Sweet Romance14 min read
When Senses Crossed: The Meteor, the Cat, and a Kiss
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I remember the night like an electric pinprick under my skin.
It was a full moon. The sky was clear. I lay in my bed, curled like an embarrassed child, because of cramps that felt like someone was trying to pull my insides out. I had my phone propped up and was watching a cute comic about a chubby cat to distract myself.
"He looks like a marshmallow," I whispered to the dim room.
"Want me to bring you a heating pad?" my mom had messaged earlier. I turned back to the comic and hit Send on a snarky sticker.
A second later my fingers felt... different.
"Ow," I said aloud, and then I realized my hand felt strangely full. Not pain, not exactly—more like a plushness, as if my fingers were squishing through soft, warm fur. My thumb brushed something springy and warm. I stared at my empty hand.
Then the pain in my stomach flared so sharply I gasped and doubled over. Whatever warmth I had felt disappeared.
"Nope. Waking up, Em," I told myself. "Just a dream."
I tried to go back to the comic. A second later I felt warm water running down my shoulder and a weight on my arm, like someone was washing me gently with a washcloth. The sensation moved—my arm tingled as if scrubbed by another set of hands. I slapped myself across the cheek to prove I was awake.
Another slap landed on my face. Not from my hand.
I yelped. I slapped myself again, and another smack hit me in response. A horrible, ridiculous idea slid into my head.
"You are not human," I muttered into my pillow.
It didn't stop. A few more slaps exchanged across the void of two rooms and two bodies. I ended up laughing because what else could I do? When the slapping stopped, silence stretched for a beat, and then a small, sheepish ping came through my phone.
Emilia? Are you awake? Griffin.
I stared at the message. Griffin Bauer. Griffin was my childhood friend—my neighbor, my partner-in-crime since we were five. He always looked like he had wandered out of a magazine: tall, easy smile, hair that refused to lie flat. We've been "like siblings who don't share clothes" for as long as I could remember.
I typed back: What did you do last night? Why are my hands puffy?
He replied: What do you mean? Are you okay?
"You tell me," I whispered to the dark.
On the phone he sent only one more message: Call me.
When I called, his voice came through low and breathy, like he'd just been woken. "Em? Did you—did you just yell? I thought you were making a weird noise."
"I felt fur," I said. "And someone was washing me."
"Fur?" He was silent for a beat. "I was petting Petal. I thought I was the only one awake."
Petal—Griffin's cat—was a round ball of gray who liked to sit on his lap and stare at the world like it was a salad bar.
"You're messing with me," I said, but both of us were too sober to laugh.
Over the next week, things escalated like an experiment gone wrong.
"Stop it," I told him in the hallway one morning when we should have been to class. "You felt my cramps last night. What the hell, Griffin?"
He rolled his eyes, but his cheeks pinked. "I thought you had a stomach bug."
"You had a cat on your lap and you felt my cramps!"
"Maybe Petal was dramatic."
"You're impossible."
He pretended not to feel the sting in my voice, but every time I yelped or sighed, a tiny twitch would pass through him. When I sat on the cold dorm steps and hugged my knees, he flinched as though someone had just tapped his shoulder.
And then we discovered smell.
One evening I sat inside our dorm with friends. Somebody had been to a food fair and someone else had brought barbecue. I could smell charred meat despite being two rooms away. My roommates laughed about it.
"Em, you do have a weird nose," Kaitlyn teased with a grin. "Stop being dramatic."
I sent Griffin a text: Are you eating at the food fair? Because I can smell barbecue.
He replied, almost immediately: No. I can smell it too. Is this real life?
"Maybe it's a ghost," Jewel suggested, tossing her hair.
"I don't think..." I started. "Griffin."
"What?" He sounded small suddenly.
I decided, finally, to talk about it like two people who had survived middle school and all its awkwardness.
"It started last Saturday," I said. "I felt your cat. Then I felt you washing yourself. Now I can smell what you smell."
Griffin's answer came after a pause I could feel in my ribs: Maybe we linked? Like, literally linked?
"This isn't a rom-com," I said. "We're not supposed to link like... bodies. We are best friends, not soulmates."
