Sweet Romance11 min read
She Liked My Comments, My Professor Liked My Smile
ButterPicks12 views
I woke up to my phone buzzing like it had a life of its own.
"You're viral," Kelly said before I even looked at the screen.
"Viral how?" I mumbled, fingers fumbling with the blanket.
"Open it." Kelly shoved my phone at me. Her face was inches away, breath warm, eyes huge.
I blinked. Messages, likes, follows—my entire night had been turned into a tiny, humming storm.
"Someone called me 'picked by a mother-in-law,'" I read aloud, dumbfounded.
"That's because you literally commented under a mother's matchmaking video," Kelly said, hands on her knees, laughing. "You said you'll be her daughter-in-law."
"I know." I should have felt silly. Instead my stomach did a slow, pleasant flip. "I meant it, okay? It was a joke at first. But—"
"But what?" Kelly tipped her head.
"But what if it's a real person? What if it isn't just some internet thing?" I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured what I had seen the night before: a short clip, a tidy living room, a cheerful woman saying, "I'm ready to be a mother-in-law," and a smiling younger man beside her. The man was exactly my type—tall, lean, easy smile like he was saving up small surprises.
"Well, the mother answered your comment," Kelly reminded me, pointing at the chat thread. "There's a reply, and it's cute! You should add her."
"Add her?" I said, heart tripping over the word.
"Yes." Kelly was already approving the screenshot. "What are you waiting for, Blakely? Don't be shy."
I clicked, typed, and then—because my fingers had grown bold in the middle of the night—I typed another line and hit send.
"Mom, when are you free? I can come visit!"
Three messages. Three push notifications. Three little explosions of possibility.
Then the next morning, when my inbox had barely stopped humming, my professor's name popped up on the screen as a friend suggestion.
Gwen Komarov.
It was a profile I recognized: photos of academic conferences, a dog or two, headshots that wore friendly, tired smiles. I stared until the coffee went cold.
"Your professor?" Kelly read over my shoulder and made a sound that was half laugh, half incredulous. "No way."
I sent a tentative message—"Hello, Professor Gwen, it's Blakely—your graduate student? I saw your post last night and—"
The reply came like it had been waiting for me.
"Good morning, Blakely. 'Daughter-in-law,' huh? Your comment made my day." Then a single emoji wink.
My mouth went dry. Kelly whooped. "She wrote back! She actually wrote back!"
Minutes later, a card landed in my friend requests: "This is my son's contact," the message said. "Call him 'your husband' if you like."
I felt dizzy. "Is this for real," I said, and pressed the contact.
An unexpected thing happened. The name on the contact was familiar. Not exactly like a known face, but familiar the way a melody is if you've heard it in a dream. Still, to see it connected to my professor—my Gwen—made everything feel slightly unreal, like someone had rearranged the air.
I typed, "Hello? Is this—this for real?"
A voice note popped up. A laugh: bright, easy. "Call me 'husband' if it'll make you happy."
"Well, this is awkward," I whispered, half to myself. "I wrote a silly comment. My professor sends her son's number. Of course it's awkward."
"Go talk to him," Kelly said. "You're avoiding the universe."
I told myself I was only going to make a normal, civilized small talk. I was not going to act like I'd leave my classes and marry someone within a week. I was not going to answer like someone auditioning for a rom-com. I put my hair up, put on the least desperate outfit I could find, and went downstairs.
There he was near the campus flowerbed, in a white shirt and black trousers, hands in pockets like he'd folded the whole morning neatly into himself. He didn't scroll his phone. He simply waited.
When he looked up and our gazes met, my chest made a ridiculous sound.
"Hello," he said. "Cristian."
"Cristian," I echoed, as if his name might be a talisman. "I'm Blakely."
"Your professor talks about you." He smiled, and the world slid into a more comfortable angle. "She says you're fearless in meetings."
"Fearless?" I tensed and tried to appear modest. "I wouldn't go that far."
"She also sent me the comments," Cristian said quietly. "You were very bold."
"I was foolish," I admitted. "Or brave. Pick the nicer word."
He reached into his pocket and produced two chocolates, one for me, one for himself, like he'd brought a tiny, private peace offering.
"For you," he said. "My mom said you like chocolate."
I accepted it like a treaty. "Thank you."
On the walk to the dining hall, we fumbled through the kind of conversation that fills initial hours: majors, favorite teachers, worst cafeteria dishes. Every so often he would pause and grin in a way that made the people around us notice. "They think I'm weird for meeting someone like this," he said once.
"Like how?" I asked.
"Like... whose mother posts those videos," he said, shrugging. "They think I'm being dramatic."
"I don't." I laughed. "It was cute."
"Yeah?" He was looking at me like he was trying to remember how my face aligned with a thought.
As the days folded into each other, Cristian became both the easiest and the most puzzling person to be with. He anticipated things. I would think of a favor, and it would appear. I would want orange juice, and he would hand me a chilled carton. Sometimes he would finish a sentence before I spoke it. It felt like being pair-programmed to another brain in all the best ways.
"Are you always this good at surprises?" I asked him once, our elbows pressed together on a bench near the library.
