Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc

She didn’t mean to see him.

But her apartment was seven floors up and his was seven floors up on the building opposite, and the city was full and lit and she was standing at her window at midnight because she couldn’t sleep, and there he was — standing at his.

He saw her see him.

He raised his hand.

She raised hers.

She didn’t know him. He didn’t know her. But he was there the next night, and she was too, and it became — she didn’t have a word for what it became. A ritual. A strange lighthouse of a thing. She looked forward to it in a way she found embarrassing. She started thinking of him as the window man, who stood with his coffee and looked at the city and occasionally looked at her.

A month in, he held something up to the glass. A piece of paper. She squinted.

*Your light is the best thing about my view.*

She felt it in her chest like a chord.

She went and found a piece of paper. She wrote something down and held it up.

*Yours too.*

She put a lamp in the window. He put a lamp in his.

Two weeks later she was in the coffee shop on the corner and a man said: “You’re the seventh floor.”

She looked up.

He was tall and had warm eyes and was looking at her like she was something he’d been wondering about.

“You’re the seventh floor,” she said back.

He sat down across from her without being invited, which should have been too much and wasn’t.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this without it being strange,” he said.

“It’s already strange.”

“Strangely good?”

She looked at him across the table. A month of lamps and notes and raised hands at midnight. A month of going to her window on purpose.

“Yes,” she said. “Strangely good.”

He ordered coffee. She stayed.

The lamps stayed in the windows for years after that — not because they needed them, but because they liked the reminder of how it started, this small, lit, improbable thing.

So you made it to the end… which probably means you’re the kind of person who enjoys a little romance with their coffee ☕. If you’re in the mood for more stories about messy feelings, stubborn attraction, and women who absolutely refuse to settle for boring love, you can find all my books here.

Fair warning though. One story tends to lead to another. I’ve seen it happen. Repeatedly.