Amsterdam, Drizzle, and You

It was a strange thing to say, and they both knew it, and neither of them looked away.
“I’ve been avoiding you for eight days,” she said.
“I know. I’ve been avoiding you for eight days.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for a moment. The barista moved at the far end of the counter, indifferent, polishing a glass. “Because I didn’t trust myself to be normal about it,” Ewan said. “About seeing you. And I thought normal was what we’d agreed on.”
She felt something loosen in her chest.
“We agreed on sensible,” she said. “I’m not sure we agreed on normal.”
He almost smiled. “Difference being?”
“Sensible means you make the right call. Normal means you stop feeling it.” She looked at the canal through the window — the slow water, the old stone bridges, the city that had been hers for a year and now felt suddenly reoriented. “I made the right call. I didn’t stop feeling it.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Ewan said, “I have six weeks here. Maybe eight.”
“I know.”
“That’s not very long.”
“No,” she agreed. “But it’s longer than eight days of pretending.”
He laughed — low and sudden, the laugh she’d remembered without meaning to — and the last of the tension between them shifted into something warmer and less guarded. He reached across the bar and his hand covered hers, just briefly, just enough.
“Can I take you to dinner?” he said. “Properly. Tonight.”
She looked at their hands. At the canal. At him.
“Yes,” she said. “But you’re paying. You owe me two espressos and eight days of unnecessary stress.”
When Serena told her sister the story three months later, she always ended it here — at the bar, in the amber light, rain-smell and cardamom and the canal going silver outside. She’d leave out what came after: the dinner, the long walk home along the water, the conversation that went until the cafés closed and the bridges emptied. She’d leave out the part where they decided, slowly and seriously and with full knowledge of how uncertain it all was, to try again. She’d leave out Edinburgh and Amsterdam and the logistics they hadn’t solved yet, because none of that was the point. The point was the moment at the bar when she’d said yes to dinner instead of goodbye, and the way Ewan had looked at her like a man who had stopped pretending to be normal about it. That was where it had turned. That was the part that mattered. And when her sister asked, “So what happened?” Serena would smile and say, “We figured it out.” Because they had.

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About the Author

Lila Merrick — a Cambridge graduate writing first love and campus nights full of possibility. She organized foreign exchange students welcome parties for 3 years.

— Lila Merrick

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Categories: Forbidden, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Amsterdam, canal café, contemporary fiction, forbidden romance, Lila Merrick, literary romance, second chance, short story, slow burn

September 16, 2026

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