Peace Beside Me

The Booking

By the first week of September, the air in Frankfurt had changed.

It was not winter-cold, not yet. It was only the kind of cold that slipped through an open window in the evening and rested gently on the skin. The kind that made people reach for socks, pull sleeves over their hands, and turn the lights on earlier than they had the week before.

Mara noticed it while standing in her kitchen with a mug of cocoa warming both hands.

Outside, the sky had become the pale gray-blue of a thought not fully formed. A few leaves had already gathered along the pavement below her building, gold against wet stone. She watched them circle in the wind and thought, as she often did lately, of Elias.

She had never touched him.

There had been no first meeting at a station, no awkward hug, no moment of discovering whether his hand was large or small around hers. She knew the shape of his smile from a screen, knew that he tilted his head when he was listening closely, knew he said her name as if it deserved patience. She knew the low warmth of his voice when the world was too heavy and he stayed awake to make it lighter.

But she did not know how he smelled after rain. She did not know whether he slept on his back or curled on his side. She did not know whether he would take the blanket from her in the night.

These were ordinary things. They were almost ridiculous things to miss.

Still, they made a tender ache in her chest.

Her phone lit up on the counter.

Elias: Tell me what you’re looking at.

Mara smiled before she answered.

Mara: The beginning of autumn. It is cold enough that I wish you were here.

The typing dots appeared, disappeared, then returned.

Elias: What would we do if I were?

She looked at her kitchen: the small wooden table, the bowl of apples she had bought that morning, the cinnamon jar beside the stove. It was not a remarkable room. The paint near the window had begun to peel. One cupboard door refused to close unless she lifted it slightly. But in her imagination, it opened into a future so warm it seemed to glow.

Mara: I would make hot cocoa.

Elias: I make better cocoa than you do.

Mara: You have never tasted mine.

Elias: I can tell from your confidence that it is dangerously sweet.

Mara laughed quietly, alone in the kitchen.

Mara: It is perfectly sweet.

Elias: Then I will drink it anyway.

That was one of the things she loved most about him: the way he made room for her in a sentence. He did not promise impossible things. He did not pretend the distance was easy. But he spoke of small futures as if they were real enough to prepare for.

She imagined him at her table, pretending to complain about the cocoa while taking another sip. She imagined his knees bumping hers beneath the table. She imagined reaching for a napkin and finding his fingers there first.

The thought left her breathless in the gentlest way.

The next Saturday, rain settled over the city before noon.

Mara woke to its soft, steady sound against the glass and stayed beneath her blanket longer than she meant to. She reached across the empty half of the bed, not because she expected someone to be there, but because the space had become familiar. It was the shape of a question she carried with her.

Would you fit here?

She smiled into her pillow.

Of course you would.

In the kitchen, she pulled apples from the bowl and opened a recipe on her phone: apple cinnamon rolls, soft and warm and unnecessarily complicated. Elias called just as she was measuring flour.

“You started without me,” he said, his voice bright with mock disappointment.

“You are late.”

“I am 6 thousand kilometers away.”

“Excuses.”

He laughed, and she set her phone against the sugar jar so she could see him. His hair was still messy, and he wore a faded sweater that made her want, suddenly and fiercely, to know how it felt beneath her hands.

“Show me,” he said.

“The recipe?”

“No. You.”

Mara looked down, shy despite herself. “I am covered in flour.”

“Exactly.”

She turned the phone toward herself. A soft white streak crossed her cheek. There was flour on the front of her shirt, on the counter, somehow even on the handle of the refrigerator.

Elias’s smile slowed.

“You look like home,” he said.

For a second, Mara forgot what she was doing.

The rain continued. The dough rose. They talked as though the distance between them were nothing more than a long hallway. He told her about his morning, about a neighbor’s dog that had decided his shoes were suspicious, about the book he had fallen asleep reading. She told him about the leaves turning too early and the woman at the market who had insisted the apples were the sweetest of the season.

When it was time to roll the dough, she propped the phone closer.

