Page 107 of Cava with My Colleague

The next year…

The apartment is streaked with gray with early morning light. Izan snores from the floor and the fan turns lazily above me.

I should get up. We have plans today. But Jade is still asleep beside me, her hair a mess across the pillow, one arm flung over my chest, and I’m content to stay exactly here.

Last year, I met Jade at the airport and told her I loved her.

A few weeks later, she moved to Austin, and I visited shortly after.

It took seven months.

Seven months of video calls with Fernando and his family when I was in Austin, but more often video calls with Jade. When I was able to visit, I loved being there with her, falling more and more for her every day. I semi-retired, handing off more work and balancing my life until we landed on something permanent.

And then she got an offer.

Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Salud, one of Madrid’s top research hospitals, needed someone to lead their oncology patient care innovation program—and they’d been watching her work with the patient advocacy network all summer. It wasn’t as research-heavy as her past job, but it was better—more autonomy, bigger budget, the chance to shape how patients actually experienced treatment, not just study it from a lab.

She took it without hesitation.

And now she’s here. Permanently. In our apartment—not mine, ours—with her clothes in the closet and her ridiculous collection of sex toys in a dresser in the closet and her research papers scattered across the dining table. The two shoeboxes of Polaroids live on the shelf above the wardrobe now, the corkboard on the wall off to her side of the bed. She put up enough old pictures to cover half of it, and we’re working on adding more. More of Madrid, but different. Us.

She stirs beside me, makes a small sound of protest at being awake.

“Morning,” I murmur.

“No.” She burrows deeper into the pillow. “It’s too early.”

“It’s almost eight.”

“Exactly. Too early.”

I laugh and kiss her shoulder. “We have lunch with Fernando and Diana at eleven.”

“That’s in three hours.”

“And we need to go buy a gift.”

“It won’t take us three hours.”

“Jade—”

“Fine, fine. I’m up.” She rolls over to face me, eyes still half-closed. “But I’m grumpy about it.”

“Noted.”

She opens one eye. “Coffee first?”

“Already made.”

“This is why I love you.”

“Just for the coffee?”

“Also for your face. And other things.” She stretches, yawns. “But mostly the coffee.”

I get up and bring her a mug—one of the ridiculous ones, this one says “I’m not arguing, I’m just explaining why I’m right”—and she accepts it like I’ve brought her gold.

“So,” she says, propped up against the headboard. “Carmen’s birthday lunch. I thought Diana said no gifts?”