Surprise
Sometimes love arrives dressed as innocence.
The whale watching trip.
The bus.
The excitement.
Two broken young people discovering intimacy together.
Readers fall in love with them.
I’d just moved for him.
Leaving home felt less like running away and more like running toward something I’d been waiting for.
Three months.
That’s how long we’d loved each other through telephone wires.
Three months of late-night conversations.
Favourite songs.
Favourite foods.
The stories we trusted each other with before we trusted our hands.
Now we were learning each other all over again.
He booked a whale-watching trip at Jervis Bay.
It felt like something out of a movie.
Sea air.
Salt on our lips.
The kind of day you secretly hope never ends.
On the bus home, we sat halfway down, just far enough away to borrow a little privacy.
We kissed.
A lot.
The kind of kisses that make time forget itself.
Every time we pulled apart, one of us found an excuse to lean back in.
I remember thinking...
How can someone miss a person who’s sitting right beside them?
By the time Sydney appeared through the bus window, I was certain of one thing.
Going home was the last thing either of us wanted.
He looked over his shoulder.
The back seats were empty.
“Come on.”
We moved.
I laughed.
“What are we doing?”
“I don’t know.”
Neither did I.
Maybe that’s why it felt so wonderfully alive.
People always assumed they knew who I was.
The good Christian girl.
The sensible one.
The careful one.
I smiled to myself.
If only they knew.
I surprised him that afternoon.
Maybe I surprised myself too.
His expression...
I’ll never forget it.
Not because of what happened.
Because he looked like a little boy who’d just discovered Christmas wasn’t only for children.
Wonder.
Disbelief.
Joy.
Nobody had ever looked at me like I was capable of surprising them.
I liked that.
When we finally stepped off the bus, neither of us spoke very much.
We didn’t need to.
Some conversations never use words.
We caught a taxi.
Neither of us was ready to say goodnight.
He spotted a park a block from my place.
“Let’s stay a little longer.”
I nodded.
At home, there were walls.
Parents.
Rules.
Expectations.
Out here, there was only the night.
The moon hung quietly above the trees.
The air carried that crisp edge only Sydney seems to have after sunset.
We sat close enough that silence felt warm.
The rest...
belongs to us.
All I know is that when I walked through my front door later that night, I wasn’t the same woman who’d left that morning.
Neither was he.
Sometimes love doesn’t arrive all at once.
Sometimes it slips quietly into the empty seat beside you...
and asks if you’d like to stay on the bus a little longer.
