Sweet Romance14 min read
My Bad-Boy Professor, the Midnight Notes, and the Online Riot
ButterPicks16 views
I had never pictured a blind date could make me both glow and die inside at the same time.
"Bennett," he said when he sat—simple, as if a name could settle a room. "Hello, Elisa."
"Elisa," I answered, trying to sound like the writer who could flirt with paragraphs and men in equal measure.
He reached for the teapot and poured for me with slow, precise movements. "You like books," he asked.
"Yes," I said. "A lot."
"You write?" His voice had the steady calm of somebody who taught people to think across centuries.
"Romance," I said, feeling the small thrill. "Under the pen name LycheeIsSweet."
He smiled, barely. "Bennett Lehmann."
"Does Bennett Lehmann write online?" I went a little brash, half-hoping.
"No." He shrugged. "I teach. I publish."
I should have known by the neatness of his cuff and the patient crease at his brow that "publish" meant a shelf of learned things. But I found myself believing a gentler version of him—a three-stream author like me, maybe.
"You've published?" I asked, too loud.
"Several." He folded his hands and watched his tea steam. "History."
"History?" I laughed in disbelief. "You—what? You mean, like, big history?"
"Academic history." He nodded. The smile on his face was small but not unkind. "I teach at A University."
I felt all my bravado melt into a pink puddle. He might be a professor, he might be an impossibly cool professor, and the room went ridiculous and sticky and loud around us.
"Do you read romance?" I tried to steer the ship back into my harbor.
He looked at me, and for the first time his eyes were not only polite; there was something almost amused. "Sometimes."
"Which ones?" I pressed, because authors trade names like currency.
"Literary nonfiction mostly," he said. "But I saw a comment about your book on a forum. It was lively."
My phone screen betrayed me. I had meant to be casual. I had meant to be clever. But words are treacherous and fingers are traitors. When he searched his name on my phone and results came up—books, lectures, essays, the professor's world unfolded in clear, patient type—I understood how far apart we were.
"You're not a three-stream author," I said. "You're not—"
He reached for his cuff and fastened the top button of his shirt. "No," he said quietly. "Not three-stream."
That small button click made me want to laugh and sob at the same time.
"Why did you press?" my mother demanded later, standing at the kitchen stove like a small law court, stirring eggs and justice both. "First date and you say 'we're not compatible'?"
"Maybe our temperaments." I said it calmly, but inside I was a rolling storm. We had stared across a table and I had let myself think maybe—the impossible—might happen. He had politely closed a question like a book.
"He asked to walk you home," my mother said. "Say yes. Learn a thing or two."
"He's a respected professor," I said, a whisper of shame and self-preservation. "Mom. I am a romance author. He will never—"
"You might learn research," she said like it was a real weapon.
That afternoon I did something embarrassed and bold: I brought two bubble teas to his office with a half-formed plan to befriend the scholar.
He was at the podium when I arrived, and he was nothing less than doctrinal in his calm. The classroom teemed after class, girls clustering like bees. When he stepped down, a woman rushed to him and hugged him—his colleague, I would learn, Angelina Bond—and the instant she looked at me, I felt small.
"Is she a friend?" Angelina asked later, with a smile carved out of ease.
"Her clothes are stained," Bennett said, indicating me as if I were a museum specimen.
"Thanks." I scrambled to my feet, cheeks hot.
"Ms. McCormick," he said politely, "the bathroom is on the left."
I locked the door behind me and changed into borrowed clothing Angelina had left—a white dress that fit like something I'd seen in a different life. I came out, my pulse in my throat.
"I am here to ask about poetry," I lied. "Ancient erotic poems."
He cocked his head. "You know them?"
"No." My mouth was dry. "I memorize for my stories."
He sat back and looked at me—stern, then gentle, then patronizing in the way mentors can be. "Learning is thinking, Elisa," he said. "Reciting isn't understanding."
"What are some famous h poems?" I read from my notes, tripping across lines that sounded more daring read aloud than in private. He listened. He did not laugh.
