Sweet Romance13 min read
Birthday Messages, Borrowed Meal Cards, and an Airport Reunion
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I got drunk on my birthday.
"I'll be fine," I told Lorenzo when he raised an eyebrow. "It's just one night."
"You said that last time," Lorenzo said, hands already cupping a beer bottle. "And the time before that."
"I'll be different tonight," I lied and smiled anyway.
At midnight I waited, like I had every year, for that one private message. Years of habit make men ridiculous. When I was younger I thought my mother would show up somehow—call, text, something. She had been gone for a long time, and the hole she left in me had turned into a waiting room where a boy sat and checked his phone until his thumbs cramped.
When the clock hit twelve, my thumb hovered above the screen. The bar's neon bled into my face. Glasses clinked and people shouted, but inside my chest the room was quiet and precise.
A notification. I froze.
"Happy birthday," the message read.
Elisa Ellison.
I blinked until the letters stopped moving. Elisa. I scanned her account, then another, then another. She had messaged me on a whim—maybe an auto-message, maybe not. She'd been that soft, shy girl who followed me from the shadows on social feeds, who liked my posts with a tiny, almost-hidden heart or a comment with three dots. Someone who folded herself into the corners of my life without disturbing anything.
I shut the phone with a snap, like slamming a book closed on a memory I didn't want to read. "Of course," I muttered. "Of course she sent it."
The next day I was in the cafeteria, jittery from too little sleep and too many calories the night before. The line moved slowly. My tray felt heavier than it should. I kept scanning the room because the universe loves to make fools of you when you most need privacy.
"You okay?" Diesel hissed next to me.
"Fine," I said. I was not fine. I was annoyed that some girl I knew only from internet corners might be real and also annoyed that I cared.
She was real.
Elisa—hair tied high in a ponytail, wearing a faded floral dress and carrying a notebook with a worn rabbit phone case poking out—stood two people ahead, eyes flicking over the crowd until she caught mine. Her face went pink and she ducked her head. Cute, I thought, and then the thought hardened into annoyance. Why did cute have to be my problem?
"Hey, Kingston!" Connor piped up behind me. "She owes you a meal card anyway, right? Saw her grab one yesterday."
I turned. "She did what?"
"Borrowed it," Lorenzo supplied. "Ran off with your card like it was a golden ticket."
The group laughed, a chorus of small sharp things. My hand, as if by autopilot, reached into my pocket for the card that wasn't there. Panic is weirdly clinical: first a cold shock, then a hot rush. I spun around.
"Excuse me," I said without thinking, and the cafeteria chatter seemed to dim into a hum.
She was by Raul's table now—Raul Vazquez, the studious type who always had the right answers and the wrong absence of warmth. She waved the card like a child waving a flag. "Raul, I got a card! Do you want something?" she asked, voice small and bright.
"Thanks," Raul said, barely glancing up. He smiled like a brother—pat, distant. He put his arm around the back of the chair for a second, nothing intimate, and answered, "Water's fine."
I felt something sour and cold in my gut. "She used my card," I said, louder than necessary.
"She?" Diesel asked, eyebrows up.
"That girl," I said. "The one who sent me a DM last night."
Lorenzo snorted. "Dark romance, huh? She's stalking you in the sweetest possible way."
"Stalking is a strong word," Connor said, grinning. "She's more like... an over-attentive fan."
I shouldn't have cared. I did. "She's not my fan," I snapped. "She's... nothing."
We teased each other about it all week. "She bought Raul water and not you," Diesel exclaimed one night during practice. "Can you believe the betrayal?"
"Traitor," Lorenzo said, but he punched my shoulder like we were still kids. We were grown but we kept certain old shields. Maybe that's what friends are—people who keep making you feel like a boy on the inside even when your outsides are supposed to be a man.
I tried to avoid her for a while. Avoidance has its own stubborn dignity, the kind you exercise like a muscle to avoid feeling weak.
But then came the game night. Loud music, a crowd, the whole campus turned into one big pulsing body. I shuffled into the stands and found a space beside my friends, only to realize Elisa was a few seats down, right next to Raul. The camera searched couples during halftime, the big screen sweeping over faces like a net. I felt a stupid little panic. If the camera hit the wrong pair...
"It'll be fine," Lorenzo said, but he was smirking. "Don't act like you don't want a kiss on the big screen."
"Please," I said. "I am not that kind of guy."
Then the screen turned to them.
