Sweet Romance11 min read
"You were never my backup — and that bell in the milk shop still rings"
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"Get off me, Eliza. Get off my couch."
The first words he said to me that night were meant to shove me away. He had his hands wide on either side of me, pinning me to the sofa. I could taste the wine on my lips, and the room tilted. His face was a shadowy high-contrast thing; I couldn't see the fine lines, only the hard edges.
"You owe me nothing," I said, trying to stand. My words slurred.
Sebastian's jaw tightened. "Playtime's over. Get off my shoulder, get back to your life."
I blinked. "Sebastian—"
"Eliza Pierce," he cut me off, and his voice went low, "I am not your backup."
The words landed like a drop into a still pond. I tasted something sharp and metallic, then I laughed, the wrong kind of laugh. "Who said I was your backup?"
"You cried for him in the rain and pretended it was the weather." His thumb brushed my cheek and I swore for a second it was gentleness. Then he dragged me upright, toweled my hair like he owned the right to touch me, and pushed me toward the bathroom.
"Go shower," he ordered. "You smell like cheap regret."
"I—" My knees were unsteady, the bathroom tiles cold. Water cut my face and I crouched against the wall, the shower drowning everything out for a moment, then the door banged.
"Eliza, don't cry in there," he called. "Three minutes, get out or I break the door."
He was ridiculous and impossible and, impossibly, he was my childhood friend. He had always been there, the boy who laughed too loud and ran too far and then, one day, told me he liked me with a seriousness that made the air stop.
I remembered that confession like a postcard pressed in an old book: the way he stood too close, the way his voice had cracked once, the way I said no because my head shifted to the other boy who smelled like coffee and patience—Daniel Campos.
"I said it was the rain," I sniffed as I opened the bathroom door. I wrapped Sebastian's oversized sweater around myself. He didn't look at me as he chopped carrots at the kitchen counter.
"You want me to call him for you?" I asked, sudden and stupid hope flickering. "He's your roommate. He always picks up when you call."
Sebastian's knife paused, then kept cutting. He said nothing. He didn't look at me. He tossed the diced carrots into the rice cooker, set it humming, and finally—after everything else—he laughed.
"Why would I call Daniel for you?" He said it soft, but there was the bite. "He's my rival, Eliza. Why should I help you reach him?"
My fingers tightened on the phone. "Please."
He stepped out of the kitchen and shoved the phone into my palm, fingers cold. Then he walked to the balcony and smoked like someone who didn't want to be known as fast.
Daniel's voice was distant and polite. "Eliza, I'm sorry."
Then line dead.
I stared at the phone. Sebastian had returned to the sofa and watched me sleep for an hour, like he had nothing better to do. At two in the morning I woke because he touched my forehead, and said with a string of angry affection, "Damn. I owe you for a previous life."
I got sick after that night, a fever that made the world fuzzy. Sebastian didn't flinch. He nursed me, brought soup, and after a month I was whole enough to go find a job. He guarded me with his irritations and his silent insistence.
A month later, after a night of overtime, he told me to take a taxi home and he would follow. I walked into my building and my phone buzzed—"at home"—from him. I stopped, and then I saw him leaning against the dim steps between two blocks. Daniel was slumped on a bench nearby, smelling like cheap beer.
I crouched and touched Daniel's shoulder. He mumbled "stomach". I took him to the hospital, and while a nurse cleaned him out, I lied about where I'd been so Sebastian wouldn't worry. Daniel said "thank you" before he sank back to sleep.
"Don't be a habit," the nurse scoffed as she left. "Drink less, honey."
I left with an ache. In the taxi I remembered Christmas when Daniel had left me in the snow because his ex had returned. I remembered Sebastian appearing like a lighthouse that night, tired and raw.
Days stacked. I learned small things about Sebastian: he could cook, scrub floors, tie my shoelaces when I couldn't reach for a moment. He was blunt and proud and stayed beside me with a sort of territorial care that embarrassed me. But I loved Daniel in flickers—because his face fit the shape of my longing. I loved Sebastian as a whole mess that couldn't be sorted into tidy pieces.
