Sweet Romance13 min read
The Moon Wrote Back
ButterPicks14 views
I never expected that a careless double-tap would be the beginning of everything.
"I tapped his shoulder," I said when I told Danna later, "and the text that popped up was... 'Brother, come into my arms.'"
Danna laughed until she cried. "You're ridiculous. Who even sets that as a 'poke'?"
"I know," I said. "But then—"
"Then what?" she pressed.
"Then Ellis Feng answered me."
"Stop."
"He typed, 'Does your husband mind?'"
Danna gasped. "He's dead, Hayes."
"Exactly." I put the phone on my palm like it might float away. "That's why I'm saying—it's insane."
Ellis had been my silent center for years, until the night my courage failed me and his cruelty undid it. He was my professor, brilliant and remote. He'd looked at me like light could be measured and calibrated—then one evening at his loft party he asked, loud enough for everyone to hear, "Who would like a disabled person?" and the men laughed like knives. I had left him that night, my dignity crushed into the gutter.
"You're not going to tell me you've been texting the dead," Danna said. "You're not."
"I double-tapped his avatar by accident," I repeated. "It sent the preset. And then—" My voice scraped.
"Why did you go back to his house in the first place?" she asked.
"Because he wrote, 'come to my place,'" I said. "I was stupid."
Danna didn't argue. She always knew when to stop. "Then go," she said at last. "Tell him off. Or—don't. But don't let him own your nights anymore."
That was the new me: Hayden Scott—assistant turned scholar, quiet until I wasn't. I left home on scholarship, and the lab was a place of numbers and the tiniest human kindness. Ellis noticed me the way a star notices a moth. He offered me a job in his lab the first day, not because he needed me, but because his eccentricity liked to leave tasks unfinished. "I hire assistants because I'm lazy," he'd said then, with a half-smile that made the lab light up. I stayed. I learned. I watched him sleep at his desk, fingers stained from solder and chemical residue, and I loved a man who never promised anything.
Years later, five years away and then the offer to return as faculty, my life had a trajectory I could finally trust. I took his old office when the university cleared it for me. I found a yellowed obituary in a university newsletter the week I moved in: "Professor Ellis Feng passed away at 32." The sentence hit me like an unexpected storm. My throat closed.
"You should have answered him back," Brody said when he came to drive me to the new office. Brody, my brother—Brody Fisher, who never asked for much—had become my anchor. He had been there the night I fled Ellis's party, bringing me home with silence and a thermos of tea.
"I didn't," I told him. "I was stubborn."
"You always were," he said.
Days passed. The office smelled of dust and old paper. I found his phone in a bottom drawer like a relic from another life. It still worked, battery like a stubborn ember. There was a balance tied up in that account, and a small wooden box on the desk—an object I'd given him years ago at some thrift booth. Inside it I found two letters: my confessional binding the first day I dared to say the words, and then—his reply.
"Hayden," the letter began in his precise hand, "I write to you from the balcony where the sun is warm. Your letter burned me in a way I can't explain..."
He had answered me once, and I hadn't read. Regret is a cold animal. I touched his name on my phone like it might be warm, and then, as Danna had predicted, I double-tapped.
The preset message popped up. I patted his virtual shoulder and said, as if I were daring the world to be normal: "Brother, come into my arms."
There was a pause. Then: "Does your husband mind?"
I went from cold to hot and then numb. "Who is this?" I typed.
"Ellis Feng."
I laughed. "Stop."
He did not stop. "Hayden Scott, no nickname? Not even a note?"
I called him. It rang. "Hayden?" came a voice, low and steady, softer than the memory of him, and I felt my knees fail.
He was in another place, another time. He said, "I'm in a coffin," like it was a joke.
"Are you dead?" I whispered. I couldn't breathe.
"2019," he said softly, "October ninth."
Everything shifted. Three years split between us like a canyon that could sometimes be bridged with one trembling text. He was alive in one time and not in mine, or perhaps he'd been dead and then the timelines tangled. I was a physicist by training; I knew enough to propose many hypotheses and none of them soothed my frantic heart.
"Believing is ridiculous," I told him, because denial is a gentle drug.
He typed back, "I believe you."