"Stop," he said finally, soft as a closed door. "We are not here for that."
My phone sang in my pocket like an alarm, my mother's voice bubbling through the line with an inane cheer: "Guess who I met? Someone... a '婆婆,'" she said. I choked on the laughter that wanted to escape.
He answered a call and said, "I'll bring her along. We'll have dinner."
Dinner was a civil battlefield. His parents were mahogany and gentle: his mother, Catherine Ellis, refined and warm, wrapped me up with manners and tea. I wanted to sink into the chair and never breathe. Bennett was polite and precise, my mother chatty and loud, but underneath the words Bennett had a steady thread—he would not be dragged, he would not be used as a trophy.
"What do you write?" his mother asked.
"Romance," I said, and my editor Preston White, who texted me at the table, made a small joke about my update schedule.
Later, after the meal, I trailed Bennett outside and, in a moment of misguided courage, shouted, "Do you take female students?"
He stopped and there were heads, and he answered, "I do not."
The world laughed; I wanted to disappear.
"You're not a professor who dates students, are you?" I whined later into my pillow.
"Do you want to learn?" he asked me the next day when I sat at his desk, the office too quiet and too lit. "From the poems you quoted, you clearly have a taste for vivid images. Tell me about your work."
"I wanted material," I confessed. "I'm writing a scene that needs realism."
"So be a student of history, not scandal," he said, with the blunt candor of a man who grades midterms for a living.
We were thrown together by small events—my spilled bubble tea, a misplaced t-shirt left in his office, a misunderstanding in the hallway—and circled closer. He taught me research and restraint; I taught him to laugh at ridiculous internet comments about my own book, The Fall of the Master: Eighteen Moves.
"Your comments are... energetic," Bennett said once as we drove through a congested evening. He reached to shield my brow from the car's glare; I felt fingers cool and careful across my forehead, and in the small heat that gave me, something unfurled.
"Don't call me Miss McCormick," I said. "Call me El, or just Lychee."
"Elisa," he corrected once, because he liked the sound of my full name when he was being precise. "Elisa."
A day came when social media fell on us like a storm.
First the bored trolls, then a coordinated push. Someone posted a candid photo of us together. Someone started a rumor: a famous professor and a trashy web writer. My message board exploded. Preston messaged: "We need an official line. Put down a brief statement."
I typed, "Please do not harass him. Thank you." My fingers felt childish under the glare of hate.
Then a video dragged through the mud. A rival author, Cassandra King, posted an old excerpt with a spiteful caption. She baited her followers: "Romcom author claims authenticity. Guess who loves the legend?" My readers railed; her time was an orchestrated sabotage.
"What do you want me to say?" Bennett asked when he sat beside me late one evening under the thin light of my phone.
"Just... say my name?" I whispered. "Say it's not true."
"Not true," he said in the cold quiet. "She's been making false claims." He posted—a simple picture of his latest academic text with a brief note: "The book is academic. My relationship with Elisa McCormick is private and remains so." The comment thread erupted in support. Some fans cheered; others dug deeper.
The next blow was uglier. My publisher contact, Angelina Bond, who ran a cozy, polished desk at the publishing house we were negotiating with, started showing a delicate smile when we passed. Her assistant, Pascal Flowers, was helpful until I noticed his eyes lingered a second too long. Then a secret came from the periphery: a bootleg edition of Bennett's lecture notes had cropped up online with obvious edits—errors that people pointed at and screamed "fake!"
"That's sabotage," Bennett said when he pointed out the manipulated pages. "Those errors don't exist in my original manuscript."
We traced the print run. The trail was thin and sticky; it led to a small vendor and then to a woman inside the publishing house—Angelina Bond. It led to someone Cassandra King had close ties with.
I was angry in a way that wavelets had never taught me. They had not only made me the target—they had tried to topple a man who graded with honesty and wrote with care.
We collected evidence. Preston and I sorted the plagiarism claims, Bennett pulled copies and timestamps. My fans did half the detective work—a kind of chaotic good that helped more than it hurt.
