Reading mode:
ACT 1 — THE SETUP
The rain came down the way it often did in cities that had built themselves around glass: in sharp, continuous sheets that drummed against windows and turned the world outside into a smear of neon. I watched it from the door of The Meridian's revolving entrance, my tote heavy with notebooks and an extra pair of shoes I had convinced myself I might need for an after-hours shoot. The hotel's lobby smelled like polished teak and citrus—freshly cut orange rind, a line of orchids along the reception desk—and for a moment I let myself breathe as if the scent could wash the flight out of me.
I am not a conference person by nature. I am a travel writer, which, in the romantic version, means I get paid to search for coral reefs and hidden cafés. In the practical version it means I am adept at squeezing interviews into ten-minute windows, living out of a carry-on, and turning a buffet breakfast into a feature on continental rituals. This morning, at forty-two hours of travel fatigue and caffeine deficit, I had the luxury of arriving before the sea of name tags and lanyards took over the lobby. The registration desk was a neat island of faces and glossy pamphlets. I signed, smiled, and accepted the complimentary pen like a diplomat.
He was across the room when I first noticed him, leaning against the low wall of a marble planter, the kind hotels put there to make travelers feel like they are somewhere tasteful. He had the slow, casual posture of a man who had been in enough rooms and read enough audience lists to know how to be both visible and unremarkable. He had a cropped, dark haircut, a jacket tailored to a studied nonchalance, and the sort of jaw you could run your finger along if you liked to test lines. He wore a cufflink shaped like a compass—tiny and deliberate. The sort of detail that made me register him as someone who cared about direction.
His mouth tilted when he saw me, and I felt a small, private fizz behind my sternum—entirely professional, I told myself. The conference was about experiential travel and hospitality innovations; I was here to report, to sit on a panel about storytelling in luxury spaces, to shake hands and take notes. He was scheduled to be the keynote speaker that evening: Julian Price, investor and founder of several upscale boutique hotels across the world. I had read his profile: urbane, exacting, an eye for restraint. He sounded like someone who measured every word as if it were a currency.
“Zara Hale,” my badge announced. I found him a couple of hours later at a small table by the lobby bar, his fingers wrapped around an espresso cup like it anchored him to the room. He greeted me with the same easy tilt of his head and a grin that asked permission without needing it.
“You write the travel pieces,” he said, as if reciting a stanza. “The ones that make people want to leave their lives on a Tuesday and disappear for a week.”
“Flattering,” I replied. My voice was sanded down from early-morning croaks, but it felt steadier talking to him than it had to half the panels I was supposed to moderate. There was a warmth in his eyes that kept the conversation from becoming performative. “And you make people want to book a suite even if they don’t know where they’re going to be sleeping.”
“And you?” he asked, leaning in, conspiratorial. “What is it you’re here to steal—stories or the continental breakfast?”
“Mostly stories,” I lied. “But if there’s a good croissant, I’ll be shameless.”
His laugh came out like a private joke. There was a cadence to his banter—light, intelligent, dexterous—that felt like clinking crystal. It was catnip for me. Conversation with Julian was a game I had to admit I liked playing. There was something deliberate about the way he asked questions. Nothing invasive; everything tactical. He drilled into my answers like he had a map and liked to see which lines connected.
I told him, pertinently, that I had been unmoored for the past year: a long relationship dispersed like paper ash, a move to a new city that was mostly boxes and empty apartment echoes, and the kind of loneliness that made Tuesday dinners too cute for Instagram and not enough for a person. He told me—carefully, like a man delivering a curated wine—that ambition had been his constant companion. Travel had filled his life the way a ledger filled a book: neatly, with margins, with decisions about what to keep and what to cut.
There was an ease between us, then, and a current of something warmer when our hands accidentally brushed as he handed me a brochure. He tightened his fingers around mine for the barest beat, as if checking the present. The touch was short and filed away in my senses like a charged coin—something to be spent later.
I spent the afternoon at panels and networking groups, my voice polite when I was supposed to be clever. I watched him from across the room on and off, always the same composed figure—listening, nodding when someone said a technical term, asking a pointed question when a speaker described a renovation strategy. He was always in motion that day, though not hurried. There was deliberate movement to his attention. When he walked past me near the resource tables, he slid a folded napkin into my hand. On the napkin he had written a time and a room number with a single sentence: “For when the lights go velvet.” It was audacious and playful, and it made my pulse skip in a way conference schedules had no business doing.
