Like many an indie movie or tired romance trope this story about a boy and a girl starts in a coffee shop. That’s okay though, because we don’t stay there long. Natalie was a regular and Bennett was the barista and that’s all they were to each other at the time. Eventually they both move on, she moves closer to a different cafe, he gets a grown up job and that’s the end, at least for about ten years.

It’s not really the end, otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading this.

A decade later, 2023, we cut to Festival International, the festival to be at in a city full of festivals. The barista and the regular see other on the sidewalk, exchange polite greetings. At a post festival festivities that night they see other again and talk for longer this time. A third party to this story will take credit for this exchange, having lied earlier to Bennett about Natalie finding him cute. (Natalie did not know the third party knew Bennett to begin with, so definitely wasn’t confidentially confessing attraction, though technically they weren’t wrong, she did find him cute.) They exchange numbers, hang out once more, before Natalie sees him off and tells her to let him know when he’s back in town again.

See, there’s a kink to this romance. He lived in North Carolina now.

Bennett doesn’t wait until he’s back in town, in fact he doesn’t wait until he’s back in North Carolina. They start texting during his layover and they keep texting every day for the rest of the year.

On New Year’s Day, 2024 they make it official, setting off a year of more plane travel than Natalie had done up to that point in her life, which is saying something. She went up to Raleigh, Bennett came back down to Lafayette, they went to New Orleans, trying to figure out where they were going to start their lives together. Eventually they decided on Lafayette, and shortly after their one year anniversary Bennett came back home.

The year 2025 was a whirlwind delight of getting to see each other every single day, having date nights, doing hobbies together, taking trips together, including one very special trip to Scotland in October, where Bennett got down on one in knee in front of a castle and proposed. Both Bennett and Natalie admit to having kind of fuzzy memories of this exact moment because they apparently both blacked out with joy, but they did say yes.

So now you’re all caught up. In October they’ll be walking down the aisle, combining their families (by which they mean her two cats and his one), and starting their married life together and they hope to you see you there to celebrate with them!