The gym smelled like floor polish and cheap champagne. They’d strung fairy lights around the basketball hoops, tacked up old class photos on the walls, and looped Take On Me on a warped cassette deck like it was some kind of time machine. But no matter how much the decorations tried, Jon couldn’t be pulled back to the past. He’d lived too many lives since then.

Cameras flashed in his face. People laughed a little too loudly, a little too nervously—piling praise on top of old insults they thought he didn’t remember. They said they always knew he’d make it. That he was so cool even back then. That they used to love his little songs, even though he knew they used to call him a loser behind his back.

He smirked. He could play the game. Sign the napkins, nod at the yearbook quotes, take a few photos. Hell, he could even pretend he didn’t notice that Greg Harper — the golden-boy quarterback who used to mock his ripped jeans and call his music “garage trash” — was now balding and begging him to play at his wedding.

Jon hadn’t even wanted to come. Richie had told him it would be good for him — “some closure or whatever.” Closure. As if there was ever any.

But then he saw her.

It wasn’t dramatic. No spotlight, no cinematic music swell. Just the soft click of her heels against the polished floor and the turn of a hundred heads when the door opened.

She stepped in like a ripple across still water — controlled, composed, graceful in that way she always had been. Ballerina posture, pristine hair, white silk gloves brushing down a champagne-colored dress that clung to her like it was made for that moment.

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Ten years, and she still walked like a stage was under her feet.

Jon forgot how to breathe for a second. Just stood there, holding a plastic cup of something fizzy and flat, watching the girl who used to tuck her hair behind her ear at locker 217 and pretend not to see him smirking at her. The same girl who used to twirl across auditorium stages while he scrawled her name into the margins of detention worksheets. The one who used to walk past him in the hallway—arm linked with that smug jock—while Jon sketched her face in the smoke trails of his cigarette, sitting alone on the steps.

He hadn’t spoken to her since senior year. Hadn’t needed to. She’d belonged to someone else. Someone taller, louder, cleaner. Someone whose parents donated to the school and wore matching varsity jackets with her after class. Jon had only watched. Only flirted when no one else could hear. Only carved her name into pickguard plastic and lined notebooks with her initials.

But now?

Now she stood in front of the old gym doors with a poise that made every other woman in the room feel like a blur. Her eyes scanned the crowd politely, gracefully, as if none of it surprised her. And then—

She saw him.

Their eyes met.

And for the first time that night, Jon wasn’t Jon Bon Jovi, rockstar, chart-topper, heartbreaker.

He was just the weird kid in the back of the class again. Fingers ink-stained, guitar in his lap, smoke in his lungs, and a face in his head he never quite forgot.

The room didn’t go silent. The crowd didn’t disappear. But in that breath—right there—it didn’t matter.

Ten years later, and she was still the one.

And maybe… just maybe… he wasn’t too late.