One Favor Too Many

“Then what is this?” She gestured between them. “Because I know what we said it was. I know the arrangement. But something changed and now you’re… gone. And I don’t know how to pretend that’s fine.”
He stepped back to let her in. She stood in the middle of his small living room, rain-damp and steady, waiting.
“Matteo called me,” Luca said.
She closed her eyes briefly. “Of course he did.”
“He’s not wrong to worry. I’m his best friend and you’re his sister and if I get this wrong, I don’t just lose you. I lose him too.”
“And if you do nothing?” she said quietly. “You lose me anyway. And you know it.”
The words landed softly, but they landed hard.
He looked at her — really looked, the way he’d been carefully not doing for weeks. The way she held herself, steady and a little braced, like she was prepared to be disappointed but had come anyway. That had always been the thing about Dani. She showed up.
“I’ve been in love with you,” he said, “since the night of your university graduation party. You were arguing with your father about Calvino and you were completely wrong and completely certain, and I thought, that’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever seen.”
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I was not wrong about Calvino.”
“You were absolutely wrong.”
“Luca.” Her voice was soft now, the composed mask entirely gone. “That was four years ago.”
“I know.”
“You waited four years and then let me trick you into a fake relationship to figure it out?”
“To be fair,” he said, “you’re very persuasive.”
She crossed the room and stopped just in front of him, close enough that he could see the rain still caught in her hair. “Matteo will survive,” she said. “He’s dramatic, but he loves us both. He’ll come around.”
“You’re very confident about that.”
“I’m always confident,” she said. “You know this about me.”
He did. He knew this, and the way she took her coffee, and the name she’d given the dog outside his office. He knew the sound of her laugh when something genuinely surprised her and the particular silence she kept when she was thinking hard. He had been quietly collecting her for years without admitting it, and now she was standing in his living room in a damp coat, looking at him like the answer had always been obvious.
He reached up and tucked a strand of wet hair back from her face, his fingers barely grazing her cheek. She didn’t move away.
“This stops being a favor right now,” he said.
“It stopped being a favor,” she said, “the first time you held my hand at that dinner table and I didn’t want to let go.”
Outside, the Roman rain came down steady and silver over the old stones of the city, indifferent to everything except the fact that it was beautiful. Inside, Luca smiled — slow and certain, the kind of smile a man only finds when something he’d stopped hoping for walks through his door in a damp coat and refuses to leave.
He took her hand. She held on.
And somewhere across the city, his phone buzzed with a message from Matteo that read: “Just talk to her already. I’ve known for months. You’re both exhausting.”
Luca laughed, showed Dani the screen, and she laughed too — the real laugh, the surprised one — and the last wall between them came down as quietly and completely as the rain.

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About the Author

Sophie Alderidge — a student of human attachment, for whom friendship always hides something more. Just do not mention about your handsome brother or his friend …

— Sophie Alderidge

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Categories: Forbidden, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, contemporary romance, fake relationship, forbidden romance, love story, romance, Rome, short fiction, short story, slow burn

July 13, 2026

10min-stories