Sweet Romance13 min read
I became a lovesick scholar and won him (with a pink hair tie)
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The acceptance letter arrived while I was knee-deep in midnight review notes, the little envelope shaking in my hands like it had a life of its own.
"I got into Tsinghua," I said to my empty desk lamp, and the words felt like candy melting in my mouth.
"You really did it," Carolina called from the next room through the thin wall. "No way. Show me."
"I passed," I answered, and then louder, "I passed, Carolina. I—"
I stopped myself from yelling like a lunatic and instead smoothed the paper with trembling fingers. For three years I had chased numbers, doodled formulas in the margins of every notebook, and slept with textbooks under my pillow. I had become a creature of exams and determination. But none of that grit would have carried me across the finish line if not for one impossible reason.
"He said it," I whispered into the quiet of my tiny dorm room, as if Gideon could hear me from wherever he was and turn on a light just to look my way. "He said it: 'If you don't get into Tsinghua, no dating.'"
My voice carried a smile and a confession all at once. Gideon Legrand was the kind of myth that walked around campus in human shape—textbook-perfect hair, a gaze that read like a sharp paper cut, always at the top of every class, and a reputation that held like a steel beam. He spoke rarely and precisely. He called people out with three words and a cool tone, and somehow those three words could rearrange a day.
"He told me that." I laughed softly, thinking of the first time I had declared my problem aloud to him on the high-speed train, ridiculous and brave at the same time.
"You seriously went to the exam to win a boyfriend?" Carolina's voice carried laughter and awe.
"It's not about the boyfriend," I said too quickly. "It's about the challenge. If he says something impossible, I want to prove it possible."
I had been a mediocre student through most of high school, always a few steps behind, but when Gideon set a bar, I turned stubborn. "Fine," I told his invisible standard. "I'll get in."
The day Gideon told me those words, he looked at me with a grim infrequency that could freeze breath.
"If you don't get into Tsinghua, no dating," he had said.
"That's the only condition?" I answered then, reckless.
"Yes," he said.
I didn't think for long. I ran at the exam like a person who had one last game to play.
Now I had the paper that said I had made it. The taste of victory was as sweet as the syrup on the late-night milk tea I had queued for—two hours in line, money and willpower spent to bring Gideon a paper cup once. I kept thinking of that hair tie stuck on his wrist the first time I'd put it there, small and ridiculous and pink with a tiny rabbit charm.
"Do you remember the hair tie?" I asked out loud, and I could hear Carolina hum.
"How could I forget?" she said. "It was the cutest thing."
"I left it there for a reason," I said. "It was my first move."
The hair tie had been a joke and a shield at once. I had taken mine off and placed it around his wrist during a crowded dorm performance, like threading a small flag into his calm. He'd frowned, then worn it.
"You're such a clown," Gideon had said once when I tried to explain my antics.
"Am I?" I had teased back. "I say it's strategic."
In all the messy, loud, half-awkward attempts at attention, there were quiet moments too—like the time I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder on the train and he woke me up with a push that was almost a caress.
"Don't be a fool," he'd muttered.
"I wasn't," I'd said, blinking awake. "I was resting."
That push—so small, so precise—became one of my earliest proofs that he could be more than a distant puzzle.
I won't call myself brave. I will call myself persistent. I spent nights learning to like math, mornings swallowing bitter stress, afternoons drafting essays until every sentence was a promise. I wanted not just Tsinghua but the chance to stay close to him, to watch him study the way a scientist watches an experiment, unblinking.
After the acceptance, something strange shifted. Gideon and I kept orbiting the same spaces—classrooms, the library, the basketball court—like two satellites with slow, deliberate paths. I kept doing things that, taken out of context, seemed terribly foolish. I sat next to him in the same high-speed train again by "chance," I brought him milk tea I knew he didn't like, and I wore an expression that said, loudly and without subtlety, "I am here."
"You planned this?" Gideon asked once, cool as ever, when I slotted beside him on the train.
"It wasn't planned," I lied with a grin that wanted to be honest.
He watched me, and in that watching, I learned to read the small changes in his expression.
"Why are you here?" he asked, soft but plain.
"For you," I said, and the whole stupid room heard my sincerity.
He had friends who tried to guess my moves. Eli Avery, a friend I sometimes confided in, grinned at me.
"If the bootlicker rises, what then?" Eli asked.