That evening, when the crowd thinned and the hotel staff swapped talking shop for the lowing hum of cocktail service, I found myself more aware of him than of any panelist. He had become a presence that made rooms rearrange themselves around him. The lobby shifted under his steps. Even the chandeliers seemed to drop their glare a degree.
He spoke in those velvet hours the way he had in the bar—measured and teasing. The cat-and-mouse thing between us was deliberate. He’d throw a line that was nothing more than a pebble—an anecdote about the last hotel he had restored, a clever aside about a dish that ruined him for all others—and I, reflexively, would skip it like a stone, giving it enough attention to keep it from sinking but not so much that he'd know how much it mattered. We danced on those margins: he, coaxing more; I, resisting just enough to make the tug interesting.
I learned later, as the lights softened and the conference gave way to side-conversations, that he liked the quiet things: the first cup of coffee that made a hotel room habitable, the way a certain seamstress in Lisbon could make a pillow sing, the view from a third-floor landing in Tokyo where he’d watched the city breathe. I told him that I loved airports that smelled like cinnamon on winter mornings, that I collected postcards I never sent, that I sometimes chose train routes specifically for the way they changed light. He listened like he was cataloging evidence, maybe for a future room, maybe for himself.
There was backstory, too, threaded through the flirting like a dark ribbon. He had been founding hotels long enough to have had a rupture—a marriage that had ended not in fireworks but in a long, polite unpacking. He spoke of it as if it were a book you returned to a shelf, its spine still warm from being handled. I told him about the person I had been with, and how it had taken leaving to remember the taste of my own laughter. These were soft admissions, given wholly and without accusation. That evening the conference felt less like an event and more like a stage set where the two of us had been cast for a role neither had auditioned for.
When the final keynote concluded and people trickled back into the night for dinner plans and cab rides, Julian appeared at the top of the stairs—no announcement, no entourage—and he asked, simply, “Are you going to the rooftop afterparty?”
My calendar was full of freelance deadlines and the sensible decision to go back to my room and edit, but the corners of my mouth tipped up. “I might. Depends on whether the afterparty deserves me or I deserve it.”
“Then I shall make it worth your editorial judgment,” he said.
He did not make promises beyond the night. He signed his name on my mind with a flourish and left me to the rest of the hotel and the rain.
ACT 2 — RISING TENSION
The rooftop was a glass-sculpted language of wind and city lights, and Julian was there, easy and unassuming in a way that made him more dangerous. He had shed his jacket. The breeze had teased his hair into a small disorder that softened the severity in his face. The bar up there served a gin infused with sage that tasted like the first time you ever realized adulthood had flavors you could name. He insisted I try it, and we toasted the banalities—good Wi-Fi, worse keynote slides—and then to the uncanny intimacy of strangers becoming confidants within the allotted time of a conference.
There is a special kind of attention between two adults who do not intend to complicate existing lives; it is mercenary and intense. We traded stories—my favorite was of a night in Valparaíso when I had slept on a rooftop and woken with someone’s fingers braided in my hair, his name a mystery; Julian told me of a hotel in Marrakech where a woman had asked him, point-blank, whether his rooms came with heartbreak included. She had been charmingly direct, and he had been disarmingly candid in return.
We had near-misses that felt contrived in retrospect but were unplanned in the moment. Our hands hovered, once, across a bowl of almonds at the rooftop bar; another time, in a crowded elevator, the doors closed too slowly and his palm found the small of my back to steady me. There were logistical interruptions too: panelists who needed to be ferried to a next talk, a publisher who insisted on a commitment, a colleague who cornered me with a networking opportunity and refused to believe any answer other than yes. Each interruption was a nudge farther along a line we did not yet name.
Where the rooftop offered wind and skyline, the hotel's library turned the night inwards. Shelves of leather-bound books, a muted fireplace, and the hush of people pretending to work while they avoided the afterparty crowd. Julian found me there an hour later, a small pool of lamplight around my chair, a notebook open with half-formed sentence fragments.
“You keep running to places that demand a different kind of silence,” he said, sliding onto the seat opposite mine.
“I go where the sentences let me breathe,” I told him. “And where the coffee is patient.”
“I could tell you a place in Lisbon where the espresso waits for no one,” he offered.
