Sweet Romance10 min read
The Camera, the Forum, and the Boy Next Door
ButterPicks16 views
I never thought a forum thread and a secondhand quirk of fate would rearrange everything I believed about Emil.
"Do you remember when he wet the bed?" my mother said one night in a tone like she was telling a tender secret, and I nearly choked on my tea.
"No!" I said, too loud. "Mom, seriously."
She laughed like a little bell. "I'm only saying, he was helpless. You two have always been close."
"That doesn't make us—" I stopped myself. We had been neighbors for as long as I could remember. We knew each other’s small betrayals and private victories. We knew when the other had a fever and when the other ate too much cake. Two families, two doors apart, two futures that until then always ran the same course.
"Emil," I said once when we were kids and he was sulking because he'd lost a match, "you'll be great one day."
"You always say that," he told me, and then he grinned before anyone else could.
My mother, Florence Wilson, and Emil's mother, Gloria Ashford, loved that we were "close." At the end of our final high school exam, the two moms put their heads together like conspirators.
"Why don't you both try the same university?" Gloria asked, clasping Emil’s hand like a secret pact.
"It'll be easier for them," Florence said, smiling. "They can look after each other."
Emil and I exchanged a glance that would have been readable to anyone else as "absolutely not."
"I'll check out Z University," I said, careful and small. "I'll think about it."
Emil frowned. "I'm thinking Z too," he said, and then, with that stubborn smile he'd had since we were six, "You should go check their stuff too."
I pretended to check. I told myself I was being reasonable, that a separate life would be fine. When the time came, I clicked F University on my application without telling Emil.
I did it because I wanted space. I wanted to be my own person. I wanted to prove I didn't need to be in the same orbit as the boy who knew all my small betrayals.
"You're plotting," Emil said months later when we bumped into each other outside our building, both clutching our envelopes.
"I am not," I said.
He looked at the F University envelope in my hand and the F University envelope in his, and his smile was the kind that could be two things at once.
"You tricked me into Z and then—" he said.
"I didn't trick you," I said, because it was true I had only suggested checking Z.
"Then why did you also choose F?" he asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Because I wanted to," I said, and left him there with his inscrutable face.
When our admission letters arrived on the same day, the same courier window, my heart did that ridiculous tight thing like someone had squeezed it.
"Veronique," he said, and there was that look in his eyes—so composed, like a photograph he already knew the light of.
"You too?" I said, the words a little too sharp.
"I didn't tell you I was applying to F," he said. "You didn't tell me either."
"Exactly," I said.
Two envelopes, two sets of parents who had already started planning dinners to celebrate. My mother looked at us like a proud general. "You two should celebrate together," she said, as if we'd never been anything but a pair.
I swallowed against the sudden twist in my throat.
"Our parents have opinions," Emil said, low.
"Clearly," I answered.
At the new student registration Emil and I walked together because… we always did. The campus seemed to know our names before we did. Seniors waved banners. An anxious girl beside the gate asked us if we were siblings. A senior laughed and said, "You two go together like matched luggage."
Emil put his arm around my shoulder for a second—light as air. He looked so ordinary that it felt like a secret.
"You two are a couple, right?" a senior asked, pointing at a photo on a flyer.
Emil glanced at me, then shrugged. "We're old neighbors."
"Old neighbors?" the senior said with a smile. "That's sweet."
"Not like that," I said, but the senior smiled wider anyway.
The next day, the campus forum exploded. Someone had taken five photos of Emil and me during registration and made a thread titled "Freshman Pair Goals." The fifth photo was the one that still made my chest tighten: Emil had tousled my hair, and I had swatted his hand away, half-annoyed, half-smiling. The caption read: "Found them—college sweethearts already. So cute."
Bianca, my roommate, squealed. "This is practically a rom-com!"
"Don't be ridiculous," I muttered, but my cheeks burned.
"I told him not to mess things up," Emil said later when I confronted him. "You're on the forum's front page now."
"You're the one who let them take those pictures!" I accused.
He looked at me like the whole world was a puzzle he wanted to solve. "I didn't stop them," he admitted. "But it's not like it's bad."
"It makes us… public."
"It also makes me a little proud."
I blinked. "Proud of what?"
Proud of someone who knew me before I knew how to hide the crinkles at the corner of my mouth. Proud of someone who'd slap a "we're just neighbors" label on a picture and then be the first to protect that label with a private fury.