At the office, Daniel popped in like a ghost with a fresh haircut and questions that weren't apologies. He asked me out to eat with the manner of a man who felt entitled. "I won't bother you long," he said. "I just need to know—are we done?"
"I'm done," I said.
Later, he tried to pull me back. He was awkward when he tried. "You and Sebastian... do you...?" He asked like an accuser. "Twenty years, you two, and you can still not be with him, huh?"
I closed my mouth. The words sat like stones. He added me back on WeChat, sent me trivial messages that sounded like ghosts. I didn't respond.
At home, Sebastian kept not asking me to explain. Once I tried to tell him about Daniel calling me the night he knocked over an advertising board and almost got hurt; he watched my phone in silence and said, "Did you miss him?" as if assessing a wound. When I shoved the phone at him, all he said was, "You're crying because of a man."
He said the wrong, territorial things with the right feeling. He hated the idea that he should soothe me. He wanted me to stop needing others. His "I don't comfort people who cry for other men" became a dare I didn't know how to take.
Time bends in the small ways: a soup, a text, a door slammed open, a laugh that used to be for us both.
One night, seven minutes before the milk shop closed on Qian Street, Daniel cornered me by the office exit. "Ten minutes, just ten," he begged. He pulled me to a stall where a Valentine's display played cheesy music. He proposed redoing us, rewinding us.
"I loved you once," he said, "you can love me again."
"Daniel," I said, steady, "I used to, but I don't now."
Then the display collapsed—an advertising stand fell and David (my brain kept saying Daniel in definitions) was caught in the crowd as the metal brushed the aisle. He was winded, bleeding. I ran for help. Later, in the ER, he mumbled thanks and I left, late, to find Sebastian.
At 11:40 I pushed open the bell of the seven o'clock milk shop. The bell chimed the same way it had when we were teenagers—thin and honest. He wasn't there. I sat for an hour and waited for an apology he never gave.
Next morning, I went to his company to tell him it was a misunderstanding, to plead for the constable of truth. He was there with a girl—Ines Martins—his laughter bright and free. She hit him playfully. He bowed like a gentleman for a joke. The distance between us felt like the length of a long country.
"Ines," he called later, "I always thought of Eliza as a sister." He smiled without hiding the fact she'd asked for her chance.
"Maybe I do have a chance," Ines teased, and walked on.
That day the air changed. The Sebastian I knew—loud, overflowing, reckless—was back. The person who had been retreating for months was suddenly his old self when he was near Ines. I would later watch them move furniture together, move jokes through rooms, measure each other's tastes. I sorted my own feelings in the dark for months.
"Do you still like him?" I finally asked the night he took me to the dumpling shop because his stomach said so.
"Ten years," he said. "Are you insane enough to think I can just stop liking someone because of a silly timeline?"
"I lied about missing him," I said after I boiled my crisis into a question. "I went to him that night."
He looked at me the way a man looks at a map he has reread too often. "We missed each other," he said. "We failed to meet. It's over."
Then he dated Ines. He told me they were together because she asked him to try. "She wanted an arrangement to forget someone else," he told me plainly when she wasn't around. "It was supposed to be temporary. But things happen."
It hurt in that heavy, growling way. I couldn't sleep. I ate without taste. Work blurred. Once, I even took a taxi to his address and stood on the pavement, watching the study lamp glow like a small sun. My fingers went numb with the attempt to press the doorbell, but I left.
On my birthday, Daniel came with a box and the air of theatrical contrition. Sebastian arrived in a gray suit, and said casually—"He's moved on. Ines and I..." He paused, and smiled like a man handing someone a knife that cut both ways. "We are together."
The birthday cake tasted like a hollow thing. I walked out. He called to say he had "arranged another apartment". He told me it would be better for me to be elsewhere. He did it gently, like he had practiced it for months.
