The first time Avery saw him, she was mad. Really mad.
Her flight was delayed. Three hours. On Christmas Eve. She was supposed to be home by now, eating her mom’s food, laughing with her sisters. Instead, she was stuck at gate 14, staring at a screen that just said “DELAYED” in red letters.
She walked to the small café near the gate. Only one seat was open, next to a man who was reading a book.
“Is this seat taken?” she asked.
He looked up. “Nope. Just me and bad coffee.”
She laughed. She didn’t mean to, but she did.
His name was Rowan. He was flying home too, to see his dad. They talked for around 3-4 hours. About nothing. About everything. About the coffee being terrible and the airport chairs being worse. Avery’s flight finally boarded, and she picked up her stuff from the table and started walking.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
“Merry Christmas, Rowan,” she said.
She thought that was it. One nice conversation. A stranger she’d never see again.
One year later, next Christmas, her flight was delayed again. Same airport. Same gate area. And there he was, at the same café, like some kind of joke the universe was playing.
“You again,” she said.
“Small world,” he said, smiling. “Or just bad luck with flights.”
They sat together again. Talked for hours again. This time, before she left, she wrote her number on a napkin.
“Just in case,” she said. “You know. If our flights get delayed again next year.”
They texted sometimes. Not every day. But enough. They both found reasons to book flights through that same airport. Neither of them wanted to be the one who said “I booked this flight because of you”
It became their thing. Every Christmas, they’d meet at that café. Sometimes their flights really were delayed. Or if they just arrived hours early, they always sat and waited together.
Year three, he brought her a small gift. A cheap snow globe from the airport gift shop.
“It’s stupid,” he said. “But it made you think of me.”
She kept it on her desk. Every time she looked at it, she smiled.
Year five, they almost kissed. Almost. Her flight got called, and she panicked and ran, and she thought about that almost-kiss the whole way home.
Year six, they finally did.
It was strange, what they had. They didn’t call it dating. They lived in different cities, different lives. They didn’t talk every week. But every Christmas, without fail, they came back to that same café, that same airport.
“Why don’t we just… be together?” she asked him.
He looked down at his coffee. “Because this is easy,” he said. “And real life is messy. What if we try, and it breaks? Then we lose this too.”
She didn’t like the answer. But she understood it. So they kept doing what they were doing. One week a year. Fifteen minutes of nervous waiting to see if the other one would show up. Then hours of talking.
Year eight, he told her he loved her. Right there in the café.
“I love you too,” she said.
Still, they never changed anything. Still just Christmas. Still just the airport. It was safe. It was theirs.
Then came year ten.
Avery’s flight landed. She walked toward the café, excited like always, her heart doing that little jump as it always did before she saw him.
But something was wrong.
The café was gone. Not closed for the day just gone. Empty, space, dust on the floor, a sign taped to the wall.
“THIS TERMINAL IS PERMANENTLY CLOSED”.
Her heart beat dropped for a second.
She looked around, confused, panicked. Where was he? Would he even know to come here? Was he already looking for her somewhere else?
She waited two hours by the closed café, hoping he’d somehow find his way there too. He didn’t come.
She called him, but his number was changed, and she lost the thread somehow.
Now the place was gone.
She checked her phone. No new message from him. She texted him: “Where are you? Our spot is gone”
No reply.
She called. It rang twice, then a robotic voice says: “This number is no longer in service.”
Her stomach dropped. She waited by the construction wall for an hour, in case he showed up confused like she was. He didn’t.
What she didn’t know, because she’d find out much later, was that Rowan’s phone had been stolen out of his coat pocket three weeks earlier, at a different airport, on a work trip.
He’d gotten a new phone and a new number fast, because of work, and he’d meant to text everyone the new number before Christmas. He’d meant to. He just hadn’t gotten to her yet, because he told himself he’d just tell her in person, like always.
That was their whole thing — showing up, not texting.
He flew in the next day, one day late because of a work meeting that ran long. He walked to their spot and found the place was gone.
He didn’t have her number written down anywhere except in a phone that was gone. He’d never memorized it. Why would he? He always just saw her name pop up when she texted.