“I know a coffee cart in Prague that does,” I countered. Our banter became a map; each city a landmark within a conversation that skirted the obvious.
When he stood to leave, he took a folded page from the cutlery rack on the side table and tucked it into my tank top where my collarbone showed. The paper warmed against my skin until it smoothed flats into a secret.
The content of the note was not a line but a question: “What do you want to do tomorrow that you haven’t allowed yourself to want?” I read it three times, each time finding more courage in the question. I thought immediately of booking a train to somewhere unnamed, of refusing an assignment, of ordering food for one without feeling conspicuous. Above all, I thought of him—of the way he had a patient and tantalizing way of asking me to notice myself.
The conference day spilled into the next with a cadence that made the world feel smaller and the hotel feel like a private universe. There were workshops: one on sustainable design, another on the ethics of curated experiences. We found each other in them, their chairs bringing our knees close for casual conspiracies. We stood together by a window and watched the city move, our shoulders almost touching. He smelled like cedar and something citrus-laced, a scent that seemed to press itself to my memory with intent.
There were professional boundaries; he was a building owner, I was a storyteller. But business kept bumping into private in ways neither of us could prevent. He took me to lunch with a developer who used words like footprint and yield until my head swam; he kept me laughing between his pointed business talk with a look that made me forget the spreadsheets completely. That afternoon, after a tour of a model suite for a hotel prototype, our conversation ended with a corridor light that turned amber and a housekeeper pushing a cart at the worst possible time. We paused in the doorway, pressed close to avoid the cart, and as we waited for the hall to clear, his fingers found mine and did not let go.
“Are you afraid of public rooms?” he asked softly.
“Of public rooms and public endings,” I admitted.
He looked at me then with an attention that asked for a translation of my confession. For a heartbeat I considered the integrity of my own boundaries. I had been careful for months not to meet someone on these terms—transient, textured, likely to evaporate at plane-time. Part of me liked that the way he made me pulse came with an expiration date. It meant I could indulge without shifts and the longings that come after intimacy. The other part of me, older and less recent, wanted to test whether the magnitude of the pull might be something I could build a life around instead of a footnote.
Late that night, after the official afterparty dissolved into a few faithful clusters that retreated to private suites, Julian found me near the hotel's spa, leaning against the frosted glass and watching steam press patterns against the pane. He had come alone; he had the unguarded look I had seen only rarely.
“You’re dangerous,” I told him.
“That’s a serious accusation.” He grinned. “Is it because I keep finding you in places that make room for things?”
“Because you keep making me reconsider the train I booked home.”
He moved closer. The hum of the hotel fell away. The air smelled faintly of eucalyptus from the spa and something softer—maybe bergamot from his aftershave. His hand cupped my jaw like a map. He held me there for a long second, as if he were deciding if he liked what he found.
“I don’t want to be careless with what you’re carrying,” he said. “But I also don’t want you to leave without knowing what it feels like to be seen.”
That line—seen—hit me more sharply than any touch. I swallowed.
“I’m not sure I like being a subject under too much light,” I said. “I’m still sorting out how to be the one who chooses where the light falls.”
“Then choose,” he said.
This is the narrow, dangerous point of temptation: the moment when agency and surrender converge. I chose to go with him to a bar that was half-suite and half-library, a small, private room the hotel kept for important guests. They slid us into a corner like we were a specimen. He ordered a drink I had never tasted—something with smoke and citrus—and we sat with our knees almost touching and a language that made everything else forgettable.
The next morning the conference schedule was full. There were meetings, interviews, photo shoots. We each kept our professional faces on, but the undercurrent of our late-night talk threaded the day with a kind of delicious distraction. We had near-misses that day like a string of beads: an interrupted handshake that left our fingers lingering, a microphone that cut out right as one of us confessed to having been to a city the other loved, an elevator that took too long and allowed us more time than we deserved.
Vulnerability came in small packages. I told him, in a quiet moment between sessions, about the morning after the breakup. I described how I had found myself in a thrift shop, buying a scarf that I had no business wearing in a Colorado winter, and how that scarf had become the first thing to make me laugh again. He told me, in return, about the night he signed the papers that ended his marriage—a tidy, melancholic business—and how he went to the roof of a hotel and watched taxis make constellations of red and gold. He had an ability to tell things as if they were scenes rather than confessions, which made the intimacy feel like watching someone set a table.