I drank. Not because I liked how it numbed the hurt, but because the crowd said wine made things small. It only made my stomach lurch. I threw up in the bathroom and he stood outside the door, narrow with a question I could not answer. He rubbed my back and said, "You don't need to play games."
I went crazy with apologies those nights. "I'm sorry I couldn't see it sooner," I said. "I'm sorry I wasted you."
"I didn't waste anything on you," he said with an odd, shaky laugh. "I was here."
"Will you come back?" I asked once, my throat raw.
"I could never promise what you want," he said. "I am not in the habit of making vows to someone who walked away."
I moved out. He watched me from the passenger seat as the moving truck pulled away. His hand found the back of my neck and covered it like a landlord covers a tenant.
They left me. I told myself I would be okay. But the nights were long.
Two months passed in a slow, gray blur. I taught myself not to call him, not to text, not to fling myself into the little joys that burned as if on borrowed light. I kept telling myself: distance makes you calm.
Until he got sick.
The phone call from his mother came like a small storm: "He's running a fever. Could you come? He might need you—he told me he couldn't find you." I ran. I found him pale, with a hospital gown and an embarrassed, stubborn look.
"I'm not broken," he croaked.
"You were sick," I said. "You couldn't tell me because you didn't want me to come."
He didn't answer. He let me help him. For the first time in months, the space between us felt like a window.
At the hospital Daniel stopped me in the corridor, and muttered, "You look terrible." Then, as if desperate, "Do you hate me?"
"You dropped me once," I said. "I don't like you the way I did."
He frowned, and there was no real villain in his face—only regret. If there had been, it would have been too simplistic.
Weeks later, a rumor began to clasp the city like ivy: Daniel had been spreading that he and I had almost reconciled for his sake and then I dumped him publicly. That wasn't true. But people liked stories.
There was a fundraiser at the municipal art hall. Daniel showed up in a crisp jacket and a practiced smile. He was being handsome and solemn and a man who knew how to win public favor. He bumped into the mayor, smiled into the camera, and made meaningless promises.
In a corner I found Sebastian with Ines, both oddly easy together, both oddly distant when the crowd thickened. Daniel moved through the room like a man testing the floor for applause. He walked up to a dais microphone with an ease I recognized from my own conversations with him—calm, polished, practiced.
At that point I decided I had been given one last small, honest strength. I stepped onto the stairs and walked straight up to the microphone while the host fussed with the program.
"I have something to say," I started. The crowd hummed, a tide of paper cups and polite breath. Daniel smiled like he was about to be applauded. "Daniel Campos—" I allowed the name a second to catch in the light. "—has been telling people that he tried to reconcile with me, that I rejected him in front of everyone, and that I humiliated him."
"That's not true," Daniel's smile faltered, just a fraction. "I never—"
The room leaned toward drama. Someone took out a phone.
"He left me in the snow once," I said. "He left me to his ex for weeks. He was cruel in a quiet, slow way. He begged after I left. He asked for forgiveness in whispers. And then he came to this same hall two weeks ago, flirting with donors who didn't know he had treated me like a mat for his feet."
My voice tightened. I thought of hospital lamps and cheap beer and the hollow little boxes of apology gifts he sent. "He told people he loved me. He told some of your donors that we'd reunited. He lied for sympathy. He told his story again to anyone with listening ears so he could build a pity shield."
A camera light found his face.
"That's not true!" Daniel barked. He looked around. "Eliza is lying—"
"No." I shook my head. "I am not lying for anyone. If you want to know the truth, ask the nurse in Ward B who cleaned your vomit at 2am last month. Ask the person who called an ambulance when you fell against the advertising stand. Ask the woman who sat with you in the ER at midnight."
His expression changed. First he was smug. Then his jaw twitched. Then his eyes flashed with panic. For the first time in months I saw something crack in his countenance. He moved toward me like a man trying to rearrange a falling picture.
"You're lying!" he said louder. "You're making this up because you want sympathy. You want to ruin me!"
The crowd's chatter rose. People began to murmur and to point. An old client shook their head like a judge. Two younger people started recording on their phones. A woman with good lipstick took pictures and whispered into her phone, forwarding the scene.