There were moments of ridiculous tenderness after that. We found that we could talk across time through the strangest seams. He would tell me the little things: "I ate grapefruit today," and I'd tell him about a lecture and he'd ask whether I was warm enough. He teased me mercilessly. One night I sobbed to him, liquored on loneliness and fear, and he said, "Don't cry. Crying makes me ache." He told me he loved me once, in an evening of thunder and traffic and truth. I told him I loved him back in a voice that nearly broke.
"I will do anything to keep you," I begged. "Tell me how."
"Give me the lottery numbers," he said. He made me laugh even in grief. I sent them.
"You're impossible."
"Maybe," I answered. "But go buy the ticket."
He bought it. He laughed. He didn't win enough to save his life, but the attempt was a concrete thing that felt like our hands interlaced across years.
For a while, our romance lived in these small ruptures: video calls across windows that showed the same tree outside the same balcony; flowers that arrived in my kitchen at impossible times because he had preordered them from his 2018 self; messages in the middle of a night that read like a living letter. He sent me sunflowers because he knew I liked them. "They're for the girl who feeds me soup when I'm in a bad mood," he'd said once, and I almost combusted.
Then we were interrupted by reality—the kind with sirens and dates. On the harvest of the year when he was scheduled to go abroad for treatment, his messages grew thinner. On a night when I could not reach him, a rumor like a shadow took shape on campus. "Ellis Feng—passed," read a post someone had put up. The world folded the other way again.
I panicked, then learned the truth in a way that should have shredded me. The timeline had shifted. There were new memories grafted onto mine—the kind of memory that felt foreign and yet mine. I began to dream things I'd never lived: an afternoon in California where a young version of me sat across from him on a borrowed porch; a tea spilled; a secret written into a phone like a talisman. When I woke, the memories stuck to the inside of my skull. Ellis had, somehow, threaded his survival into the past. He told me later: "I had to make sure I existed. I had to meet a version of you who could carry me."
"Why didn't you say?" I asked when he returned three years later, when the world righted itself into a present that included him.
"Would it have changed anything?" he asked me. "Would it have made you stop becoming you?"
It was true. I had left. I had become someone on a path he couldn't conjure by waving hands. He had stitched patches in time so that he might remain—so that his presence could linger and we could still meet on balconies and send daisies and laugh like fools.
We were so clumsy and so precious in the months that followed. He took care of me, and I took care of him in ways small and exacting. He scheduled my implant surgery—Aria, the new cochlear interface he had labored over and named "Hayden's Voice" in a note I found later. "Aria will work," he promised with the stubbornness that had always made him dangerous and safe at the same time. "I'll make sure you can hear birds again."
I could hear the rust of paper and the breath of the man beside me—my man—on the first morning the implant hummed to life. The smallest sounds became a symphony. "Do you hear the kettle?" he asked.
"I do," I said, voice raw with happiness.
"You sound different," he teased.
"I sound alive," I corrected.
Life beneath that new sound was everything we had tried to make of the stolen years. He was warm and mewing with eccentric tenderness. He wrote letters and hoarded them in a locked chest for me to open the first spring after he left. He told me to live, to not stay looking backward like I had been a compass that only pointed the wrong way.
And then—because no story is only sweetness, because the angles of light always produce some shadow—Dominick Beatty came back into our orbit.
Dominick had been at the party the night I had been humiliated. He had been one of the ones making crass jokes about me. He had been the loudest. He had been the sort of man who found solace in cheap applause and who thought moral weight was a flexible thing. After I returned as an academic and helped Aria become a real product—one that would help thousands—Dominick tried to attach himself to that success. He wrote a piece for a science and society column, claiming—blatantly and absurdly—that he had been one of the early proponents of cochlear advancement, that he'd "helped fund a study" and that a certain assistant—me—had been part of his "circle." It was a lie that smelled of ambition and cowardice.
I almost ignored Dominick. I almost let his petty appropriation drift into the background. But there is a balance in the world and people who humiliate others have a way of surfacing when the ground beneath them becomes bright. The launch of Aria would be public. The university had invited journalists, donors, and the medical press. There would be cameras and applause and my name on the release.
On the morning of the launch, the auditorium thrummed like a held breath. Ellis was at my side, hands tucked into mine, and I could feel heat and steadiness. Brody and Danna sat under the spotlight, cheering like family. Students lined up at the aisles with their phones like small constellations.
