forty-eight (a pandemic love story)
/It had been the longest forty-eight hours.
They’d made a decision to take the test—to take on everything that meant—after weeks of DMs, texts, and Zoom calls. Oh, the Zoom calls. The very memory of them made her blush. Made everything deep inside stand at attention.
He’d looked so good on those calls, a tantalizing progression from first date attire, to sexy loungewear, to that one night, when it was late, and they’d engaged in a game of chicken.
One. Article. Of. Clothing. At. A. Time.
Goddamn, how she’d wanted to pry her laptop open, slip a hand inside, and stroke every last inch of him.
Now she’d actually get to. Maybe.
Forty-eight hours and counting.
There was always Netflix to pass the time and indeed, there’d been A LOT of Netflix to pass the time. She went into the kitchen and poured a scoop of kernels into the air popper before flicking on the machine. It whirred to life, the sound both comforting and familiar, an echo of a time when it hadn’t necessarily signaled another evening spent alone. Her mind began to space out as the kernels swirled, lost in another year. Hell, another decade. Her phone buzzed against the ceramic countertop. She almost didn’t hear it, but then it registered, off-tempo. She grabbed it with both hands and saw the message she’d been waiting on. It held a single word: Negative.
Boy, same.
This was it. This was really, truly it. She flicked off the air popper because who had time for that now, and rushed to shower, shave—definitely shave—and change into something that accentuated everything she’d mirthfully teased over webcam.
They were finally going to meet. And it was going to be everything.
Ninety minutes later, she was in the lobby of her building, her breath pooling against the front windowpane in a seeping fog of anticipation. The weather was cool, but spring was practiced at finding tiny cracks in which to put down roots. Good things to come, she just knew it. She sensed him before she truly saw him, a dark figure moving down the sidewalk. His steps were solid and heavy against the last of the snow, but careful, the way they are when someone’s looking for something. In his case, her building. Her.
She moved to open the door, save him the text or attempt to use the broken intercom.
From the doorway: “Hi.”
He looked up, smiled. It was devastating. “Hey, it’s you!”
“It’s me.”
He moved past her into the lobby and even bundled in a wool coat, she could feel his heat. It struck hard and fast, the way she somehow knew it would.
She let the door drift shut behind him, closing them in, alone in the slender entryway.
She invited him to follow her inside, but he ran a hand over her shoulder, urging her to wait. She turned in time to watch as he peeled off his mask.
The face she’d so carefully studied through the screen was real.
She hooked a finger through the strap of her own mask and let the slip of fabric fall away, leaving her bare and missing everything normal, and in one desperate stride he was there, his mouth colliding with hers in a slow, stirring kiss that was unquestionably worth forty-eight hours, and forty-eight days, and every single second in between.
They say Covid-19 can impact the heart—but she’d never imagined it would be like this.
His hand in hers, she led him to her apartment, isolated no more.
