A Last Call for First Loves

The fluorescent lights of Gate C-7 buzzed like angry bees, and I was already on my third cup of overpriced coffee, waiting for a flight that kept getting pushed further into some mythical future. First it was weather in Chicago. Then mechanical issues. Then crew rest requirements. Each announcement chipped away at the fragile patience of the crowd until the gate area felt like a powder keg of business suits and vacation clothes.

I should have been frustrated. Hell, part of me was. But after the week I'd had—corporate merger, seventy-hour workweeks, sleeping in my office three nights straight—this forced pause felt almost like permission. Permission to stop, to breathe, to remember I was human and not just a suit with a laptop perpetually overheating in my carry-on.

That's when I saw him.

He was leaning against the bar in the terminal's sports grill, one elbow on the counter, scrolling through his phone with the same concentration I remembered from senior year calculus. The years had been good to him—filled out his shoulders, added laugh lines around his eyes, streaked his dark hair with premature silver that somehow made him look distinguished rather than old. But I'd know that profile anywhere, the way he held his head when he was thinking, the slight tilt to his left shoulder that had always made him look like he was leaning into a private joke.

Jake Morrison. My first everything.

My coffee turned to acid in my stomach, and suddenly the airport's recycled air felt too thin, too sharp. Ten years. Ten years since graduation night when we'd promised to make it work, to survive different colleges, to come back to each other. Ten years of Christmas cards that gradually became birthday texts that eventually became radio silence. I'd googled him, of course. Who doesn't? But social media had never been his thing, and my late-night searches had turned up nothing but a LinkedIn profile with no photo.

Now here he was, close enough that I could see the small scar above his eyebrow—the one I'd kissed a hundred times after he'd walked into that tree during our camping trip junior year. Close enough that I could see he was still drinking his coffee black, no sugar, the way I'd teased him about being a masochist.

I should walk away. Should pretend I hadn't seen him, find another gate, another bar, another anything. The sane, rational part of my brain—the part that had negotiated million-dollar deals and faced down hostile boardrooms—was already calculating angles and exit strategies. But my feet had apparently mutinied, carrying me across the industrial carpet until I was standing three feet away, close enough to smell his cologne. Still the same—cedar and something citrusy that made me think of summer drives with the windows down.

"Still drinking it like motor oil, I see."

He looked up, and those eyes—Jesus, I'd forgotten how blue they were, like tropical water in travel brochures—went wide with recognition. His phone slipped, clattered against the bar, and for a moment we just stared at each other while the airport swirled around us like we were caught in our own pocket of stopped time.

"Anna?" His voice was deeper than I remembered, rougher around the edges. "Holy shit. Anna Cartwright?"

"Last I checked." My laugh came out shaky, uncertain. "Though these days it's Anna Chen. Back to Cartwright professionally. Long story."

He was staring at me like I was a ghost, and maybe I was—some phantom of seventeen-year-old possibility that had gotten lost somewhere in the decade between who we'd been and who we'd become. I wanted to touch his face, to prove he was real, to anchor myself in this moment that felt simultaneously impossible and inevitable.

"What are the odds?" He gestured to the stool beside him, and I slid onto it, still trying to process that this was happening, that he was real and solid and smelling like home. "Your flight delayed too?"

"Indefinitely. They're talking about putting us up in hotels if the crew times out." I nodded at his phone. "You were probably checking just like I was, trying to will it into existence."

"Actually, I was reading an email from my mother. She's convinced I'm going to die alone and wants to set me up with my cousin's divorce attorney." He grinned, and it was the same crooked smile that had made my heart stutter when I was sixteen and convinced I knew everything about love. "But the flight thing too. Chicago?"

"Chicago. You?"

"Denver. Connection to Seattle." He signaled the bartender, raised his eyebrows at me in question. When I nodded, he ordered two more coffees, remembered without asking that I liked mine with cream, no sugar. The small intimacy of it hit me harder than it should have. "What brings you to... wherever we are?"