Dominick, with a smile that had been bleached by office gossip and cynical coffee, climbed onto the stage "to say a few words." He was introduced, and for a moment I thought nothing of it. Then his speech turned, with practiced agility, into a claim. "I have the utmost respect for Dr. Feng," he said, "and for the team. I was involved in the early funding phases, and I had suggested—years ago—this lovely concept of accessible sound."
He said "accessible sound." The room tilted. Murmurs.
I stepped up to the podium in a motion I hadn't planned. He looked at me with the faint, mocking interest of a man who still wanted to be center-stage. "Hayden," he said like a question.
"You're speaking about my work," I said, my voice a blade that had learned tenderness, sharp when it needed to be. "And about credit."
"Credit?" Dominick smiled. "Credit is a complicated thing."
"Credit isn't complicated when people are honest." I looked out at the faces—students, donors, reporters—and then at his. "You said cruel things at a party six years ago. You laughed while others mocked someone who is disabled. You told a woman that no one would like a disabled person, and you made her feel small. You did that in public, and you have never apologized."
His face shifted. The smile remained, but now it teetered.
"No one here deserves the kind of erasure you're trying to perform," I said. I felt Ellis's fingers tighten around mine. "You didn't fund this project. You didn't care when it mattered. You showed up now to take a bow. That bow belongs to people who stayed, who bore the small relentless work when it was quiet."
"You're saying—" Dominick began.
"I'm saying you used people as props," I said. "You used humiliation as entertainment. And we won't let you rewrite that."
A reporter in the front row clicked record with the eagerness of someone smelling a story. A student I knew raised his hand and said, "Did you say something like that to Professor Scott?" He sounded as though he had been holding his question like a held note.
Dominick's color changed, the amused ivory replaced by a flush of anger. "This is slander," he announced. "You can't just—"
"Watch me," I said. I had an archive in my head: the memory of men leaning in, laughter like glass, the exact cadence of that phrase he'd used. "You laughed. You said, 'Who would like a disabled person?' You mocked me. There were witnesses. People who left that night felt bad—enough to ask you about it later. Do you remember the girl you called 'sweetie' and then dismissed? Do you remember the way you forced words into her mouth as jokes? You encouraged cruelty."
Someone in the back muttered, "I remember."
Another student, one of the graduate researchers, stood up. "You told me at a conference once that science was about winners," Lincoln Carr said, voice steady. "You told me people like Dr. Scott would never be significant. I took your words down. I forgot to burn the notes."
He handed a notebook to the event organizer. The organizer skimmed, and then looked up with a face gone pale. "These are direct quotes," she said. "Published work and private notes that contradict your claims."
Dominick's face contorted. He started to sputter denials. He tried to reach for tone, for lawyer-speak. "This is a smear," he said. "This—this is a hatchet job."
The auditorium shifted into a chorus. Cameras panned hard. People murmured. Someone recorded him on a phone; another student uploaded a voice memo to a science forum that already analyzed the work he'd plagiarized. The donors exchanged looks that tasted like disappointment.
"You used other people's discomfort as entertainment," I said calmly. "You used someone else's vulnerability for a laugh. That is not an academic sin only—it's a moral one."
At that, Dominick's defenses began to crack like poorly tempered glass. He tried to laugh it off. "It was a long time ago," he said, sweating. "People change."
"Do they?" a woman near the aisle asked. "Did you change when you tried to take credit?"
People who had once been his allies in faculty meetings stepped back. A board member turned away. Two students recorded the whole exchange while asking follow-up questions. "Why did you mock her?" one asked bluntly.
Dominick faltered. He reached for the coherent rhythm of policy and PR, but in the face of dozens of small testimonies—notes, recollections, the same phrase repeated by other mouths—the stage of his authority crumbled. He went from bluster to denial to a stammering search for control. "You're inventing this," he told me. "It's a lie."
Laughter began to ripple through the room—not supportive laughter, but the laugh of someone whose emperor's robe was sliding off. The humor turned against him. Someone in the audience began to record the scene and upload it live. "There's a recording of the party," someone else called. "We have an audio clip. We'll upload it."
