Bastille Day
Lia is thirty-five now and owns her own publication - a small, stubborn magazine that runs on espresso, chaos and stories that still feel like they matter. Her name is on the masthead, but she prefers to stay off the record. Behind the lens. Behind the screen. Behind the version of herself that fits into the shape the world expects.
Home is wherever her shoes land next: Paris in the spring, sometimes Chicago, once Cape Town. London still stings. Oxford remains untouched.
Tonight, though, she’s in Hyde Park. It’s Bastille Day - the one date she doesn’t negotiate. No meetings. No deadlines. Her staff and friends know. "Bastille is sacred," they say, half-joking. She just smiles.
She spots him across the crowd the way a heartbeat settles into rhythm. Not dramatic. Just inevitable.
The park is humming with strangers, music and wine, and there he is. Callister. Arriving not early or late, but precisely when he’s supposed to. Familiar boots. A cigarette tucked behind his ear. That half-smile that dares you to ask what he’s thinking.
They don’t speak right away. Just a nod, a glance, a shared pull that doesn’t ask for explanation. They stand side by side, watching the fireworks bloom above them like they’ve done before, like they will again.
He brings her a glass of wine. She offers him a lighter. It all clicks into place, quietly, like it’s rehearsed.
"Didn’t think I’d spot you first this time," he says, voice quieter than she remembers, but still wrapped in that crooked charm.
"I was busy pretending you weren’t real," she answers, eyes still on the sky.
He laughs low, under his breath, the way he did that first summer in the park. "How’s that working out for you?"
She finally looks at him. There’s a new line now at the corner of his mouth, the kind carved slowly by things unsaid. Her fingers twitch slightly, resisting the impulse to trace it.
"Terribly," she says. "You’re more annoying in person."
"You’re still... breathtaking," he replies, a trace of a smirk in his voice, like he doesn't realize the effect he still has on her.
He does. He always knows.
Lia looks away fast, pulls in a slow breath and steadies the hand that wanted to shake by tightening her grip harder around the stem of her glass.
He doesn’t look at her. His gaze stays on the horizon, on the crowd, on the crescent moon tangled in the trees.
And just like that, it begins again.
They find their patch of grass - slightly damp, half-remembered, but theirs without discussion. She’s wearing a blue dress that isn’t the original. That one’s packed away in tissue paper, in a box under a bed that doesn’t belong to him. But this one is close enough, the kind of close that lets her pretend that nothing’s changed.
They haven’t been a couple in nearly a decade.
The first time the day came around, she didn’t expect him to show. It was the summer after the end, and everything was still all too fresh. Too sharp. Too late.
But there he was.
And the year after that.
And the year after that.
Once a year, they meet.
Once a year, they remember.
There have been others - long relationships, short ones, the kind that glow and fade.
Cal sends postcards. Lia doesn’t respond, but keeps every one. She emails him pieces she’s proud of, never with a note, just subject lines like Read this or you’re dead. He rarely replies, but she knows he reads them.
They’ve tried to stop. To draw a line and keep it. But something always gives - a phone call, a bad night, a hospital room, a war zone, a whisper of grief they don’t know where else to send. When the world slips sideways, they reach for each other.
Her friends still ask, gently, "Are you seeing anyone?"
And she answers "No," because technically, no - she’s not.
But also yes. Always yes.
There’s no title for what they are. Not lovers. Not strangers. Something heavier. Something messier. Something that’s survived all their attempts to outgrow it.
Callister Bennett is not her boyfriend.
But she loves him.
They return to Hyde Park not because they promised to, but because neither of them ever stopped showing up. They drink. They laugh. They drift into sleep beneath a bruised sky that remembers them kindly.
In eight Julys, they’ve kissed, slept side by side, let the night pass in silence. Sometimes it’s physical. Sometimes it’s not. It’s never been about the rules.
Lia sits cross-legged on the spot where, eleven years ago, she and Cal shared a paper plate of powdered sugar beignets and laughed at how terrible the band playing La Vie en Rose sounded. It’s almost a tradition now - the bad music, the summer drizzle, the red lipstick she reapplies before seeing him, even though he’s seen her in worse.
