I checked my phone for the tenth time in as many minutes. 12:55 PM. I was five minutes early. Punctuality was usually a point of pride for me, but today it felt like a tactical error. Five extra minutes for my anxiety to marinate. The stone steps of the museum looked monumental, like the entrance to a place where my social ineptitude would be put on full public display. My palms were damp, and I wiped them on the thighs of my jeans for what felt like the hundredth time since leaving my apartment.

And then I saw him.

He was standing near the grand oak doors, not looking at his phone, but staring at the posters advertising the exhibit. He was wearing a simple grey henley that fit him well across the shoulders and dark jeans. He looked exactly like himself, which was somehow both a relief and a new source of panic. He hadn't dressed up, so my simple sweater and jeans were the right call. But he also looked effortlessly good, and I suddenly felt like a collection of mismatched parts.

As I watched, he rocked back on his heels, then shoved his hands into his pockets, only to pull them out a second later and run one through his hair. He looked… nervous. The realization hit me with a jolt. His posture wasn't relaxed; it was tense. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, a restless energy about him that mirrored the frantic thrumming in my own chest. He wasn’t the cool, confident guy I’d built up in my head. He was just Zachery. And he was nervous to see me.

The thought gave me just enough courage to close the remaining distance. My feet felt like lead, each step a deliberate, clumsy effort. "Zachery?" I called out, my voice sounding thin and unfamiliar.

He turned, and his whole face changed. The anxious line of his brow smoothed out, and a smile spread across his lips. It was that smile, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes. "Ayaan. Hey. You made it."

"Of course," I said, stopping a few feet in front of him. This was it. The moment of greeting. What do normal people do? A hug felt too familiar. A wave felt too distant. He took a step forward, closing the space between us, and his arms started to lift as if initiating a hug. At the exact same moment, my brain screamed HANDSHAKE! and I shot my right hand out into the space where his chest was about to be.

The result was a clumsy collision. His forward momentum met my outstretched arm, and we bumped shoulders awkwardly. My hand ended up pressed flat against his stomach for a split second, the warmth of him seeping through his shirt, before I snatched it back like I’d been burned.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry," I stammered, my face heating up so fast I felt dizzy. "I don't know why I did that. A handshake? Who does that?"

He let out a short, surprised laugh, a real one that wasn’t tinged with pity. He took half a step back, giving us both a bit of breathing room. "Don't be sorry," he said, and his smile was so genuine, so warm, that it seemed to physically push back the wave of humiliation threatening to drown me. "I was going for a hug. I think we just invented a new greeting. The hand-hug-bump."

I looked up at him, into his eyes, and saw nothing but sincere amusement. He wasn't laughing at me. He was laughing with me, at the shared, ridiculous awkwardness of the moment. The knot in my stomach didn’t disappear entirely, but it loosened its death grip, allowing me to take my first full, steadying breath of the afternoon.

"The hand-hug-bump," I repeated, the words feeling foreign and clumsy on my tongue. The name was as awkward as the action, but it worked. It broke the spell. For a moment, I felt like myself again.

Zachery motioned toward the entrance. "Shall we?"

I nodded, and we walked through the heavy oak doors together. The sudden quiet of the museum's grand lobby swallowed the small pocket of ease we had created outside. The air inside was cool and still, smelling faintly of old paper and floor polish. The warmth of our shared laugh evaporated, and the awkwardness came rushing back in, colder and more formal this time.

He paid for our tickets at the front desk while I pretended to be deeply interested in a brochure about museum membership. When he came back, he handed me a ticket and a museum guide. Our fingers didn't touch.

We entered the exhibit, and the tension became a physical thing—a solid wall of air between us. We walked side-by-side, but with a careful, deliberate foot of space separating us. It was a formal, polite distance. The kind of distance you keep from a stranger in an elevator. My entire consciousness shrank until it was focused on that single foot of empty space. I was acutely aware of the whisper of his jacket sleeve moving through the air so close to my own, the soft, rhythmic sound of his shoes on the polished wood floor next to mine.

All the conversation starters I had rehearsed, all the witty observations about cartography I’d stored up, vanished. My mind was a roaring emptiness, a vacuum of white noise. The only thought I could form was a frantic, repeating command: Don't do anything weird. Don't trip. Don't say anything stupid.