"I'll probably delete and block everything," I joked.
He raised his eyebrows. "Delete and block a champion? You're ruthless."
"Someone has to keep the role pure," I said.
Everyone teased me for my "licking"—my total, generous, ridiculous devotion. They didn't know it was more than just devotion. It was the spine of my studies. Every time Gideon passed someone else in class, the sting of wanting to be better tightened in me. I wanted to be someone who deserved looking at.
Then the pink hair tie incident happened.
"We put one on his wrist," one of my classmates announced, a whisper spreading like confetti.
"You did what?" Gideon said later when I came to find him about it.
"It's strategic," I said, and in my own crazy way, I meant it. "A shield."
He tilted his head. "A shield against what?"
"Other girls," I said, ridiculous but fierce.
He didn't look amused. "You're making things awkward."
"Maybe," I sighed, "but I like awkward."
He wore the hair tie for a few days. Then the campus started to notice.
"Someone found out Gideon has a hair tie," a classmate texted. "There's a rumor."
The rumor became a small noise. Then a post appeared on the campus confession wall with a grainy photo of Gideon straightening his hat and the ribbon of the pink hair tie visible like an exclamation point.
"Problem solved," I thought. "He will stop getting random confessions."
But someone else was watching too—Jazmine Schumacher, who danced flawlessly and kept her notebooks in perfect lines, an elegant threat. Jazmine was gentle and sharp, the kind of girl who moved through a lecture hall like poetry. She tried to befriend Gideon in public performance rehearsals. I tried to be thorny.
"Why are you so loud about him?" Jazmine asked me once after one of our group practices ended.
"Because I like to make noise," I said.
"Does it work?" she asked, and I tried not to hear the arrogance in it.
"Sometimes," I said. "Mostly it makes people look."
Her eyes were kind then, and for a second I saw a girl who was perhaps lonely under her grace.
The rivalry with Jazmine taught me something—my methods were big and messy, but they had heart. She had every advantage, but she also had a quiet blankness I couldn't read. Still, Gideon didn't fall for drama or for shows of talent; he responded to stubbornness and to the sense of someone unafraid of being plain and sincere.
Then there was Clayton Malik, an older student everyone respected. He told me one afternoon, "If the bootlicker ever makes it, what will you do?"
"I'll probably delete and block everything," I repeated from habit.
He laughed. "Then you'll be the only one who knows how to be alone and also how to win."
That afternoon, I came up with an outrageous plan to meet Gideon on a high-speed train, to "bump into him" like storybook fate. I shifted seats until I was beside him, and then I made a show of small talk.
"What luck," I said, leaning like a conspirator. "Gideon Legrand on the morning train."
He frowned. "This is real luck."
"So, add me on WeChat?" I tried.
"Stop being loud," he replied, dry as stationery.
"You're so mean," I pouted. "Be nicer."
"Too loud," he repeated.
I tried to rest my head on his shoulder for a second. He pushed me away gently, and I felt something give—like the first time someone had pressed a button labeled "danger" and it didn't explode.
A small, strange peace settled on me: pursuing him didn't mean changing who I was. It meant keeping my stubbornness and letting it put me on the same stage as him.
Military training was where everything became sharper. The army instructors commanded attention with the kind of authority that clears thoughts out of your head. Gideon was there in the line like a statue with a soft heartbeat I began to hear.
Someone wrote on the campus wall during the long nights, "Gideon has a girl's hair tie. He must be taken."
I told myself I would be the one to protect him—not from attention, but from himself if he insisted on keeping his distance.
"Cover your face when you go out," I told him once as if I were a cartoon bodyguard.
"Only you?" he asked.
"Maybe only for you," I confessed, and he answered with a look that was almost a smile.
I kept trying new small things to prove the impossible had been proven. I queued for milk tea for him twice, meaningfully—though he told me he didn't like sweet things, and he refused to touch what I handed him the second time. I left sticky notes that said things like, "Remember to breathe" and "Don't skip lunch," and watched him read them with a face that mixed annoyance and something warmer.
"You're insufferable," he told me once, which I took as the most tender compliment.
"Insufferable and persistent," I corrected.
"If you insist," he muttered. "Fine."
He started to return the little gestures, one at a time, in the way of someone who didn't say grand things. He kept the hair tie. He let me come to his basketball games and tried not to be bothered by my loud cheering. He stopped refusing to take my small gifts—sometimes.
