Sweet Romance14 min read
Lucky to Have Known Him
ButterPicks15 views
I write on a forum to bury an old crush.
I thought I could put that wound into words and let other people read it, cry over it, and help me move on.
"Is it true you killed him off in your story?" someone typed in my live chat once, and for a second my hands froze on the keyboard.
I laughed and answered their sobbing emojis with a tease. "Yes, that story has a model."
The chat flooded with cries and "hugs." I said, "Okay, okay, no more tears. Everyone come into my arms. I'll comfort Cotton for you."
Cotton was the nickname readers had for my heroine in "Summer Sleepless." Pei Fei was the hero. Their ending was sad. The readers loved to be sad with me.
"Did you get to be with your 'Pei Fei' in real life?" a user asked.
I went quiet. "No," I told them. "I didn't."
After the stream I slumped back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. College had left an ugly crease in my life — a crush that died without ceremony. Whenever I was low I dreamed the same dream: he came back and we made up. I woke up worse than before. For years I didn't want to keep dreaming. I needed quiet, so I made a pen name and I wrote, and I read to people on late-night voice streams.
My phone buzzed. Dana Corey, my assistant, sent a message. "Boss, a client DM'd our studio on Weibo. They want a lifestyle shoot. Good money. At his house. Shall I take the job?"
"Take it. Set it up," I typed without looking.
I hung up my coat and tried to breathe normally when the client arrived on schedule.
He stood at my studio door with calm, quiet eyes. Time caught. My chest tightened.
Ezekiel Medina.
He had gone abroad years ago. When I pictured seeing him again I rehearsed what I'd say — but not a single line ran through my head now. I froze.
Dana said, "Mr. Medina, this is Gianna, the studio owner and photographer."
He didn't answer. He looked at me the way one looks at a book they once loved and then forgot on a shelf.
"Come in," he said finally.
The crew set up. I told them I wasn't feeling well and let Dana handle most of the talking. It helped; working kept me from falling apart. But every so often Ezekiel asked me direct things.
"Gianna, can you see clearly from there?"
I shuffled forward a little.
"Gianna, how should I pose? Show me."
I sent Dana a look. Dana mouthed, Got it. Dana stepped in and guided him.
"Will this angle be good?" he asked, and then, as leisurely as if he were taking his time folding a paper airplane, he unbuttoned another shirt button.
I couldn't help the quick glance. There, just under the collar, a collarbone that had always made my breath hitch.
The lighting tech cleared his throat like a small animal. "Wow," he whispered.
Ezekiel studied me. The smile that sometimes lived in his eyes had the same private pull as it always had. He buttoned his shirt back up slowly, keeping one hand in his pocket. "You look tired," he said once.
I caught myself thinking: his smile still reaches his eyes.
By the time the last set came around, Dana proposed we take the sunset shots on his balcony. He paused, turned to me, and said, "I want those on the bedroom balcony. I don't like too many people in my bedroom. Only the photographer. Is that a problem?"
My skin prickled. "You don't have to—"
"I'll leave the bedroom door open," he said, casual and careful. "Your crew can wait outside. Scared I'll eat you?"
The air went taut. Dana looked at me; her brow lifted. I told her to pack up, and we went to the bedroom together.
The balcony was neat, a small sunbed, a little pot with a plant someone loved enough to keep alive. He lay back on the lounge chair and watched me. I moved slowly, finding angles, trying to be smooth. He stayed still like a statue and then spoke.
"Gianna, don't you have anything to say to me?"
My stomach dropped. I expected the coldness of ignoring. I smiled as if nothing were happening. "We can shoot now."
For a second his face loosened into something like a small, bitter laugh. Then he read out a line from my story, the one I had written with my throat tight and my hands trembling:
"At dusk I wore his shirt and we curled on the balcony watching the sun go down."
The words left his mouth like a small accusation and a tender memory both. My heart slammed. "Did you read my story?" I heard my voice cave.