"Not soulmates," he echoed, and then, softer, "But what if it's temporary? What if it's some cosmic glitch and we'll be fine in a week?"
"Fine how?" I asked, and the cramps lanced through me so hard I clutched the stair rail. "Fine how, Griffin?"
"I don't know," he said. He sounded helpless in a way I'd never heard before.
We tried to adapt. We synchronized showers so we'd both get that bizarre sensation of someone else scrubbing your back. We developed ridiculous codes. A double pinch meant "text back." A poke on the arm meant "I'm outside." It was intimate and annoying and sometimes, rare and honest, it felt like someone else looking at the world the same way you do.
"Stop poking me," I'd tell him in the middle of class, and he'd pretend he hadn't felt it.
"What if this never ends?" I asked one night, lying on the grass of the campus quad, watching the stars.
"Then we'll be each other's weather report," he said, and tapped my knee. "Sign me up?"
"You are ridiculous." The words were half anger, half something softer.
Then hearing unlocked. We both woke up one morning to a chorus of early-morning chaos: the boys across the hall were loud, and Griffin grabbed his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.
"I can't stand it," he hissed.
"You're trying to sleep through human noises?" I laughed.
He didn't answer; he was listening to our floor's hallway chatter and to my roommates making coffee, and I could feel the scrape of his tension as if it were electricity.
Hearing made the link claustrophobic. Someone in his dorm sneezed, and I jumped. His roommate's jokes became my background noise. I couldn't concentrate in the library because he was in a lecture two buildings over and I could hear the professor's cadence in my head. We started sharing playlists in the middle of lectures and removing each other's earbuds like thieves stealing calories.
"It has to happen at night," Griffin said one time. "All of it seems to start after lights out."
"11 to 11:30," I guessed. "Twice now it's around then."
Griffin chewed at his thumbnail. "What did you do at 11 on October sixth?"
I blinked. "I watched a webcomic and fell asleep."
"I made a wish," he said slowly. "On Petal."
I laughed, incredulous. "You wished to understand me with a cat?"
He looked at me like I'd lost my mind. "I didn't think it'd work."
"Work what?"
"That wish. I don't know, like—" He rubbed his forehead. "I wished that someday I could just get you. Not like date you, only—be close. Understand you."
I felt a familiar ache—less cramps this time and more a tightness under the collarbone. "You wished to understand me," I repeated. "And the universe said, 'Okay, here, take his senses too'?"
"Look," he said. "I don't know. But when I woke up the next day, I spent half an hour petting Petal and the cat was purring like a chainsaw. Something felt different."
We both fell silent, mulling the absurd possibility.
We decided to test the sky.
On October 25th, the astronomy feed lit up with news about an incoming meteor shower. It would be visible from the mountain near our town. There were limited tents and more people wanted the stars than the locals wanted to host. We bought two tickets like thieves grabbing golden pastries.
"If this is a wish-based curse," I said, buckling my coat, "then we're going to a mountain to beg the heavens to fix it."
"If it's a curse," Griffin said, amused, "then at least the mountain has hot chocolate."
We set up our tent at the ridge and lay under a black that smelled like cold stone and memories. For a long time we watched—meteor, nothing. We traced constellations and tried to avoid the subject like it was a low-grade fever.
"Promise me," I said finally, voice smaller because the air was thin and brave sounded expensive. "If tonight it doesn't stop, we'll find another way. We try everything."
He turned to me and smiled. "Deal."
He left to go to the bathroom and as soon as he crossed the threshold of the tent, the world flashed.
I'd seen things before—his hands petting Petal, his face flushed by embarrassment—but this was different. My vision blinked and for a moment I was looking through his eyes. I saw his bare belly, a messy tangle of hair at his navel, a ridiculous sight that made my cheeks burn. The flash ended and I nearly fainted.
"It's happening," I whispered.
He came back and crouched at the tent flap. "Em? Everything okay in there?"
"Fine," I lied.
Then the sky tore into diamonds. The meteor shower arrived as if summoned—thousands of streaks, each one a small, furious blessing. People around us whooped and one couple started sobbing in a way that made my throat ache.
