Sweet Romance18 min read
I Mocked the Matchmaker — Now He's My Boyfriend
ButterPicks17 views
They say you should never insult a god. I did it at three in the morning while nursing instant noodles and a Netflix hangover. I was bored, single, and fed up with everyone around me celebrating someone else's rings and photos. So I muttered into the dark, loud enough to wake my own echo:
"Matchmakers and fate—what a joke. If there's a Matchmaker, he can come find me. I dare him."
I meant it as a rant. I didn't expect anything to answer.
"Do you like being daring?" a voice asked in my dream that night.
I laughed in the dream and, without thinking, wrapped my arms around a handsome stranger's leg like a clingy child. "Yes! I love offending deities," I said, nudging him with a grin.
He took a step back, amused. "You could be less... dramatic."
The next morning I opened my eyes and almost choked on air. There, sitting at the edge of my bed, was a man so pretty and quiet I forgot my lines.
"Who are you?" I blurted.
He reached up and tapped my cheek with cool fingers. "Don't play dumb. It's me."
The touch was real. The voice was a low, lazy hum that made my stomach flip without permission.
"I—" I swallowed. "What are you doing in my apartment?"
He smiled like someone who had read spoilers about my entire life. "You called my kind a joke. I came as RSVP."
He was wrong, of course. I had muttered that insult as a private, vengeful joke. Yet here he was, and his presence felt like a spoiler that had just appeared in the middle of a book.
He spoke then, a little clipped. "My name is Jalen Roux."
"Jalen Roux," I repeated, tasting the name like a new song. "You look... different than in my dream."
"You dream with too much attitude." He smirked. "And you... you wrapped a red thread around my hand."
I pulled my wrist up. Faint as a whisper, a red line crawled along my skin. It wasn't ink. It wasn't a tattoo. It was a line that seemed to blink and breathe.
"Is that..." I asked.
"Red thread," Jalen said, and his voice fell down an octave. "One thread binds one pair. Yours touches me."
My brain did a poor job of keeping up. "So—so that means we're...?"
"Bound," he said dryly. "Unless something ends it, that's how it works."
I imagined being bound in legal documents—boring, paper-heavy. This felt electric and dangerously intimate. I knelt, ridiculous and dramatic because apparently my dream self had set a precedent, and clung to his leg. "I didn't mean to make a god my problem."
He exhaled, almost soft. "You did, though."
For a moment he looked frustrated. For a moment he looked like someone being put out by human messiness. Then he said, almost smaller, "I have a favor to ask."
"A favor from a god?" I placed my hands on my knees as though this were a late-night infomercial. "Name it. I'll do one free kiss for good work."
He blinked. "Not that kind. Help me find someone."
"Find someone?" I repeated, eyebrows high. "Isn't that your job?"
"You could say that," he said, and I watched his jaw work. "She exists in your city. I want you to find her."
"Me? Why me?" I asked. I was a matchmaker—by occupation, not by divine power—so the irony should have made me smug. Instead I was dizzy with the idea that destiny had literal HR.
"Because you called," Jalen said simply. He smiled a little, and for an instant his face softened into something that might be mistaken for warmth. Then he was gone. Vanished from my bed like breath.
I did what anyone would do: I went to work feeling like I'd been handed a lottery ticket.
At the matchmaking agency I worked for, clients filled out forms, uploaded photos, and dreamed of someone who would stick. We used a clunky system to match preferences: age, hobbies, the usual bullet points of soul-searching. I had been there long enough to learn how to coax people into honesty and how to make them laugh when they cried about breakups.
I told myself little lies on the way to work. "He was a dream. He won't come into reality. Red threads are folklore. You have a sales target to hit."
Then I opened the database and something odd happened: a list of potential perfect matches lit up in my head like neon signs. Names I would never have guessed, matches where backgrounds, preferences, and timing clicked together so precisely I felt like the system had been rewritten inside my brain.
"Your face," my coworker Sofia Blanc said, peering over my monitor. "You're glowing."
"Don't be gross," I snapped, then laughed because Sofia always did squeal like a child. "Maybe I had a good sleep."
