Photo reblogged via The Telegraph.

Continued from A Transatlantic Love Story: Part IV.

I woke up on the morning of my birthday and packed a suitcase. My new love interest decided that, if I was willing, I should leave my entire birthday plans to him. He’d gone to London a few days before to prepare, and on my birthday I boarded the train alone.

I remember that journey like I remember a well-loved movie. It seems hard to believe now that it was real life. The countryside burst with electric greens despite the late winter chill. I ate a baguette with cheese and strawberry jam and what the English call white coffee.  I remembered being a little girl in Indiana and watching the news with my great grandma. The weather man would sweep his arm across the map to show international wind patterns, his finger landing on London. London. It seemed an almost mythical place where Paddington Bear, Christopher Robin, and all of the Narnia kings and queens came from, a place of great adventures. And there I was, twenty-one years old, in London and in love.

I met him on the Tube track. We hugged, an Americanism, but then again so is dating. When we jumped onto the next train the seats were almost full so he offered me a seat while he stood, handing me two gifts: a Cadbury Crème Egg and a paperback of “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt wrapped in paper and tied with a bow.

“I don’t know what you like to read,” he said, “but I hope you like this one.” I’d gotten good birthday presents from boyfriends before, but no one had ever given me a book that he loved, trusting that I would love it, too.

“I’m sure I will,” I said. I already did.

We had lunch at a little café then walked uphill through a park so he could show me his favorite view of London, atop Parliment Hill, where the whole city rolls out like a Persian carpet in grays. He pointed to where his family lived, where he’d gone to school, the BBC tower, and the Thames. We sat on a bench for hours or maybe minutes and talked about the patterns our lives had taken to bring us to that moment.

Like a true English gentleman, he dropped me off at my hostel for an hour to change before dinner. When he came back to pick me up, the real magic began. We went for dinner at a posh London restaurant, the finest he’d known at just twenty-one-years-old himself, the restaurant where his father’s office held their annual Christmas party. We had a prix fixe meal especially for those going to the theatre, laughed a lot, felt awkward very little, and before we left he slipped the night’s menu into my purse.

“It has your birth date stamped on it,” he said, “so you’ll always remember this day.”

We walked a short ways down the wide streets of Central London with the finest stores of the world lining our path. Then we slipped into a theatre for balcony seats to Les Miserable, a story that I’d studied in French class but had never seen. He’d studied in Paris the semester before, and I must have seemed so quaint to him, but he didn’t let on. And in the middle of that musical, lights down, actors crying out, my date looking through the little binoculars, I leaned over and kissed his cheek. Without looking away, he reached over and took my hand.

Afterwards I wanted wine but all of the pubs had closed at eleven. Even the convenient stores were forbidden to sell alcohol then, but my local love interest had a guy, he said. Soon he’d come walking down the lane, back to the car where I waited, with a bottle of red only to realize that we didn’t have a corkscrew. He somehow took care of that, too, and we headed back to my hostel where we sneaked past the night clerk. I was meant to share a room with someone else, another female traveler, but when I turned the lights on the room was vacant.

We lie on the bed until sun up, listening to late night English radio, talking, him pushing the hair back from my face whenever it fell forward, and drinking red wine from plastic cups. As the sunlight flickered through the window grate marking the end of my twenty-first birthday and the start of the rest of my life, I leaned over, kissing his mouth. And being no fool, he kissed me back.