Your breath is warm against my jaw, the wine still lingers on your lips, your fingers tangled in my shirt, half of it already undone, your mouth tracing a path I forgot I missed.

“You shouldn’t be here,” you whisper, voice breaking somewhere between guilt and need.

But you don’t stop kissing me and I don’t listen.

Because right now, we’re on your bed—the one that used to be ours—the sheets are new, maybe, but the headboard hasn’t changed, neither has the way you still sleep closest to the window. I’m lying here with you, shirts halfway off, like I never moved out, like we never signed those papers, like we never broke a damn thing between us.

Your hand slides along my chest, resting just above my heart. I breathe in too deeply, afraid it might shatter this fragile, stupid, perfect mistake.

It started with the kids, it always does. I was only dropping them off, just a regular Monday, one of those routine exchanges we’ve learned to perfect over the past two years. They’d spent the weekend with me—movies, pancakes, soccer in the garden. Noelle didn’t want to leave, Darcy begged for five more minutes and Rowan just wanted one last piggyback ride.

You opened the door in leggings and an oversized sweatshirt, hair still damp from a shower, tired but glowing in that way only you do—the kind of glow that made me fall in love with you in the first place.

Then the girls wanted to show me the picture they painted, Rowan asked if I could stay and read them a book. You hesitated at first, but you didn’t say no, and somehow, an hour turned into dinner, dinner turned into bedtime.

And bedtime turned into this.

We were just kids when we met. 2013—you were 18, already stealing the screen with roles people still bring up in interviews, I was 19, touring the world with four of my best friends, pretending I knew who I was when I didn’t. Cara introduced us at some model’s party in London, you were sitting on the arm of a velvet couch, sipping something too strong, legs crossed, laughing at something sarcastic Cara said. Then your eyes met mine and it was over.

I was gone. Love at first sight sounds cliché until it happens to you. But it did, for me, for us.

After a year of dating we made it official. We became the it couple, teenage dreams come to life. People wanted to be me, more people wanted to be you, some days, even I did.

I proposed in 2016, you said yes with tears on your cheeks. We got married in 2017—me at 23, you 22—way too young, they said, but it felt right, felt real. Then the babies came. Noelle and Darcy in 2018—born minutes apart, like they couldn’t bear to be without each other. Chaos and heaven wrapped in blankets. And in 2021, our son—Rowan.

You pressed pause on everything for them—two times, you stepped out of the spotlight and each time, I stepped deeper into mine. You stayed home with diapers and night feeds while I stood under lights, pretending I wasn’t tired of missing you.

We stopped touching each other. Then we stopped seeing each other.

We were parents, not lovers. Roommates who once made vows on a beach in Italy.

2023, it broke.

There was no yelling, no betrayal, just silence. We looked at each other one morning and knew it was over. We signed the papers quietly, I moved just ten minutes away so I could still pick them up on Fridays and bring them back on Mondays. We stayed civil, for them, for ourselves.

We even tried dating again, brief flings, nothing serious. You said you weren’t ready to let someone new meet the kids and I wasn’t either, maybe because no one ever felt like home. But you did, still do.

“I missed this,” I murmur before I can stop myself.

You freeze just for a second. Your eyes meet mine and for a moment, we’re 19 and 18 again—two kids falling for each other with no idea what’s coming.

“This doesn’t fix anything,” you say.

“I know.”

“We’re not who we were.”

“I know that too.”

But then your hand pulls me closer and I press my forehead to yours and we forget the years, the distance, the divorce.

Tonight, we are just us again. The almosts, the maybes.