I started making calls. I set up meetings for people who were, on paper, wildly incompatible. I dragged clients from coffee shops and elevators into blind dates. Something inside me hummed like a tuned engine; the matches worked.
"How are you doing this?" my manager Liam Lefebvre asked one afternoon, suspicious and pleased as a cat with a full bowl.
"I don't know," I answered honestly. "It just feels right."
A week later I had my best sales numbers since joining the company. My boss handed me a small bonus envelope like someone giving out a reward for good scavenger-hunting. It felt like proof. It felt like I had been given a gift by the universe and was cashing it in.
That night, of course, Jalen returned in my dreams. He appeared thin and tired, as if my favor had cost him something.
"You messed up," he said, and his voice echoed as though coming through a hallway.
"I did?" I yawned, lying on my back in a dream that had the soft lighting of a film set. "I made the company money."
"Not that. You made me visible."
It hit me then: gods don't like being visible. It was a rule I'd read in books, or in the romantic tales people liked to tell around campfires. But being visible meant risk. Being visible meant names, faces—fallible human things.
I woke to the sound of his hand on my shoulder. He was at the window, where the morning painted him silver.
"You can be loud," he said, as if he'd been putting up with my life for a long time. "Do you know what visibility costs me?"
I had no idea. "Does it cost you... coffee?"
His smile didn't reach his eyes. "It costs me energy. It costs attention. It costs... blood."
"That's dramatic," I said, and then quieter, "Do gods get tired?"
He dropped into the armchair. "Yes, when they care."
I wanted to say something bright and flirty. I wanted to tell him that I would be his comfort, that I'd bring him decaf and a blanket. Instead I said something truthful and small: "I don't know how to be loved."
He looked up, surprised. "You were a matchmaker."
"So I'm an expert in other people's love, not mine." I sat up, crestfallen. "And now I'm tangled with a god who has two red threads. One attached to me, one attached to someone else."
Jalen's expression sharpened. "Two?"
"You had two in your hand when I first saw you," I said. "I can see threads. I can sense things. I thought it was a gift. Maybe it's a curse."
He leaned forward, the air around him cool and forgettable. "Those are rare. Only a few have more than one binding. It means someone else matters to me. It means choices were made."
"So am I the choice?" I asked, and my voice felt like it was dragging its feet.
"Not at first," he admitted. "But you mocked. You wrapped yourself in the red. You insisted."
"Since when do gods give up control because I wrapped string around them?" I tried to joke.
"Since you, apparently." He reached out and pressed his palm against the red thread on my wrist. "You shouldn't take binding lightly. People get attached. Gods get trapped."
That day, at work, everything changed. I still matched couples with a system that hummed in my head. I still smiled and rode elevators and tasted too much office coffee. But at night I learned pieces of his life, in fits and images: dusty libraries of names, a ledger of couplings, long corridors lit by candles, and the scene of a woman—faint and familiar to me—falling into a black river.
"You were the woman," I said once in the dark, clinging to his sleeve.
He exhaled. "I should have stopped you."
"Why didn't you?" I demanded, hungry for some drama, for some reason to point fingers at his immortal heart.
"Because I loved you," he said simply. "Because I thought I could save you from whatever came after."
"Save me?" My laugh came out thin. "From what? Bad dating apps?"
"From forgetting," he said. "From being forced to wander alone."
I pressed my hand over my mouth. The image of the river returned: black water, objects drifting like sad ornaments, and a feeling of being pulled into something vast and endless.
"This was before?" I whispered.
"Before you came here," Jalen corrected. "Before you were Haruka Davenport in this life. Before everything. I searched for you for centuries."
"Centuries?" My eyelids felt heavy with the weight of his words. "I thought you were joking about the river and the... punishments."
"I made trade-offs," he admitted. "I gave up privileges to be closer to you. To find you. I begged for leniency. I lost a lot to keep searching."
All of it—my small apartment, my cramped childhood, the endless thrift of my bank account—felt suddenly like trivia next to his confession. He had worked himself raw trying to find a version of me across lifetimes.