"Indianapolis. Work conference. You?"

"Wedding. College roommate. I'm the best man, which should tell you something about how desperately he needed groomsmen."

The coffee arrived, and we fell into the rhythm of it—small talk, catching up, the careful dance of two people who'd once known everything about each other and now had to navigate the minefield of almost-strangers. He told me about his software company, the startup he'd launched with two friends that had apparently become successful enough to afford him that expensive-looking watch. I told him about my consulting firm, the merger I'd just survived, the promotion that had come with an office overlooking the lake.

But underneath the words, I could feel it building—that magnetic pull that had always existed between us, like we were two planets who'd forgotten their orbit but remembered the gravity. He kept leaning closer when I talked, close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in his irises, the way his hair curled slightly behind his ears. When he laughed at something I said—a story about my assistant's catastrophic attempt to order lunch for twenty executives—his hand brushed my arm, and electricity shot through me like I was seventeen again and he'd just touched me for the first time.

"You look good," he said quietly, when our conversation hit one of those natural lulls. "Really good. Success suits you."

"You too." I was trying not to stare at his mouth, at the way it moved when he talked, when he smiled, when he took another drink. "The whole tech entrepreneur thing is working for you."

"Yeah, well." He ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture I remembered from every exam we'd ever taken together. "It keeps me busy. Most weeks I'm lucky if I remember to eat actual food instead of just surviving on coffee and whatever's in the office vending machine."

"That sounds familiar. Last month I realized I'd eaten lunch at my desk twenty-two days in a row. I actually had to google 'restaurants near me' because I'd forgotten what real food tasted like."

We were close now, closer than the conversation required. His knee brushed mine, stayed there. Neither of us moved away. The bar was filling up with other delayed passengers, but it felt like we were alone, like the universe had conspired to create this pocket of possibility in the liminal space between where we'd been and where we were going.

"Do you ever think about it?" His voice was barely above a whisper. "About us? About what we thought it would be?"

All the time. In the middle of meetings when I should have been focused on quarterly projections. At 3 AM when I couldn't sleep and found myself scrolling through old photos on my phone. Every time I smelled cedar or heard someone order coffee black or saw a couple too young to know how much love could hurt.

"Sometimes," I said, because sometimes felt safer than always.

"I do." He wasn't looking at me now, was staring into his coffee like it held answers. "I think about that night before we left for college. How we promised we'd make it work. How we swore distance wouldn't matter, that we'd be different from everyone else."

"We were kids. Kids make promises they can't keep."

"Did we have to, though?" His eyes found mine again, and there was something raw there, something that made my chest tight. "Could we have made it work if we'd tried harder? If I'd called more? If you hadn't transferred to that school in Boston?"

The what-ifs hung between us like a bridge I wasn't sure I wanted to cross. Because the truth was, I'd asked myself those same questions a thousand times. Had lain awake in my dorm room sophomore year, wondering if I should have fought harder when he'd started pulling away. Had stared at my phone during graduation, wanting to call him and knowing I shouldn't.

"It doesn't matter now," I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were a lie. It mattered. It had always mattered.

"Doesn't it?" He shifted closer, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from his body. "Because sitting here with you, it feels like it matters. It feels like maybe we left something unfinished."

My pulse was racing, and I knew he could see it—could probably see the way my breathing had gone shallow, the way my hands had clenched around my coffee cup. This was dangerous territory, this conversation that could lead places we couldn't come back from. But I couldn't make myself move away, couldn't make myself end this moment that felt like stepping back in time to when everything had been possible.

"Jake..."

"I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't—" He started to pull back, and something in me rebelled against the loss of contact, against watching him retreat again.

"Wait." I caught his hand without thinking, and the touch sent electricity shooting up my arm. His fingers were warm and familiar and different all at once—calloused in new places, stronger than I remembered. "I think about it too. All the time, if you want the truth. I think about what we had and what we lost and whether we were stupid or smart or just young."