“More cinnamon,” Elias instructed.

“There is already enough cinnamon.”

“There is never enough cinnamon.”

“You are impossible.”

“And yet you miss me.”

Mara paused, cinnamon dusting her fingertips.

“Yes,” she said.

The teasing left his face, replaced by something quieter. Something that crossed the distance and found her exactly where she stood.

“I miss you too,” he said.

Neither of them tried to make it smaller.

When the rolls came out of the oven, the apartment filled with the smell of butter, apple, and cinnamon. Mara sat at the table with one still too hot to eat, her phone resting beside the plate. Elias had made tea at his own home, though he confessed it was not as good as the cocoa he planned to criticize someday.

She broke the roll in half and held one piece toward the screen.

“This one is yours,” she said.

He lifted his cup. “Save it for me.”

So she did.

Not the actual roll. She ate it later, standing at the counter with sticky fingers and a smile she could not hide. But she saved something else: a small place in the drawer, cleared beside her mugs. A recipe written in her notebook, with his ridiculous note—more cinnamon—added at the bottom. A spot on the couch that stayed open when she watched the rain.

And every night, before she fell asleep, she left the other side of the bed untouched.

Not empty.

Waiting.

Autumn deepened slowly after that.

The mornings grew darker. The trees along the street turned gold and copper, and the city seemed to exhale into colder days. Mara and Elias continued making their little shared rituals across the distance. They drank cocoa at the same hour. They watched films together, pausing to complain when the connection froze. They sent photographs of warm windows, cloudy skies, books open on their laps.

They also planned.

Not in the fragile language of someday, but with dates, savings, flight routes, and the practical courage of people who had decided love deserved more than longing.

Some nights, fear returned to Mara in the quiet.

What if the first hug felt strange? What if the love they had built in late-night calls and careful messages could not survive the reality of being in the same room?

Then Elias would call. Or she would reread something he had written. And she would remember that love was not made real by touch alone.

It had already been real in every moment he listened.

In every gentle question.

In every time he had said, Tell me about your day, and meant it.

Still, she wanted the touch. She wanted it with all the tenderness of a person who had waited a long time to hold what she loved.

The message arrived on a Wednesday evening, when Frankfurt was washed in rain and Mara had just turned on the lamp beside her sofa.

Elias: I booked it.

Mara stared at the words.

Her heart seemed to stop, then begin again too quickly.

Her hands still trembled as she wrote, Booked what?

He sent a screenshot: a flight from New York City to Frankfurt, leaving in October and arriving the following morning. Beneath it, another message appeared.

Elias: I’m really coming to you.

For a long moment, Mara only stared.

She read it once. Twice. A third time, because her eyes had filled before the sentence could settle.

Outside, the wind lifted leaves from the street and carried them in bright, spinning circles. Inside, her kitchen was warm. The cinnamon jar stood on the counter. There were apples in the bowl again, because she had bought them without thinking.

New York had always seemed impossibly far away—not only because of the ocean, but because it held him. A city of yellow taxis, crowded sidewalks, late-night takeout, and a skyline she had only seen through the small frame of her phone. Now its name sat beside Frankfurt’s on a booking confirmation, connected by a thin printed line across the Atlantic.

She called him.

When he answered, neither of them spoke immediately.

Then Elias smiled, that familiar smile that had lived for so long behind pixels and distance.

“You booked a flight,” Mara whispered.

“I booked a flight.”

“You are coming here.”

“I am coming to you.”

She laughed, but tears were already sliding down her cheeks. Elias’s expression softened.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

“I’m happy.”

“I know.” His voice grew quieter. “Me too.”

She looked around her apartment, suddenly aware of everything. The blanket folded over the couch. The single mug drying beside the sink. The narrow hallway. The room she had imagined him in a hundred times.

“What if it feels strange?” she asked.

“It might,” he said honestly. “At first.”

Mara looked back at him.

“But it will be real,” he continued. “And we get to learn the real version together.”

Mara pressed her hand over her mouth.

Then she laughed.