When he got sick with a sudden and scary stomach bleed, I learned the measure of the person behind the cool eyes. He was stubborn even in front of pain. He minimized it the way people do when they're afraid of being smaller in other people's eyes.
"You're lying about how you feel," I said, turning the question into an accusation because I didn't know the language of fear.
"I'm fine," he said.
Lies were sticky and thin; I saw right through them. He went to the hospital, and I sat in the waiting room like a student waiting for a grade, and every tick of the clock felt like an exam.
The doctor told me plainly that sometimes the safest path was not the bravest one. "He can go home soon," the doctor said carefully. "The treatment was effective. He was being cautious."
"Was he really in danger?" I asked.
"Not as dangerous as all of you think. He was stubborn about staying in—mostly it was his pride," the doctor answered.
When Gideon came back to the ward he looked thinner, and the color left his face like a paper sail. He smiled weakly when he saw me and did nothing to hide the way I wanted to collapse into his arms.
"You should have told me," I said.
"I didn't want you to worry," he replied.
I refused to be placated by his stoic armor. "I brought you porridge," I said, proud as if I'd delivered a monument.
He took a spoon and tasted it. "It's okay."
"Only okay?" I teased, pushing him.
"Don't be dramatic," he answered, and then—softly—"Thank you."
There was a moment in the sterile hospital light where everything felt fragile and too valuable. I rubbed his belly because the doctor said food would help. He flinched at first, then relaxed. Then he laughed—something like the sound a person makes when they realize they are home.
"You look ridiculous when you massage me," he complained.
"I look heroic," I said.
"I'm lucky," he answered, and that single admission felt like a confession composed of a thousand small seeds.
What's funny is that our relationship didn't begin with fireworks or declarations. It began with a cheap hair tie, with a penchant for being loud in the wrong places, and with me deciding to become better—not for him necessarily, but because he looked like a prize to chase and I loved to run.
There were jealousy storms. Jazmine cried after being refused—she had hoped he would choose differently. "I can't understand why he likes you," she sniffed one afternoon. "You're so loud and chaotic."
"I like chaos," I said, shrugging.
"Maybe he likes that too," she replied.
Clayton told me once, "Don't lose yourself for any man."
"Who says I'm losing myself?" I shot back. "I'm refining myself. That's not the same."
He looked at me like a person looking at a ship with a new sail. "Refine, but keep your corners," he advised. "Don't let them sand you down."
I kept a corner reserved for my own stubbornness. If anything, I learned how to channel it into exam scores, speeches, and presence—not desperation.
At the annual hundred-day rally for the national exam season, I surprised everyone. I climbed the stage and spoke from a place of simple truth. I told the crowd how I had chased a condition and how it had given me a reason to try harder. I told them it was okay to have strange, small motivations for big things.
"You don't have to be proud of your reason," I said into the microphone, "but it's yours. Use it."
When I walked down the stage and slid my hand into Gideon's—calm and almost casual—there was a ripple. People gasped and cheered. He didn't pull away. He didn't let go. He let me thread my fingers through his.
"You admit it?" I whispered.
"That I'm fascinated?" he said.
"Admit it," I pressed.
He smiled the smallest smile. "I am fascinated," he said. "But don't make it a habit."
"Too late," I grinned.
We learned each other in increments. He learned that I could be dangerously loud and also silently wise. I learned that his small acts—an extra pencil left for me, a book with an underlined sentence inside for me to discover—were how he loved. We built routines from these unnoticed notes.
"If I'm honest," he said once, late at night, "I checked what you would do if you won. I asked your friend what you said you'd do if you became the master of your own fate. I thought you'd delete everything and be proud that you'd won just for the sake of winning."
"Did you imagine I'd disappear if I got what I wanted?" I asked.
"I imagined you would change," he answered. "I didn't want to be the reason you became soft."
"Did I become soft?" I demanded.
"No. You are still annoyingly loud," he admitted, and there was something like warmth in it.
We held our strange, comfortable love like a careful treasure. It wasn't always graceful. Once I tried to move on and flirt with Clayton to test something in myself. I was embarrassed to find out quickly that my mouth said the wrong things when my heart kept tripping back to Gideon.
"You should just be honest with yourself," Clayton said gently.
"Honest?" I laughed. "That's one of the hardest things to be."
