“You don’t have to keep flying,” he replies.
“I want to.”
“It’s a lot of back and forth.”
“Eight years of nothing was worse.”
That shuts him up.
He looks at me, something complicated moving behind his eyes. “I don’t want you rearranging your life entirely around me.”
“I’m not rearranging it. I’m integrating it.”
He studies that answer carefully, like he’s testing it for cracks.
“And I’m not moving in,” I add. “Not yet.”
His shoulders loosen slightly. “Good.”
“Good?”
“We need time,” he says. “To figure out who we are now. I don’t want to default to what we were just because it’s comfortable.”
That’s one of the differences.
Eight years ago, Ollie would have leaned into intensity and hoped it held. Now he thinks in architecture. In foundations.
“I don’t want comfortable,” I tell him. “I want stable.”
He nods.
I pull into a small parking lot a few minutes later.
He looks around. “Where are we?”
“Food.”
He blinks. “You drove all the way out here for food?”
“You said simple.”
Recognition dawns slowly. The diner sign glows red against the snow. His mouth curves. “You remember.”
Of course I remember. We celebrated his birthday here, quietly, and one of my awards for song writing. And that’s the point: Our four years together were filled with so many good, perfect moments. And love. Always so much love.
Inside, the warmth hits us first, followed by the smell of coffee and frying oil. No one stares. No one whispers.
We slide into a booth, and it feels almost surreal how easy that is.
He exhales. “This is perfect.”
We order burgers and milkshakes like we’re twenty-two again. The waitress, Doreen, still wears the same unimpressed expression that she did the last time we were here all those years ago. She doesn’t look twice at us.
For a while, we talk about small things.
Ollie tells me about a rookie who tried to body him in drills and nearly bounced off. I tell him about a producer in LA who insisted on adding a saxophone to a track that absolutely did not require one.
He laughs more easily than he used to. The edges around him feel less brittle. Therapy, maybe. Time. Or maybe the relief of no longer splitting himself in two.