The-Bench-By-The-Wall
She did not go down at once. She was not brave the way she'd promised herself she'd be; she was only standing at a window, watching a man she'd loved on paper for a third of her life, and finding that the having-found-him was almost too large to add a face to.
So she did what she had always done. She got out her pen.
She wrote it small, on the back of a bus ticket, because that was all she had: *I came to find the courage to meet you. I should have known you'd be exactly where you said the quiet was.* And then, because the letters had always been braver than she was, she folded it once, put on her coat, and went down the two flights and out the blue door into the salt evening before she could talk herself out of it.
He looked up when her shadow fell across the page. Up close he was older than his handwriting and softer around the eyes, and he had the wary, hopeful look of a man interrupted in something private. "Sorry," he said, beginning to move the book to make room on the bench, courteous to a stranger. "Plenty of room, if you—"
"Thomas," she said.
He went still. The gulls wheeled. Somewhere a halyard tapped against a mast, patient as a clock.
"I'm sorry to do it like this," she said, and her voice was not steady, and she found she didn't mind. "I rehearsed something better on the bus and I've forgotten all of it. I booked this week to be near you. I wasn't going to