They talk. It starts light - a joke about the wine, a complaint about the heat, something safe to break the surface. Then it drifts. Her publication is doing well. He says he’s proud of her, and this time, she lets the words settle instead of brushing them off. He tells her he’s living in Brussels now. Flying part-time. Mentoring younger pilots. He doesn’t elaborate and she doesn’t ask him to.
They move through topics the way people move through the park - slowly, with a kind of practiced familiarity. Cities. Street food. Politics, in that dry, amused tone people only use when they’ve argued before and learned how not to wound each other. They mention names without context, the ones they both remember - people who came and went, or lingered a little too long.
It’s easy, almost. Until it isn’t.
Because it’s always just one day. One day a year, sacred and selfish and carved out of time. Sometimes they text between Julys. Sometimes whole seasons pass in silence. She’s dated people. He has too. But no one stays. Because loving each other, in whatever this strange, shapeless way is, has made it harder to settle for less.
There’s a pause, eventually. A familiar one. The kind that always comes after the laughter fades and the light conversation runs out of safe places to hide.
“So… are you seeing anyone?” she asks. Light enough to pass for casual, like she’s asking about the weather. Her eyes stay on the ripple of the lake, not on him.
He exhales through his nose, slow. “Not seriously.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
His laugh is low, edged with something like fondness. “No. You?”
She doesn’t answer.
The quiet that follows doesn’t press. It just lingers, low and warm and known. Her silence isn’t distance — it’s care. And Cal, for all his chaos, knows how to leave it be.
“I’ve got something for you,” he says finally, thumb tapping the screen of his phone. He turns it toward her.
It’s a folder. July14. Dozens of photos. Some of them she took. Some of her - sleeping, laughing, caught mid-sentence. A few from old camera rolls she doesn’t even remember sending. One from a video call during lockdown — she’s crying in it.
“You kept these?”
“I keep everything you give me.”
Her breath doesn’t catch - not outwardly. But something shifts behind her ribs. There’s so much she could say. Too much. But they’ve learned to leave the unsaid where it belongs. That’s how this survives.
So they walk.
Sometimes it’s easier to move than to speak. The air between them isn’t heavy. Just full. The kind of full that happens when memory is thick on the ground.
They drift toward the bench they always end up at - same one as last year. And the year before. The paint’s chipped more now. A smear of blue graffiti on the armrest. She sits. He follows. The space between them isn’t much.
He lights a cigarette and offers her one. The ritual is intact. She declines without words, and he doesn’t ask again. He still remembers which days she won’t smoke.
“You look tired,” she says, not unkindly. “Quieter this year.”
“Getting old,” he replies, exhaling toward the trees. “And the annual heartbreak workout doesn’t get easier.”
He glances at her. Not with intensity. Just openly.
“Shame,” she says, a crooked smile brushing her mouth. “I liked you better when you were reckless and stupid.”
His eyes narrow with amusement. “You still like me.”
“I said better. Not much.”
A smile tugs at his mouth. “You used to say I was trouble.”
“You were trouble,” she says. “Still are. Just slower now. Like rust.”
He lets out a low laugh. The real kind. The kind that sneaks up. “You’re one to talk. You show up once a year and ruin me in under three hours.”
“That sounds like a personal problem.”
“That’s our problem.”
There’s a pause. One of those too-full ones that swells in the space left behind.
She doesn’t flinch, but her voice dips. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you mean them.”
He doesn’t argue, just finishes his cigarette, flicks the ash toward the tree roots and exhales like the quiet deserves to be kept.
A breeze moves through the park, soft and aimless, like it doesn’t know where to land. Lia smooths the skirt of her dress without thinking, fingers pressing into the folds like she might be able to iron something out - a crease, a thought, a feeling that’s been sitting too close to the surface all evening.
“I think about it sometimes,” she says, like it’s not quite a confession. “What it would’ve been like. If we’d tried again.”