Not because anything was funny, exactly. Because the longing had suddenly chkanged shape. It was no longer a room without a door. It was a path. It was a flight arriving. It was a man crossing the distance between them.

“I’ll make cocoa.” Mara smiled 

“Too sweet?” His eyes were full of tenderness.

Mara looked around her small, imperfect kitchen, already seeing it differently: flour scattered over the counter, rain against the windows, his sweater hanging over the back of a chair. His hands reaching for hers. His laughter filling the rooms that had only known it through a speaker.

"Perfectly sweet." Mara whispered.

That night, after the call ended, she opened the window for a moment.

Cold rain scented the air. Somewhere below, tires whispered across the wet street. Mara held the edge of the curtain and smiled into the dark.

The distance still existed.

But it had an arrival time now.

And for the first time, the space beside her did not feel like an empty place.

It felt like a promise.

Preparations

The days that followed became full of small, delighted urgency.

Mara cleaned her apartment as though it were waiting to be judged by a panel of invisible experts. She washed sheets, dusted shelves, arranged books, rearranged them, then put them back where they had been. She bought a second toothbrush and stood in the bathroom staring at it with embarrassed happiness.

It was such a small thing.

It was everything.

She filled the kitchen with things he might like. Coffee, though she preferred tea. The spicy crackers he had once mentioned missing. Extra milk for cocoa. Apples. Butter. Cinnamon. Far too much cinnamon.

Elias sent photographs from New York.

A view of Manhattan from a subway platform. Steam rising from a paper cup as he walked to work. His suitcase open on the bed, clothes folded badly inside it.

Elias: How many sweaters do I need?

Mara: At least two. Frankfurt can be cold.

Elias: I thought you were going to keep me warm.

Mara looked at the message for a long time before replying.

Mara: I am planning to.

He sent a heart. She sent one back.

Each night, they crossed another day off the calendar together. Each night, the number became smaller.

Ten days.

Seven.

Three.

The morning before his flight, he called from his apartment in Queens. Behind him, a familiar slice of New York waited beyond the window: brick buildings, fire escapes, the restless noise of a city that always seemed awake.

“I have to leave for the airport soon,” he said.

Mara tried to smile normally. “You should sleep on the plane.”

“I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll be too excited.”

She lowered her eyes, smiling.

Then he said, “Mara?”

“Yes?”

“When I see you… can I hug you?”

It was such a careful question that her heart hurt.

“Yes,” she said. “Please.”

Across the Atlantic

The flight tracker became Mara’s entire world.

She watched the little plane icon leave New York, travel across the dark blue Atlantic, and move slowly, impossibly slowly, toward Germany. Every refresh brought it a few centimeters nearer on the screen.

In Queens, Elias sat by the airplane window with a blanket over his knees, trying and failing to sleep.

The cabin dimmed. The city lights vanished behind clouds. Hours passed in the strange suspended time of an overnight flight, when the world beneath them was an ocean and everyone around him was dreaming.

He thought of Mara’s kitchen.

He thought of cinnamon rolls and too-sweet cocoa. He thought of the empty space beside her on the couch—the space she had saved, not as an obligation, but as an invitation.

He imagined seeing her at arrivals.

Would she be nervous? Would she laugh? Would he recognize her immediately, beyond the photographs and calls, beyond the familiar curve of her smile on a screen?

Of course he would.

He knew her voice when she was tired. He knew the quiet she fell into when she was thinking. He knew the way she said okay when she was trying not to reveal that something had moved her.

And yet, he had never held her hand.

He looked out at the black sky beyond the window.

“I’m coming,” he whispered, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

In Frankfurt, Mara woke before her alarm.

The morning was still dark. Her apartment was too quiet, and she paced through it in thick socks, checking things that had already been checked. The cocoa powder. The apples. The clean sheets. Her phone, her wallet, her keys.

She changed her outfit twice.

Then three times.

At last, she stood in front of the mirror, one hand resting over her heart.

“You will be okay,” she told herself.

But she was not sure that was the right word.