"Make a wish," Griffin said, and his voice was tight.
The air between us felt like a held breath. I almost laughed that it was so cinematic. We closed our eyes and I made a selfish, stupid wish: Please, let this be fixable.
When the shower ended, he looked at me and said the quietest thing I'd ever heard from him.
"I like you," he said. "I like you, Emilia. I like you a lot. I'm sick of being 'just' your friend. I want more."
I felt like someone had hit the wrong chord in my chest. "You do?" I asked, and I didn't know if it was hope or panic or a dozen other small things.
"Yes," he said. "I'm not joking. Say something."
"I—" My mind skittered. I should have said the brave things, the easy things, but all my usual scripts left the station.
"Say yes," he tried.
"Say something," I asked, which was neither yes nor no.
He laughed like a soft mistake. "Okay. Consider that a yes."
We didn't solve anything that night. The link didn't vanish. But the confession hung between us like a warm scarf.
Back at school, the link kept interrupting our lives.
"Why are you blushing?" Norma May asked me one morning, bright as coffee.
"Because my childhood friend kisses like a bulldozer," I muttered.
"This is about Griffin," Kaitlyn guessed with a grin. "Admit it."
I tried to ignore her. Which mostly failed.
We made rules. No changing in the dorm when the other was awake. No reality TV before bed. No sudden uses of spicy food in the next room. The rules were ridiculous, but necessary.
The worst was jealousy without cause. Because we could hear, smell, and feel each other's lives, I learned things I didn't want to know. Girls talked to him. He didn't tell me everything. I could hear his laughter when someone leaned too close. It felt like reading a book with the last page missing.
"Does she like you?" I asked once, fiercely.
"What girl?" His voice was cool.
"You're smiling at someone in the cafeteria."
"There's no one."
"Don't lie."
He fell quiet for a long time. "I like you," he said finally.
"Then stop acting like you don't," I snapped.
He was exasperatingly earnest. "I don't know how to be anything else and not ruin everything."
Then Petal disappeared.
One night at home Griffin said, flat and small, "Mom called. Petal's gone."
My stomach dropped as if someone had taken a cup and poured it out of me. We retraced every path her little paws might have taken, posters smudged with cat hair, and a small trail of empty cat food tins in the kitchen. In his living room we found a mosaic on the carpet: someone had arranged cat food into a crude picture.
I should have expected odd from the person who had once named a rock "Rocky" and kept it on his desk. But the cat-food mosaic wasn't accidental. It was a picture of a boy and a girl kissing. The boy looked like Griffin. The girl looked like me.
"What—" I said.
"Maybe it's a clue," he whispered.
We called around, put up flyers, checked every alley. His parents were frantic and every time his mother cried into the phone I felt it in my chest. We asked neighbors, posted to group chats, and slept in shifts near the front windows.
That night we found a message in the stairwell, written in flour. It was ridiculous and creepy. Under it, someone had left a small paper with a single sentence: "Taste can fix what the sky broke."
"It sounds like something from a shrine," Griffin said.
"A shrine?" I laughed. "Who writes poetry with cat food and flour in 2023?"
"This is silly and very on-brand," he admitted.
We argued about whether we should try kissing to trade taste and break the link. I felt silly and terrified by the same weight.
"What if kissing doesn't do anything?" I asked. "What if it makes everything worse?"
"Then we'll eat a whole pizza and see if the world explodes," he said, and there was a nervous smile in his voice.
We tried other things first. We made noise by banging pots. We lived so deliberately that a neighbor joked we must be performing a new reality series called 'Senses: Extreme Edition.' It was ridiculous and sweet, like us—awkwardly trying to steer a runaway train made of two teenage hearts.
The search for Petal came to nothing for days. Then, suddenly, mania set in. People online started sharing our flyers. Someone found a clue on a trail camera: a flash of gray near the old mill. We raced there, breathless and stupid with hope.
Petal sat on the mill wall like she owned it.
This Cat—this fat, nonchalant, gray cat—blinked at us with the uninterested dignity of royalty.
"I thought we lost you," Griffin breathed, and the feeling hit me like an old song.