"I saved the photos," he admitted. "And I pasted them into a folder. I don't want anyone to take that idea away from me."
I wanted to be offended and found myself softening. There are moments like little flares—three of them that I still keep in my chest like warm coins. One was when he refused to let me be embarrassed by the forum thread and texted the uploader with so much calm that the original post vanished within hours. Another was when he bought me a camera with money he said he earned from tutoring, and he looked distinctly embarrassed while insisting I keep it. The last was a small gasp-he's-smiling-at-me moment as he kissed the corner of my mouth one night under the borrowed light of a streetlamp because I had let him hold my hand in front of my parents.
"Take it," he had said about the camera. "You wanted to join photography club. This way you can stop living on instant noodles and admiration."
"I don't want you to spend money on me," I said.
He shrugged, like it had been nothing. "I wanted to. Besides, you'll owe me a thousand pictures."
"That's a weird currency."
"Fine. Ten."
It was all awkward and charming.
The camera became proof. It documented dinners with our two families, exams we almost failed, and nights when the campus smelled like rain and paper. We learned to take pictures of each other that were not posed, that captured the little lines at the corner of a smile.
We lived through the easy parts of college: registration, club sign-ups, late-night noodles. We also learned each other's corners—he had a way of counting syllables when he was nervous, and I had a habit of folding my sleeve into a ring when I lied.
"It's ridiculous you still count syllables," I teased him once in the lecture hall.
"It helps me stay organized," he told me. "If I don't, everything gets jumbled."
"But you once said you wanted to take a life that wasn't planned," I said.
"Plans change," he said. "You change plans."
My roommates teased us, turned our private choreography into campus gossip. "They're such a pair," Jadyn would say, ridiculous enough that I sometimes wanted to hide.
"Shut up," I would tell her, but I'd be watching Emil return a smile to a stranger and feel something like peace settle down my spine.
Then the rumor started. A girl from student government—Keyla—appeared like a shadow at events and smiled at Emil in ways that made me clench my jaw. She was a senior, efficient, glossy-haired, the kind of person who knew how to arrange her life like a plan. People said she liked him.
"Is she—" I asked him one night when we walked under the campus lights.
"No," he said quickly. "She thinks I could be a useful contact. She asked once if we could 'practice' public affection to make things look good for campus PR."
"What?"
He pinched the bridge of his nose. "I told her no."
"Why would she even suggest that?"
"Because people are people," he said. "Don't give her a reason to be interesting in the story."
I watched him stand there, measured, and something in my chest tightened—not jealousy, not quite. Instead it felt like a protective heat.
"Promise me you'll tell me if anything changes," I said.
He took my hand. "Do you think I could hide it?"
"I don't know," I said. "I was bad at hiding things."
He kissed my forehead. "Then you won't have to."
It was not a dramatic confession, more like a careful architecture of small assurances. He was not melodramatic. He showed it in little things: bringing me a pancake from the stall by the subway; saving a seat for me in class; defending me with a single sentence when someone asked if I was "just the roommate of Student Council's Keyla." "She's my girlfriend," Emil said, and we both pretended that wasn't as dramatic as it felt.
Days slid into months. We found a rhythm. We studied. We took pictures. We lied—to professors, to ourselves—about how little sleep we had. I learned his hands had calluses from piano practice at twelve, and he learned I chewed on my left thumbnail when nervous.
One Saturday morning he texted: "Can you come out? I have something to show you."
"Is it a cat?" I texted back, because he always joked he might bring home a cat.
"No," he replied. "Not a cat. Later."
He met me outside the dorm, looking both nervous and excited. He took my hand and led me to the digital market. Right in the middle of a display of cameras, he stopped and turned to me.
"Pick one," he said.
I laughed. "You already gave me one."
"This is for you," he insisted, like he suddenly had more courage than rationality. "Pick a camera you really want."
I did. We tested lenses. He insisted on helping me pay, which I refused until he folded his hands and said, "Please."
I let him. I took the camera home and cried when I realized how much he had saved. He kept saying, "You have to keep it. You need to make pictures."
The camera's first image was taken with my fingers shaking. He insisted we practice a formal portrait. He set a timer and we crowded into the frame, both trying to look natural.
"There's no SD card," I said at the camera store joke later when we looked at the photo on a display.
He looked at me, eyes wide, and for a moment he looked like every boy who had ever been caught. "Oh—"
"You forgot the SD card?"
"I knew you'd say that," he muttered. "I wanted to make you laugh."