He watched me. Sunlight cut across his face. Then he said quietly, almost teasing, "So, will you watch the sunset with me?"
I moved to open the bedroom door, but he was quicker. He placed a hand against the door frame and a palm against my lower back, nothing violent, only an old habit of closing the gap between us. "I heard you wrote me dead," he said.
He said it like a fact, not angry, only a soft, dangerous curiosity.
For a terrible moment the room swam. He smelled like wood and soap. I had dreamed of this and now panic made my voice small. "I didn't mean—"
He straightened and the small warmth left his face. The shoot stopped. He said, "You always knew how to run."
It was not a condemnation so much as a diagnosis. He moved back to his chair and folded himself away like someone pulling shells over a pearl. The rest of the shoot ended awkwardly. I went home and dreamed of the past.
The dream put me in the college canteen again, the last time we had crossed paths before everything broke. He had come, said the memories aloud, and at the end he had typed that message: "Let's never contact each other again." I pressed that chat open in the dark and typed, rewrote, erased, never sent.
I closed the chat, went to sleep, and that night Dana messaged me a little while later: "Gianna, Mr. Medina said he wants to talk. Lunch tomorrow at noon."
It felt like stepping into a river that might be deep. I went.
I hadn't set foot on campus since graduation. I parked at the same gates and felt the memories pinch. Dean Abbott — the old professor who used to give tests people feared — was in the office. He squinted when he saw me.
"You're the one who used to take the double major," Dean Abbott said, cheerful in a way that made my face hot.
Ezekiel came out, clean and quiet. The professor teased us both and told us to sit. Then he said, "You're here to help photograph graduation, are you not?"
I agreed. The professor smiled like I had turned a small page in a book correctly. He asked us to be present for the campus celebration. Ezekiel glanced at me as if deciding whether to answer for me. "I'll pick her up," he said.
He escorted the professor out and left me in his stuffy office. My pulse went loud. Why had he asked me here? He closed the door behind him and sat down across from me like someone about to read a will.
"I teach economics now," he said.
That small sentence made my chest warm. He was staying in this city. A small joy crept in. He changed. He looked softer in ways. He also looked still very much like him — neat hair, quiet lines around his mouth.
"Fix the photos the way you like," I said when he asked about retouches. I could barely finish.
Then his phone pinged. "Lunch?" he said, standing. He walked me to the canteen, and we ate with the mechanical silence of two people decoding a map.
Once or twice students came to greet him. He answered calmly and then embarrassed the whole table by answering a stray student's offhand joke with a crisp economic question. The kid fled red-faced. I laughed inwardly.
After lunch, he asked my address. "For the graduation day," he said. I told him it would be fine. He looked almost apologetic. "Professor arranged it. He'll be mad if I don't help."
That was a tiny, strange sadness that looked like asking permission. He said goodbye and drove off. I went home and tried not to think too much.
For a few days there was space. My studio picked up work. Dana and I built the calendar and the social feed. We were busy. We rewarded the crew with a meal and I told Dana to pick the place. She suggested the bar "Linger," a local dim-light spot owned by Guinevere Foley. She had been my friend since early days. She was the sort who smoked a cigarette like she had clocked every reason to laugh and every reason to fight back.
"Let’s go see Guinevere," Dana said. "You always get a free drink from her."
I thought I was going just to be the friend, to watch the crew unwind. But when I arrived, the room smelled like orange peel perfume and laughter. Guinevere found me and hugged me like I had been away for months.
Dana and the others teased me about being the studio boss. Guinevere laughed and waved it away. "I'm treating," she said, and slid a drink across the table.
I stood up and, feeling small, walked to the small stage. The bar had a piano. I had sung here often years ago. Tonight, I chose a song that used to make me think of him. I sang quietly, and the room narrowed to my breath and the lights. The song filled the space like a memory.
When I finished, a girl I knew called out, "Little Gianna?" It was Jules Barron, an old upperclassman. I smiled.
