I’ve been sparse lately—
     not from lack of feeling,

     just a calendar
          that keeps insisting
               on talking over my heart.

Last night we fixed that.

8:45—Lyft dispatched,
     like muscle memory,
     like our little ritual
     still knows the route.

Irby’s routine:
       same ease,
       same corner,

       hours of laughing like nothing’s chasing us.

And then—
    somebody introduced a shot.

(Always the plot twist.)

The middle went a little blurry,
       the way a good song does
         when you stop counting
              and start singing.

But once we crossed the threshold at Sylvan—
    the memory comes back… sharp

    like the room itself flipped on its own light.

Oh. My. God.

I’d been carrying this quiet fear—
       that the thrill was fading,
     that maybe you were drifting
             into polite distance.

I was dead wrong—thank God.

The night kept saying “again”,
    a conversation between pulse and skin,
              and I remembered—so clearly—
        you don’t *lose* attraction, Mari…
               you just pick your moments

                 and then you *take* them.

Somewhere in there
          we ran out of clock,
             ran out of clever,
             ran out of everything
                 except each other—

          until we were both spent,
          and sleep finally won

          the way it always does after the best kind of losing.

We forgot alarms.
Of course we did.

So you stayed—
    all night.

Bad for the schedule.
Murder on the grown-up plan.
Sad for Coal. (sorry, Mr. C.)

And yeah,
    we might pay for it today—
    La Grotta becomes *another* raincheck,

    another mulligan we pretend we didn’t want.

But listen—

I would pay that price again.

Because the thrill ain’t gone.

It’s here.

It’s loud in the quiet.

It’s right under my skin this morning,
     even with the consequences lined up like meetings.

I’ll make it up to the dog.
I’ll make it up to the calendar.

But you?

You don’t need making up.
You need making room.

And I’m still learning
    how to clear the whole night
    without saying it out loud—

                   just a hand,
                        a door,
          the lights going out,

          and that familiar,
          impossible truth:

          The Thrill Ain’t Gone.

Not after that night.

…Next time, though,
 we set the alarms.