The Eleventh Year of My Secret Crush
At sixteen, Iris Shen first fell quietly, helplessly, and entirely in love with a boy.
His name was Adrian Hale—a boy who favored crisp white shirts and carried the scent of sunlight wherever he went. He played the drums with a restless energy that made people turn their heads, and when he smiled, dimples bloomed at the corner of his lips, softening the coolness in his eyes. To Iris, he was brilliance incarnate: warm, dazzling, and impossibly distant. She watched him from across classrooms and after-school corridors, storing every glance, every fleeting moment into the tender corners of her youth.
But he never knew.
At eighteen, Iris chose to repeat a year of school—a decision that confused her friends but one she made with quiet determination. With relentless effort, she was admitted to the very university Adrian once attended. She thought she had finally taken a small step closer to him. She imagined seeing him at the library, passing him beneath the maple trees on campus, catching glimpses of that familiar silhouette in white.
Yet the day she arrived, she learned Adrian had transferred to a university in the United Kingdom six months earlier. Her world paused, the laughter around her blurring like a distant tide. The boy she had chased for two years had left without leaving even a shadow behind.
Time moved, as it always does. Through long winters and fleeting springs, Iris studied, grew, stumbled, and stood up again. She became quieter, steadier, accustomed to burying her past affection deep within her heart.
Four years later, at twenty-two, on the day of her graduation ceremony, fate unexpectedly brought Adrian back into her life. He was no longer the untouchable boy she had admired from afar, but a young man standing in the crowd with gentler eyes and a calmer presence. Iris gathered all her courage, clutching a letter she had written the night before—a letter containing ten years’ worth of unsent tenderness.
Before she could give it to him, she overheard a casual conversation:
Adrian had a girlfriend, someone he had been with for many years, through continents and long-distance challenges.
Her letter remained in her bag. Her courage dissolved like sugar in warm water. That day, Iris realized love wasn’t always something one could offer, even if it had shaped an entire adolescence.
Years passed again. Iris stepped into the working world, navigating responsibilities, heartbreaks, and quiet moments of solitude. Adrian lived his own life somewhere far away, untied from her world and yet never entirely erased from her memory. She thought her story with him had ended long ago—unfinished, unspoken, and better left untouched.
But ten years after her first secret spring, during an ordinary winter, their paths crossed again—unexpectedly—because of a blind date arranged by their families. Adrian appeared at the small café before she did, no longer a distant sun, but a man whose gaze softened the moment he saw her walk in.
Time had changed them, but something familiar lingered beneath the years.
And this time, neither of them turned away.