When the truth slid into place, I felt dizzy. The bracelet I had kept since childhood—simple, ordinary—had more meaning than I'd believed. Jalen watched my fingers touch it with a look that was almost desperate.
"Where did you get that?" he asked, voice tight.
"I found it as a child," I said. "I thought it was a keepsake." I laced my fingers around it like a talisman.
He took my hand and held the bracelet as if it were the most precious artifact. "They call it a binding token. It anchors souls."
"Is that why I can sometimes sense matches?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "You were always meant for this work. Fate laughed, and then you laughed back."
He stayed. He taught me things I couldn't have learned at a job training: how binding threads felt when they hummed, the weight of names in a ledger, the way a god's watchfulness turned small human gestures into omens. He was practical in ways that surprised me. He helped me field calls, review intake profiles, even sit through dates and give tips.
"And in private?" I asked, because the rest of the world could be white noise sometimes.
"In private," he said, and the word bent into velvet, "you steal my patience and my breath."
Our days folded into each other. I would teach Jalen how to use our agency's software—he pretended to be bewildered and I giggled—and he would tell me stories of long-ago pairings and the weight of a promise that can last a thousand years.
There were moments that turned my ribs into a secret drum.
He would stand in the doorway while I made coffee and say, "You always make it too strong."
"Yeah, it's the only thing that keeps me awake," I'd answer, and he'd take my hand and put his palm over mine, guiding it. Warmth would move from his skin to mine like a promise kept.
Once, in winter, I came into the office early and found him already there. He had sleeves rolled up and the morning light made gold in his hair.
"You're here," I said.
He didn't say anything for a while. Then he whispered, "I like seeing you before the world wakes."
My heart did the thing it does when someone recognizes a small, private part of you. "You shouldn't be sentimental," I told him, smiling like a fool.
"I didn't ask your permission to be," he replied, and in that sentence was a confession that unclipped my breath.
Another time, on a busy work night, I was in tears over a client's story. Jalen came up behind me without me hearing, draped his jacket over my shoulders, and said, "There, that's better."
I turned. He was close enough that his breath touched my cheek. The office noise fell away and I felt nothing but the hum where our red thread lay.
"You're always fixing things," I said, half-joking.
He only watched me, soft and relentless. "You fix me," he said. "By staying."
Those are the smaller miracles: him laughing at my dumb jokes, him learning to fold a fitted sheet because I hate how it's done. Little flares of affection that felt like fireworks in a sky I'd almost stopped believing in.
Then came the day the other thread showed itself.
It began with a note on my desk—an old habit of people who loved drama. The clients were out; the office hummed like a waiting animal.
"Someone from upstairs asked for you," Sofia said, peeking in. "Says their name is... Liam. Liam Lefebvre."
Liam, my boss, was the kind of man who smiled like a handshake. He had lines at his eyes from laughing and a way of clapping you on the shoulder that made you feel like you were exactly where you should be.
"Send him in," I called.
When Liam entered, he wasn't alone. A man followed him in, tall and contained. He stood like a photograph—impeccably dressed, with a calm presence that could fill rooms without noise. For a moment, all I saw was his profile, the turn of cheek and the line of jaw.
"Haruka," he said, and his voice was the echo of something unfinished. "May I—"
Before he finished, Jalen's face closed like a drawn curtain. The air shifted; you could feel the thread tighten.
Liam laughed, oblivious. "There's a client who insists they met their match through us. They want to thank the agency."
The man stepped forward and suddenly there was an old ache in my chest. I recognized him from a hundred dreams I never remembered—images that were not mine but felt like home. My fingers found my bracelet and pressed it like a shield.
"You—" I started.
He smiled at me like he'd found a photograph tucked into a book. "Haruka Davenport. It's an honor."
I felt a cold knuckle around my throat. Jalen stood. His expression was unreadable; the calmness before a storm.
"This is awkward," he said. The voice didn't sound like him. It sounded like someone speaking through armor.
"Why?" I asked, because fear had a way of making me blunt.
"Because that man—" Jalen nodded to the newcomer, "—is connected to me."
