“Well,” Adam staggered embarrassedly, “I’m not sure you’re going to understand what it is that I meant by my regret, but I guess I owe it to you anyhow.”

            “I think I’ll understand, unless it’s still a burden,” Jane returned.

            “You know that weekend that we spent, about a month before we broke up?”

            Jane gazed at him like he had sprouted a second head or a third arm.

            “You have to remember,” he insisted. He knew that it was not a figment of his imagination, though the time spent together had been more than unreal.

            She nodded. “The weekend in Los Angeles, when we—”

            He reached for his wallet in his pants pocket, and he produced two worn sheets of paper. “It’s really kind of absurd, but I kept these all this time—even after we broke up. I was going to give it to you before we broke up. I bought these tickets so we could forget about everything for a few days, I don’t think you can see the ink, but I wrote ‘to my Ocean Blue’. I was seriously arranging every second. We were going to spend a weekend in the Tropics, no reservations, just us. At least that was the plan.”

            A smile crept upon Jane’s face as one of the flight personnel commenced boarding. “That’s it?”

            He handed the ticket to her. “It’s still good, I never used it. But that’s not exactly it either.”

            “I’m gonna have to go, so hesitating will do you no good, Adam—”

            At that moment, Adam pulled her into a tight embrace, and though their lives had been forever changed by Jane’s return, it was the first time that both of them understood fully why they had to walk away.

            A peculiar expression was on Jane’s face. “I almost didn’t call, because I knew what you would do. God, Adam, I knew exactly how this was going to end and I almost didn’t want it this way. Of course I remember the weekend, because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamt about it, how many times I’d wished I could have relived it. I could have told you when I met you that you would do this, and I still almost didn’t want it like this.”

            “Why not? I mean, I knew what I was going to do, but why wouldn’t you want it to end the way it’s ending?”

            She handed him the tickets, folded his hands in such a way that they clutched the tickets to his heart, and Jane smiled a genuine smile. Her expression was simple, the purest form of contentment he had seen her wear. If he hadn’t been right there, standing before her, Adam would have never imagined Jane’s expression as such. “I guess that’s the question for next time, isn’t it?”

            “Next time?” Adam asked, his head cocked in an expression of pure curiosity. “You’re not planning on doing this full time, because I don’t think that I could—”

            She laughed lightly, and the words she whispered left a sweet sound that lingered in the air. “You’ll just have to come after me again.”

            Adam stood mute as Jane presented her boarding pass to the attendant, and as she walked onto the connecting ramp she left him with no more than a fleeting glance. Every inch of the tall, red-haired beauty was going to remain in his mind, but he secretly knew that he would see no more of Jane. His mind, in time, would likely forget the minor details, but Adam would remember the others—the way the sun shined on her glossy auburn hair, the faint yet still noticeable laugh lines, the way the tight sundress had accentuated every curve that day. The face of his siren was imprinted in his mind, the face of the woman as she had left him. As Adam walked back to Mickey, who sat reading the Sports section of the Los Angeles Times, he realized the way he would remember her would not be such a bad way after all. Life had blessed Adam with second chances, and for the case in point, several of them. He may not have gotten everything the way he wanted; in the midst of it all his girlfriend had still broken up with him, but Adam was hardly the angst-ridden young man that he had been when he parted ways with Jane the first time. It may not have been his proudest accomplishment, and he would certainly never tell the papers about Jane’s return, but it mattered where it counted most—it mattered to a certain Adam Noah Levine and that was enough for him.