The announcement system crackled to life, and we both jumped like teenagers caught doing something we shouldn't. The voice was apologetic, professional, delivering more bad news with practiced sympathy. Flight delayed another three hours. They'd be distributing hotel vouchers shortly.

"Well," Jake said, when the announcement ended and we were left in the buzzing aftermath of our almost-confession. "I guess we're not going anywhere tonight."

I should have let go of his hand. Should have pulled back and resumed the careful distance of near-strangers who used to be something more. But my fingers seemed to have developed their own opinions about the matter, staying intertwined with his like they were trying to memorize the feeling of being connected again.

"Guess not." I took a breath, felt the moment stretch and settle into something new. "You want to get out of here? Find somewhere quieter to wait for our hotel assignments?"

His smile was slow and devastating and exactly like I remembered. "I thought you'd never ask."

We found a corner in the mostly-empty food court, tucked away from the main thoroughfare where delayed passengers milled like restless ghosts. The air smelled of stale grease and industrial cleaner, but the table by the window gave us a view of the runway lights blinking in the rain. He returned with two sandwiches and waters, and the normalcy of the gesture—him bringing me food—sent a jolt of memory through me. He’d always done that, in the cafeteria, on study dates. The small, unconscious caretaking.

He slid into the booth across from me, his knee bumping mine beneath the table. “So. A consultant. Do you enjoy it?”

“I enjoy solving problems,” I said carefully. “I enjoy the rush of a deal closing. The actual work… it pays for a very nice apartment I’m never in.”

“I get that.” He unwrapped his sandwich. “The app is doing well. Really well. But sometimes I look at the code and think, ‘This is what I traded my twenties for? A slightly more efficient way for people to manage their inventory?’”

“It’s not just inventory. It’s their livelihoods.”

“I know. That’s the only thing that makes it feel worthwhile.” He took a bite, chewed thoughtfully. “What about… other things? Are you…” He trailed off, uncharacteristically hesitant.

“Am I what?”

“Are you with anyone?” The question landed between us, simple and loaded. His eyes were fixed on his food, as if the answer didn’t matter, but the tension in his jaw gave him away.

The truth was complicated. There was David, the architect I’d been seeing for four months in a carefully scheduled arrangement of dinners and overnight stays that never quite felt like coming home. It was convenient. Undemanding. “Sort of,” I said finally. “It’s not serious. More of a… mutual scheduling agreement. He travels a lot too.”

Jake nodded, a flicker of something—relief?—passing over his face. “I was engaged,” he said, the words quiet. “Two years ago. Lasted eight months.”

The admission startled me. “What happened?”

He gave a short, humorless laugh. “She was a brilliant graphic designer. We met at a tech conference. It was all very modern and efficient. We even had a shared calendar for date nights. The problem was, we were building a life like we were building a product—iterating, optimizing, troubleshooting. One day I realized we hadn’t laughed in three weeks. Not really laughed. We called it off mutually. It was the most amicable, depressing conversation of my life.”

“I’m sorry.” “Don’t be. It was a relief.” He looked at me, his gaze direct. “It made me realize I’d been trying to recreate something without remembering what the original felt like. It felt like a checklist. Not like…”

“Not like what?”

“Not like it was with us.” He held my gaze, not looking away. “Even when we were fighting, even when we were stressed about exams or our parents or the future… it never felt like a transaction. It felt alive.”

His words carved a hollow space inside me, an echo chamber for my own quiet disappointments. David and I never fought. We discussed. We negotiated. The memory of fighting with Jake—real, messy, passionate fights that always ended in tearful, desperate reconciliations—suddenly seemed like a luxury.

“Do you ever get angry?” I asked, the question surprising me as much as him. “About how we ended? I did. For a long time. I was so angry at you for giving up, and even angrier at myself for letting you.”

