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“I got a full-ride to Os Alta University,” Aleksander says, “their Politics course is the best in Ravka, and it’s the ideal place to get internships with MPs.”
“I got a full ride too,” Alina tells him, “to study Cartography at Ketterdam University.”
They look at each other, expressions sad but resigned.
Alina is a foster child about to age out of the system. Ana Kuya is kind, but there won’t be any money coming from her.
Aleksander’s family is on the breadline, barely scraping by.
They’ll both have to take on a part-time job and work over the summers to make up any extra costs their scholarships won’t cover. There won’t be any money for plane tickets, or even a ferry and train journey.
“We’re both too practical not to see what will happen,” Alina sighs.
They love each other, but everyone knows long-distance is hard, especially when they might be able to see each other perhaps once in person over the next four years.
Better to keep the good memories, to not let them be tainted by frustration and missed calls and ignored emails and the temptation of other people much more easily accessible.
“No contact?” Aleksander suggests, his dark eyes stormy.
“No contact,” she agrees.
Their friends will think it’s harsh, but they know each other too well. They need a clean break or they’ll linger over each other, together but not together.
“I love you, Sasha,” Alina whispers.
“I love you too, Linka,” he presses his lips to hers.
If it’s meant to be, they both think, then they’ll find their way back to each other eventually.
Fifteen years later
It’s strange, settling down.
Alina has spent the years since she graduated from Ketterdam University moving regularly with her job. She’s lived in Kerch, Ravka, Shu Han, Fjerda, Novyi Zem and the Wandering Isle at different points, but she’s never stayed in any of them long enough to plant roots.
She wouldn’t change what she’s done, even if all her travelling had been the catalyst in her break-up with Mal. She never dreamed she be able to see so many new places and she loves her job.
Her new job offer has come at the perfect time, though. She’s ready to make a more permanent home base – she still loves to travel, but she wants to slow down a little now.
She’s never actually lived in Os Alta, but Nina and Matthias, who she’d befriended at Ketterdam, are working in the city and have promised to show her around. Knowing Nina as she does, Alina expects this to involve a tour of Nina’s top ten places to get waffles, but she’s hoping to at least get her bearings before she starts her new job.
Her first weekend, though, will be spent alone. Nina and Matthias have a wedding in Balakirev to attend, but Alina waves off their apologies about the bad timing – she’s moved a lot and she’s found sometimes it’s good to just walk around, get a feeling of the area and hopefully find some hidden gems (like a used bookshop or a café selling nán guā bǐng or a pretty blue and gold scarf).
She’s at the park, enjoying the sun, when she spots a familiar figure balancing an ice-cream cone with three scoops and a chocolate flake.
“Sasha … is that you?”
He looks over, eyes wide with surprise and delight, “Linka!”
She’s over to him in a matter of seconds. He laughs, lifting his arms to keep his ice-cream from ending up in her hair as she wraps her arms around him in a tight hug.
Plenty of people would be sceptical if she said that hugging Sasha feels like coming home, but it’s honestly true.
It might have been fifteen years since they saw each other, but she’s never felt as safe and comforted as she did as a teenager in his arms.
“Saints, Sasha, it’s been a long time.”
Inexplicably, she starts to tear up. A decade and a half since she’s seen him, since they professed their love and then went their separate ways to university.
“It’s really good to see you, Linka.”
He’s staring down at her, so intense and focused that he doesn’t even notice his ice-cream starting to drip onto his wrist.
She sighs happily, refusing to relinquish her hold on him just yet. She doesn’t know if he’s married or dating, or if he’s got children. She should probably ask that before she keeps clinging to him, but she can’t bring herself to let go.
He strokes her hair, gentle and soft, “you cut it.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, “about ten years ago. Do you –”
“I love it,” he grins, “you look amazing.”
Mal had hated it, she remembers. He’d spent about six months badgering her to let it grow out before he gave up.
When they eventually break apart, half of Aleksander’s ice-cream is in a puddle on the floor or leaving sticky stains on his arm and the hem of his shirt.
He looks mournfully down at the lost sweet treat for a moment, but then turns to Alina, smiling, “we should catch up, Linka.”
Alina nods eagerly, “dinner?”