Raul and Elisa. The crowd cheered politely; the camera panned in and Raul put his arm around Elisa like a protective shell. He didn't kiss her. He called her a little sister when the camera moved on. She blinked, and I saw the flash of rain in her eyes.
She didn't cry. Not loudly. She let one tear slide onto her cheek. I felt a tug I couldn't name and then—without planning it—she leapt toward me and hugged my neck.
"Hey!" I blurted; my heart went off-beat. "What are you doing?"
She clung like a frightened bird. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I just needed someone."
Something in me that had been hardened into shapes of anger and caution gave way. "Don't," I said softly, afraid of what I sounded like, and the softness in my voice startled me as much as it did her. "Don't cry."
She sniffed. "You—you're always so cold," she said. "But you're warm now."
There were a dozen stupid, small moments that hooked me. The way she tucked hair behind her ear when she concentrated. The way she rehearsed things and then said them without the rehearsed stiffness. The way she ate a sandwich and chewed so neatly like she was afraid of making a mess of the world.
We started seeing each other more on purpose after that. It was awkward at first, like two people learning a new language. She was the kind of quiet that wrapped around you slowly, and I was the kind of silence that crashed like a wave.
"I don't go to bars," she said on our second date, which was more like a late-night walk. "But I wanted to see where you spend your time."
"So you followed me to a bar," I said.
"It wasn't stalking," she protested, indignant. "It was curiosity."
"It's fine," I said, and it was. I liked seeing her out of the fluorescent light of lecture halls. She laughed at the bartender's jokes like they were the first jokes she'd ever heard.
"Why did you message me on my birthday?" I asked one night as we walked under a row of trees that smelled like wet summer. "Was it automatic? A bot? A star alignment?"
She looked up at me, surprised. "I wanted to," she said simply. "I thought you'd like it."
"You thought?" I pressed.
"Yes!" Her hands went to her cheeks and she made that face I had come to memorize. "You looked lonely on your feed sometimes."
"Lonely?" The word hit me sharper than I thought it would.
"You were," she said. "Not... not because of your posts, but because of your pauses. The way you stopped writing like you were waiting."
"I wasn't waiting for anyone," I lied.
She didn't scold me. She simply reached for my hand. "You were," she said. "And I wanted to be the echo."
That's when things changed. Not because I proclaimed it. Not because I stood on a rooftop and shouted it into the wind. Because one small hand in mine made being part of someone else's rhythm feel less like giving up a piece of yourself and more like finding a missing beat.
We had little rituals. I would steal fries off her plate and she would pretend to scold me, then blush. She would hand me a thermos with soup when the rain came and I'd hold it like a precious thing. Once, in winter, she waited under a tree while I zipped up my jacket and then slipped into the sleeves before I could, as if she decided my neck was cold without asking. My heart does a weird thing when someone decides to fix you without making a big deal about it.
"You're impossible," she told me once, head on my shoulder. "You say you don't like people and then you... do this."
"I used to think I didn't like anyone," I said, "but maybe I was being dramatic."
"Maybe you were," she agreed.
We were simple. We were clumsy. We had differences like little prickly things—she loved quiet, library days; I loved the hum of bars and late-night games. She wanted to go to England for a research program. I had an odd, visceral hatred of England because my mother had left me there once, in my memories, wrapped in a suitcase of unanswered questions. I didn't want to go.
"Just come," she said, hands clasped as if she were offering me a box of something fragile. "For a while. Please?"
"I can't," I said, but I found myself saying, "If you go, I'll... I'll try."
She smiled like a weary sunrise. "That's enough for me."
Then the phone call came.
"Can you come to the consulate?" my dad asked, voice paper-thin. "There's... there's something we need you to bring back."
There are moments when a single line of news rearranges the architecture of everything you've been building. I flew over a paper-thin map and landed into a cold hall with a man handing me a small, porcelain box.
"It’s your mother's remains," he said, but his voice felt like a sound underwater.
The world tilted and I found my balance in drinking and in sleep that didn't come. The gray of England felt more bitter than I had remembered. All the things I had been angry at—the empty chair at holidays, the lack of an explanation—congealed into a hot, useless coil in my chest.
I called Elisa.
"Are you okay?" she said after three rings.
"I'm fine," I said, because I'm an idiot who believes the truth is a weapon to be wielded only when necessary.
"Come home," she told me. "Come and sleep. The bed is empty when you're not in it."
"I'm not leaving," I said.
"Please," she whispered. "Please come."