She doesn’t look at him when she says it. The words are careful, but not guarded, shaped by time, not fantasy. Like something she’s been carrying long enough to let out without apology.
He doesn’t ask what she means. He never asks her to clarify the things they both already feel.
“You shouldn’t say things like that,” he murmurs.
“Why not?”
He exhales, slow, like the answer’s old. “Because you mean them.”
“I do,” she says. The words feel quiet and solid in her mouth. “But it doesn’t change anything.”
And maybe that’s the part that stings. Not the love. Not the missing. Just the knowing. The reality that all the wanting in the world doesn’t untangle what they already decided.
“I did try, Lia”
“I know.”
“And you did too.”
“I know that, too.”
There’s nothing else to say. Not really. The silence folds itself neatly around them for endless minutes - not heavy, not empty. Just honest.
“You’re going to leave now,” she says, and this time she does look at him.
“I am.”
They don’t move. Not yet. The moment stretches, quiet and close, as if even breathing might unmake it.
He glances at her hand resting beside him on the bench, then back at her. “Will you call me?” Cal asks, voice low.
She doesn’t answer right away. Her gaze is steady, full of the years between them.
“I love you,” she says finally, like something final and unpolished - like a stone she’s been turning over in her mouth all night. Not like a question or dare. Just the truth, handed over quietly, the way you might return something that never really belonged to you.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t try to return it. Just watches her the way he always has - like she’s a place he used to live in. Like if he looked away now, she might disappear for good.
For a while, neither of them moves. The space between them pulses with all the things they’ve never asked for out loud.
Then she leans in.
Not as a decision. Not as a test. Just slowly, like breath. Like gravity caught her off guard.
He meets her there.
Their mouths find each other the way they always do. Not like it’s new, but like it never really stopped. Like some part of them kept kissing all year without permission.
It’s not gentle, but it isn’t rough either. It comes quietly, like weather changing. Like a melody you forgot you remembered. He tastes like smoke and something sweet she can’t name but recalls anyway - maybe from that fall in Vienna, when he kissed her outside the museum in the rain, her dress soaked through, his hands in her hair like she was slipping through his fingers.
Her fingers curl into the collar of his coat, just enough to feel the fabric between them. His hand slips into her hair as he exhales through his nose, shakier than he means to be, and she kisses him harder - not to make it last, but to let it happen.
There’s no urgency. No choreography. Just the long, slow pull of being known.
This has never been about need. Not even about want. It’s about recognition - about the way their bodies still understand each other, even now. About the way her heart still folds at the sound he makes when she kisses the corner of his mouth instead of the center. About the way he still holds her like she's sunlight and ache and every version of home he's ever wanted.
They kiss until it becomes too much. Or maybe until it becomes exactly enough.
When they part, it’s not a gasp. Just a breath. The kind you didn’t know you were holding until you let it go.
He presses his forehead to hers, steady and quiet. Just for a second. Just to remember how close feels.
Then he walks away.
She doesn’t move. Just stays where she is, one hand resting lightly against her lips as she watches him walk back into the crowd. The grass doesn’t crunch beneath his boots. He doesn’t turn around. Lia wouldn’t ask him to.
Later that night, she sends him something. No message. No explanation. Just an email - subject line: Read this or I swear to God. One of her articles, published that afternoon. The kind she only sends when the feeling sits too close to the surface.
He won’t reply. He rarely does.
But she’ll picture it anyway: his apartment quiet, the screen lighting up his face, thumb hovering over her name like it’s still warm. She’ll imagine the moment he starts reading, and the ache in his chest when he realizes it’s about him.
And maybe that’s what matters.
To be read. To be held in that quiet, private space he never offers anyone else.
Because even when the words don’t come, they still reach. Through silence. Through memory. Through the soft rituals they never unlearned.
This isn’t a relationship. It isn’t closure either.
It’s something else. Something they keep circling, even when they pretend not to. Not perfect. Not permanent.
But real.
And on July 14th, in Hyde Park, it is enough.
