Ten years to the day, and Aiden still got a little nervous walking through the front door with flowers. Not because Sam didn’t like them — she always did — but because ten years in, it would have been easy to stop bothering.
“You didn’t have to,” Sam said, the way she always did, taking the bouquet and burying her face in it anyway.
“I know,” he said. “I wanted to.”
They’d built a life that looked, from the outside, fairly ordinary — a mortgage, a dog that barked too much, a group chat with old friends that never quite died out. But ordinary, they’d learned, wasn’t the same as unremarkable. It had just taken them a few years to figure out how to keep choosing each other on purpose, instead of coasting on momentum.
“Remember our first apartment?” Sam asked later, the two of them tangled together on a couch that had replaced three others since. “The one with the radiator that only worked in July?”
“I remember you making me sleep in three sweaters,” Aiden laughed. “And somehow it was still one of the best years of my life.”
Sam propped herself up on an elbow, studying him in the low evening light. “Do you ever think about how different we are now? From who we were then?”
“All the time,” he said. “I like who we’ve become. I like that we became it together.”
She kissed him then, slow and unhurried, the kind of kiss that didn’t need to lead anywhere to mean everything. Ten years hadn’t made things predictable in the way people sometimes warned it would. If anything, it had made the ordinary moments — the flowers, the couch, the terrible radiator they still laughed about — feel more significant, not less.
“Ten more?” Sam asked against his shoulder.
“At least,” Aiden said. “I’m just getting started.”