Then the public punishment happened. It happened on a bright Monday at a bookstore event where Cassandra King had been invited for a panel on "digital-era authorship." The room filled—fans, reporters, rival supporters. There was a table at the front with microphones. Cassandra sat smug in a leather jacket. Angelina Bond took a seat beside her, polished and confident.
Bennett and I entered with Preston and Pascal. For once Pascal's face had a different color; he looked small in the bustle of the crowd.
"Ms. King," Bennett said, stepping to the microphone, "you accused my partner of plagiarism and orchestrated attacks. We have evidence showing that your campaign included commissioning black PR, purchasing anonymous posts, and instructing Angelina Bond to circulate a falsified copy of my textbook."
"That's a serious allegation," Cassandra said, her smile held like a sharp coin. "Do you have proof?"
"Yes." Preston slid a folder across the table, and someone pressed "play" on a laptop. The screen filled the room with email chains, timestamps, invoices. Heads turned. The first lines were straightforward—payments to social accounts, dates that matched Cassandra's public posts, a scanned contract with Angelina's name signed in an unmistakable hand.
A woman in the front row gasped. Cameras pushed forward. "What is this?" whispered a reporter.
Cassandra's face, once cool as a stage prop, gave way. Her lips thinned, and then a twitch came to her jaw. "You—this is—fabrication," she stammered. Her hands went to her chest like a woman trying to hold herself together against wind. "This is—"
"Do you deny wiring funds on June 3rd to 'AnonPromo'?" Bennett asked, voice composed.
"No—no!" Cassandra's eyes flashed. "That's a forgery!"
"Then explain this. Ms. Bond?" Bennett turned gently to Angelina Bond. There was a rustle; the crowd leaned forward as if a breeze had begun.
Angelina's smile had slipped. For the first time she seemed to feel the room shrink. Preston laid out the invoice showing Angelina's company as the intermediary for printing the bootlegs. "We have bank records, deliveries, and shipping logs," Preston said. "The bootleg copies contain deliberate errors put there to discredit Professor Lehmann. The shipping label traces to a small press at Ms. Bond's subcontractor."
"You're lying," Angelina whispered. "I would never—"
At that exact moment a reporter played a voice message. It was the contractor recording a phone call: "Make sure the tiny mistakes are in this run. They'll blame the professor; it's perfect." The voice was unmistakable—anguished, mechanical, recorded. The hall was a slowly inflating silence.
Cassandra's expression shifted—first flint, then cracking. Her posture folded a fraction.
"Do you—do you have anything to say?" the moderator asked. Crowds shift like birds. Cameras clicked. Faces turned from curiosity to revulsion.
Cassandra rose. Her carefully constructed arrogance fell away. "I—it's business," she said. "Competition is fierce. I—"
"Business?" someone in the back stage-swept laugh that had been packaged as derision. "You get a business by stealing someone's work?"
She tried to smile. It did not reach her eyes. Her voice climbed the ladder: "You people don't understand the industry—"
A hand raised in the audience. It belonged to a young author who had once idolized Cassandra but had been refused help. "We saw your accounts," she said, with a new steadiness. "We were asked to post. We were paid. We did not know the whole story."
"How does it feel?" another woman from the crowd shouted. "To pay people to attack? To get people hurt?"
Cassandra's face drained. She faltered, fingers twisting, throat working through the words that would not keep her afloat. "I—it's not like—" Then she tried blame, the last refuge of a guilty builder. "They offered me an advantage."
"At whose cost?" a man yelled. "At Elisa's cost!"
Near me, a group of my readers stood like soldiers who had come to defend a cause. "Shame," someone said, half-cry and half-ache. "You used us."
Angelina's composure ruptured last. She began to cry—not a single silent tear, but a flood that spilled down blush and mascara. She stumbled away from the microphone chair, then back, then forward, the performance of a woman whose script had been yanked.