He leaned back, his expression turning inward. “Yeah. I got angry. Mostly at myself. For being too proud to admit I was drowning freshman year. For thinking I had to handle it all alone. By the time I surfaced, it felt like too much time had passed, like I’d forfeited the right to call.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I heard you transferred to Boston. I figured you’d moved on to bigger, better things. I didn’t think I’d fit into that new life.”

The old hurt, long dormant, twinged. “You could have asked. You could have tried.”

“I know.” The words were heavy with regret. “It’s my biggest regret, Anna. Not the trying and failing. The not trying at all.”

The admission hung in the greasy food court air, more intimate than any touch. It was the first real acknowledgment of the wound, not just its ghost. It added a necessary friction, a grit of past failure that made our present connection feel more earned, less like a fairy tale.

We ate in silence for a few minutes, the past sitting with us like a third party. The conversation shifted, lighter but no less charged. He told me about nearly burning down his first office with a faulty coffee maker. I told him about presenting to a boardroom while unknowingly having spinach in my teeth for an hour. We laughed, the sound feeling foreign and wonderful in my throat. But the philosophical questions from before—the ones about the nature of happiness and adulthood—remained unspoken. The moment felt too fragile for abstractions. The stakes were here, now, in the way our feet tangled under the table, in the way he watched my mouth when I talked.

"Do you remember that night we drove to the lake? Senior year?" he asked, his voice softer.

I nodded, the memory washing over me: the blanket spread on the hood of his old car, the impossible sprawl of stars, the feel of his hand in mine as we talked about everything and nothing. "We were so sure of everything."

"We were happy," he said simply, and the word landed differently now, after his confession. It wasn't an accusation, but a stark, shared fact.

Before I could answer, a harried airline employee approached our table with a clipboard. "Vouchers for the delayed Chicago and Seattle flights?" We took the offered envelopes, a tangible reminder of the ticking clock. The hotel was only for the night. Our flights were at 9 AM and 9:15 AM respectively. We had twelve hours. Maybe fourteen if we stretched breakfast.

He looked at the voucher, then at me. "Looks like we're at the same place. The connected Courtyard."

"Convenient," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

"Or fate making up for lost time." He stood, gathering our trash. "You could come back to mine. If you wanted. We could order room service, watch bad movies, pretend we're not two people who got too busy being successful to remember how to be happy."

It was a terrible, wonderful, dangerous idea. I looked at him—at the man he’d become, with the ghost of the boy I’d loved in his eyes—and felt the careful scaffolding of my adult life shudder. "Okay," I heard myself say. "But we set ground rules. No talking about the past unless we both want to. No making promises we can't keep. Just... two old friends catching up on missed time."

"Two old friends," he agreed, but his thumb brushed over my knuckles as he took my tray, a touch that promised nothing about our arrangement was strictly friendly.

The hotel was a study in corporate anonymity, but the walk there felt charged with anticipation. The covered walkway was long and brightly lit, our footsteps echoing. He walked close enough that our arms brushed with every other step, a constant, quiet spark. The lobby was a cacophony of frustrated travelers, but we moved through it in our own bubble of silence.

His room was on the twelfth floor. Mine was on the fifth. We stood before the elevator banks, the choice hanging in the air.

"Platonic seating arrangements are probably better on the twelfth floor," he said, a slow smile playing on his lips. "The view's better."

The elevator ride up was quiet, shared with a family wrangling sleepy children. We stood shoulder to shoulder, not touching, but the air between us vibrated. When the doors opened on twelve, we stepped out into a carpeted hallway that smelled of vacuum cleaner scent and distant cigarettes.

His room was standard: a king-sized bed with a maroon and gold geometric spread, two stiff armchairs by a small round table, a generic landscape print of a forest above the headboard. The heavy curtains were drawn against the runway lights. A desk held a coffeemaker and a binder full of hotel information. It was impersonal, transient. A place for pauses, not permanence.

He tossed his bag on the luggage stand and turned to me. The door clicked shut behind us, sealing us in. The noise of the airport vanished, replaced by the hum of the air conditioner and the sound of our own breathing.

