Cupid's Arrow

Prologue

"Maybe Cupid ran out of arrows to shoot my other half"

He says it laughing, one arm slung over a plastic chair, a half-empty bottle sweating on the table between him and his friend who have heard this joke enough times to already be rolling their eyes.

His friend annoyingly throws a chip at him. "bro, again?"

He grins wider, because the grin is the point, if he says it lightly enough, it never has to be a question anyone answers seriously. Somewhere behind the laughter, a small, unlit part of him wonders if it's true. He doesn't let it stay lit long enough to find out.

Across the city, or maybe not so far, maybe only a few buildings over, close enough that if either of them had looked up at the right second on the right Tuesday they might have seen the other's silhouette in a window, she says the same words to no one.

"Maybe Cupid ran out of arrows to shoot my other half."

She doesn't say it like a joke. She says it like a conclusion. Like something she's already run the numbers on and confirmed, alone, at a desk with one lamp on, notebook open to a page she isn't writing on.

She isn't devastated. She's past devastated, she's just quietly, tiredly "sure". Sure the way you get sure about weather you can't change. She closes the notebook. She doesn't cry. She's not being dramatic. She simply believes it, the way you believe any fact that has been proven to you more than once.

Neither of them knows the other exists yet. Not really. Not as anything more than a name that might have crossed a shared class list, a face that might have passed in a hallway between buildings that don't belong to either of their programs, a rumor of someone a mutual friend mentioned once and then never again.

But somewhere, filed away in the part of a story that hasn't happened yet, there is a version of this same year where those two sentences are not two separate people talking to no one.

There is a version where the joke and the conclusion are answering each other. Where the arrow did not run out. Where it had already been loosed, long before either of them said a word about it, and was simply just for reasons that had nothing to do with fate and everything to do with two very human, very stubborn hearts, taking its time to land.

This is not that version.

This is the one where it lands too late to matter, or not at all, or exactly on time and still gets missed because destiny, it turns out, is only ever half the plan. The other half was always going to be up to them.

They just didn't know that yet. Neither did the arrow.