As a hopeless romantic who thinks the whole nickname not real name thing is just kind of fun (not that he even uses what little social media he does have) I wanted to tell the story of the boy next door.
First thing to establish, I literally mean the boy next door. Growing up I always had a crush on the boy who lived next door to me. Like right next door. For some reason even after I've explained that people will see it for themselves and be like "Oh wow you really mean next door".
We had (unknowingly) admired each other from afar and while I was home from Ai in Pittsburgh for the summer I made my first ever successful batch of macarons & posted them on facebook. I was shocked to see a "like" roll in from him as in all 5 years of our fb friendship he had never liked or commented on anything I saw. So I got giddy and left some on the porch for him before leaving to go back to school. A few days later I threw my phone in excitement when a facebook message popped up from him saying he loved the macs and wanted to take me to dinner. We hit it off on our first date, talking for over 5 hours, and have been best friends & partners ever since. He was the first person to tell me to go for it with Sweet Costo, insisting I'd succeed despite my doubts and hesitations so I probably wouldn't even be writing this if it weren't for the boy next door.