There was a fragility to both of us, couched under the armor of wit and professional anonymity. We had obstacles beyond the hours of the conference: I had a freelance editor who expected a column on Monday; Julian had an investment meeting that would mean his flight was scheduled earlier than mine on the final day. There were also the small intervening barbs of the world—the colleague who wanted a piece of me for a roundup, the assistant who needed to run suiting measurements, the publisher who made a reasonable but immovable ask. Each obstruction was a little test. We both failed them with graceless eagerness.
On the penultimate evening, the hotel's concierge arranged a salon for a small group of speakers. The room was an intimate curve of plush sofas and low lights, and Julian and I sat slightly apart, angled in such a way that we could be private without having to close the door. The host had a habit of asking the wrong questions, amplifying the publicness of our private conversation. “Have either of you ever curated a room for a lover?” she asked, smiling like she felt she’d staged the evening.
Julian’s answer was immediate. “Many rooms are curated for many things,” he said. “Sometimes you think you’re curating a view and you end up curating responsibility instead.”
“And you, Zara?” the host asked, leaning in.
“I curate sentences that smell like other places,” I said, and the room hummed with the small contentment of an answer that was both true and evasive.
We left the salon with more than a few eyes interested in our path. In the corridor, as we stepped into the hush, he pressed the heel of his hand against the small of my back. We walked in silence, not because we had nothing to say but because the air between us had learned a new language of its own.
The night before the conference ended, the city decided to host lightning. The hotel trembled with the electricity of it. Somewhere below, a piano played soft and wrong, and people laughed at things that would be tomorrow’s anecdotes. Julian and I found ourselves in the hotel kitchen’s service elevator by accident—an unintended detour—and it stopped between floors with an indecent slowness. The lights dimmed to an intimate, flickery shade.
“Of course this happens,” he said, and his voice had a kind of reverence to it.
“It’s the universe’s way of telling us to take our time,” I replied, breathless.
We were close enough that I could see the tiny imperfect line at the corner of his eye, the way his lashes rested on his cheek. His mouth was the kind that learned and adapted—half demand, half suggestion. When he leaned in, there I was: the line between what I wanted and what I believed was negotiable.
He kissed me with the economy of a man who had been careful with many things and then decided care could be different. There were no immediate declarations, no vows. It was a kiss that asked and answered certain questions simultaneously, mapping the interior of me like a cartographer discovering a small, secret bay. His hands were patient; they moved with the soft expertise of someone used to building things—not buildings alone, but atmospheres. I think we both understood, in the slow compression of minutes, that whatever followed this small complicity would be more than a stairwell interlude.
The doors opened to lobby noise and the flood of other people's evenings. We stepped out as if nothing had happened and yet, for both of us, something fundamental had shifted. We had begun the game as players with rules; now we were collaborators improvising a script.
ACT 3 — CLIMAX & RESOLUTION
The last night of the conference had the weight of a denouement. People kissed cheeks and wrote emails that began with 'pleasure meeting you,' and the air hummed with plans to connect on LinkedIn. Julian and I had decided, almost unspokenly, to postpone the inevitable goodbyes until the very end. There is a certain cruelty in doing that—drawing out the prelude when the finale sits impatiently in the wings—but there is also a delicious cruelty to savor.
We had dinner planned with a cluster of attendees that time-pressed us into a room full of polite laughter and wine that tasted like meaning. I watched him across the table while he discussed a renovation budget with a developer. There was a soft, internal music in my chest every time his hand brushed the stem of his glass. I had resolved, earlier that day, not to leave without knowing what this felt like in full, without asterisks.
After dinner, an unspoken agreement brought us back to the hotel's private library suite. It was a place of couches and thick rugs, of lamp light that made skin look honoured. The concierge had been helpful with privacy—no one checked the room without a reason. We sat close enough that our thighs touched. The air tasted faintly of old pages and lemon. I was suddenly daring in a way that felt like a vintage scent: bold but tempered with grace.
Julian set his glass down and looked at me like a man who had a good poem bookmarked. “I don’t often allow nights to do what they want,” he said.
“Nor do I,” I said back. “But I like where this is going.”
He laughed softly, and that laugh was the prelude to the rest of the evening. He reached for my hand and guided me across the room, past the rug and the fireplace, past a window that showed the glitter of wet streets. He stopped by the window and took my face in both hands, the way someone steadies a plant that is leaning toward sun.