"I didn't know it would go this far!" Angelina cried. "I thought we could use promotion—"
"You used falsified books," Preston said. "You sold them. You profited." He placed images of the counterfeit print side by side with official proofs. The difference was obvious: one set had deliberate, juvenile errors. The other was meticulous, authoritative. No one who loved books could look at them and not recoil.
Cameras, once indifferent, now leaned forward. People began to record. I heard the soft sound of a thousand collective reckonings—the clatter of phones, the whisper of disgust. Cassandra's supporters began to thin out like water pouring through a broken lip. Someone stood up and walked away. A few people took photos and then posted them in real time. Inside seconds, Twitter-like platforms filled with the breaking scandal.
Cassandra's face changed again—first defiant, then stunned, then panicked. "This is libel! You can't—" She was cut by a chorus of reporters asking for a comment, and the only answer was a sound that might have once been a laugh but now was thin and hollow.
"Do you want to apologize now?" someone asked.
Cassandra sank into her chair like a marionette with cut strings. "I'm sorry," she said. It sounded empty even as it traveled. "I'm sorry."
The room did not clap. The audience did not forgive. Cameras recorded her betrayal in close-up. People who had once loved Cassandra turned their faces the other way; a few even stood and applauded the honesty of the exposure—an ugly, necessary applause.
Angelina slumped, her professional armor in tatters. "I thought promotion was everything," she sobbed. "I didn't think—"
"No one thought they'd hurt real people?" Preston answered. "You were willing to put a man's career and a woman's dignity at risk for sales."
Outside the hall an angry crowd had gathered. Bloggers did not just crush them; they unpacked the evidence. Within the day, complaints were filed. Angelina's role in publishing unauthorized material leaked to the press. Cassandra's publishers—already jittery—began to distance themselves. Her agent texted an uncomely message: "We will review our cooperation."
That day, in public, the mask came off. People photographed Cassandra's face as if capturing the exact instance of moral collapse. She tried to gather herself, to plead ignorance, to place blame on tricksy intermediaries, but it looked like a metronome of denial repeated until everyone was tired.
The fallout after the event lasted weeks. Some of Cassandra's so-called supporters called the whole campaign a "misstep." Others deleted posts and wrote tepid apologies that read like legal disclaimers disguised as regrets. Angelina's company was put under internal audit. Vendors were questioned. The bookstore refunded purchases at the event. A thread of accountability had been pulled and the whole ugly sweater unknit.
For me, the punishment mattered because it was public. I watched the audience shift its gaze like a tide, and I felt not triumph but relief. I watched people who once cheered at a rival's venom now lean toward the truth. I watched Cassandra's face change colors the way a good actor's does when the curtain falls.
Bennett stood beside me the entire time. After the microphones folded and Preston closed the laptop, Bennett took my hand and squeezed.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I think so," I said, voice thin. "It was ugly."
"For you," he said, using a word that sounded like shelter. "For truth, too."
He escorted me home as the evening settled. Cars and lights smeared like watercolor. I thought of the way the crowd's faces had shifted—curiosity, disbelief, then scorn. It had been messy and necessary.
After the public exposure, the calm we had been quietly building returned in small, honest pieces. Angelina faced an internal investigation and public censure. Cassandra was dropped by her main distributor; many bookstores listed her as "no longer recommended." The public punishment had been thorough enough to sting and public enough that the sting would linger for them.
We were not done. Legal talks followed for months. My publisher cut ties with the distributor that had supplied counterfeit runs. Preston's team worked with lawyers. Fans continued to post, to confess that they'd been paid to stir, to apologize. The internet is humiliating that way: loud confessions and quieter rebuildings.
"Are you mad at me?" Bennett asked one afternoon as I sat on his couch, book open and unread.
"For what?" I asked.
"For not telling you sooner about the hustle he faced," he said. "For not protecting you faster."
"You were trying," I said. "And you did protect me. You were there."
He laughed softly. "I am clumsy around care. I am not very good at the performative things. But I know when to act."