She was not okay.

She was overflowing.

Arrivals

Frankfurt Airport was brighter than Mara expected.

People moved through the terminal with luggage rolling behind them, voices blending into announcements in German and English. Families stood with flowers. Children pressed their faces to the glass barriers. A man held a sign with a name written in careful black letters.

Mara stood near the arrivals exit, clutching a small paper bag.

Inside were two cinnamon rolls from the bakery near her apartment. She had wanted to bake them herself, but she had been too restless to trust her hands with yeast and dough. Instead, she had chosen the warmest ones she could find.

On the top of the bag, she had written, in a pen that shook slightly:

For the journey’s end.

Her phone buzzed.

Elias: Landed.

She covered her mouth.

A few minutes later:

Elias: I’m through passport control.

Then:

Elias: I’m getting my bag.

Her heartbeat became so loud that it seemed impossible no one else could hear it.

The doors opened. People came through in waves.

A woman in a red coat. Two students pulling oversized suitcases. A tired couple with a sleeping child. A man in a dark jacket speaking rapidly into his phone.

Mara searched every face.

Then she saw him.

He was taller than she had imagined, though she had known his height. His beard was slightly messy from the flight. He wore the dark sweater from their calls beneath a jacket, one hand gripping the handle of his suitcase.

For one second, he stood still.

His eyes found hers.

Everything around her continued—the wheels on tile, the announcements, the murmur of strangers—but it all moved far away.

Elias smiled.

Not the smile she knew from a screen. This one was unguarded and bright and real. It changed his whole face.

“Mara,” he said.

Her name in his actual voice, carried through the same air.

She began walking toward him. Then walking became running.

He dropped the suitcase handle just in time.

When he held her, Mara forgot every fear she had rehearsed.

His arms came around her carefully at first, as if he were asking one last time. Then she held him tighter, and he did too. His coat was cool from outside, but his chest was warm beneath it. She could feel his breath near her hair. She could hear his heartbeat—or maybe it was her own.

“You’re here,” she whispered.

“I’m here.”

She laughed into his shoulder, and then she cried, and he held her as though there were nowhere else in the world he needed to be.

After a while, he leaned back just enough to look at her.

“You’re even more beautiful than I thought,” he said.

Mara’s cheeks warmed. “You look tired.”

“I am,” he admitted. “But I don’t care.”

She lifted the paper bag between them.

“I brought you something.”

He read the words on it and looked at her with a softness that made her want to cry all over again.

“For the journey’s end,” he read.

“I thought you might be hungry.”

“I think I’m the happiest person at this airport.”

“You haven’t even tasted them yet.”

“I don’t need to.”

Then, with a hesitation so brief it was almost not there, he touched her cheek.

His thumb brushed a place just beneath her eye.

Mara leaned into his hand.

The touch was ordinary.

It was everything.

Home, At Last

The drive into the city felt dreamlike.

Elias sat beside Mara in the back of the taxi, their hands linked between them. Neither seemed willing to let go for long enough to check a phone or adjust a sleeve. Outside, Frankfurt passed in blurred pieces: gray skies, familiar streets, bicycle lanes shining with recent rain.

“Is this really your city?” he asked.

“It is.”

“It feels strange seeing it without a camera between us.”

Mara looked at him. “It feels strange seeing you without one.”

He smiled and squeezed her hand.

At her apartment, Elias stood in the doorway for a moment, his suitcase beside him.

“This is it,” Mara said, suddenly shy. “It’s small.”

“It’s perfect.”

“It has a cupboard that will not close.”

“Then I’ll learn the trick.”

She laughed. “You have not even seen it yet.”

“I already know I’ll like it.”

He stepped inside slowly, looking at the room with the attention of someone entering a place he had visited many times in his imagination. He noticed the blanket on the couch. The books. The lamp. The bowl of apples on the counter.

Then he saw the cinnamon jar.

“You really bought extra cinnamon,” he said.

“You said there is never enough.”

“There isn’t.”