"I like making you smile," he said simply.
I believed him. Mostly.
But small doubts started to nibble at the edge of my contentment. How did he know the exact moment my mood would drop? Why did the things I wanted most often appear as if conjured? I dismissed the questions as the fearful artifacts of someone who'd once been burned by fairy-tale quickness. Yet curiosity, once strutted into my life, didn't leave quietly.
One afternoon in the library, I saw a skinny stack of physics textbooks on the table where he'd been sitting. I found a pink notebook tucked between dense pages—a hand-bound thing that looked out of place amid diagrams and equations. Curious, I reached for it when Cristian went to the restroom.
There were notes inside: observations, short phrases, bullet points about conversations, a faint but exact list of things I'd said and things I hadn't said. At the end of one page, a small note read, "How she reacts when I mirror her thoughts."
My mouth went dry. That explained the earlier fascination and unease. This wasn't magic. It was someone paying attention to a level that felt invasive.
When Cristian returned, I confronted him. "Is this yours?" I held the notebook up like evidence in a trial.
He didn't flinch. He didn't deny it. He sat down, looked at me, and something like confession softened his face.
"It is," he said. "I—used to... keep notes."
"Used to?"
He nodded. "I've always been... hyper-aware. When I was a kid, I started hearing things that weren't said. Not voices—more like impressions. Names, cravings, half-formed jokes. At first it was a mess. I wrote them down to make sense of it."
I sat across from him, feeling like a detective and the accused and someone who'd found a strange treasure all at once.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
"I was afraid you'd be scared," he said. "Or that you'd think I was weird and you'd walk away."
I laughed, short and stunned. "You literally kept a manual on me. I feel both observed and adored."
"I'm sorry," he said. "When I realized I could... sense you, I—" He looked down. "I didn't want to exploit it. But I wanted to understand you. I wanted to do right by you."
"Did you?" I asked.
"I tried." He lifted his eyes and the earnestness in them was bright as a switch. "If knowing what you thought sometimes made things smoother, it was only because I wanted to make you happy."
The discovery made everything sharper. It explained the chocolate, the replies, the uncanny timing. It also raised a question I couldn't keep down.
"Can you hear everyone?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Just you. The first time I heard you properly I was at my mother's office. You were talking about the cafeteria piano and sugar-sweet ribs. It sounded like a chorus, and I couldn't help but eavesdrop. Then it never stopped. You filled my day. I thought it was a curse. Then I thought—maybe—"
"Maybe what?" I urged gently.
"Maybe it isn't only about listening. Maybe it's about being responsible."
He said it plainly, like an oath. It made me want to hold his hand and never let go.
We fit. We fell. Not in a dizzy, wall-of-flames way, but in soft, deliberate tides. He moved closer, literally—he'd offered a couch and then a study desk, then a few boxes of clothes. He would knock at my door just before I would decide to get up for coffee. He left little notes like bookmarks in my day.
One night, when the power went out and every sound seemed too loud in the dark, I bumbled toward the lamp on my bedside table and hit my shin. Panic made me press the door lock and listen. After a heartbeat I heard someone call my name, and then the door creaked.
"Blakely?" Cristian's voice, muffled. "You okay?"
Relief was a sudden expensive thing. I opened the door and he stepped in like a hero without armor, arms full of blankets and a flashlight. He smelled like soap and a woodsy scent that made me want to stay quiet and catalog that smell into memory.
"You scared me," I said, closing the door at last.
"I called like ten times," he scolded gently. "You didn't pick up."
"I was trying to stay awake," I lied and he didn't press it. He put his phone on the nightstand and handed me a lantern.
When the lights flickered back on, we laughed at ourselves for being dramatic. But the up-and-down of our days had an intimacy behind it that felt like a secret.
"Do you ever feel like you don't have privacy?" I asked him one evening as we leaned against a window ledge, watching rain smear the world.
He considered. "Sometimes," he said. "Hearing everything can feel like being in a crowded room with no doors. But with you—" He shrugged a little. "You are bright. I'd rather know your inside than not know you at all."
"I don't know if I want to be known that well," I confessed. "But I do like that you know me that way."
"Good," he said. "I like being part of you."
We were a pair of sentences that fit, oddly and perfectly.
Then he left for a competition out of town. We had one video call under a shared glass of moonlight, and he told me he'd lost his ability.
"I lost what?" I asked, and a little panic licked at my voice.
"My mind reading." His smile was small. "I think... it went quiet. Maybe it needed to rest."
I felt strange at the news. For a moment I mourned the tiny, precise ways he'd once caught my mood. But then on the call he did something else: he listened. He asked me to say things. He repeated them back. He learned me anew.
"When will you be home?" I asked.
"Tomorrow night," he said. "Will you be there?"
"Of course," I said.
He won the competition. He came back. We sat together sifting through the easy days, the heavy project times, the library nights where we shared much more than notes. One afternoon, when I wasn't expecting it, he asked me again.
"Blakely, will you be my girlfriend?" he asked, as if asking the nicest request in the world.
"Yes," I said. "Yes."
