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In another life, I would have met you on the street. You’d be leaving the coffee shop with some monstrosity of a latte in your hand, a smile on your face as you bid goodbye to the barista. With your attention snagged, you wouldn’t have noticed me until we bumped into each other.

“Sorry! Didn’t see you there,” you’d say as your first words to me. The whipped cream would tilt precariously toward the tiny hole at the top of your to-go cup, but no coffee would spill.

“Oh, it’s okay,” I would have replied. I would have looked up and immediately blushed because of course, you just had to be the most attractive man I’d ever seen in the city.

We’d stand there, on the precipice of a love story neither of us knew we’d started writing, and life would seem…bearable. For once, there would be more possibilities and impossibilities, and it would take a single step forward for the rest of our lives to be ascertained.

In another life, falling in love with you would have been that simple. A chance meeting on the street, an awkward bumble of a first conversation, and all of the other firsts that come with the territory. Our families would laugh together, relishing in the union of two people whose love outshone the darkness shadowing their steps.

But we’re not in that other life. We’re here, your dagger in my chest and poison smeared across your lips.

Neither of our tears can undo the mistakes leading us to this stone slab under an abandoned apothecary, the time wasted sending each other surreptitious glances across a ballroom. Neither of our screams sufficed in convincing our families we’re meant to be.

“I’m sorry,” you say as your skin grows ashen. Even now, with blood splattered on your clothes and a cut blooming along your brow, you are so devastatingly beautiful. “I thought you were gone.”

My hand is firm around the hilt of your dagger, the one I slid out of its sheathe when I realized what you had done. What I had done.

“I won’t regret dying,” I whisper, your eyes flecked with starlight as they catch mine. “Not when we’ll be together. But I… I regret not living, that we let our fear of a hard life shove us toward death.”

Your breaths stutter as the poison takes root, but your grip around my waist tightens. We’ll die here in a dank room, holding each other the way lovers should, and I let your lingering warmth into my cooling heart.

“The next life,” you murmur in my ear. “Promise me, Juliet.”

“The next life, Romeo,” I vow, my grip finally slackening. “And all other lives after that.”