There’s so much she wants to say to him, but she’s liable to babble right now and she needs to compose herself a little. The hours until dinner will give her some time to order her thoughts and prepare to see who the teenage boy she was in love with has become.
“Dinner,” he nods happily in agreement.
She’s half in a daze as they arrange a time and a restaurant, torn between paying attention to what he’s saying and finding herself lost in her memories and cataloguing all the subtle ways he’s changed over the years, somehow even more handsome than she remembers him.
SOS she messages Nina as she walks out of the park ran into Sasha, going to dinner. HELP!
Fuck yes her friend messages back.
“Aahhh!”
Aleksander winces at the high-pitched volume of his sister’s excited cries.
“Ulla, calm down.”
“But I’m just so happy for you, Sasha.”
“We’re going to dinner to catch up, Ulla, I’m not proposing.”
He knows he sounds nonchalant. Too nonchalant for how intensely he and Alina had been in love, and for how much he’s thought of her over the years. But he doesn’t want them getting over-excited and reading too much into this. After all, it’s been a long time – he doesn’t know anything about Alina’s life now.
“Not proposing yet,” Luda adds.
You too? He raises an eyebrow at his ex-wife, now sister-in-law.
“Oh, come on, I’ve heard the stories twice over, from both you and Ulla. If things had been different, and you and Alina had gone to the same university, you’d probably be married with a brood of children right now.”
She sounds very matter-of-fact and not at all jealous. It truly can be so strange to have such a reasonable, friendly ex-wife, especially one who is now married to his sister. He actually can’t wait to tell Alina that story – he thinks she’ll probably find it very amusing and probably quite sweet too.
“Just dinner,” he reminds the pair of them, “it doesn’t necessarily mean –”
Luda rolls her eyes, “oh, please, Sasha. It means the world to you and we all know it.”
“Saints, Lu, you’re making it sound like I’ve been pining for fifteen years. We were married, remember. And I did love you – still love you – even if it wasn’t true love.”
“You don’t need to be delicate about it because you’re worried about Lu,” Ulla laughs, “she doesn’t mind. Besides, she’s got me, and everyone knows I am the superior sibling.”
Luda leans over to give her wife a sweet kiss and it should be weird, really, but Aleksander is honestly just happy for them. He’d been shocked, when they first got together, but they work on a level Aleksander and Luda never did, and he’s so glad they found each other – not many people get that sort of amicability post-divorce.
“I still don’t understand why you never looked her up after you and I divorced,” Luda says.
“I did, once,” he admits, “I found her Instagram, but it … it was full of photos of her with another man – Malyen, I think his name was – and I … well, it would have hurt too much to get in contact at that point. Maybe they’re still together now – she might be married, or engaged, or –”
“Or single,” Ulla reminds him, “just go with an open mind. If nothing else, Alina was your friend before she was your girlfriend.”
“And try to relax, Sasha,” Luda smiles kindly, “don’t overthink it.”
Aleksander can do that.
He can definitely avoid overthinking and remembering how it felt to kiss Alina and reminiscing on how happy they were and hoping desperately that she’s single.
He’s not overthinking at all.
At the restaurant, Alina breaks the slightly awkward tension by suggesting they guess what each other will order.
“It’ll be fun,” she grins, “we can see how well we remember each other’s tastes.”
And it is fun, looking through the menu and deciding what they think the other will like best.
Somehow, they’re unsurprised when they present each other with perfect matches. They remember all of each other’s favourites.
While they eat, they play twenty questions to catch up.
He’s the Member of Parliament for the Western Quarter of Os Alta – “it feels like a thankless job sometimes,” he admits, “but then I help a constituent manage an issue and they thank me, or I manage to fight for an important piece of legislation, and then it all seems worth it.”
She worked for the United Nations, keeping the maps updated and current, especially in disputed territories and sometimes even war zones. Now, though, wanting to settle down more or less in one place, she’s taken a government job checking maps and charts are accurate and to scale by adding or removing new roads and landmarks. Another often thankless task, but one that can help people.
“Do you remember,” she giggles, “when I wanted to be an explorer, mapping the way to the Bonesmith’s Workshop and Captain Sturmhond’s hidden treasure, and you insisted we’d have colonised the moon by this point and you’d have been elected its president?”
