Love at First Swipe
Vintage charm meets digital precision in this Romantic Comedy teaser short
Elspeth
“You’re going to die alone, Elspeth.”
The words came wrapped in a brogue so thick it could butter toast. Margo, her best friend and occasional bartender, leaned across the bookshop’s counter with all the tact of a battering ram made of floral perfume and sequins.
Elspeth didn’t look up. She was busy reorganizing the banned books section by emotional damage.
“I don’t mind dying alone,” she said evenly, “so long as I have time to alphabetize my regrets before I go.”
Margo rolled her eyes. “You’re thirty-seven, not seventy-seven. You own a business, quote dead poets in casual conversation, and still think tea can solve everything.”
“It usually can.”
“You are prime rom-com material, Elspeth MacRae, and I refuse to let you end up as the weird lady who leaves saucers out for ghosts.”
“That was one time, and it was for Robert Burns’ birthday.”
Margo snatched her phone off the counter and pulled up an app with an elegant nest logo.
“Try Nest,” she said, tilting the screen toward Elspeth like she was offering a holy relic. “It’s for romantics. No swipe trash. It matches people based on words, not waistlines.”
Elspeth gave it a look like it had personally insulted Austen.
Margo pressed on. “You make a profile. You pick a quote. You write an intro. You let the algorithm work it's witchcraft.”
“I am the witchcraft,” Elspeth muttered, but took the phone anyway.
Her fingers hovered over the screen. She typed, hesitated, deleted, then retyped.
Username: thebookwitch
Quote: “Love is the voice under all silences.” - e.e. Cummings
Bio: Book lover, Tea devout. Fluent in sarcasm. Looking for someone who dog-ears pages and shows up anyway.
She hit submit before she could regret it.
Elias
Meanwhile, two blocks away in the office kitchen upstairs, Elias was engaged in an entirely different war, against a motivational podcast blaring from a coworker’s wireless speaker.
“I’m telling you,” said Sean, his business partner and resident chaos muppet. “Nest is about to blow up. You should be on it. People want to know the guy behind the code.”
“I built it,” Elias said, stirring oat milk into his coffee like it had personally wronged him. “That doesn’t mean I want to date on it.”
“You’re single.”
“I’m busy.”
“You quote Douglas Adams and eat leftover pad thai in your bathrobe. You need this.”
Elias arched a brow. “Since when did you become my dating coach?”
“Since your last relationship ghosted you during Comic Con and you didn’t notice for a week.”
“That’s fair.”
Sean shoved the app in front of him. “Come on. Just... try it. Be yourself, but like, a version that doesn’t terrify people.”
With a theatrical sigh, Elias tapped in his details.
Username: artofcode
Quote: “Don’t panic.” - Douglas Adams
Bio: Code monkey with a heart of jazz. Plays chess. Drinks coffee like it’s a personality trait. Looking for someone who isn’t afraid of quiet.
He hit submit, tossed the phone on the table, and muttered, “This is going to end in disaster.”
Sean grinned. “Or you’re going to meet your manic pixie book witch.”
“Please never say that again.”
A week later
The bookstore sat wedged between a vape lounge and a boutique gym, both with names spelled in missing vowels and neon-lit signage that pulsed like a warning. Inside, the shop, Earl Grey & Plot Twists, was a narrow kingdom of quiet rebellion. Floorboards creaked under the weight of stories. The owner, Elspeth MacRae, wore red lipstick like armor and stocked the front table with banned books and secondhand poetry, each one tagged with a handwritten review that bit like sarcasm or hummed like prayer.
She was, in the words of her ex-boyfriend, “feral in a romantic way.”
And Elspeth liked it that way.
But the gentrification tide had rolled in hard this spring, and with it came the landlord’s letter: rent increase, new lease terms, and a promise that the building was being “modernized.” She’d pinned the notice to her bulletin board with a dagger-shaped push pin and refused to acknowledge it further.
That was three weeks ago.
Now, as the bell above the door jingled with the arrival of her doom, Elspeth Looked up from her copy of Persuasion and fixed her scowl like a duelist drawing steel.
He wore sneakers too white to be trusted. The kind of man who probably had a sleep-tracking app and thought “grunge” was a Pinterest aesthetic. His name was Elias Stone, and he was younger than she’d expected, tall in that arrogant way, with hair that looked like it disobeyed him on purpose.
“Hi,” he said, as if this were a Tinder date instead of a siege.
“You’re standing in my nonfiction section,” Elspeth replied coolly.
He blinked. “Right. Sorry. I’m the... new tenant leasing the upstairs space.”
She gestured around her “And this is my temple. You installed a cold-brew tap and fiber-optic cables directly above my poetry alcove. Please remove your shoes and your capitalist intentions.”
To his credit, Elias laughed. A genuine, startled laugh. “I promise I’m not here to ruin anything. I actually really like books.”
“Do you now?” Elspeth asked, arching a brow. “Name three.”
“Dune, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and... The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”
He winced before she could judge him. “That last one was a dare. My roommate tried to KonMari our spice rack.”
“Tragic,” Elspeth muttered. “I’ll add it to the wall of atrocities.”
But there was something in his grin. Not smugness, surprise. Like she wasn’t what he expected either.
The next battle came two days later over the thermostat. Then over wi-fi access. Then their conversation over her refusal to digitize her receipts, file her taxes with anything other than a ledger and pen, or even acknowledge the existence of Square readers.
Elias, in his sleek black co-working space upstairs, ran a dating app called Nest, for people who “wanted to build something together, not just swipe past it.” It was trending. Investors were calling. But every time he descended the creaky staircase and walked into the scent of bergamot and vintage angst, his algorithm failed him completely.
Elspeth was chaos wrapped in a cardigan. She kept forgetting to label her tea tins. She played opera at closing time and let the cat, Ginsberg, nap in the philosophy section.
He was used to code. Precision. Predictable flows.
Elspeth was none of those things.
But then one night, the internet went down. Elias came downstairs, grumbling, only to find Elspeth curled up in the poetry alcove, candlelit, reading aloud to herself from a volume of Neruda.
He sat.
He listened.
He stayed.
And later, without realizing it, they both logged in to Nest under their fake names thebookwitch and artofcode and started chatting in earnest.
Neither of them expected the person on the other side of the screen to be their real-life nemesis.
And neither of them wanted to stop.
I know this story was out of your wheelhouse due to the nature of the prompt, but you absolutely knocked it out the park! Your dialogue is always just superb, and I love how it was used here to really bring out each character's personality.
The Douglas Adams references were amazing as well. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a formative piece in helping me find my own comedic voice for some of my work. This was just the perfect blend of rom, com, and wonderfully wholesome vibes. Amazing work!
I loved this story! it has a unique take on romance/dating and had so many fun and charming moments. Love your character's use of poetry quotes, adds a really nice touch.