Passengers began trickling through the gate. I bounced up onto my toes, earning a sour look from the woman next to me, and waved wildly at a short, disheveled man in khakis. Graham paused, face blank, before slowly grinning and trotting toward me. Not running—running in an airport is a good way to attract the attention of the TSA, and no one enjoys that—but moving fast, wasting no time.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me off the ground. I squeaked. Then he was kissing me, whiskers rough against my skin, and for a moment I focused on that to the exclusion of anything else. Graham was here. I was here. The world was changing, but it had not yet changed enough to make a moment like this one impossible, no matter how improbable it might one day seem.

The kiss ended. Graham grinned, close enough that I could see the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. I reached out and pressed the tip of one finger against the web of lines.

“When did we get so old?” I asked.

He laughed and put me down. “That’s what you ask? Not ‘How was your flight’ or ‘Did you want to grab something to eat before we go back through security,’ but ‘When did we get so old’? Are you having some kind of existential crisis on me here?”

“I just missed you,” I said. He removed one arm from my waist, letting me pull my suitcase with my free hand while I used the other to guide him toward the baggage claim. “And this was your idea.”

“Yes, when I thought I could get a connecting flight,” he said, doing his best to sound pitiful. “I didn’t expect to need to change airlines. I’m doing airport security twice in one day. You should feel sorry for me.”

“I always feel sorry for you,” I said. “You are a sad, sad example of a human being.”

“I know.” He kissed my temple. “I don’t know what I did to deserve your tolerance, but I’m thankful every day that I can manage to keep it up.”

I snorted. We kept walking.

The baggage carousel was another demonstration of just how much people were curtailing their flight plans. Only about half the normal allotment of bags came tumbling down the belt, and many of those were overstuffed beyond all logical limits, like their owners were planning to stay awhile. Graham squeezed my fingers reassuringly until his own battered brown suitcase appeared. Then he let me go, retrieved it, and dragged it to the nearest trash can, where he began stripping off the identifying tags that might send it right back to Seattle if he checked it as-is.

“There were no issues getting away from the survey?” I asked, for what felt like the eightieth time. It was probably closer to the eighteenth: it was too many, no matter how I sliced it.