The relationship wasn't all sunbeams. We had small fights—about priorities, noise, whether to keep his pink notebook in a drawer—and reconciliations that felt like knitting stitches in something we were building together.
Sometimes I still worried. I wondered if the way he'd arrived into my life—the matchmaking video, the professor's joke, the mother playing Cupid—was too neat a story. But he was there in the messy places too. He was the one who held my hand during a long proposal review, who let me cry out the deadline stress and then made me tea.
"How could I be so lucky?" I asked him one night when we shared a bowl of ice cream and campus lights blinked like a thousand tiny stage lamps.
"You were bold enough to joke in public," he said, earnestly. "And you stuck your neck out. That takes courage."
"I didn't expect to be rewarded with you," I admitted.
"You deserve someone who notices," he said.
Months later, after things had smoothed into a rhythm, I stumbled across the pink notebook again. It was on his shelf—no longer hidden between textbooks, but in a place of honor, worn at the corners. I opened it and read notes that were no longer about plotting my moods but about tending the relationship. There were entries titled "Listen without expectation," "Allow her silence," "Be brave enough to lose answers."
I pressed my forehead to his shoulder and he laughed, the kind of laugh that held no shame.
"You changed it," I said.
"I did." He kissed the top of my head. "Because you taught me how to be generous without counting."
There was one last twist that made me laugh out loud: the original matchmaking video still existed online. It had a new comment thread, with other hopefuls making jokes. Gwen had made a follow-up post: "Wanted—someone to laugh with my son. Got one."
"Did you ever think my professor would be so involved?" I asked, while Gwen made us both lemon squares in her kitchen.
Gwen smiled, flour on her cheek. "I thought more people would be braver," she said, as if confessing some great plot.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?" she asked.
"For being the mother-in-law who shoved me toward my husband," I teased.
Gwen shook her head. "I didn't shove. I only waved the map and said, 'You may want to look here.'"
"Either way," I said, checking that Cristian was in the living room putting dishes away. "Either way, it worked."
At the end of the semester there was an awards ceremony, candles and small trophies, and Cristian was called up for something—the competition recognition he'd earned. He glowed as he accepted it. I told myself I wasn't going to be proud in a stagey way, and then I applauded until my hands stung.
Afterwards, standing by a window, I leaned my forehead against his. "You know," I said, "I used to comment under videos for a laugh. I didn't expect the world to rearrange itself."
"It didn't rearrange," he said. "You rearranged with it."
I laughed. "That's fair."
He touched the small scar on my wrist—left from a clumsy run-in with a filing cabinet—and then looked at me like he had always loved me for exactly that imperfection.
We had become ordinary in the best sense: partners who made still-lives of coffee mugs and textbooks look like home. We had argued over thermostat settings and who would do the taxes; we had laughed over midnight pancakes when neither of us could sleep. And when the world was loud in ways that had nothing to do with us, he was steady like a table where I could place my cup.
Months into our life, Cristian told me something that made my heart both sink and expand.
"I think I had it for a reason," he said quietly.
"For what?"
"To learn how to listen without stealing privacy," he said. "To learn how to be chosen, not because I knew everything about you, but because I learned to love you from what you actually said and didn't say."
I pressed my hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat, quick and certain.
"When you lost it," I said, "we found each other again."
"Yes," he said. "And maybe that's what matters most."
That was true. The read-between-the-lines thing had been a strange gift, and then it had become a responsibility. Losing it let us move closer by choice, not by advantage. I liked that truth.
One afternoon, years later, I opened the old comment thread under Gwen's matchmaking post, just to see the internet's memory.
There was a new wave of comments—young people hopeful, sarcastic, tender. One of them asked, "How did you two meet? A dating video?"
Gwen answered: "A mother with an old idea, a bold comment, and a son who actually listened."
I smiled and typed under the post, "I was bold. He listened. It worked."
It wasn't a fairy tale. It was a real life where we made mistakes, apologized, and learned. It was the steady rhythm of homework and help, of a pink notebook turned into a journal of promises, of power outages that ended with two people on a couch laughing with a lantern.
When I looked at Cristian—his face turned toward mine, eyes warm and patient—I thought of the first chocolate he had handed me, the small, careful acts that became the scaffolding of everything we had built.
"Do you ever miss it?" I asked him once, when the evening was soft and quiet.
"The hearing?" he asked.
"Yes."
"No," he said, then after a second, "I miss the way it made me learn fast. But not the way it made me take shortcuts. It is better to learn the long way."
I leaned my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes.
"I know," I whispered. "I like the long way. I'm glad we took it together."
He folded me close, and I thought of Gwen's video again—an unlikely beginning, a joke turned into something honest—and of the pink notebook that had been a map and then a mirror. The story had kept a few surprises for me. It had taught me what courage felt like: not the sudden, sharp bravery of a stunt, but the slow, patient courage of continuing a life with someone, day by day, laugh by laugh.
"Always?" he murmured.
I smiled into his shirt, thinking of the chocolate, the comment, the professor who had winked, and the boy who had listened.
"Yes," I said. "Always the long way."
The End
— Thank you for reading —