Studyabroadromance Stories

Twenty-six-year-old Tori Williams catches her white fiancé in bed with her coworker three months before their wedding, discovering an eight-month affair that shatters everything she believed about love and her own worth. Devastated by betrayal and drowning in PTSD, she flees to Kyoto, Japan on a two-year MFA scholarship in design, desperate to escape the wreckage of her life in Atlanta. Arriving broken and barely functional, Tori navigates crushing loneliness, brutal culture shock, and hypervisibility as a Black woman in homogeneous Japan. She faces constant stares, microaggressions, and the exhausting work of existing in a country where she'll always be Other. Through traditional joinery workshops, she meets Ren Beaumont-a half-Japanese, half-French architecture student with devastating good looks and an emotionally unavailable playboy reputation, haunted by his own family wounds and running from intimacy through meaningless hookups. As they learn kintsugi-the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, making it more beautiful for having been broken-two shattered people begin to recognize themselves in each other's cracks. Tori must decide if she can trust again after annihilating betrayal, while Ren confronts whether he's capable of the vulnerability real love requires. Through cherry blossom seasons and autumn leaves, temple gardens and late-night workshops, they discover that healing doesn't mean becoming who you were before breaking-it means honoring the cracks while building something entirely new. This is a story about surviving trauma, finding home in unexpected places, chosen family that saves lives, and learning that broken and whole aren't opposites-they're the same thing, gold-filled and beautiful. ©️ Relle H

Maya is on her study abroad trip in England, planning to have no love interests until she meets Kallias, a student also studying in her program, and who is also living on her floor. Both witty and sarcastic, Kallias and Maya find it hard to connect after a tough initial meeting. But as their study abroad time goes on, both may find unexpected twists and turns in their trips, and their hearts.