My stomach dropped as if someone had stolen the floor beneath me. The newcomer looked at Jalen with a strange softness. "Jalen," he said. His name cut the room open.
"Who is he?" I asked, because reality had gone thin at the edges.
Jalen's eyes flicked to mine, then back to the man. "His name is Klaus Jorgensen."
Klaus smiled at me as if revealing a private joke. "Haruka, you look like the kind of person who blames herself for the weather."
I heard myself laugh, but it sounded like a tin can being kicked. "This is getting complicated."
"It is," Jalen said. "Because he once had a bond with me. A thread. When a thread exists and then frays, it can leave echoes."
Klaus's gaze was gentle and steady. "We were partners centuries ago," he said. "We matched people, too. We argued about endings."
The room spun slow. Sofia's eyes were wide. Liam's jaw worked. I wanted to sit down and hide. I wanted to demand explanations like a sensible grown-up.
"Why are you here now?" I asked Klaus.
"To find what I lost," he answered. "To see if the world remembers the promises we made."
The presence in the room had changed from an office to an old cathedral where decisions echo forever. Jalen stood still, but a tension vibrated under his skin like a taut wire.
"You have two threads," Klaus said softly, almost kindly. "One tied to me, one to her."
I looked at Jalen. For the first time I saw the timeline—his hunger for me, his sacrifice, the slow grief at something he'd given away. He had lost privileges to find me. He had bargained with powers above his station.
I felt small. I felt enormous. I felt human down to my bones.
"I didn't choose to hurt you," Jalen said. "I chose to find her. I chose badly once. I will not repeat it."
Klaus met his eyes. "I know. I came to test the truth. To see if Haruka was the same soul or a new one."
"Was I?" I demanded, wanting to be the centerpiece of my own life again.
"You were here," Klaus said. "You were stubborn and funny and foolishly brave. You tore at red threads because you couldn't stand an unjust binding."
I remembered, in shards: a palace room, a ledger of matches, my small hands pulling at thread until something snapped and a law trembled in alarm. I remembered falling into black water and deciding I would rather remember than be erased. The memories came in breath-sized pieces.
"You did something forbidden," Klaus continued without accusation. "You tore a celestial binding for someone who was not meant to be moved. The result was punishment. You were cast into cycles until you learned your humility."
My throat burned. "So I'm punished?"
"No," Klaus said. "You chose. You asked for being remembered. You jumped the river on purpose."
"Why?" I whispered, because asking was easier than confessing.
"Because you loved," Klaus answered simply. "Love is its own rebellion."
That night, Jalen took my hands in both of his and spoke the kind of truth that has no easy return.
"I gave up things," he said. "I lost rank, privileges, comfort. I begged to be allowed to search. When I found you, I did what I could. I brought you back. I tied a thread so I could feel you. I wanted you close, even if it meant pain."
I wanted to push him away and keep him. I wanted to tell him his sacrifices were silly and unnecessary. Instead I said what I felt with the kind of honesty I only give to people who make me laugh at midnight.
"Why me?" I asked.
He looked at me with a tired sort of devotion. "Because you kept cursing gods and looking at the sky like it owed you an explanation. You were real. You were a voice. You were stubborn. You were human. And stubbornness sticks."
I squeezed his hands. "Then we'll be stubborn together."
He smiled, small and private. "Deal."
The days after Klaus's arrival were strange in a new way. Klaus moved through the office like someone trying on a new life. He had an old-world charm that made clients relax and made some older women sigh. He wasn't trying to reclaim what had been; he was testing a present.
But storms followed.
Rumors started—silly, human things: rumors of an affair, rumors of a god walking the office corridors. People whispered and took pictures with phones that never slept. The press smelled an angle. Social media fluttered like a bird with a broken wing.
One morning, on the agency floor where we once discussed hobbies and coffee preferences, a crowd formed. A junior employee had leaked a photo online: me with Jalen at a charity event, him smiling like a man who had found a home.
The rumor started like a match. People speculated. "Is she dating him?" "Is that the Matchmaker?" "How can a mortal date a god?"
Jalen's fingers tightened on the edge of my desk. "You need to be careful," he said.
