The Sympathizer's Smile

a short story by Roger B. Rueda

There are moments that don’t crash into you—they unravel. They drift in like fog through a broken window, not to announce their arrival, but to remind you they've always been there. Waiting. Watching. Quiet.

His smile was like that.
Not loud. Not sharp. Not the kind that made your heart stop, but the kind that made it slow down and sigh. Soft. Inconspicuous. And ultimately, dangerous. It was the kind of smile you’d only recognize as a warning in hindsight—when the damage is already done and your breath tastes like regret.

I remember it exactly. The way his lips barely curled, as though too much joy would betray him. The slight tilt of his head when he looked at me—not out of flirtation, but calculation, disguised so delicately it felt like shyness. There was a gentleness in him I mistook for fragility. But fragility can be real. This wasn’t.

It was practiced.
Deliberate.
A performance honed not in front of mirrors, but in front of people who wanted to fix something.
And I—I’ve always wanted to fix something.

That’s what made me the perfect choice.

He came to me like a line from a well-written script: with pauses in the right places, eyes that knew when to flicker with awe, and a story wrapped in need. And I—professor, reader, fool—read him the way I read poetry. With hunger. With projection. With every ounce of hope I had left for beauty in broken things.

I should have known then. I should have closed the door when he stood there with his awkward notebook and wide-eyed questions. I should have seen the danger in the softness. But people like me—people who teach literature for a living—are often the last to recognize the plot they’re already in.

We annotate other people's tragedies.
We don’t see when our own has begun.

*****

It began—like most tragedies do—with something embarrassingly small.

A hallway.
The kind of hallway that echoes too loudly in the afternoons, the kind that smells like old books, rusted ceiling fans, and whatever sandwich the philosophy instructor forgot in his desk drawer again. Sunlight broke through the shutters like a secret too golden to trust. And then there was him—already there, waiting just outside the faculty door.

I didn’t hear him approach.
He just appeared.
As if conjured.
As if he had always been standing there, rehearsing the moment, deciding exactly how much of himself to reveal.

“Sir, sorry po... I didn’t know if I could ask this,” he said.

His voice was quiet, careful, like he was trying not to wake something. Or someone.

I looked up and saw him properly for the first time—Paolo.

That was the name he gave me. Short for something longer, something too regional to be fashionable. He was slight, sunburned, and apologetic in the way island boys sometimes are—as if their very existence needs to be justified to the world that forgot to give them anything easy. His uniform was too large, the sleeves rolled in awkward cuffs like a child pretending at adulthood. His shoes were scuffed, his ID lanyard faded. He wore his poverty like politeness—clean, ironed, invisible unless you knew how to look.

He said he was an Education major. First-generation college student. No connections. No one in the family who’d ever finished high school. And he said it with that sideways humility—shame softened by charm—that made me want to listen. That made me want to help.

But it was more than that.

He had this way of making himself smaller—physically, emotionally, almost spiritually. He shrunk himself to fit the moment. He tucked his shoulders in, tilted his head downward, held his hands in front of him like he was preparing for prayer—or punishment.

It was a performance.
One that bordered on brilliance.
But I didn’t see it for what it was. Not yet.

I just saw a boy trying to ask about a Yeats poem he hadn’t read. Or was it the grading rubric? The truth is, I don’t remember what he asked. I only remember how he looked at me when he asked it—like the world was finally giving him permission to speak, and I was the one holding the key.

And in that moment—shame on me—I felt chosen.

What a dangerous thing it is, to be needed by someone who knows how to make you feel irreplaceable.

I would learn, far too late, that people who learn to survive on very little often become the most gifted actors. Because they’ve had to be. Because the world doesn’t give kindness to the unpolished unless they know how to perform for it.

And he performed for me.

I just hadn’t learned my cue yet.

*****

He became a fixture. Not suddenly, but with the soft inevitability of a shadow learning the rhythm of its host.

