Oh! My Pretty Boy

“I, Ferdinand Alexander ‘Sandro’ Alfonzo Mercado II, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the position of your boyfriend.”

My voice rang through the courtyard with the clean, practiced confidence of a man who had never been interrupted.

People stopped walking.

Of course they did.

Students gathered along the stone path, beneath the old arches, beside the fountain where the water kept running as if it had no respect for history. Phones lifted one by one. Small black lenses pointed at me from every direction, eager to preserve the moment Sandro Mercado chose a girl in public.

The nation’s choice.

The golden grandson of a dead hero.

The kind of boy whose family name appeared on hospitals, scholarships, campaign banners, and the sides of buildings poor people entered with lowered voices.

I smiled because a Mercado knew when he was being watched.

Perfect teeth. Perfect posture. Perfect timing.

Across from me, Yvette Veronica Mendoza Gonzalez stood with the stillness of something carved and left in a chapel.

Her dark hair moved in the afternoon wind. Nothing else did. She did not blush. She did not lower her gaze. She did not press her hands to her mouth like the girls before her, as if my attention were a blessing too heavy to hold. She only looked at me with those unreadable eyes, calm and empty enough to make the courtyard feel colder.

I hated, suddenly, that I could not tell what she was thinking.

I continued anyway.

“I swear to love you, support you, tolerate every strange little habit you have, including that impossible attitude of yours, and live each day with you with all my heart.” I offered her the bouquet. Red roses. Imported. Expensive. Their stems were wrapped in black satin, because white had felt too innocent and ordinary flowers would have been an insult. “So, Yvette, will you be my girl?”

Silence dropped over us.

Not the sweet silence before applause.

Something thinner.

Meaner.

For one second, then two, then three, she said nothing.

My smile stayed in place. I had been trained for that. Smile during speeches. Smile beside coffins. Smile when reporters ask about legacy and sacrifice and public service, as if a family’s power becomes holy when enough dead men are placed in front of it.

But I felt the eyes on my back.

The phones.

The whispers.

The waiting.

Am I not good enough?

The thought came so quickly that it disgusted me.

Me?

Ferdinand Alexander Alfonzo Mercado II?

I was born beneath chandeliers and baptized beneath cameras. My first birthday had a guest list longer than most weddings. My bloodline was recited in classrooms. My mistakes were softened into charm before they reached the newspapers. People did not reject me. They admired me. Envied me. Desired me. Feared disappointing me. Lied when they claimed they did not.

But Yvette only stared.

Then, slowly, she straightened her back.

Something entered her expression.

Not anger. Anger would have pleased me. Anger meant heat. Anger meant I had touched something inside her.

This was worse.

This was absence.

“I am Yvette Veronica Mendoza Gonzalez,” she said, her voice clear enough for the courtyard to swallow, “born without a famous name, without a perfect family, without anything special to offer except an unknown past and an uncertain future.”

She stepped closer.

The roses between us looked theatrical now. Ridiculous. A prop in a performance where one actor had forgotten to obey the script.

“And I don’t want to be your girl.”

The crowd stirred.

A soft, hungry sound.

My hand tightened around the bouquet. A thorn bit through my palm. Pain flashed bright and immediate, and I welcomed it because it was easier to understand than her face.

Yvette lifted her chin.

“I don’t need someone like you.”

Then she pushed me.

Not hard.

That was the insult.

It was not enough to make me fall, not enough to make her seem cruel, not enough to turn anyone against her. It was small. Controlled. Almost careless.

Just enough to make me move.

Just enough for every raised phone to capture Ferdinand Alexander Mercado II taking a step back.

Touched.

Refused.

Moved aside like any ordinary man.

The courtyard broke open into whispers.

My face burned so fiercely I thought, for one ugly second, that I might strike the flowers across the stones. I did not. Mercados did not lose control where cameras could see. We smiled for scandals. We buried rage under tailored sleeves and called it discipline.

So I looked only at her.

At the girl who had taken my perfect confession and cut its throat in public.

She turned away.

She did not wait for my answer.

She did not look back to see what her rejection had done.

As if my answer no longer mattered.

For twenty-five years, I had been wanted.

Chased.

Praised.

Chosen before I even entered the room.

Girls had cried because I smiled at them. Families invited me to dinner and pretended it was not an audition. Professors excused my absences. Friends laughed at jokes I left unfinished. Men twice my age lowered their voices when they spoke to me. Women who called themselves independent still glanced toward my seat when I entered.

The world had trained itself to open.

And then there was Yvette.

Yvette, who did not tremble.

Yvette, who did not soften.

Yvette, who looked at me like I was a locked door in a burning house and she would rather die than touch the handle.

My palm stung.

I looked down.

Blood had gathered where the thorn broke skin. A thin red line slid toward my wrist, dark against the pale inside of my hand. For a moment, I watched it with the strange calm of someone observing evidence.

There it was.

Proof.

She had made me bleed.

For the first time in my life, the taste in my mouth was not victory.

It was humiliation.

It crawled under my skin. It settled behind my ribs. It whispered in the private, rotten place inside me that had always known admiration was not enough. Worship was not enough. Being chosen by everyone meant nothing if the one person who refused me was allowed to walk away untouched.

She thought she could reject me and continue living as if nothing had happened.

She thought this ended because she had decided it ended.

Poor Yvette.

No one had taught her the cost of humiliating a man who had inherited everything except restraint.

I lowered the roses to my side.

The cameras were still watching. The crowd was still breathing around me, pretending not to enjoy my disgrace. I gave them what they wanted because I had learned early that people forgive almost anything if it is delivered with beauty.

I smiled.

Not for them.

Not for the Mercado name.

Not for the dead hero whose portrait hung in halls where men made decisions that ruined lives.

This smile belonged only to Yvette’s retreating back.

I had never chased a girl before.

Perhaps that was why my heart beat harder with every step she took away from me.

Not with love.

Love was too clean a word for what opened inside me.

It was hunger.

It was insult.

It was the quiet, poisonous certainty that she had made a mistake the moment she believed I would accept her no.

I, Ferdinand Alexander “Sandro” Alfonzo Mercado II, will not back off.

I will not become a rejected memory in Yvette Veronica Mendoza Gonzalez’s life.

I will learn the shape of her days. The names she answers to. The places she goes when she thinks no one is watching. I will learn what makes her look away, what makes her hesitate, what makes her afraid. I will find the cracks in that cold little wall she hides behind, and when I find them, I will not knock gently.

I will make her see me.

Need me.

Choose me.

And when she falls, she will not fall into love like girls do in songs.

She will fall because I have taken away every other place to stand.

That is not a promise.

It is my mission.