“Saints,” he laughs, “what exciting and completely deluded children we were.”
“I still think those jobs would be amazing, if only they existed. Alas,” Alina sighs, “we’re forced into government drudgery.”
She’s been engaged, “to a man I wasted far too much time on,” she grumbles. Aleksander wonders briefly if that’s the Malyen he’d seen on her Instagram page, and then decides it doesn’t matter, since he’s clearly out of the picture.
He’s been married, and he worries for a moment what she’ll think of that, but he tells her the whole story and she stares for a moment.
“Wait, so … you married Luda, got amicably divorced three years later … and then she married your sister!”
They both burst out laughing.
There is none of the awkwardness they both worried about earlier. They’ve been apart for fifteen years, and they’re both different in some ways, but it’s still easy and relaxed between them.
“I suppose I can’t blame Luda,” Alina shrugs, “Ulla’s amazing. I had a crush on her for a while, just before you and I started dating.”
“Linka!”
“What? She’s so pretty and she was bold and outspoken and fun.”
“I’m starting to feel a little worried right now.”
“Relax, Sasha. I adored Ulla, but I was never in love with her.”
Her passport has stamps from all over the world. She knows how to buy food and drink, book a hotel room, ask for directions and swear up a storm in about eight different languages.
He is quite a homebody. He’s only been once for short holidays to each of Shu Han, Fjerda and Kerch. He’s fluent in five languages, but he admits it’s the more formal language of a person who is rarely among native speakers.
He has two cats who look as different as night and day, named Sol and Volcra.
“They’re spoiled rotten,” he admits, “and very much inside cats.”
She never had a pet when she travelled so much, but has recently adopted a dog from a shelter, “an older one, basically a pensioner. He’s very cuddly.”
“I wonder how he’d get on with my cats,” Aleksander wonders out loud, freezing when he realises what he might be implying, “I mean –”
Alina only laughs, though, “I guess we’ll have to find out.”
They trade stories about embarrassing work incidents and terrible bosses and awful first dates.
They talk about old classmates and new friends – “you’ll have to come and see Ulla and meet Luda,” he tells her, and she responds with “you’d like Nina and Matthias, I think, and Nina makes the best waffles your sweet tooth could desire.”
They talk about their hobbies and the books they’re reading and their current favourite TV shows.
It becomes increasingly clear that this isn’t just a one-time, catch-up. They’ve found each other again and neither of them want to let go.
It’s just so easy between them.
No desire to hide who they are or try and be someone they’re not.
They’re comfortable together, even after so long apart.
Without explicitly stating it out loud, they decide to go for a walk by the river after dinner is over.
Neither of them wants the night to end just yet.
They stroll down the path hand in hand, casual intimacy picked back up like it hasn’t been fifteen years since they saw each other.
Eventually, though, they have to go home.
Real life calls and they both have work the next day.
“Linka, I –” Aleksander begins as they stand in front of her apartment building.
She cuts him off, leaning up to kiss him, winding her arms around his neck to tug him closer.
They’re both smiling when they eventually break apart.
“There’s an exhibition on at the Os Alta Art Gallery on Wednesday evening,” she says, “I’ve got two tickets?”
“I’d love to go with you.”
“I mean, I was going to ask if Ulla was interested, but I suppose –”
She yelps as he picks her up, laughing as he spins her around, “don’t tease, Linka.”
“I’ll see you on Wednesday, then,” she grins as he puts her down, “I’ll message you the details.”
“I wouldn’t miss it.”
Two weeks later
“If my brother was marrying anyone else after dating them for two weeks,” Ulla says to the small group gathered for the ceremony, “I would have insisted on checking him into a psych ward, “but this is Alina, and it isn’t two weeks, not truly. They just took a really long break – which, incidentally, helped me meet the love of my life, so thanks for that, you two. But back to the bride and groom. Sasha and Alina first met when they were eight years old and she roped him into playing pirates by, err, literally lassoing him with some rope she’d found and insisting he be the prisoner. It was, I think, the start of a beautiful relationship. And from then on …”
Aleksander and Alina turn and look at each other as Ulla continues her speech, wide smiles on their face.
Most would say they were mad for marrying two weeks after their reunion, but when you know, you know.
They’ve got a second chance and they’re not going to waste a moment of it.