It's feminine intuition — 'cuz I always had a vision of us standing like this.

⋆ ˚｡⋆୨ ♡ ୧⋆ ˚｡⋆

The bar is loud in that specific way dive bars always are on a Thursday night — glasses clinking, someone laughing too hard at their own joke, a song you half-recognize bleeding out of a jukebox in the corner. You're not even sure why you came. You almost didn't.

But then you did, and now you're standing in the bathroom line, pressed between strangers, and he's there.

You've seen his face before. Not in person — on a screen, scrolling at 2 a.m. when sleep wouldn't come and your thumbs had a mind of their own. You'd told yourself it was nothing. Curiosity. The kind of thing you'd never admit out loud.

And yet. Here he is.

Patrick Zweig leans against the wall like he built it himself, like the whole bar is just a backdrop assembled for the sole purpose of making him look like that. Dark eyes scanning the room with the particular laziness of someone who's never had to try too hard. He's got a beer in his hand that he's barely touched, and he's wearing something simple — a collared shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow — and somehow that's worse. Somehow that's the thing that makes your stomach do something embarrassing.

You look away. You look back. He's already looking at you.

A slow smile. Not a smirk — something a little more genuine than that, which is, frankly, unfair.

"Hey."

One word. Just that. And you feel it in your chest like a key turning in a lock you didn't know was there.

He shifts off the wall and into your orbit like it's the most natural thing in the world, like the two of you have done this before in some other life. Up close, he's even more disarming. There's something almost reckless in the way he holds himself — loose, unhurried, like he's got all the time in the world and has decided, for the moment, to spend it on you.

"You look like you're trying to remember something," he says.

"What?"

"The way you were looking at me." He tilts his head slightly, curious, not cruel. "Like you'd seen me somewhere before."

You could lie. You could say no, nothing, you were just spacing out. But his eyes are doing something to your better judgment, and the words come out before you can stop them.

"Maybe I have."

He laughs — a short, surprised sound, delighted — and leans a little closer to be heard over the noise.

"I'm Patrick."

You tell him your name and he repeats it once, quietly, like he's testing the weight of it. You feel slightly insane. You feel more awake than you have in months.

The line moves. You don't really register it. You're too busy cataloguing the way he talks — unhurried, like he's thought about each word and decided it's worth saying. He asks if you've ever been somewhere unexpected, anywhere strange or far, and the question is so oddly sincere that you answer honestly, and he listens like your answer actually matters.

At some point the bathroom line ceases to be the point.

At some point you're just talking, tucked into the corner near the jukebox while the bar moves around you like water around two rocks, and his shoulder is almost touching yours, and there's chewing gum in your pocket and about a hundred things you want to ask him, and you keep thinking: this is not something that happens. This is not a thing that actually occurs.

Patrick glances down at your hand, then back up at your face, and there's a question in the look that isn't quite a question — more like an open door.

"Walk you home?" he asks. "We can go slow."

And the city outside is cold, and the bar closes in an hour, and you think — you are completely, irrationally certain — that if he kisses you tonight, something in you will simply stop working. Fall to pieces on the pavement. Drop dead on the spot.

"Yeah," you say.

"Okay," Patrick says, and smiles again, and picks up his jacket.