"See?" he said, gesturing to the chairs by the table. "Totally platonic seating arrangements."

I didn't move toward the chairs. I stood just inside the room, feeling the weight of the decision, the sharp, sweet urgency of our limited hours. My gaze traveled from the sterile art to the perfectly made bed, then back to him. He was watching me, his expression open, waiting.

The space between us wasn't empty; it was thick with a decade of unsaid words, of parallel lives, of this undeniable, terrifying pull. My heart hammered against my ribs. I could hear the faint, rhythmic thump of music from a room down the hall. A cart rattled by in the corridor.

I took a step forward. Then another. I stopped an arm's length away, close enough to see the rapid pulse at the base of his throat, to smell the cedar and citrus of his skin over the hotel's linen spray.

"You're assuming I want platonic." The words weren't a challenge, but a quiet, breathless admission.

His eyes darkened, the blue deepening to something stormy. He didn't move, but his entire body seemed to tense, to focus on me. The air left the room. There was no sound but the rush of my own blood in my ears. He simply looked at me, his gaze dropping to my lips, then back to my eyes, a silent, potent question.

"Anna..." My name was a low rasp.

"I'm not sixteen anymore, Jake. Neither of us are. We know what we're doing here, and we know what the risks are." I took the final step, closing the distance so only inches separated us. I could feel the heat coming off him. "Maybe it's time we stop pretending we're just catching up and admit we're both wondering what would happen if we stopped being so careful."

He closed his eyes for a second, as if steeling himself, then opened them. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "And what do you think would happen?"

"I think we'd remember why we were so good together. I think we'd stop torturing ourselves with what-ifs and might-have-beens. I think we'd take this night that fate handed us and we'd use it to write an ending that doesn't hurt anymore."

"And tomorrow?" he breathed, his hand coming up to hover near my cheek, not touching, not yet.

"Tomorrow we go back to our lives. But maybe we go back different. Maybe we go back remembering what it feels like to be wanted, to be known, to be happy even if it's temporary."

His hand finally settled, cupping my face, his thumb tracing my cheekbone with a tenderness that made my chest ache. "You always were the brave one," he whispered. "Always willing to say what the rest of us were too scared to admit."

"Brave or reckless. The jury's still out."

"Brave," he confirmed, and then his mouth was on mine, and the world condensed to this: the soft pressure of his lips, the taste of coffee and him, the sound of his sharp intake of breath as I wound my arms around his neck.

It was a kiss that held ten years of silence. It started slow, a rediscovery, a mapping of familiar territory with new landmarks. Then it deepened, fueled by a hunger that had been building since the bar, since the food court, since long before that. He kissed me like he was starving, and I kissed him back like I was the feast. My fingers tunneled into his hair, disheveling it, while his hands slid down my back, pulling me flush against him. I could feel the hard planes of his body, so different and yet so known.

We stumbled toward the bed—not in some frantic rush, but like we were both too caught up in rediscovery to care about destination. The backs of my knees hit the edge of the mattress, and he paused, pulling back just enough to look at me, his eyes searching mine in the dim light filtering through the curtains.

"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice gravelly with want. "We can stop. We can go back to being careful."

I answered by pulling his shirt over his head, by pressing my lips to the hollow of his throat, by whispering against his skin, "I've never been more sure."

He made a sound low in his throat, part groan, part surrender, and then we were falling together onto the crisp hotel sheets. The room was a blur of muted colors and shadows, but he was in sharp focus. The scar on his shoulder from a long-ago bike accident. The new tattoo on his ribcage—a simple, elegant line of mountains I’d learn later was for Colorado. I traced it with my finger, then my tongue, and he shuddered.

He took his time, undressing me with a reverence that stole my breath. His hands, those familiar hands now stronger and more sure, explored every inch of me as if I were a country he'd once loved and was now reclaiming. He kissed the inside of my wrist, the curve of my hip, the sensitive spot behind my knee that he’d discovered when we were eighteen. He touched me like I was something precious, like he was trying to memorize every inch of skin with his fingertips. I kissed him like I was drowning and he was air, like we could fix everything that had gone wrong if we just tried hard enough.