Dominick's face went white. He lunged forward in an obvious attempt to seize the microphone, but a security officer stepped in, firm and unafraid. "Sir," the officer said, "please step down."
His allies, who had stayed silent too long, now slid out of the rows like people leaving a plane that had lost pressure. The donors shifted their seats away. The journalists circled like vultures hungry for narrative, but even they had the sense to turn their attention to his unraveling.
"You're all witnesses," I told the room. "You heard him. The record will be clear."
Ellis, who had been quiet the whole time, spoke for the first time with the clipped clarity that used to make his lectures hypnotic. "Ethics in science isn't optional," he said. "We don't build technology to feed egos. We build it to heal lives. If you are here for show, leave. If you are here to take credit for what you did not do, that will be addressed by the university."
That was the last of Dominick's masks. He realized, too late, that he had miscalculated the room. People who had been mocked by him now felt a rush of vindication. Phones flashed. Comments bloomed online with his old phrase replayed and judged. A board member leaned over and quietly instructed an assistant to archive a request for a formal investigation into academic misconduct and harassment. Dominick tried to find leverage. There was none.
He left with his reputation rattling behind him like a loose chain. The murmurs followed him, and the record continued to grow. Students applauded when the organizers moved the program forward, but the applause felt different—less for spectacle and more for something like justice.
Later, in private, the university issued a statement, and Dominick was put on administrative leave pending investigation. Ten days after the event, details of his fabricated funding claims and earlier humiliations were public. The people who had once laughed in the shadow of his contempt issued letters of support for me. The world had turned without arrogance so beautifully that I felt dizzy.
That public humiliation was not my revenge; it was the world setting itself right. I didn't gloat. I had no appetite for schadenfreude. I only wanted the space to breathe without old echoes. When children later wrote to me thanking me for helping them find their voices, I kept Dominick's name out of the letters—and out of my mind. He was a lesson, not a life.
After the launch, Ellis and I left the stage and walked through the garden where the sun set in colors that seemed to approve. I asked, softly, "Do you ever regret changing things? Changing the past?"
He looked at me like someone who had held both a scalpel and a second chance. "Every day had risk," he said. "But then you got to be here. You got to be me."
"You got to be here," I repeated. "You made yourself a promise."
"We made a promise," he corrected. He laughed, a sound that used to be spare and now filled with relief. "We signed a terrible, beautiful contract with time."
We left behind the auditorium that contained our public life and stepped into a smaller world: our kitchen where he burned toast and apologized in the sweetest way, the old shop where we bought sunflowers at odd times, the hospital corridors where he explained surgery like a love letter. We made a life out of small facts: coffee at seven, a walk at three, a card in the locked chest every year. We argued about table settings and what to name future plants and made plans in the modest way of people who have already outlived their biggest losses.
When the end came—because in some way I had always known there might be an end—it was the quiet that did it. He drifted like one who no longer felt the stomach's need to demand more time. He left me letters, a chest of words, and an insistence that I should not "stay stuck on being brave in memory." His last letter was straightforward and tender: "I will wait for you, as you asked. You must live so that when we meet again, we have stories to exchange."
I kept writing back. I kept living. My life became a sequence of small jubilations stitched into a longer, resilient fabric. We married when we could, in a small place with an old camera and an old man who took our photograph with the tenderness of someone who had photographed other couples for decades. His students called me "Professor" now. I called him "my husband." When our days were good, we would sit in the window with a pot of tea and read letters aloud.
Sometimes, at night, I would open the locked chest and take out a single folded page. I would read the handwriting that knew me better than anyone. "Hayden," it began, and I would smile until my eyes burned.
If you asked whether those double-taps and thrown words and fatal nights were worth it, I'd answer without hesitation: yes. Because love in our story was not only the fireworks and the whispered confessions; it was the patient, stubborn unclogging of cruelty and the public setting to rights of a man who once mocked. It was being brave enough to stand up on a stage and say, "You will not make this smallness matter."
We walked a long way to be there together. We tended sunflowers even after his hands were thin. We kept the chest of letters locked, and every spring I would pull one out and read it aloud, the voice of the man who had learned physics and then learned how to love. The sound of his voice—the thunder of small truths—was always there in the air I breathed.
The End
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