The Boy Who Saved Me a Seat
In the eleventh grade, Hao saved a seat for Yuan at the back of the biology classroom for an entire year. It was a joke between them — his hand on the plastic chair, a raised eyebrow, the same two words every morning: 'Saved it.'
They were best friends and nothing more, or so the story went. He went north for university, she stayed. The first year they called every week. The second year, every month. By the third, they mostly sent each other birthday messages and pretended that was the same thing.
Then Chen, a mutual friend, got married, and the seating chart put them at the same table. Yuan arrived late, in a green dress, annoyed at the traffic. The chair beside Hao was empty; someone had moved the place card. She sat down without thinking.
For an hour they were seventeen again, swapping insults and old stories, until the toasts began and the room went quiet. The bride's father talked about the long, unremarkable years of marriage — the shared mornings, the arguments about nothing, the way love is mostly made of Tuesdays.
Hao leaned over and, in a voice too low for anyone else, said it: 'I saved it, you know. Not just the chair.' Yuan put down her glass. Outside, the evening had gone blue. She looked at him for a long moment, and something she had spent ten years explaining away finally stopped needing an explanation.
They had a small wedding the following spring. At the reception, Chen had the place cards reprinted, and on the back of each one was a single line: Saved it.