Mara put water on to boil. Elias followed her into the kitchen, close enough that the space behind her no longer felt empty.

When she reached for the mugs, he reached too. Their hands met around one.

They both stopped.

It was not dramatic. No music rose from the walls. No one applauded. The kettle clicked softly behind them.

But his fingers settled around hers, warm and certain.

Mara looked up.

“Too sweet?” she asked.

Elias smiled. “Perfectly sweet.”

They drank cocoa at the small kitchen table while rain began to fall again outside. He told her about the flight, and she told him how many times she had checked the tracker. They laughed over the cinnamon rolls, which were slightly dry from the bakery but still warm in the middle.

Later, when the jet lag caught up with him, they sat together on the couch beneath the blanket she had always imagined sharing.

Elias’s arm rested around her shoulders. Mara leaned into him and listened to the rain against the window.

For so long, she had believed that warmth was something she had to imagine.

It had lived in messages, in calls, in photographs of distant skies. It had been cocoa held between her hands and cinnamon lingering in an empty kitchen.

Now it was here.

It was the rise and fall of his breathing beside her.

It was his fingers intertwined with hers.

It was the quiet way he kissed the top of her head and said, “I’m glad I came.”

Mara closed her eyes.

Outside, early autumn gathered around the city, cool and silver and beautiful.

Inside, there was cocoa. There was cinnamon. There was love that had crossed an ocean.

And there was no longer a space beside her.

There was him.

Learning Warmth

The rain had softened to a hush by the time the cocoa was gone.

Mara stood at the sink rinsing the mugs, though neither of them had really needed washing. Behind her, Elias sat on the edge of the couch, quiet in the way people become when happiness has finally made them tired.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Because if I sit down, I might start crying again.”

Elias smiled. “Happy crying?”

“The most embarrassing kind.”

“There is nothing embarrassing about you.”

The words were simple. He did not say them like a line from a film. He said them gently, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell her in the same room.

Mara turned off the tap.

For a moment, she held the dish towel between her hands and looked at him. The lamp cast a warm pool of light over the couch, catching the tiredness beneath his eyes. He had crossed an ocean, passed through terminals and queues and sleepless hours, and now he was here in her little apartment, wearing the dark sweater she had seen so many times on a screen.

“You’re really here,” she said.

Elias looked around the room, then back at her. “I am.”

“I keep expecting the call to freeze.”

He laughed softly. “Or for one of us to say, ‘Can you hear me?’”

“Can you hear me?”

“Perfectly.”

She walked toward him.

This time, she did not run. She wanted to notice every second: the sound of the floor beneath her feet, the way he watched her approach, the small nervous breath he took before she reached him.

When she stood between his knees, Elias looked up at her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Mara nodded, but he waited.

“Yes,” she said again, more surely. “I am. I just… I don’t know what to do with you being real.”

His hands rested lightly at her waist, not pulling her closer, only offering. “We don’t have to know everything tonight.”

That made her smile.

“We can start with something small,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like sitting together.”

Mara’s chest tightened with affection. “We already did that.”

“Then we’re doing great.”

She laughed and sat beside him. Almost immediately, their shoulders touched. The contact was so gentle that it should have been nothing, but warmth traveled through her sweater anyway.

Elias lifted one corner of the blanket.

“May I?”

She nodded.

He drew it across both of them, settling it over their knees. Mara tucked her feet beneath herself. Their hands lay close together on the blanket, not quite touching.

She looked at them.

He noticed.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

“Want to what?”

“Hold hands.”

Her smile came slowly, helplessly. “Yes.”

Elias turned his palm upward.

Mara placed her hand in it.

His fingers closed around hers carefully. His hand was warm, a little rougher than she had imagined, and so unmistakably real that her eyes stung. She traced the line of his thumb with her own, as though learning a word in a language she had always wanted to speak.

“You have warm hands,” she whispered.

“So do you.”

“No, mine are always cold.”

“Not now.”

Outside, a car passed through the rain-dark street. Somewhere above them, pipes murmured behind the walls. The ordinary sounds of her building wrapped around them, but her whole world had narrowed to the space beneath one blanket.