"Daniel," Sebastian said from the side, his voice small but cutting. "Sit down."
Daniel's face turned from anger to disbelief. "You—you're on her side?" His voice wavered. "But you—"
Ines' eyes were wide. The room smelled like too much perfume and citrus canapés.
"How could you do this?" Daniel demanded of me. "You came here to make me look bad."
"No," I said. "I came here because men like you make women disappear to save their face. You want everyone to say you are noble. You are not. You used your charm to cover the fact you avoided commitment and then you told a thousand people you're the wounded party."
For a moment he tried to laugh and failed. Then his defense shifted to denial. "You used me!" he spat. "You used my feelings to climb up."
"That's not how it went," I said. "You refused to give me what I needed. You left when things were inconvenient. You only came back when you had a story to tell."
The people around us were breathing faster. Someone clapped once, sharp, like a judge dropping a gavel. A man near the back muttered, "Finally." Another whispered, "He always did look slick."
Daniel's face crumpled. Smugness left; denial scrambled to fury; fury slid into shame. He stepped back, a hand over his mouth, as if he might retch. His eyes darted. "This is slander," he said, voice shrinking. "You can't say this—"
"Then what are you going to do? Arrest me?" I asked. "Admit you tried to play both sides: you tried to win me back and to win pity from donors at the same time? Admit you left me on a cold night and now you're showing up to be loved for it?"
He had no words. He had rehearsed the lines of victimhood. In the bright lights and the phones pointed at him, it fell away. The donors shifted their gazes. The mayor's face went polite and worried. Someone whispered to their partner, "He's a liar."
Daniel's shoulders slumped. The public unraveling continued like a recorded symphony. He tried at first to scold me—"We were private!"—then to plead—"Please, Eliza, don't—"—then to bargain, "I'll tell them I was wrong,"—then to beg—"Please, stop."
But the crowd had already turned. Some people snapped photos. One woman laughed and said, "Shows up like he's a martyr. Pathetic." Another man spat, "He always looked small." A few people offered soft murmurs of sympathy to me instead. Others whispered praise at my courage.
Sebastian watched with a distant, hard gaze. When Daniel's face finally collapsed into silent weeping, a small group of restaurant volunteers surrounded him with bottles of water. He looked toward Sebastian as if Sebastian should save him. Sebastian turned his face away.
That night I left the hall with a ringing in my ears and a strange, fierce relief. People I worked with patted my shoulder and told me not to worry about petty men. Someone gave me a tissue. Someone told me they'd seen the whole thing and it felt like something undone.
Daniel's public disgrace was not a jail sentence. He was not dragged away by police. He was, however, stripped of a carefully curated image in front of strangers who once admired him. He tried to stand and failed. He tried to explain and everyone heard a man explaining away his own cowardice.
When the papers the next day printed the video, he called. He begged. He called me names then begged. He tried to woo me with that same old softness, and I finally—finally—hung up.
Sebastian and Ines traveled for a project and came back different. Ines told me, frankly, "I didn't want to use him. But someone had to help him step away from what he couldn't face." She laughed like she had already forgiven me the jealousy I felt. "You need to be fair to yourself."
I had learned to stop chasing what wasn't mine.
Weeks later, Sebastian and I sat on his couch. The electric kettle sang. He took my cold hands in his and said with a mocking grin, "So, did you think I was a backup?"
"You have a bad way of asking things," I replied.
He leaned close and brushed my hair. "I have been losing to you my whole life, Eliza. I always lose. But I kept showing up because you made me show up."
"Why now?" I asked.
He smiled crookedly, like a boy.
"Because sometimes you wait too long and then everything is on fire, and you either run away or you shove a bucket on it." He kissed me then, slow and honest, quick enough to make me dizzy and long enough to say yes.
Months later, sometimes when the small bell rings at seven o'clock milk shop on Qian Street, I close my eyes and hear the thin clarity of that tone, and it tells me the truth: I was never a backup. I was always someone's home.
The End
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