We stopped at the first glass case, which held a series of faded, hand-drawn maps of the coastline.
“Wow,” Zachery said, his voice a little too loud in the quiet room. He cleared his throat. “These are… really detailed.”

“Yeah,” I managed to squeak out. My throat was tight. “The lines are very… straight.”

The lines are very straight? My inner critic screamed at me. That’s what you have to say about a priceless 17th-century artifact? I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole. I risked a glance at him. He was just nodding, his eyes on the map, his expression unreadable. Maybe he hadn't noticed how lame I was.

We moved to the next display. The silence stretched, thin and brittle. I could feel his presence beside me like a low-grade electrical current, making the skin on my arm prickle. I focused on breathing. In through my nose, out through my mouth. Just act normal.

"It's amazing how they did all this without modern technology," he offered, trying again.

"It is," I agreed, my gaze fixed on a depiction of a sea monster in the corner of a map. "They must have had steady hands."

Steady hands. I was a walking, talking book of boring, obvious facts. I was convinced he was regretting this. Every silent step we took was another nail in the coffin of whatever this was supposed to be. He was probably already composing the polite "let's just be friends" text in his head. The thought made my stomach clench. I stared ahead, watching our separate reflections move across the glass of the display cases, a perfect picture of two people standing near each other, completely and utterly alone.

I was about to suggest we just leave. I’d invent a headache, a forgotten appointment, anything to end this slow-motion train wreck. I opened my mouth to say something, but we turned a corner and the words died on my lips.

Before us, taking up almost an entire wall, was a map of our city. Not the city I knew, with its grid of streets and sprawling suburbs, but the city as it was in 1852. It was rendered in sepia ink and delicate watercolor, a fragile, sprawling organism of a town clinging to the banks of a river that looked wilder and wider than the one I knew. It was beautiful. My breath caught.

We both stopped, the silent agreement to pause needing no words. For the first time since we’d entered the exhibit, I wasn’t thinking about the space between us. I was just looking.

“Look,” Zachery said, his voice softer now, closer to my ear than it had been all day. He lifted a hand and pointed to a winding blue line that snaked through what was now the downtown core. “That’s the old river path. Before they dredged it and built the retaining walls.”

My eyes followed his finger. He knew. We’d had a long conversation once, months ago, about a local history book I was reading that detailed how the city had reshaped the river in the early 1900s, burying entire streams and tributaries to make way for development. It was a throwaway conversation, one of dozens we’d had. But he’d remembered.

The fact that he remembered, that he’d pointed this out for me, was like a key turning in a lock I didn't know was rusted shut. The roaring white noise in my head subsided, replaced by a single, clear thought.

“They called it the Serpent’s Bend,” I said, the words coming out easily, naturally. I stepped a little closer to the glass, tracing the curve with my eyes. “See how it loops back on itself right there? That whole area used to flood every spring. It’s why all the original merchant houses on Front Street have those raised stone foundations.”

When I glanced at him, he wasn’t looking at the map anymore. He was looking at me, a small, genuine smile playing on his lips. It wasn't the polite, strained smile from before. This one was real. “I never knew that,” he said. “I just thought it was a stylistic choice.”

“No, it was completely practical,” I said, feeling a warmth spread through my chest that had nothing to do with embarrassment. It was excitement. I pointed to a cluster of tiny, hand-drawn buildings. “That’s where the old tannery district was. They needed to be right on the water, but the flooding was so bad they had to rebuild half the structures every decade. It’s all landfill now. The entire financial district is built on top of a buried riverbed.”

“You’re kidding.” He leaned in, his shoulder now just inches from mine, his attention fully on the map. The wall of air between us had crumbled without me even noticing. “So we’re standing on an old swamp right now?”

I laughed, a real laugh that felt like breaking the surface after being underwater for too long. “Essentially, yes. A very well-paved swamp.”

He laughed with me, and the sound echoed in the quiet hall, a warm and welcome intrusion. He turned his head, his eyes meeting mine. They were bright with interest, and for the first time all day, I didn't feel like a specimen under a microscope. I felt like a person he actually wanted to be with.