Between his fingers and the cat's purr something seemed to click. He kissed the top of Petal's head—an odd, private little worship—and we both felt something loosen, like a zipper being pulled.
A week later, Grain by grain, something changed.
We still had traces of each other's lives. But one afternoon, when I flicked my wrist to deflect an annoying poke, there was no answer. I pinched my thigh until the pain came purely from me and not echoed in another body. I laughed till I cried.
"Are you sure?" Griffin asked over the phone, voice strangled.
"Yes," I said, and the relief was like rain.
We'd tried everything and somehow... Petal did something. Maybe it was the wish, maybe it was the cat, maybe we were just stubborn kids who made it through by being clumsy together. We never found out exactly why the senses crossed. Maybe some things don't have neat explanations. They only have moments.
The link had given us gifts I hadn't expected—tiny windows into the other person. I learned how he moved when he was embarrassed. I learned how he hummed when thinking of an answer. He learned the sound of my breath when I held a secret. It made our friendship a narrower, closer corridor. It made the lines thinner.
Then, with the craving and the unknown gone, the romance began to find its form.
There were small confessions, the kind that get tucked into lunch boxes and the margins of notebooks.
"Why did you kiss Petal?" I asked one day, and he tipped his head.
"Because I thought maybe a cat would understand better than the sky," he said.
"You are such a dramatic idiot."
"You loved it," he said.
"Obviously not. I am, however, grateful."
One cold night he pulled me into a doorway and said, with all the wind in his words, "You thought I was joking that night on the mountain?"
I looked at him and the ridiculous scar on his chin that threw shadows over his laugh. "A little."
He cupped my face like it was both strange and sacred. "I'm not a joke. I like you. I like all of you. Your stupid protests, your dramatic sighs, the way you eat muffins like they're contraband."
I felt something inside me untie.
"Do you want to try?" he asked.
"Try what?" My voice was a thin thread.
"For real. Not because the sky or the cat or whatever trick has us tied together. For us."
I exhaled. It was a messy "Okay" that contained more courage than I usually had.
We moved forward like two people learning a new dance. We kept things secure: small dates, public walks, the kind of affection that learns to be normal again after something extraordinary. We both made mistakes. I got jealous. He tried to play clever games and wound up overcomplicating things. But we talked—awkward, fumbling, and honest—and that felt like healing.
At one point, Denver Johnson—the self-assured senior who had never met a personal boundary—decided to be charming again. He had a way of filling rooms with his voice and assuming my attention was currency.
"Emilia," he said one afternoon at club, leaning in with an overfamiliar grin. "You should come to the animation showcase. I'll save you a front seat."
"No thanks," I replied. "I'll watch from the back, like my dignity."
He laughed like a practiced echo. "Your loss."
Griffin, who had been across the room, raised an eyebrow and pretended not to notice. Later, he told me, "He was just joking."
"Was he?" I asked coldly.
He squeezed my hand. "I don't like how he looks at you."
That was the thing. The senses link had saved us in a different way: it had taught us to notice details, to be honest about slights, and to act before petty things could mutate.
My roommate Kaitlyn and Jewel were an orchestra of loud support. "You two are so cute when you fight about nonsense," Kaitlyn chided once.
"Noted," Griffin said. "Do you have anything for breakfast, Em? I can smell your dorm, but no pastry today."
"Hey!" I laughed. "Your nose would have failed you."
We ended up in a silly rhythm. We texted each other from the cafeteria during class. In the library we would pass notes, which he still swore felt like contraband.
The final scene—if one can call the tiny, ordinary moments a final scene—came on a Tuesday afternoon.
We had just finished a boring lecture on microeconomics. Griffin pulled me outside under a tree whose remaining leaves were the color of concession stands. He reached into his backpack, fiddled for a second, and tossed me a pillow-shaped thing wrapped in tissue.
"What is it?" I asked.
He grinned sheepishly. "Open it."
Inside was a tiny jar of salt-scented candies we'd once argued about in our freshman year. "You remembered," I said.
"How could I forget?" He sounded surprised I would even think he might.
