Vlad

I was quite the character: a perpetual humor machine and a self-taught programmer. I skipped lectures, but I livened up classes with jokes. And then HE appeared. Vladislav Viktorovich. The spitting image of a computer in human form: 27 years old, a perfect shirt, perpetually furrowed brows. Pedantic to the point of gnashing teeth—not a single unnecessary space.

We irritated each other from the very first glance. My indifference against his icy tone. And then there was the coursework. The topic was brutal, I did it beautifully, but not according to the manual. I missed the topic about some keys and didn't include it in the coursework. The defense failed. He watched silently, ready to destroy, but suddenly asked:
— The architecture... is interesting. Where did you learn to containerize like that?
— On YouTube.
He chuckled for the first time in six months: “Stay after class and I’ll help you redo it.”

We sat in the empty classroom until evening. I suddenly sneezed, and he became distracted:
— Are you cold? It's November outside. I wanted to make a joke, like he's tough, but I didn't. He stood up, took off his jacket, and threw it over my shoulders. It smelled of coffee and wood, and then he quietly said,
— The last thing we need is for a student to get sick before the exam.

That evening, the ice monster melted. It turns out we love a lot of the same things, and he's just really tired.

After six months we started dating.

A week after the exam, we went to a coffee shop. I was telling him something, and he watched and smiled openly. And then he kissed me for the first time in the parking lot, hiding me under an umbrella from the cold rain.

and then one day I was doing my homework and went to look at the grade book and saw a 2 in his subject - I immediately wrote to him.

• Hey, Vlad, why do I have 2?
  "Viktorovich, for starters. And Vladislav," came the reply. "And secondly, there's nothing to give him an A for."
  — Why? The homework is perfect.
  "You've indented an uneven number of spaces. You haven't written the paragraph title or conclusion. Am I supposed to guess what the topic is?"
  — Vladislav Viktorovich, what are you doing?
  "We didn't switch to the informal 'you'. Go like that guy from TikTok."