He’s arrived five minutes early, blue hydrangeas clutched in his hand.

Then his eyes lift from his shoes and find mine. I’m standing before I realize what my body is doing, colliding into him, closing the distance between us.

It isn’t until I hug him that I realize just how homesick I’ve been.

Oliver is the apartment on Hester Street, the soda shop on Delancey Street, the rumble of the subway, Central Park on a quiet Sunday morning. He’s a lifetime of quiet glances across a small kitchen.

I wrap my arms against the expanse of his rib cage, bury my face in the familiar warmth of his chest, and even in this strange city, I’m home in all the ways that matter.

“Frances.” He breathes my name into my hair like a sigh of relief.

I peel my cheek from off his chest to look up at him. Same familiar green eyes, but his hair is a little longer than when I last saw him, dark and waving around his ears, pushed up off his forehead. There’s a shadow of stubble around his jaw, and most horrifyingly, an attempt at a mustache growing above his lip.

“Oliver Callahan.” I slap his arm. “You can’t greet me after three months with a mustache.”

He laughs and clutches his chest, performatively aghast. “I thought you’d like it.”

“I hate it.”

He sinks down into the seat across from me and I follow suit. “You hate me?”

“I hate it…. You I like very much.”

He smiles, dimples in his cheeks, so fond it makes my chest hurt. “The feeling is very mutual. God, it is good to see you again.”

Other than the horrible little mustache, he does look well. Sun-kissed and more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him, and the tight coil of his shoulders has unwound a little in the months we were apart.

I want to hold his hands across the table, to feel him as a real solid thing, rather than the idea of a boy in my head, but I resist the urge. It wouldn’t be appropriate, not here in public.

As if reading my mind, he extends his hand across the table. The tips of our fingers brush, just barely, and this is it.

“How was the journey?” he asks.

“Dreadfully long. I hate the ocean, I think. Too large. That’s my official review.”

“I agree,” he says. “Was the food good?”

“I ate snails.”

His eyes go wide. I could stare at him forever. He’s always made it easy to forget everything else. My world is narrowed to a single point, to a single color, the spring-grass green of his irises.

“Metropolitan! What’d you think?”

“I was underwhelmed.” I wave my hands in dismissal. “Enough about me, enough about snails, tell me everything! I want to know everything about Paris.”