He leaned forward, close enough to be a breeze. "Emilia, I want to keep saying it so it won't go away. I like you. I don't want a life where I wonder whether I told you enough. Will you be my girlfriend?"
"Yes," I said, and it was the most certain, ridiculous, pure thing I could find.
He kissed me then, gentle and sincere, like pressurized summer. It was not the undoing of anything supernatural. It was a kiss that belonged to two people who had stood at the edge of a meteor shower and decided to try again anyway.
When we walked back to the dorm, Griffin's shirt still bore that ridiculous shimmer of lipstick from the prank night long ago. I pointed it out and he laughed, tugging at his collar like it was an old, beloved map.
"You want to make sure no one else gets lost in the map," I teased.
He kissed the top of my head. "Maps are better when you're not alone."
The link had made ordinary things intimate, and ordinary intimacy, in turn, made everything steadier. We grew comfortable with proximity; we learned new boundaries not because the world told us so, but because we wanted to protect each other.
There were many small moments—him rubbing my shoulder when my cramps hit, me stealing fries when he wasn't looking, the way we would both text at midnight because something funny happened on a show—that measured the distance of our contentment.
And then one evening, months later, as rain skittered down the windowpanes and the campus smelled faintly of wet cement and memory, I found a small scrap of paper under my pillow. It had a doodle of a chubby cat and, in Griffin's messy handwriting, three words:
"For when you forget."
I kept it like you keep a photograph you are allowed to write on. It reminded me of the meteor rain and the cat-food mosaics and flour messages. But mostly it reminded me of something only the two of us knew: that reckless, awkward closeness had made room for something like love.
"I like your ridiculous ways," I told him that night.
"You like that I'm ridiculous and also wrong sometimes," he said, and kissed me in the dim room.
Sometimes I think the universe liked to meddle. Other times I think people revise their own stories—wish and cat and meteor be damned. We were the kind of people who could make messes and clean them up again; who could be ridiculous together and serious together.
A month after the meteor, on a night when the moon was round and full, we passed the place on campus where the cat-food mosaic had once been found. Someone had drawn a tiny heart in chalk. Griffin bent down and adjusted the line with the tip of his shoe.
"Remember when that looked like a conspiracy?" I asked.
He smiled, small and private. "I remember."
"I remember," I said back.
We sat on the curb and shared a small, plain sandwich, nothing flashy. It tasted like bread and a kind of peace I didn't have words for. Across the street, a cat stalked its business, indifferent as ever.
"Do you ever wonder what would have happened if we'd never felt each other?" I asked.
He looked up at the moon. "Maybe we'd still be friends? Maybe we'd be less honest. Maybe we'd miss this." He tapped my fingers with his. "I like that we had to learn it."
"I like that you learned," I said, because I did. I liked that he had learned to see me, in the unspectacular, stubborn ways that matter. I liked that Petal had walked into our mess and somehow walked us back to each other.
He put his head on my shoulder and we watched the sky.
The meteor shower had taught me one stubborn truth: sometimes the sky will throw a wild thing at you—a string of falling stars, a cat's peculiar logic—and the best you can do is make something warm out of what falls.
"Promise me one thing," he murmured.
"What?"
"That if the sky ever decides to fix us again, we'll at least ask for royalties."
I laughed. "Deal."
He nudged me with his shoulder. "Emilia."
"Yeah?"
"Thanks for being my favorite kind of map."
I kissed him, because sometimes gratitude needs a soft, ridiculous container.
We both kept Petal when the situation normalized, like a small, furry reminder of how strange things can be. The cat would sidle between us at night and purr like an engine, untroubled by metaphysics.
The world didn't give us explanations. It gave us moments: a meteor, a missing cat, a taste-traded kiss that broke a bond and made way for something else. We learned that sometimes love arrives disguised as a problem you must solve together, and that true closeness comes out of awkwardness, apology, and a hundred tiny, tender votes.
One day we found a smear of lipstick on Griffin's shirt again. He blushed and rolled his eyes.
"It wasn't me this time," he said.
I smiled. "Of course not. This time the universe just wanted proof."
We left the old mosaic place, hands linked, and walked toward the dorm with laughter spilling behind us like a promise.
The End
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