“May I?” he asked.
“Yes.”
We undid each other in stages—the slow fumbling of buttons, the careful sliding of fabric over skin, the intimate choreography of clothes folding themselves into careless piles. There was a reverence in the way he looked at the lines of me, as if memorizing angles for safekeeping. His hands understood by touch; there was no rush in the way he explored. He traced the collarbone that I had always thought was too angular and found it perfect. I traced the dip of his shoulder and the steady rise of his back and felt, absurdly, like a cartographer again.
He guided me to the couch and lay me back among the pillows. The world narrowed to the sound of our breathing and the soft rustle of fabric. Every small friction—skin against silk, hair against nape—sounded enormous. I wanted to catalogue each sensation with the kind of attention I usually reserved for fine food reviews: note the sweetness, the sharpness, the way the texture surprised the palate. Here, the palate was touch.
He kissed my throat, and the touch of his mouth was like the beginning of a song—soft, then more insistent. Fingers found the small electric nodes of my skin: behind ears, the inside of wrists, the bend of a knee. He tasted my neck as if he were reading the day off me, extracting stories with gentle teeth. I told myself to stay present; there is no erotic tragedy worse than distraction.
We moved through those stages that make memory thick: the tender mapping of each other's bodies, the way our bodies learned to answer without words. He was patient with the small hesitations, attentive to my intake of breath, the way my fingers curled at the base of his skull. He used his mouth and his hands with equal devotion, turning my moans into punctuation marks.
When he looked at me—really looked—there was a softness that made me want to confess trivial things: that I sometimes still slept with the scarf I bought the morning after the breakup, that I had once written a love letter to a city and never sent it. He smiled as if each small admission added color to a painting he was completing.
Our lovemaking was deliberate and exploratory. He guided me with a firmness that never felt dominating; it felt like someone who wanted to be exact about pleasure as if it were an artisan craft. The first time he entered me I gasped, my body arching to gently fit him. There was a delicious paradox in that fit: it felt wholly new and somehow inevitable. I felt him everywhere and not at all overwhelmed; the rhythm he found was patient and then building, like the slow crescendo of waves.
We moved together as if choreographed by a private director. There were pauses—soft kisses, whispered names, the small, ridiculous comments we made to keep ourselves anchored in humanity: “Do you have an allergy to hotel mints?” I asked at one point, breathless. He laughed, a sound that vibrated in my sternum.
“Only to frivolous treats,” he said. “Not to you.”
He shifted and took me in a different angle, one that made me feel all the mythic ways bodies can fit. His hands travelled with a cartographer’s delight, mapping the contours of me as if I were a country he was discovering for the first time. The feel of his skin against mine—warm, slightly rough at the knuckles, triumphant in warmth—imprinted itself. I memorized the angle of his jaw when he bit his lip, the tiny scar on his thumb that felt like a punctuation to everything he did.
We had long intervals of languor between the moments of intense motion—leaning into each other, laughing in the space between breaths, drinking in everything like a half-glass of a wine that you want to make last. At one point he brought his face near my ear and said, in a voice that was all hush, “I want to hear you laugh in the morning.”
That sentence lit a small thunder in me. It was the sort of thing people said when they meant to mean more than the hours allowed. I pressed my forehead against his and told him, quietly, about the scarf and the thrift-shop epiphany. He kissed the top of my head like he approved of my eccentricities.
We changed positions; we explored small fetishes—long kisses that tasted like hotel lemon soap and something more primal. He used his hands down the length of me, circling, coaxing, until I found the small edges of my own response. There were moments of delicious imbalance when I let go of reason entirely and became a wholly receptive instrument of sensation.
When the culmination came, it did not crash. It folded, almost like a curtain pulled across a stage. There was no frenzy—only an intensifying of everything: breath, movement, the way our fingers braided in hair and then clung for support. He watched me as if to witness a painting dry, and I watched him as if to understand how large a small man could be when given permission to give and to receive.
After, we lay in a tangle of limbs and fabric, our breathing syncing like two instruments tuning. The room was small and light-shy. His face had a kind of easy contentment to it. I pressed gentle kisses along his jaw, the way one smooths the edges of a newly acquired map.
“Stay,” he said, half to the room and half to me.