"Careful how?" I asked. "Careful not to be happy?"
He didn't answer with words. He answered with something worse: action. He stood and walked to the center of the office where the chatter was loudest, and raised his voice.
"Listen." It was quiet when a god spoke. "This is my life. So is hers. If anyone thinks they can take either from us—"
The room hushed. Phones were raised like talismans. He took a breath. "I will not allow lies to be spread."
At that, a senior client—an influencer who owned a gossip column—smirked and stood up. "And who are you to stop me, sir? Are you threatening me?"
"Yes," Jalen said, and his voice was flat. "Because your lies harm people."
The influencer laughed. "You're a pretty face. That's all."
That was the moment the public spectacle became a punishment spectacle.
A loud, public confrontation erupted. People crowded in, cameras zoomed, and online livestreams multiplied. The influencer used his platform to escalate. He accused Jalen and me of fabricating matches for publicity. He accused us of manipulating people. He accused me—Haruka Davenport—of lying to clients for personal gain.
I felt the air leave my lungs. Jalen stepped forward like a shield.
"Prove it," he said.
The influencer smirked and called security, and the office manager—nervous and practical—began to talk about statements and damage control. The crowd outside grew. Phones recorded. Social media split into factions overnight.
I stood frozen while Jalen argued, presenting facts with a calm that was almost surgical. He had records, he had witnesses, he had the small but irrefutable truth of years of work. Still, the influencer refused to relent. He wanted drama—he wanted an apology from me, something public, humiliating, to satisfy an audience.
"Say you lied," he demanded.
I could have remained silent. I could have let him grind me down while the cameras feasted. But Jalen's eyes found mine across the swarm of faces. They were fierce and tender at the same time.
"Do not force her to be small," he said.
The room fell into a silence that felt like snowfall.
For five minutes nothing moved. Then, like a drain opening, the crowd shifted. Some people, who had been silent before, started speaking up in our defense. Clients who had been matched by us told their stories. Sofia stepped forward and spoke about how I'd helped her sister meet someone real. Liam, who was never one for melodrama, gave a quiet testimony about my work ethic.
"You can shout all you want," Liam said finally, "but the truth isn't a show for clicks."
The influencer's face hardened. He wanted spectacle. He wanted humiliation. When that failed, he tried to spin the story with legal threats and slander. It was ugly and public and felt like being scrubbed raw.
Jalen turned to me when the worst of it calmed into a dull ache. "You okay?" he asked, but it wasn't pity; it was checking.
"I am," I said, voice steady. "Because you're on my side."
He nodded, and for the first time I realized that the public spectacle had changed something essential. The people who loved us—those small, ordinary people—had seen us fight. They had seen Jalen protect me, not by might alone but by insisting we be treated fairly.
After that, life calmed into a new normal: interviews, polite inquiries, messages of support and messages of hate. The office had a renewed energy, a protective bubble around it. Klaus stayed close but impartial, offering the kind of old-soul advice that a friend who was once a colleague in other centuries might give.
We traveled on his rare days off—two imperfect people holding hands through tourist traps and late-night diners. We took pictures at the edge of a cliff and pretended to be normal couples. We argued about trivial things: whether to get a cat, whether to host a garden brunch on a Sunday. We built a life with small rituals.
"Do you ever regret it?" I asked once, at three in the morning, when the apartment was a nest of blankets and the city hummed below.
"Regret what?" Jalen asked, rubbing a thumb along my wrist.
"Giving up everything you had," I said. "Your privileges. The ledger. The old life."
He was quiet for a long time. "I lost a lot," he admitted. "But I gained you. That's enough."
He kissed the inside of my wrist where the red thread still hummed faintly. "I would do it again," he said.
"You would?" I whispered.
"Yes," he said simply. "A thousand times, if I had to."
When I thought the story had found its shape, another piece slid into place like the last puzzle of a room. One night I awoke with a memory sharp and bright: a river, endless and black; hands reaching; the sensation of leaping to keep memory rather than let it be washed.
I told Jalen in fragments. He listened and then told me what I couldn't remember: how stopping me had seemed impossible, how he had bargained with impossible authorities to keep searching. How, after he found me, he had given up privileges to make room for my humanity.