Elias leaned his head gently against hers.

Mara did not move.

She could smell rain on his jacket, coffee from the airport, something clean and familiar that belonged only to him. She wanted to memorize it—not because she thought he would disappear, but because she had waited so long to replace imagining with knowing.

“I thought I would be terrified,” she admitted.

“Are you?”

“A little.”

“Me too.”

She turned toward him. “Really?”

“Of course.” His smile was shy, almost boyish. “I cared about you before I got on the plane. That makes this matter.”

The honesty in it loosened something inside her.

Mara lifted her free hand and touched his cheek. Her fingers paused there, giving him time to pull away if he wanted to.

He did not.

His eyes closed briefly.

“You can touch me,” he said softly.

So she did.

She brushed her thumb along his cheekbone, then into his beard, which was softer than it looked through a camera. Elias opened his eyes and watched her with a tenderness that made the room seem brighter.

“You look at me like I’m something fragile,” he said.

“I’m trying to be careful.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of you.” She smiled. “I’m afraid I’ll wake up.”

He lifted her hand from his cheek and kissed her fingertips, one gentle press of warmth against her skin.

“You’re awake,” he said.

Mara leaned closer, until their foreheads touched.

Their breathing found the same rhythm.

“Can I kiss you?” Elias asked.

The question made her smile through the sudden rush of tears.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Please.”

He moved slowly, giving her every chance to change her mind. His lips met hers softly—more a promise than a demand. Mara felt the first kiss like the beginning of a song she had known by heart before hearing it aloud.

She kissed him back.

Once.

Then again, with a little more certainty.

Elias’s hand remained at her waist, warm through her sweater. Mara held his face between her hands, and when they pulled apart, they stayed close enough that their noses brushed.

He laughed quietly.

“What?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” His eyes shone. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

“Me too.”

They kissed again, and this time Mara did not feel nervous. She felt calm. She felt as though all the miles, all the late-night calls, all the messages typed and deleted and saved had brought them carefully to this couch, this rain, this impossible ordinary evening.

Eventually, Elias rested his forehead against hers.

“You know,” he murmured, “your cocoa really is too sweet.”

Mara gasped, pretending to pull away. “You crossed an ocean to insult my cocoa?”

“I crossed an ocean because of your cocoa.”

“That is not better.”

“It is the truth.”

She laughed, and he kissed her temple.

Then they stayed beneath the blanket for a long time, hand in hand, speaking in fragments and silences. They talked about nothing important: the plane food, the strange airport carpet, the bakery cinnamon rolls, the stubborn cupboard door.

But every now and then, one of them would look at the other and fall quiet.

Because some things could not be improved by words.

Later, when the rain had stopped and the apartment had grown still, Mara walked Elias to the bedroom.

He paused at the doorway, suddenly uncertain again.

“You can have the bed,” she said. “You must be exhausted.”

“And you?”

“I’ll take the couch.”

Elias looked at her as if she had suggested sleeping outside.

“Mara.”

“What?”

“I didn’t fly from New York to make you sleep on your couch.”

Her cheeks warmed. “I just thought… I don’t want you to feel pressured.”

“I don’t.” He stepped closer, taking her hand. “But I would like to fall asleep beside you. If you would like that too.”

Mara looked at their joined hands.

Then she nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I would.”

They changed quietly, with shy smiles and turned backs, the kind of gentleness that made the room feel safe. When they lay down, there was a moment of awkward space between them—an old habit from sleeping alone.

Then Elias opened his arm.

Mara moved closer.

She rested her head against his chest, listening to the steady proof of his heartbeat. His hand settled on her back, slow and comforting. Outside, the first cold autumn night rested against the window.

Inside, beneath warm sheets and his careful hold, Mara let herself breathe.

For the first time, longing did not ache.

It softened.

It became his voice, low in the dark.

“Goodnight, love.”

And her answer, whispered into the warmth of him:

“Goodnight. You’re home.”

❤️