Behind her, Ezekiel stood as if the world had placed him there. My throat closed. My hands felt like they had their own momentum. He looked as if he had walked in from a different season.
"Small world," Jules said with a wink.
Ezekiel watched the boy who had earlier asked for my WeChat retreat. He cut the boy's efforts off with one glance, one casual question, and the boy fled in an embarrassed whirl. The room laughed.
Jules took me by the arm like a general. "Take me, Gianna. I'm your older sister tonight."
I should have felt safe with friends. Instead an old panic rose. He didn't watch me, but every time I moved he looked like he had been tracking my orbit for years.
When we left, Jules insisted we go with him. "You and I go in his car," she said jokingly. "Not that I want to force him."
Ezekiel waited with the engine running. The joke between Jules and Guinevere felt like a knot I did not know how to untie. Jules teased, "Gianna, tell me honest — are you single?"
I tried to change the subject. She pressed: "Because that would be a crime not to be with someone as steady as him."
The car smelled like leather. He buckled me in with small, careful movements.
"You're single," he said later as we sat in the dark, watching numbers on the red digital clock. The street hummed around us.
"Yes," I said. "A little lonely."
He answered, "Me too."
There was an easy comfort to that. I yawned and slept for a while, waking as he stopped the car at my gate. He leaned forward for the seatbelt click and then said the thing I had been afraid to ask in my breathless heart.
"If I hadn't gone abroad, if I had stayed and been your classmate, would you have told me then?"
I paused, thinking of my childhood, the way I learned to fear love and to run. I wanted to tell him everything and nothing at once. I said, "We'll talk."
We made a small plan for the campus celebration later that week. I had to go to the mountains for a family matter the next day — a woman named Andrea Ramirez had called to say that Emerson Albrecht had fallen at home. Emerson was a dear elderly woman I stayed with sometimes when I was out photographing remote places. She had become more than a caretaker; she had been a kind of grandmother.
I booked the ticket in a rush. Guinevere packed medicines and told me I had to make the shoot happen, promising to talk to Ezekiel about the graduation. Jules messaged me and told me to come back soon.
On the mountain, Andrea met me at the gate. Emerson's house smelled of boiled herbs and sun. The small woman was prickly but every time she made tea she would fleece me with love. She scolded me half the day, then softly fretted about being alone. At night she folded her hands and took my face in her weathered palms.
"If you were scared, tell them," she said. "Don't run away like a rabbit."
I tried to explain the long history of my family: evenings where my father drank, my mother tried to hold the house together, me learning in small ways to be invisible. I told her about the time I ran to the street to ask my father to come home and how small and how brave I had felt and how it had been useless. Emerson listened like the river listens to rain.
"You deserve to say all of it," Emerson said, firm and simple. "If you keep things in, they'll get heavy."
At the small bedside I promised I would be brave. I called Ezekiel from the airport as I boarded, and he answered, "Are you hiding?"
"No," I said, and my voice cracked. "I'm going now."
He exhaled, soft. "When you come back say what you mean."
The words were small, but they were like a hand on the shoulder.
I got back to the city clutching the ticket stub like a good-luck charm. At the airport, he waited at the exit, his hands folded, a bunch of tiny white baby's breath in them. He looked both ridiculous and profoundly delicate. People looked, but he looked only at me. When our eyes met I felt all the miles in one breath close.
He handed me the flowers. "For you," he said.
"Is this for me?" I asked because he had been so casual.
"It is," he said plainly.
We walked to the old campus and sat on the steps of the stadium, the very place where everything between us had once started. The night held the field quiet around us.
"I need to say something," I said. "Maybe a lot."
"Say it," he told me, calm.
I told him the story of my childhood: nights when grown voices filled with pain and I learned the geometry of fear; how tears didn't help; how I decided I couldn't trust lasting love because I had watched my parents' warm moments vanish into noise. I told him how I had once decided that keeping distance was the only defense, how I had pushed people away to spare myself pain, and how the worst thing was that I had hurt the person I loved most by running.