First, it was outside my office.
He’d wait there, pretending to reread notes he never understood, eyes lifting every few minutes like he was surprised I hadn’t noticed him. Then he began bringing coffee—not good coffee, just the kind from the canteen: burnt, sweetened with too much powdered creamer, and handed to me with that half-smile, that barely-there gratitude that made me feel like I was rescuing someone. As if my very attention had weight. Value. Mercy.

From there, he migrated inside—into the small circle of quiet I had carved around myself. He sat on the wooden stool beside my desk like it was sacred. He never touched my things, but he watched them. My books. My pens. My habits. As if he was memorizing a role he would soon be asked to play.

And then, like a tide that had been slowly creeping in all along—he was in my bed.

A twin-sized mattress in a flat so narrow I could touch the stove from my pillow. A space that had once been mine. Now halved.

He didn’t ask to stay. He simply stayed.

He told me things in that room. Things soft enough to sound like secrets.
He said he’d never been kissed before.
That no one had ever wanted him.
That I made him feel real.

He said those things beneath my bedsheets, into my skin, in that breathless moment when the line between desire and danger feels like silk.

And I believed him.
Because I wanted to.

Because after Marco left—cold, final, without an apology—I had told myself I would never let another man in who didn’t knock first. But Paolo hadn’t knocked.

He hadn’t needed to.

He arrived in the ruins of someone else. And in the way water finds the cracks in stone, he slipped into everything Marco had left hollow. My routines. My body. My vulnerability.

And I—lonely, foolish, unbearably human—let him.

He never asked about Marco. Not directly.
But he didn’t have to.

There’s a silence some people wear like armor. Paolo wore it like access. Like he already knew what had come before him, and he was here not to replace it, but to study its absence.

Looking back, I don’t remember the exact moment he stopped being a visitor. I only remember how quickly the bed stopped feeling like mine.

And how terrifyingly easy it became to confuse being needed with being loved.

*****

It arrived like a curse.

No message. No warning. Just a link—glowing blue on my cracked phone screen. No sender name. No context. Just a caption, chilling in its restraint:

“This your student, sir?”

My thumb hovered over it longer than I care to admit. There was something predatory in the quiet of it. Something surgical. Like whoever sent it wasn’t angry—just certain.

I tapped it.

And the world I thought I knew began to unravel.

There he was—Paolo.
Not the shy, uncertain boy who fumbled with his lanyard and blushed when our hands touched. Not the island boy who said he had never been kissed. No, this version of Paolo was different.

Rehearsed.
Deliberate.
Devastating.

He was half-naked, moaning—but not in passion. In precision. Every sigh, every arch of his back, every glance at the camera was intentional. This wasn’t captured. This was crafted. A scene made for impact. For narrative.

And I saw it—too late.
The angle. The lighting. The distance. The softness of the focus.

This wasn’t voyeurism. It was direction.

And then—somewhere near the end—he looked at the lens.
Not through it. At it.

And I saw the reflection. Just for a second.
But enough.

It was Marco.
My Marco.
The man who had left me, unannounced, unfinished.
The one who’d taken what was tender and packed it in silence.

Two betrayals.
One frame.
And me—caught in the center of a story I hadn’t even known I was in.

I don’t remember the rest of the video. I don’t think I ever finished it. Something inside me cracked—not like glass, but like bone: quiet, slow, permanent.

Later that week, the university received a letter. Not from Paolo. Not even from him directly. But from his mother.

Formal. Accusatory. Polished with just enough false humility to sound true.

The allegations were what I expected.
Emotional manipulation.
Abuse of power.
Predation.

And though no one said it outright, the unspoken part screamed louder than all the rest:

A man like you should’ve known better.

I was advised to settle. Quietly. For everyone’s sake.
Not because I was guilty.
Not even because there was evidence.

But because of what I represented.

Because here, in this country, where love between men hides behind curtains and shame, it takes very little for affection to turn into scandal.

Here, we are always almost guilty.
And sometimes, that’s enough.

So I signed the papers. I watched my career shrink to a whisper. I wrote a letter of “temporary leave,” though we all knew it was permanent. I walked past students who used to hang on my words, now whispering them like gossip.