When I finally admitted to Gideon that I'd flirted with someone else as an experiment, he was cool and small and sharp. "Why would you do that?" he asked.
"Because I wanted to see if I'd choose you when other options existed. I wanted to see whether I was with you because I wanted you or because I had nothing better to do."
He looked at me like a patient teacher. "And what did you find?"
"I found out," I said with a laugh, "that my heart is stubborn too."
He took me by the shoulders and said, "Good. Keep being stubborn."
There were enough small defeats and victories to build a life with. We argued about silly things—about whether to go to the cafe or the library, about who gets the last slice of pizza—and we made up by sharing soups and old jokes. He stopped calling me insufferable as often, and I stopped pushing him into awkward situations just for the pleasure of watching his face.
"Promise me you won't change for me," he said one night.
"I won't," I said. "But I will try to be better."
That line—"I will try to be better"—is not the same as losing myself. It's me making a map. I learned to become someone who could stand next to him without feeling the world tilt. That was my greatest accomplishment.
We had fights like other couples, sometimes small and sometimes with the heat of whoever was hungrier for attention losing their mind. And along the way, people watched us and made their judgments.
One evening, Jazmine came up to me and said, "I don't hate you."
"That's progress," I told her.
She smiled a little. "You make him alive," she confessed.
He did. He made sure I felt seen. Once, in a crowded field, he squeezed my hand so tightly during a sudden rain that I couldn't help laughing. "You always make the wrong choice to stand in the rain," he teased.
"I make wonderful poor choices," I said.
"You do," he agreed.
At graduation, when students gathered and the sun was bright and everyone looked like a new printing press ready to stamp their blues into the world, I thought of the person who had set the impossible condition.
"If you don't get into Tsinghua, no dating," Gideon had said.
"Then we must have redefined the rules," I told him.
"You earned that hair tie," he said, touching the small pink loop at his wrist like a ritual.
"I did," I answered. "And you keep it like a trophy."
He laughed. "You used a hair tie as armor."
"Yes," I said. "Best armor ever."
We learned to make our vows out of ordinary things: silly small objects—ribbons, notes, cups of cold milk tea—and the repetition of being present. He continued with his research, I continued with my studies, and we held each other's hands through late nights and early mornings, laundering the small pains with jokes and porridge.
Once, in front of a group of our classmates, someone dared to ask if it had been worth it—to change for another person.
"I changed," I said openly. "But I changed because I wanted to be stronger, smarter, and happier. Doing it for Gideon was a reason, not a mandate."
It felt like the truth. I didn't sacrifice myself. I sharpened myself against the world until the edges glinted back clearly.
People loved the storybook summary: the girl who promised to get into Tsinghua and did so because of a boy's cold condition. But the real story is messier—the passionate chapters where I learned to be brave and not let his coolness stunt my fire, the silly parts where hair ties and milk tea mattered more than they should, and the deep parts where illness made our hearts speak.
"You're not always easy to love," I once said, leaning against his shoulder.
"And neither are you," he replied.
"So what keeps you here?" I asked.
He looked at me steady, not saying the big lines that authors sometimes pen for grand endings.
"I like that you don't fit expectations," he said. "I like that you are loud and stubborn and that sometimes you knead porridge like a protective sorceress. I like that you are annoyingly yours."
I kissed him then, as if to seal the confession.
That day on the campus stage, with the pink hair tie and the hospital room and the confession wall all folded into memory, I understood that love isn't always a clean thing. It's a collage of mistakes, promises, quiet hospital lights, and the shared knowledge that you will keep showing up for each other. I had started out as a clerk of desperate affection, a "licker" who thought devotion could be bought with queues and notes. I ended up being a person who learned to push herself because she believed in herself.
"Will you still set conditions?" I teased Gideon once.
"No," he said, and then, in his infrequent, rare smile, "But if you get too loud, I will write you a quiet note."
"Sounds fair," I said.
It was not the storybook ending of grand declarations and chaste triumph. Instead, it was a seventy-two-hour commute of small daily acts that stitched two ordinary people into something steady. We kept our silly tokens: the pink hair tie, a note under a book, a shared thermos. Those things meant everything.
Sometimes I think of the admission letter again, the trembling in my hands, and I laugh. It was the first page of the rest of our strange, stubborn, gleeful, ordinary life.
The End
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