When he finally slid into me, we both gasped—part pleasure, part relief, part the overwhelming rightness of being joined again after so long apart. It was a homecoming and a discovery all at once. Our bodies remembered the old rhythms but created new ones, slower, deeper, infused with the patience and skill that came with age. The cheap bedding scratched against my back, the generic art was a blur on the periphery, but none of it mattered. All that existed was the weight of him, the scent of his skin, the sound of his breath huffing against my neck.

"Anna," he breathed, and I could hear everything he wasn't saying in the way he said my name. All the years, all the choices, all the ways we'd found each other again in this airport hotel that felt like existing outside of time and consequence.

We moved together like we'd never stopped, like our bodies had been waiting for this reunion across all the miles and years. It was slow and sweet and achingly tender—two people who knew this was temporary but were determined to wring every ounce of joy from the moment anyway. When I came, it was with his name on my lips and his hand cradling my face like I was something worth cherishing. When he followed me over the edge, I held him close and whispered promises we both knew I couldn't keep.

After, we lay tangled in the wreckage of careful restraint, the sheets twisted around our legs. His fingers traced lazy patterns across my shoulder while I listened to his heartbeat slow to something approaching normal. The digital clock on the nightstand cast a red glow: 2:17 AM. Time was passing, relentless.

"So," he said eventually, voice rough and satisfied. "That was better than careful."

"That was worth waiting ten years for," I corrected, pressing a kiss to his chest.

"We could have been doing this the whole time."

"Would it have felt like this?" I asked, my fingers tracing the line of his jaw. "Would it have meant this much if we hadn't spent a decade learning how to miss each other?"

He was quiet for a long moment, his hand stilling on my back. "No. Probably not. We needed to become who we are. Needed to learn what happy isn't so we'd recognize it when we found it again."

"Even if it's just for tonight?"

"Especially because it's just for tonight." He tilted my chin up, made me meet his eyes in the dim light. "This isn't about recreating the past. This is about giving ourselves permission to want something just because we want it. No strings, no expectations, no pressure to make it more than it is."

"And what is it?"

He smiled—the same crooked smile that had wrecked me at sixteen and was apparently just as devastating at twenty-eight. "It's two people who used to love each other remembering what that felt like. It's closure that doesn't hurt. It's proof that we were right the first time, even if the timing was wrong."

We made love again—slower this time, with the languid ease of people who know the night is finite and are determined to savor it. He learned the new curves of my body, the way I'd learned to ask for what I wanted without apology. I rediscovered the spots that made him gasp, the places where he was still ticklish despite all the years. We talked in the dark, not about the heavy things, but about silly memories: the time we got lost hiking and ate all our snacks in the first hour, the disastrous homemade pizza that set off his dorm’s smoke alarm. We ordered overpriced ice cream from room service at 3 AM and ate it with our fingers, laughing like kids. When we finally collapsed into exhausted sleep, it was with limbs entwined, with the kind of contentment I hadn't felt since... well, since him.

Morning came too soon, as mornings always do when you're living on borrowed time. The gray light of dawn filtered through the crack in the heavy hotel curtains, painting a pale stripe across the rumpled bed. He was already awake when I stirred, propped on one elbow and watching me like he was trying to commit me to memory.

"Flight's at nine," he said softly, his voice husky with sleep. "We should probably..."

"Yeah." I sat up, the sheet pooling around my waist. The magic of the night was receding, replaced by the practicalities of departure. "We should."

We showered separately—some unspoken agreement that sharing the small, steamy space would be too intimate, too domestic for what this was. I borrowed his toothbrush and tried not to think about how right it felt to see my things mixed with his, even temporarily. The scent of his soap on my skin was a bittersweet reminder. When I emerged, dressed in yesterday's clothes that now felt like a costume, he was dressed and packing with the efficient, practiced movements of a frequent traveler.

