, but through the slow, grinding collapse of relationships and trust. Her phone no longer rang with favors. People who had once bowed to her left, their social media pointed fingers. She tried to apologize in private, to send me messages. I didn't answer.
Daxton—if his ruin could be called that—lost his chance. He tried to flirt with public forgiveness, asked to meet me. He arrived one afternoon on my studio doorstep, hat in hand and eyes wet. "I never meant—"
"Do you know what that means?" I asked. "You took a little girl's dreams and used them to lift yourself."
He fell to his knees, not theatrically, but broken. "Please," he said. "Please, Matilda."
I looked at him. I could have finished him with words; instead, I said, "You had your chance to be better. You chose otherwise."
Then I shut the door in his face.
Gage did more than shield me. He helped me get my "fallout" into a real life rewrite. The morning after the conference, he sat opposite me and said, "You're winning. Not because you were framed, but because you are you."
I spent the next months doing what I had always wanted—painting, entering competitions, and rebuilding my studio's reputation. The first big win came when a foreign illustration prize shortlisted my piece. The old "drop in hate" account that had been used to smear my name was reactivated by fans who watched the conference and saw the truth. They turned sympathy into support and followed me until my small studio got the buzz my work deserved.
Gage's career didn't fall apart. If anything, he grew braver. He made choices not to hide me anymore. He introduced me as his partner with a casual pride that made my chest hurt in the best way. In interviews, he would sometimes inject a quiet bit of proof—an anecdote about a time he saw me paint until dawn or a picture of me in ridiculous party hats. I stopped being a "stand-in" in people's eyes; I became Matilda Dudley, the artist Gage liked to brag about.
People gossiped. People continued to examine motives. Movies get made of scandals. But the lesson that never left me was that kindness is not always loud. Sometimes it is a jacket in winter, a small text, a man who chooses to hold you despite the noise.
Time steadied us. Kimberly's name became a footnote in the industry. Daxton rebranded himself in smaller venues, but the sparkle was gone. I kept sketching. Gage kept protecting me, not by staging a savior act, but by choosing me again and again when it would have been easier to choose his career.
Months later, on a quiet night, he came back from a press junket and found me in my kitchen, hands stained with paint. He walked up behind me and read the title on the small, scorched photo that used to sit on his bedside: a picture of him in front of a burned corner of a theater, soot on his jaw, raw and embarrassed.
"You still keep that," I said.
He nodded. "I keep it because it reminds me there was a day I was small and someone—someone like you—pulled me out."
I touched the frame. The little burned edge of the photograph smelled faintly of smoke, like a memory that refused to fade.
"Don't let them forget," he whispered.
"I won't," I said. "Not because I want revenge, but because I want to remember who saved whom."
And that, of all the headlines and PR stunts and vicious threads, was the one thing that felt uniquely ours: a scorched photograph on a bedside table, the echo of a night when a mattress gave way and a life rearranged. It was not a promise or a cliché. It belonged only to the two of us—and every time I looked at it, I remembered the exact way he smelled when he laughed, the way his fingers felt when they steadied mine, and the night the world watched us and was forced, by our words and our proof, to blink and adjust.
The End
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