And Paolo?

He posted something the next day.
A filtered photo of a sunset.
Captioned: “Healing is painful, but necessary.”

No tags.
No mention.
No acknowledgment.

Just that.

Just enough to finish what he started.

*****

Memory is cruel. It doesn’t return when you need it. It waits—deliberately, almost gleefully—until you’re too broken for it to make a difference.

I remembered too late.
It came to me not like a thunderclap, but a whisper.

Paolo.
That Paolo.

The name didn’t sting at first. But then I saw Marco’s face again—months before he left, crumpled and hollow-eyed in the dark corner of my bed, whispering something I hadn’t taken seriously at the time.

"He ghosted me after I paid for his enrollment."
"He said he loved me."
"I was stupid."

And I had laughed. Not out of cruelty, but disbelief. The idea that Marco—so pragmatic, so composed—had fallen for a boy who vanished after the money cleared. A boy from the provinces, fragile and charming in that carefully unpolished way. A boy who never stayed.

Paolo.

It was the same boy.

The same name. The same eyes. The same script.
Only this time, the victim was me.

He was never innocent. Not of naivete. Not of circumstance. Not of survival.
He had learned—somewhere between his first sob story and his fifth manipulated heart—that softness was a currency. That if you look small enough, quiet enough, lost enough, people will hand you everything just to feel like they saved you.

But Paolo didn’t want to be saved.

He wanted to win.

And in this town—this small, gossip-fed, reputation-thirsty town—cleverness always learns how to wear a bruise it never earned.

He cried when he needed to. Shrank when he was watched. Performed grief the way some boys perform affection—just enough to pass, just enough to wound.

And me?

I became exactly what he needed:
His alibi.
His meal ticket.
His cautionary tale.

My name became the whispered warning in department halls, the lesson other professors repeated behind closed doors: Never get too close. Never believe the ones who cry with too much rhythm.

And Paolo?

He smiled. I’m sure of it. Somewhere, alone, scrolling through posts about mental health and forgiveness, he smiled. Because he’d done it again. He’d escaped the scene while I stood bleeding in it.

And the worst part?

I still wasn’t sure if he ever loved me.
But I knew—without question—he had studied me.

*****

I hear he’s doing his practicum now.

Someone mentioned it in passing during a faculty meeting, in that half-amused, half-resentful tone people reserve for stories they think are over. A new campus. A new mentor. A new beginning. That’s the thing about boys like Paolo—they don’t just move on. They reinvent.

I checked once. Just once.
His profile is public—of course it is.

The first thing I saw was a filtered photo: his face half-turned in golden-hour light, wearing academic regalia that looks just a little too borrowed. The cap sits slightly askew. The eyes are practiced—hollow in the middle, but radiant around the edges. And beneath the photo, a caption that hit harder than anything legal ever could:

“Healing isn’t linear.”

Four words.
Soft. Poetic. Marketable.

They sat on my screen like a knife with a pink ribbon tied around the handle. As if trauma had been turned into aesthetic. As if he was the one who needed healing.

And maybe he did.

Maybe boys like Paolo break people not because they’re cruel, but because it’s the only way they know how to feel whole. Maybe pretending to be broken is the only way they’re ever given permission to be seen.

But I still wonder.
Did he ever feel guilty? Even a little?
Did he ever think about what it cost me—my name, my trust, my ability to look at softness without suspicion?

As for me?

I still teach.
I still wake up too early, drink cold coffee beside my office window, and stare out at the same garden where students whisper stories they think professors can’t hear.

The ferry still hums in the distance. The hallway still smells like chalk and humidity. Time has passed, but the memory doesn’t fade—it just softens, like a bruise you stop checking but still feel when you press too hard.

And now, when young men linger too long after class, when they say “Sir” with just a little too much awe, I no longer correct them.

I just smile.
The way Paolo used to.

Soft.
Inconspicuous.
Dangerous.

Because now, I know how the story ends.

Because now, I know how to write the warning into the beginning.