"I called downstairs while you were in the shower," he said without looking at me, folding a shirt with precise corners. "Our flights are both on time. Weather cleared up overnight."

"That's good." I was pulling on my blazer, reconstructing the Anna Cartwright who belonged in boardrooms, smoothing my hair into some semblance of order. "Can't keep fate waiting forever."

He paused in his packing, the shirt forgotten in his hands. He crossed to where I was standing by the bed, took my hands in his. His were warm. "Hey. No regrets, remember? We said no regrets."

"I don't regret it." I let him pull me close, let him wrap his arms around me one last time, burying my face in the soft cotton of his sweater. He smelled like hotel soap and himself. "I just... I don't know how to walk away from you again. I thought I'd forgotten how much it hurts."

"Then don't think of it as walking away." He pulled back, his hands framing my face. "Think of it as walking forward. We're not seventeen anymore, Anna. We know how to be happy now. We know what matters." He pressed something into my hand—a business card, crisp and white. On the back, in his familiar, slanted handwriting, was his personal cell number and the word "Always." "No pressure. No expectations. But if you ever find yourself in Seattle, or if you just need to remember what happy feels like..."

I took the card, the paper stock smooth against my fingers. I tucked it into the inner pocket of my wallet, next to my driver's license—a secret talisman. "And if you find yourself in Chicago, or if you need to remember that you deserve more than vending machine dinners and empty apartments..."

"Then I'll call." He kissed me then—soft and sweet and final, a punctuation mark on the night. "Thank you. For last night. For giving us an ending that doesn't hurt."

We walked to the elevators together, a careful six inches of space between us now, professional strangers again despite the way my body still hummed with the memory of his touch. The lobby was a chaotic symphony of rolling suitcases, ringing phones, and the aroma of stale coffee. He squeezed my hand once, a quick, covert pressure, before we peeled off to join separate check-in lines for separate flights to separate lives.

I saw him once more—at security, where the lines snaked and merged. By chance or some final twist of fate, we ended up in neighboring queues. He was two people ahead of me. Just as he was about to place his bag on the conveyor belt, he turned, his eyes scanning the crowd until they found mine. He smiled, that same crooked, heart-stopping smile, and mouthed two words, clear as day: "Choose happy."

I nodded, a lump in my throat, because that was a promise I could make to myself.

My flight boarded on time. I took my window seat, stowed my bag, and watched as the Indianapolis tarmac, still wet from the night's rain, began to slide away. As the plane climbed, pressing me back into the seat, I didn't reach for my laptop. I didn't scroll through my phone. I simply watched the world fall away, the patches of farmland shrinking into a quilt of green and brown, the highways becoming delicate gray threads.

In my wallet, his business card felt like an anchor. Not a promise of a future, but proof of a present. Proof that magic could exist in fluorescent-lit bars and generic hotel rooms. Proof that I could still feel that deeply, want that fiercely, be that known.

I didn't know if I'd ever use the number. I didn't know if we were the kind of people who could build something real from one perfect night and a decade of complicated history. But I knew, with a certainty that settled deep in my bones, that I would never be the same.

The plane leveled off with a ding. The flight attendant came by with the beverage cart. When she offered coffee, I almost said yes to cream, out of habit. Then I remembered the taste of it black on his lips, the way he’d teased me all those years ago.

"Black, please," I said. "No sugar."

As I took the small cup, I opened my phone. Not to work. I opened my calendar. I looked at the solid blocks of color stretching for the next three months—meetings, conferences, deadlines. Then, with a tap that felt more significant than any contract signature, I created a new event for next Friday. I titled it "DINNER? REAL FOOD." I set it for 7 PM. I did not mark it as "busy."

It was a small thing. A tiny rebellion. But as I sipped the bitter, honest coffee and looked out at the boundless blue sky, it felt like the beginning of everything.