"When your parents fought," I said, "I wanted to protect myself. When I thought we would end up like them, I chose to make a wound to shield myself. I hurt you because I was afraid of being hurt even more. I'm sorry."
My voice cracked. I looked down and felt like a child.
He stood and drew me into his coat like someone who knows exactly the weight to hold. "I know," he said into my hair.
"What?" I whispered, surprised.
"I knew you liked me from the start," Ezekiel said. "I knew you were there even when you weren't. When you came to me that night drunk and hugged me and told me you liked me, I thought the world had finally taken shape. Then you pulled away and I didn't know why."
He told me that he had seen me in class, in the library, waiting like a quiet shadow. He had loved the way I watched, the way I blushed. He remembered the night I threw up my confession between sobs and then swore I had said nothing the next morning. He had cried then, too. He had spent years wondering if speaking his love would just make me afraid and if the price of loving me was to make me hurt. He had chosen, he said, to stay anyway.
I couldn't think. He told me he would take the hundred steps if it meant being with me. There was no grand gesture, only the simple promise of presence.
Just then a security guard's flashlight slid over us. "What's going on here?" the guard called.
Ezekiel straightened, blocking me with his broad shoulder. "Just helping a friend get home," he said, patient.
"Make sure you're back to your dorms," the guard said and ambled on.
We laughed, small and embarrassed, the way two people who are finally brave enough to be close laugh.
After that, he came by the studio more often. On his seventh visit he walked in with snacks and milk tea and the team greeted him like a returning general.
"What's your relationship with our boss?" one of them teased.
We both turned. He answered, "I'm courting your boss."
The crew whooped. Dana smirked. I choked on my drink, half in shock, half in happiness.
He played games with the guys and showed a quick mind and steady hands. When the team lost a round, he offered calm directions, and when they won, they cheered like boys on a field. He was at once shy and confident. He brought small things: a snack pack, a coffee, a hand that knew where to place warmth.
One night I pushed him jokingly — as if in a play — and he grinned and said something that made me cross my arms like a child.
"Don't tell them the things you know," I said, flustered.
He teased me back, "Then don't write endings like mine."
I clapped a hand to his mouth so he wouldn't say it full out. The room filled with silly questions and giggles as friends pressed for details. We didn't call ourselves anything for a while, simply being.
Guinevere, Jules, Dana — they all took to teasing us like a ritual. Once, Jules swore she'd tie us together if we didn't end up together. Guinevere rolled her eyes and called us obvious; Dana took pictures and posted them like trophies.
Winter came and the city turned quiet. Ezekiel invited me over for little things: a plate of fried buns, a late-night movie, and the sound of him quietly teaching. He would make me tea and then say small impossible things like "I will keep calling you my girlfriend." When he posted a photo of us silhouetted in a sunset kiss, he captioned it "my photographer" and then wrote beneath, "my girlfriend." It was silly and perfect.
There were smaller, private moments that felt like treasure. He would press the back of my hand with his thumb when he wanted me to look at him. Once, he surprised me by drinking from the glass I had just taken a sip from — a ridiculous, possessive little thing — and in the slow clink of ice I felt the whole room hush. It was intimate in the way a secret is.
Our first proper fight was tiny. I had launched a voice stream from the studio and forgotten I had a live chat. He walked in right then, wet from a shower. I froze and then the chat lit up. He leaned down close enough that the mic caught his breath. "I'm the man you wrote dead," he said with a mischievous grin into the microphone.
The chat exploded. I slammed my hand on the table and shut it down, cheeks burning.
"I'll make you pay," I said half-dramatic, half-laughing.
"I'll take the punishment," he said, voice small and a little wounded. He brushed my hair back like a thing you smooth out of a map. "You wrote me, even with that ending. I want a redo."
How could I resist?