"Why did you stay?" I asked, with a fear I didn't know how to hide.
He looked at me as though I'd asked him to tell a joke he never tired of. "Because you laugh under pressure. Because you feed strangers. Because you stood up to a god in a dream. Because in every life you pulled at the wrong threads for the right reasons."
The honesty hit me like warmth. "So I'll love you because you sacrificed?"
He smiled. "Love isn't a trophy; it's practice. We practice every day."
We kept practicing. We kept making mistakes. We recovered. We mended what could be mended. My little agency flourished in its own way, and the world outside learned, slowly, to accept something it had never had to accept before: that a mortal and someone once high among celestial ranks could walk hand in hand through mundane life.
I asked Jalen once, in a moment of rare seriousness, "If someone else from your past comes back, will you leave me?"
He kissed my forehead and then my lips, slow and earnest. "I am not leaving. Not for anything. Not now." He paused. "But we hold the past with hands, not claws. If someone needs answers, we give them answers. Not abandonment."
And so when Klaus came back into our orbit, it was not with swords. It was with the apology of someone who had once shared a ledger and found that the world changes its rules.
"She is here," Klaus told me in private one night. "And she remembers. She is the same you, but different—a soul with scars and courage."
I took that in like a tide. "Do you forgive us?"
Klaus looked like someone who had seen more endings than beginnings. "I forgive what needed forgiveness. I mourn what we lost. But I'm glad you have her."
Jalen's chest rose and fell with relief. It was quiet and ordinary then: three people who had been ancient, now folding into something like family.
In the end, my life—once cramped and defined by deadlines, ramen, and a relentless city—expanded. I kept the agency, kept my customers, kept doing the work of bringing people together. Jalen kept the humility of one who had traded a lot for something he could finally hold. Klaus became a friend who made tea and told stories about mistakes that turned into lessons.
We made small vows. Not the kind carved into marble, but the kind that fit into pockets and wallets: to be honest, to show up, to guard each other's names from gossip.
One late afternoon, as the sun painted the office in honey, I touched the thin red thread at my wrist and smiled because it pulsed with a warmth I could always feel.
"Promise me one thing," I said to Jalen, half in jest.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Don't ever let me forget why I leapt," I said. "If I get stupid again, remind me."
He squeezed my hand. "I'll remind you with kisses and coffee and the kind of nagging you deserve."
We both laughed. Outside, the city went on making plans for people who didn't always keep them. Inside, we made new plans and clumsy promises and a life built of surprising details—like how he disliked onions, and how I always ate the last piece of cake, and how we went to the same park each spring to watch the trees decide their colors.
Sometimes, late at night, I still whisper into the dark: "Matchmaker, I'm sorry I cursed you."
Jalen hums back from the warmth beside me and says, "You were right once. Fate needed a little push."
I roll my eyes. "Don't make me think that one compliment was a trophy."
He kisses the top of my head. "If it is, I'll polish it."
We keep our threads—and our memories—close. We do not pretend the past was simple or that everything is resolved. But when the world asks us what happened, I say the truth: I mocked a matchmaker and a matchmaker turned up. He was stubborn and human in his way; he paid a price, and he chose me. I was reckless and brave; I paid a price, and I chose to remember.
And the red thread? It still warms my wrist like a pulse. It is not a law that binds me. It is a reminder of the choices that brought us here.
"Would you do it again?" I ask sometimes, fingers tracing the bracelet I found as a child.
He leans in, voice low as a shared secret. "A thousand times."
We laugh then, because the world is soft at its edges when you are with the person who once argued with a constellation for you. The rest of it—the office, the clients, the gossip columns—becomes part of a story we can tell together.
One evening, when the lights in the office dim and the city breathes slow, I open a drawer and take out the small box that held my childhood bracelet. Inside is the bracelet and a small folded note in Jalen's handwriting.
"Keep this near," it says. "So we remember who we were, and who we chose to be."
I hold it to my heart and smile, because some choices shine like truth.
The End
— Thank you for reading —