I didn't go right then. I stayed for the funeral arrangements and the small rituals that made a thing final. I watched my mother—ashes in a little box—sealed into the airport luggage. My heart was a fist. I had wanted so many things to be explained, and instead I got an absence, the most honest kind of silence.
Elisa left.
I had prepared for this. I told myself I was being kind. I posted the announcement—Lorenzo uploaded the photo of us smiling and I wrote the words that would cut clean.
"She needs space," I told myself and half the campus. "This is better."
We stopped talking like normal people. We turned into two archives of small, preserved sentences. She wrote me letters at first—long, careful notes on plain paper. I read them, then put them in a shoebox, unopened to the world but open to the dust of my life.
At night I drank and went to the places we had been and argued with the air. In the bar, friends tried to bridge the silence with jokes and dates and competitions that left my body exhausted and my mind painfully alert with missed opportunities.
"Why did you do it?" Diesel asked one night, sliding into the booth beside me. "You just... left. Why?"
"Because I thought she'd be better," I said. "I thought not being there would let her be free."
"Or," Lorenzo said, "you were scared. You pushed her away."
"Maybe," I admitted. "But I had reasons."
"Everyone has reasons." Diesel shrugged. "The question is whether your reasons were your cowardice or your kindness."
Those words haunted me. They were a mirror with poor lighting and I didn't like looking at myself in it.
Months slid by. Somewhere between forgetting and remembering, I learned that pity and love can be different languages but the same road. Elisa had moved to England. She was there, probably learning and breathing and meeting new people. Maybe she was stealing fries from someone else's plate and smiling at the way the sun hit different angles. Maybe she was happy.
I couldn't stand the not-knowing. So I bought a ticket.
Airport terminals are strange places. They are full of arrivals and departures and the liminal, sweet sorrow of people carrying bright boxes of hope. I waited by a baggage carousel and the faces rolled past like scenes from a movie.
And then I saw her.
She looked older, somehow, not by many years but by the small lines that come from squinting at more things. Her hair was the same ponytail but thicker. She carried a backpack like it was a small, stubborn animal. She laughed at something Raul—no, Raul wasn't there; someone who looked like him—said, and the laugh shook something in me open.
I wanted to run to her. I wanted to shove myself into the scene and demand apologies and explanations and the kind of closure you don't get in movies because people are messy and real life refuses to tie a bow.
I did nothing. I stood two rows back and let her go by, counting slow breaths as my compass.
She turned at the security gate and our eyes met. For a second the world reduced to the two of us and the hum of suitcases and the smell of coffee. She came straight to me and didn't hesitate.
"Kingston," she said, and it was like reaching shore after months at sea. "You..."
She hugged me first this time. Not a frightened bird clamoring for a perch, but a warrior who knew how to take ground. I wrapped my arms around her—cautious at first, then like someone trying to memorize the lines of a lost map.
"You're here," she whispered against my shoulder.
"I'm here," I said.
"You're... okay?" she asked, pulling back to look at my face.
"I'm alive," I said, and I was ashamed of how small that sounded.
We went home after that. Home with a box that fit in a palm—my mother's ashes—sat on the shelf like something I had to keep from slipping off an edge. I didn't know how to treat it. A relic? A wound? A monument? It was simply there.
"Do you want to see where she lived?" I asked Elisa one night, surprised by the steadiness of my voice.
She squeezed my hand. "Only if you want me to."
We went to the places I had avoided for years. And there, in a flat that smelled faintly of lemon polish, I told her everything I had buried. The abandonment in the years that had shaped my shoulders. The small combustions of anger that shaped poor decisions. The nights I sat at the bar and imagined her alive somewhere else, warm and angry and whole.
She listened. She didn't interrupt with platitudes. She didn't ask for immediate solutions. She sat and let me pour the thing out like a bottle.
"Why did you push me away?" she asked finally, voice almost a whisper.
"I thought I was protecting you," I said. "From me. From the mess I am."
She looked at me, eyebrows soft. "You created the mess and then ran. That wasn't protection, Kingston."
"It's my defense mechanism," I said. "Run before they see you."
Her hand under my chin tilted my face up. "And what if they already saw? What if they wanted you anyway?"
I had no answer. I only had the steady rush of wanting.
"So what now?" she asked.
I took a breath. "Now I don't run."
We moved slowly back into each other. Not with fireworks and bold promises, but with small, earnest returns. I held my temper like a precious thing—because it tends to break when something small goes wrong—and she trusted my better angels more often than not.