We moved through each small chapter like people learning to hold a fork. I learned to say sorry out loud. He learned the exact way I liked my milk tea. We fought quiet small fights and made up with even smaller apologies.
Sometimes the past reared its head. Parents still argued in letters he would let me read, and sometimes old friends asked too many questions. But the difference this time was that we did not run. We spoke, we held, we let the hard things in.
On another night, Guinevere called me out for not writing a new story. "Write me, Gianna. Make me a heroine who eats loud and speaks louder," she scolded on the phone.
"Maybe I don't want to write anymore," I said, soft.
"Write one line," she insisted.
I did. I started one small scene about a girl who hides by writing and a man who comes back and once again learns how to be brave. It felt honest. He read the draft and said, "This one's happy."
We laughed at him. He pretended to puff up with pride, then leaned in and kissed the back of my hand like a small monarch.
Months later, at a small rooftop party with friends, a former admirer of Ezekiel's strolled up and asked if I was his girlfriend. Ezekiel clasped my hand in public and said, voice steady, "Yes."
"Nice to meet you, Teacher's Wife," the boy blurted out and then, after a beat, corrected himself, outraged in a good way, "Wait! No, I mean — just congratulations, ma'am."
The group laughed and I blushed like tea leaves in hot water. I punched him lightly and he laughed, calling me "sir" in mock.
Days turned like pages. We went to the mountain again, met Emerson, and I held her hand as she pinched my cheek and told me to "not be stupid." Her blessing was small and fierce.
One spring night, I woke and realized how easy it felt to lean into him. He had not fixed me. Nothing had changed like a fairy wave. But he had given me space to be gentle with my own edges. For the first time in a long while, I believed I could tell the truth and be met.
"So," I said once, late, as we sat looking at the city lights. "Do you ever regret leaving?"
He was quiet for a long time and then shrugged, "No. I regret not coming back sooner."
I looked at him. "Why did you come back?"
He looked at me like a boy who had found something he'd kept folded under his coat. "Because you existed here."
I laughed, and it sounded like rain. "That's nonsense."
He smiled and took my hand like he had always wanted to. "Maybe it's nonsense, but I'm here."
We built a life in small things: Tuesday breakfasts, Thursday game nights, a small show at the bar where I sang off-key and he clapped like he had never heard better music in his life.
Sometimes readers still called me "the girl who writes sad endings." I still told stories. But now they had a safer heart inside them. My words still had tears, but they also had the warmth of someone who had learned to come back.
The evening I finally finished a new novel, I read the last line aloud to the small group who mattered. "At dusk, I wore his shirt and we curled on the balcony watching the sun go down," I read, and then I looked at him. He answered with his eyes and kissed my forehead like it was a medal.
The story had a proper ending now: not perfect, but honest. And there was a small, ridiculous detail that would always be ours — his habit of drinking from my glass when he wanted to make that moment private. It was silly and beautiful and it belonged to the two of us.
One night, long after people stopped whispering about the old thing, I opened a private chat for the readers who had watched me grow. The chat filled with messages and someone asked, "Is he the man in your story?"
Before I could think, he leaned into the doorway and said just loud enough for the mic to catch, "I am the man she wrote dead."
The chat blew up into hearts and crying faces. Dana started a small chant, and Guinevere sent a photo of a ridiculous kiss.
I shut the stream down with an apology and a laugh. He stood near the desk and brushed my hair back like someone who had found their right place.
"You surprised me," I said.
"You should have known," he replied, "I never meant to be gone."
He held my fingers like he would never let go. We had both been brave. We had been afraid. We had both stayed.
The city hummed beyond the window. The balcony plant still had one soft leaf. The studio light buzzed. I kept writing, but now my stories had more light; they had room for the people in them to make mistakes and then make amends.
The last line I wrote in public that year was small and very ours: I put the ring into the deepest drawer. Maybe one day I'll throw it away. But not today.
The End
— Thank you for reading —