Page 18 of What Should Have Been Ours

“One day, Gab, we’re gonna be adults sitting here. No hospital wristbands that feel like handcuffs. Just two normal people that aren’t sick, drinking hot chocolate together and talking about boring adult things.”

I remember laughing at him, rolling my eyes before asking, “You think we’ll still know each other when we’re adults?”

Cam wouldn’t even hesitate. “Of course. You’re stuck with me.”

Liar.

He left.

And for twelve years, this cafe had become a place I avoided.

Because every time I would drive by, I could still see us sitting in there at our favorite booth, hiding from the rest of the world and all of our problems. I could hear him making another one of his ridiculous theories about how hot chocolate had actual magical healing powers. I could still picture myself sitting across from him, thinking that no matter how unfair life was, I at least had him to make it more bearable.

Until I didn’t. Until he was just…taken away from me.

As soon as my fingers grip the door handle of my car, a voice in my mind whispers to me that this wasn’t a good idea.

Yeah, I can’t do this. I should just turn around and go home. Pretend I got stuck at work. Pretend I never saw his message.

Just as I’m about to shift the gear back into reverse. I look into the cafe window and see him.

Sitting at our booth, stirring his drink absentmindedly, checking his watch and his phone, like maybe he thinks I’m really not coming.

Now I don’t just see the boy who left. I see a flash of the boy who loved me. The boy who fought beside me. The boy who promised we’d always find our way back to each other, no matter what.

Maybe he wasn’t lying after all.

Before I can change my mind, I step out of the car and walk inside.

8

Cameron

It’s 6:20, and I feel a little crazy still sitting here stirring my hot chocolate, waiting for a woman to show up who probably wants nothing to do with me after all these years of silence.

Fingers drumming on the table. I keep going back and forth from stirring my lukewarm hot chocolate to checking the time.

I’m not the nervous type. Nothing has ever really made me nervous, not Med School, not taking my first patient, not my first surgery, not even the time Wes dared me to answer a question in a lecture using only medical puns, and I ended up accidentally telling our stone-faced professor that his explanation really “stroked my curiosity”—which resulted in a lecture on professionalism and a permanent ban from sitting next to Wes during class.

Yet it seems like anywhere Gabrielle is concerned, my nerves go haywire. I don’t know what it is about her. No other girl has had the same effect on me as she has. Maybe it’s everything we went through together, maybe it’s the way I saw my whole life playing out with her in it for as long as I could remember, or maybe it’s the way I never thought I was good enough for a girl as perfect as her but I never stopped trying to be.

Get yourself together, man. She’s just a girl.

Except I can try to keep telling myself that, but I know she’s not just anything, not to me.

I can do this. It’s just hot chocolate. Just a casual meet-up between two people who used to know each other better than anyone else. So why does it feel like I’m about to sit down for a job interview where the position is ‘man who might get his heart stomped on’?

I take a deep breath, trying to shake it off.

She might not even show, and I’ll be all worked up for nothing.

Then, the door chimes, and when I look up—

Yeah, scratch that whole pep talk, I’m screwed.

She stops in the doorway, scanning the cafe, clearly just as nervous as I feel.

Then our eyes meet, and I can’t breathe.