t started with a ceiling fan. Or rather, the lack of one. Because when the thermometer hit 41°C and my flat transformed into a human oven, romance was not the first thing on my mind. Survival was. I was sticky, grumpy, half-dressed, and trying to Google “how to chill a mattress using only despair.”

And then he knocked on my door.

Not him him. This wasn’t some curated Netflix moment. He was a neighbour I’d spoken to twice—once about bins, once about bees. But there he was. Holding a fan. An actual electric fan like it was the Holy Grail.

“Thought you might be dying,” he said. “Or about to murder someone.”

I invited him in. Mostly because of the fan.

Love in the Time of Sweaty Foreheads

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about Spanish heatwaves: they’re sexy in theory. In practice? Everyone smells weird, tempers fray, and touching skin feels like a mild assault. But there was something about the delirium that stripped everything back. No makeup. No effort. Just two overheated humans trying not to pass out.

We sat on the floor because it was cooler. We drank lukewarm Aquarius. We talked about nothing—terrible jobs, childhood summers, his theory that mosquitos prefer people with unresolved trauma. I laughed until I had to wipe sweat out of my eyes.

And somewhere in the middle of all that—romance happened. Not the slow-burn, yearning kind. The slapdash, heat-drunken, “is this really happening?” kind. I couldn’t tell if I liked him or if I’d just hallucinated intimacy.

Didn’t matter. He stayed. We watched the fan rotate. We tried to make pasta and gave up. He held ice cubes against my wrists like it was foreplay. It was chaos. It was gross. It was perfect.

Heatwaves Break Structure

I couldn’t write that week. I tried. My laptop sighed and gave up. My brain melted. But what I did do was observe. The way people interacted. The mood of the street. The tension in everyone’s shoulders. There’s something primal about that kind of heat. It peels layers off—literally and emotionally.

In fiction, I usually choreograph things more tightly. But this? This was instinct. A plotless novella happening in real time. Two characters with no plan, no climax, no closure. Just a fan between them and the knowledge that the power might cut out any second.

When It Cooled Down, So Did We

It didn’t last. Heatwave romances rarely do. Things normalised. He put a shirt back on. I remembered I had a life. We went from calling each other “survival buddy” to exchanging awkward nods by the lift.

But that little story lives rent-free in my brain. And it shows up in my writing. Not directly. But in the texture. In the reminder that intimacy isn’t always tidy. That romance sometimes grows in sweaty, inconvenient, unedited moments.

That’s why I don’t plan every kiss in my books anymore. I leave space for the fan. For the heat. For the neighbour with surprisingly kind eyes and a ridiculous theory about mosquitos.

Because sometimes, love isn’t in the stars. It’s in the sweat.