The first thing you noticed was how loud the airport felt—even with noise-canceling headphones on. Everything was bigger, faster, brighter than home. The announcements rolled over each other in a blur of accents, and the cold air smelled faintly like coffee.

Your hands tightened around the handles of your luggage as you stepped past the sliding doors, heart thudding with the kind of nervous excitement that made you feel like a kid again.

This trip had started as a joke in your messages—“What if I actually visited?”—and somehow turned into a real boarding pass, a twelve-hour flight, and now the dizzying reality of a new country.

Juliano Yvonne had promised he’d meet her at arrivals.

You scanned the crowd, expecting—what, exactly? A regular guy in a hoodie, maybe holding his phone, maybe waving awkwardly like in their video calls. Someone familiar in the way only late-night conversations could make a stranger feel.

Instead, there was a cluster of people near the railing. Phones raised. A security guard trying to keep a loose line. A girl clutching a poster with a name written in glitter.

Juliano.

It took you a second to connect the name on the sign to the boy who used to send you voice notes complaining about deadlines and asking what snacks you liked. The same Juliano who had never once mentioned crowds, or posters, or security escorts.

Then someone in a baseball cap and dark sunglasses stepped forward, pulling the cap lower as flashes went off. He looked up—past the crowd, past the lights—and straight at you.

And smiled like you were the only person there.

That was when you realized two things at once:

First, Juliano was definitely not just some random guy from the internet. And second, she had absolutely no idea what she’d gotten herself into.

Thinking that you were still mistaken, you walked away and explored the airport in the hopes of losing him.