Again Always

There are some love stories that begin with a kiss.

Some begin with a letter.

And some begin long before the two people involved ever learn each other's names.

This is one of those stories.

It was the kind of love that belonged to another time-when a song could keep you awake until three in the morning, when a telephone ringing after midnight could change the entire course of your life, and when people still believed that if someone mattered enough, you wrote them a letter.

Cairo Young was twenty years old when she first met Dante Hayes.

She was young, ambitious, and determined to become someone the world could not forget. She had a voice people stopped talking to listen to, a suitcase that was rarely unpacked, and a dream that seemed much bigger than the city she came from.

Dante was twenty-one.

He had a quietness about him that made people curious. The kind of man who could stand in a crowded room and somehow seem as though he belonged to a world of his own. He had his own ambitions, his own unfinished plans, and no idea that the girl he was about to meet would become the person he measured every love story against.

They did not meet under perfect circumstances.

There was no grand entrance. No orchestra swelling in the background. No sign from the heavens telling them that their lives had just changed.

There was only a night.

A city full of lights.

A song playing somewhere in the distance.

And two people who had no idea that, years later, they would still be trying to find their way back to each other.

Because that was the thing about Cairo and Dante.

They could lose time.

They could lose distance.

They could lose their way.

But somehow, they always found each other again.

And again.

And always.