There were the little things that made each day rich. She left post-it notes on my guitar case. I found a thermos with stew in it after a long day. Once she tied a ribbon to my backpack, and I kept it there like a flag. On rainy days she would nudge her head on my shoulder and I would let her because the simple pressure was a map of belonging.
"I want to marry you," I said one evening, somewhere between making tea and folding laundry.
She laughed. "You do?"
"Yes," I said. "Because I want to keep you in the room where I wake up. I want to be someone who stays."
She kissed me then, a long press of warm lips that sealed things we had been stepping around. "Okay," she said against my mouth. "Let's go get that license you keep threatening to drag me to."
We didn't make big announcements. We didn't need to. The important things in life rarely require grand stages; they like quiet corners and whispered jokes.
A little while later, when the paperwork lay on our kitchen table, she turned to me with that shy, honest face she wore when she wanted something very small but very true.
"Why did you like me?" she asked, kids of curiosity wide on her face. We were together, as we often were, with lazy sunlight sliding through the curtains and a plate of toast between us.
I smiled because the truth was easy and small. "I liked you because you chased me," I said, remembering the DM, the meal card, the way she dove into hugging me at the stadium like it was the only lifeline. "I always thought being chased was a trap. But you chased me with gentleness. You waited without demanding. You took crumbs of me and made them whole."
She poked my shoulder. "Is that the romantic line you practiced?"
"No," I admitted. "That's the honest one."
She leaned in and peered at my phone screen which was open to my messages. "See this?" she asked, and her fingers flipped the display. The private messages window glowed—a notification from years ago remained pinned.
"It says: 'Happy birthday,'" she read. "From: Elisa Ellison."
Her face bloomed with a mischievous light. "I sent that," she said. "I wanted to. But..."
"But you didn't remember doing it?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Maybe the app sent it. Maybe I did. Maybe the universe helps lonely people sometimes."
I looked at her, really looked, and my chest filled with something that felt like being allowed to keep a secret and to share it. "You did," I said finally. "Either way, you were there."
"You always liked drama," she teased.
"I like you," I said, straightforward as a blunt instrument. "I like that you borrowed my meal card and used it to buy someone water. I like that you cried when you felt small. I like that you chased me all the way here."
She kissed me, then, gentle and steady. "Good," she said. "Then stop talking and sign the papers."
We laughed, and the air around us felt ordinary and therefore enormous. Outside, the city went on—people late for work, buses sighing, a dog on a leash who probably owned the world the way dogs do. Inside, with a box of ashes on a shelf and a promise signed in ink soon to be a legal knot, the two of us made small, everyday choices that would, in time, make up a life.
That first night we fell asleep with our fingers tangled like the roots of a tree. She breathed quietly, and I listened. I had wanted so many things in my life—answers, revenge, understanding. The answers did not always come. Revenge tastes bitter. But understanding had a quiet, patient slowness, and love—stubborn, ridiculous love—was its own kind of answer.
In the months after, people asked how it all happened. I told them that some things are the product of timing and some are the product of stubbornness. Some things are the quiet work of two people deciding, every day, to stop running.
"Why did you like me?" she asked on the couch one evening, the same question but a different tone, softer like a request this time.
"Because you chased me," I repeated, because the truth fit and shone. "Because you're brave when you think you aren't. Because when I am cold, you are warm, and you don't ask for my explanations—just my company."
She smiled like she'd won something. "Then keep chasing me," she said.
"I won't," I said, then corrected myself with a grin. "Not like before. Now I'll stay."
We married with ten friends in a tiny registry office, simple vows and a ridiculous cake. Raul came and clapped like he'd been surprised by everything. Lorenzo pretended to be emotional and then stole a slice. Diesel tried to do a toast and mispronounced "congratulations" in a way only he could manage.
After the ceremony, we sat on the curb outside and ate cake with our hands. I looked at Elisa and thought about the phone notification that had started everything, whether it had been a bot or a deliberate, trembling thumb.
"Do you remember that message?" I asked.
She did. She smiled a private smile and leaned into me. "Yes. I remember."
"And if the app sent it?" I asked.
"Then the app is a romantic," she said, squeezing my hand. "And we owe it dinner."
"I think we should thank Raul for not kissing you on the big screen," I joked.
She laughed. "I should thank you for finally learning to stay."
"Don't make me cry," I said.
She kissed me then, as if to translate the rest of our messy, honest lives into something that could fit into the space of a second. The world kept moving—cars, sirens, little quotidian mathematics—but in that fold of time, things were exactly where they were supposed to be: two people who had chased and been chased and had finally decided to stop running.
The End
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