He didn’t know her last name. He’d never asked her to add him on anything else, because he was the one who’d said “let’s not make it real,” and now he’d give anything to take that back.
He looked her up online anyway, later that week. Typed “Avery” into every search bar he could think of, along with the city she was from, the job she’d mentioned once.
Nothing solid came up. Too common a name, no photo of her he could send around, no way to know which “Avery” out of thousands was actually her.
She tried too. She looked up “Rowan,” the company he used to work for, until she remembered he’d said, a year before, that he was thinking about quitting. She had no idea if he still worked there.
Every search led nowhere, or led to twenty men with the same name, none of them him.
They had spent ten years building something real, and they realized, too late, that they had built it with almost nothing to hold onto.
No photos together; they’d never once thought to take one, because they never thought they’d need proof. No socials. No last names. Just a place, and a day, and each other.
Now the place was gone.
For the next two years, Rowan flew more than he needed to. He told himself it was for work. It wasn’t, not really.
Every December, he’d find a reason to pass through that same city, walk through that same rebuilt terminal, half hoping, feeling stupid the whole time.
Avery did something similar, though she never told anyone why she suddenly wanted the window seat on every flight, why she lingered in airport cafés longer than she needed to.
Year twelve. Two years after the Terminal closed.
Avery was sitting in a different terminal now — a layover in a city neither of them had any real reason to be in- when she felt her phone buzz.
A message from an unknown number.
Is this Avery? I found an old email account, found a message you sent me once about a flight delay, and this is my number “987*****”; please call me.
She read it three times. Her hands were shaking.
She called instead of texting back.
“Rowan?”
There was a pause. Then his voice, cracking a little. “Avery. Oh my god. It’s really you.”
“I thought” She stopped, because her throat had closed up. “I thought I was never going to hear your voice again. I looked for you for so long. I typed your name into everything. I gave up. I actually gave up, like, a year ago. I told myself to stop.”
“I never stopped,” he said, and she could hear that he was crying too, trying to hide it and failing.
“I flew through that airport every December. I know that’s insane. I know how that sounds. I just kept thinking, what if this is the year, what if I turn a corner and you’re there.”
“I’m so sorry I never got your number written down somewhere. I’m so sorry, I should have—”
“Don’t. Don’t apologize. I did the same thing. We were both idiots. Happy idiots, but idiots.”
She was laughing now, and crying at the same time, wiping her face with her sleeve in the middle of a crowded terminal, not caring who saw.
“Where are you right now?” she asked. “Actually right now.”
“Home. Why?”
“Because I need to see your face. Not a photo. Not a call. I need to actually see you, right now, today, I don’t care what it costs.”
He laughed, wet and shaky.
She booked the next flight. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking the entire time she typed in her card number.
He was there when she landed. Standing near the gate, holding a coffee he wasn’t even drinking, just holding it because his hands needed something to do.
She saw him before he saw her. She stopped walking for a second, just to look, just to make sure he was real and not something she’d imagined out of two years of wanting this so badly.
Then she ran.
He caught her, and neither of them said anything for a while, just held on, her face pressed into his shoulder, his hand shaking against her back.
“I’m sorry,” he said in her ear. “I’m so sorry I lost you.”
“You didn’t lose me,” she said, pulling back enough to look at him, her face a mess, tears and mascara and a smile she couldn’t stop. “We just took the long way. I’m here. Look at me. I’m right here.”
“I thought about you every single day,” he said. “Every single day for two years, I wondered if you were okay, if you’d moved on, if you even remembered me.”
“How could I forget you? You’re the reason I hate every other airport that isn’t this one.”
He laughed, really laughed, the kind that comes out shaky when you’re still half-crying.
I want your number saved under an actual name. I want your last name. I want your address. I want everything.”
“Okay,” she said, laughing too now, wiping her eyes with both hands. “Okay. It’s Ferreira. Avery Ferreira. Now you know.”
“Rowan Cho,” he said. “Nice to finally meet you properly.”
They stood there in the middle of the terminal, people walking around them, some flight being called over the speakers that neither of them was listening to, and for the first time in twelve years, they weren’t waiting for next December.
They already had each other. And this time, they weren’t letting go.