He did. I laughed. Then he kissed the corner of my mouth in a hurry and I kept that photo even though it was fuzzy.
There were small tests. Rumors about Keyla got louder; someone posted a photograph of Emil talking to her in a hallway. I confronted him. He looked guilty for only a second.
"She asked if I could meet her in public to make things look—" he broke off.
"To make things look what?"
"Like I was available," he said.
"And you didn't tell me?"
"I didn't want you to think it was anything. I wanted to handle it before it became a thing."
"It became a thing because you didn't tell me," I said. "We share news—good or bad. We promised."
"You promised yourself trust," he said.
"Maybe I did," I said, soft, because this was the part I hated—where you discover the cartography of the other person still held unexplored territories.
He took my face in his hands. "I don't want to lose you. I don't want you to think Keyla is anything."
"Okay," I said. "Fine."
He kissed me like an apology and a promise braided together.
Then came the night with our families and the blind date that wasn't. My parents had, in their infinite optimism, arranged a dinner with an acquaintance for me. I came prepared to face the situation with a polite smile and a polite exit.
"Your daughter is young," the acquaintance said kindly to my father. "It might be early to—"
Emil burst in like someone had thrown open a window. He sat, breathless, and before the acquaintance could begin, he said, "They're not doing this."
We both stared at him as if he were a small animal that had spoken full sentences. His sudden declaration made my cheeks hot.
"What are you talking about?" my father asked.
"I mean," Emil said, swallowing, "Veronique and I are together. We want it known. We're together."
There was a pause like a held breath. Then the table erupted into conversation.
"Of course," my mother said, half laughing, half in tears. "Of course you are."
My father was quiet for once. The acquaintance bowed politely and smiled, as if arranged dates were just one of the many normal things life provided.
Emil squeezed my hand under the table. "I couldn't let them lay that out," he said softly. "Not without you."
"You interrupted a grown-up dinner," I whispered.
"I saved you from a chair next to a stranger," he answered.
It was absurdly romantic. It was also the kind of small, decisive action that made me trust him beyond words.
Years later, when we stood under a different light—an apartment we had bought with both our names on the lease—someone asked me if I had expected it to fall into place like it did.
"I didn't," I said.
"But I did know this: there were things I wouldn't give up." He looked at me like a photo he'd saved. "Like the way you huff at bad coffee."
We married with both sets of parents beaming like they'd just conquered something gentle and stubborn.
People say childhood relationships either wilt or become a tender thing that lasts.
Ours became both a little messy and careful at once. We argued over dishes and who got first turn with the shower. We learned that love is not always the fireworks you see in movies, but the small rituals that stack up like coins.
"Promise you'll keep making silly faces for my camera," he asked once, fingers fiddling with the strap of the old camera.
I mimed protest and then made the silliest face I could.
"Good," he said, and snapped the picture.
Our life kept some plainness and some magic. He brought me pancakes at the wrong time. I returned the favor by leaving notes on his pillow. We took pictures of lazy afternoons and the way light fell across the couch.
One evening, years later, we sat on the back porch watching a sky the color of old denim. He reached into his pocket and handed me the old, scratched camera he'd once bought me.
"I kept all the files," he said. "Even the ones you didn't think were good."
I thumbed through them on his laptop. There was a photo of a day with rain on the campus window, the smile of my mother, the first portrait we had failed badly at because there was no SD card. We both laughed at that—the memory of a worry that turned into a joke.
"You still count syllables," I teased him.
"Only when I'm nervous," he said.
"Do you still make lists?" I asked.
"Only the important ones," he said. "You are on them."
He leaned forward, and the sky listened to us like it had time enough.
We kept the forum thread as a silly relic. We told our children about the photo without the SD card. We told them how sometimes the world rearranges itself around a shared awkwardness and two stubborn kids who decided to stay.
The camera is still on my shelf. The battery's low, the strap is frayed. There's one picture that I keep on loop in my head: Emil, caught mid-laugh, his hair a mess, his eyes the honest color they always were. He is exactly that boy who could make the plan to share a life with me and then forget a tiny SD card, and in that forgetfulness, make something treasured.
"Do you remember when you forgot the SD card?" I asked him once, as if testing whether he remembered me the way I did him.
He grinned. "How could I forget? It was the first time you forgave me for a screw-up."
I smiled back. "Then take the picture."
He did. The shutter clicked, and the sound was somehow the whole of us.
The End
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