“I have a flight,” I told him, which was true. The dataset of our lives included calendars full of commitments. Yet the habitual way I prioritized duty over desire felt suddenly thin and smug. I considered him—this man who had been careful with so many things but had been generous with attention and touch—and I thought of the warmth of the room, of the softness of the bed, of the way his fingers fit into the crook of my hip.
“Then,” he said, “stay for as long as you can.”
We did not pretend to rewrite the future. We cataloged the present. He made food arrangements—room service that would deliver eggs and toast in a half-hour. We ate with the privacy of two people who had been intimate and wanted the small mundanity of scrambled eggs to confirm that the world continued to be ordinary after the extraordinary. We talked about trivial things—books we’d read, the oddities of airlines—and then about slightly heavier things: the possibility of a dinner six weeks from now in a city neither of us had planned. He suggested Tokyo, and I suggested Lisbon; we agreed on somewhere in between and then laughed at the impossibility.
Dawn found us tangled with a window that framed the city’s slow awakening. I woke to his fingers tracing circles on my ribcage, the same mapmaking as before. The light made him look younger and perhaps kinder. For the first time since the breakup, I felt the kind of gentleness that was not an interrogation but a quiet welcome.
We did not say the word that could have made things brittle. There was a rare intimacy in leaving some things unnamed and present all the same. When the time for my cab finally came—because inevitable things do not like being postponed—he walked me to the curb. The rain had stopped. The street smelled like the memory of rain.
“Promise me you’ll tell me about the scarf again,” he said.
“Only if you promise to tell me the story about the Marrakech guest who asked about heartbreak,” I answered.
We exchanged contact details the way reasonable adults do: with numbers and professional handles, and then I pressed a loose, lingering kiss to his mouth—no show, no pretense, just an honest, decisive motion. It tasted like last night’s lemon soap and something fig-sweet. He smiled with the sort of private triumph that made me want to rewind and stay forever.
He watched me until the taxi melted my silhouette, and then he turned and walked back into The Meridian like he belonged to its marbled heart. I sat in the cab feeling the afterglow like a heat retained in stones, like a secret sewn to the lining of my coat.
On the plane home, I opened my notebook and wrote: Velvet hours can be dangerous in the best way. It was not a confessional or a promise; it was a fact. The trip yielded copy, of course—the piece I filed later was about the way luxury hospitality both hides and reveals human needs—but it also yielded something else: a proof that I could want without panic and that desire did not necessarily equate to ruin.
Weeks later we traded messages that were literary without being overwrought. We shared small flights of cross-city jealousy—photos of menus, notes on renovations—and the sort of mundane intimacy that makes long-distance less like a punishment and more like a private game. We did not rush definitions, and neither of us forced the other into them. Sometimes, in the thoughtful way that people who value the slow burn do, we would plan a city for the other to visit next. Once, in a text that read like a dare, he offered a weekend in Lisbon, and I refused—temporarily—saying I had a feature to finish. He replied, with an economy that felt like a promise, “Finish your piece. Then come get lost on purpose.”
We were not the kind of people to write epics about our meeting. We had instead accumulated small, treasured things: a photo of the two of us on a café terrace, a folded napkin with the words velvet hours, a scarf smelling faintly of lemon preserved in my luggage. We had found, in one another, a form of attention that felt deliberate rather than reflexive, and it softened something in both of us.
Months later, when I told the story of The Meridian in an essay about design and intimacy, I described the hotel as if it had a consciousness: rooms that remember, corridors that forgive, lighting that understands discretion. I told a truth among the prose—a small admission that the most memorable voyages begin with chance encounters in unlikely places.
The last image I kept in mind was simple: a city street, washed clean by rain, and a man standing in a lobby watching the world tilt into morning. The memory is, perhaps, as sentimental as any travel writer I know would allow herself to be. But some sentimentalities are deserved. Some people arrive like a book that you read cover to cover and then keep on your shelf because you like the way it smells. Julian was a chapter I did not expect; he turned out to be a line I wanted to underline.
In the end, The Meridian did what good hotels do: it gave me a room in which to come undone and a lobby from which to reassemble myself. The velvet hours remained—moments suspended in soft light—and I left with the knowledge that I had not lost myself in the game. I had, instead, found another player who understood that the real pleasure of a cat-and-mouse is not the chase but the knowing when to stop and the courage to stay.