"You are a lot like your books," I said, teasing. "Careful, considered, precise. And secretly dramatic when pushed."
He smiled in a way that reached his eyes. "And you are loud and messy and beautiful in every page."
We learned to move forward in small rituals: late-night studying for me under his careful corrections, Bennett correcting my misuse of a phrase; me reading lines aloud until he laughed. We learned to balance him—the professor with soft hands—and me—the writer who could use a scandal to sell a book, but didn't want to trade integrity for numbers.
The months passed in work and pages. Preston found another publisher for my next book. Cassandra retreated from the public eye. Angelina resigned; later she sent a short message of apology, which I never answered. Pascal Flowers' name lingered like a minor character in a larger scene; he did what he could to help and then quietly left.
One night, months after the bookstore incident, I woke to Bennett's phone lighting the dark. He had been quietly checking to see if another rumor had started. I reached over and smacked his arm.
"Sleep," I said.
He smiled and turned off the phone. "Later," he murmured. "Tell me something true."
I thought of the little notebook that had started so much trouble—the one with the crude erotic drafts and the silly poems. I drew it from my drawer and tucked it into his jacket the next morning.
"What's this?" he asked later, when we sat on a highway that split through salt flats and mountains, the world wide and true outside.
"A souvenir," I said. "A reminder that we wrote our way into each other."
He looked at me and then at the horizon where light shimmered on a mirror-like lake. "Write our story," he said.
"Will you be the academic in it?" I asked, pretending to be rhetorical.
"Only if you promise to make me less boring," he said.
"I will," I promised.
That night, the first line of the new book came like an easy laugh: "Once a professor taught me the history of restraint. I taught him how to blush."
Bennett reached over and pressed my hand. "That's my page," he said.
"It's ours," I corrected. "And the second chapter includes an old notebook and a big, ridiculous scandal, plus a chapter on how to make someone apologize in public."
He laughed. "Ensure you leave room for another eruption."
"I will," I said.
We drove on. Somewhere near the mirror salt lake I wrote a line that became a small talisman between us: "If anyone doubts us again, remind them of the teakettle and the button he fastened in front of me. Remind them of how public truth rearranged a room."
He glanced at me, the sun sliding behind the mountains like a closing eyelid. "I remember," he said. "I remember you, Elisa."
"I remember too," I said, thinking of Preston's careful spreadsheets, Kellogg Press pulling counterfeit editions, the public shame that had undone a rival—how messy and necessary it had been.
We were far from perfect. We had been bruised, messy, and surprisingly tender. But in the end, the books we loved, the notebooks we hid, and the public stage that had exposed a lie all stitched us together in ways I couldn't have planned.
"Will you put me in your book?" he asked finally, a small, soft question.
"I already have," I said. "You're on every page I can't bear to rip out."
He pulled me close, and for a moment there was only the hum of the car and the cut of the road and the steady, very human beat of each other's hearts.
At the next press conference, when Cassandra King's name came up again, the room remembered. People still asked questions, reporters still chased news; but the truth had been planted in public soil, and it took root.
We learned, I think, the value of being seen. Some truths, when brought into light, hurt the guilty and heal the harmed.
One late night, I updated a chapter and then posted a short note: "I believe him." The net filled with surprised hearts and a few snorts, but mostly warmth.
"You're brave," Bennett said, looking at my post.
"I'm reckless," I corrected. "But we're both a little reckless."
He kissed me, a steady, precise kiss that fit into the frame of our lives like a final comma. In the morning we would wake and study and write. In the afternoon we would walk into bookstores and watch small children point at books.
And when the scandal of that season came up like a bad smell, we remembered how a teacup tipped, how a button was fastened, and how the crowd shifted its eyes from curiosity to justice.
It wasn't a perfect ending. It was a real one: a bookshelf heavy with truth and fiction, a notebook with crude drafts and tender lines, and one line I kept for myself—"The Fall of the Master: Eighteen Moves"—which would forever make me blushing and proud.
The End
— Thank you for reading —