Saturdays and Sundays were their favorite days of the week. That’s not very surprising. Most people like the weekends, don’t they? It’s ingrained in our minds since childhood: be good in school all week so you can watch cartoons and play all weekend. Go to all your classes during the week and party on the weekends. Work hard all week at your job and chill out on the weekends. Weekends, weekends, weekends,

So it’s no surprise that Natasha and Taylor looked forward to their weekends. They had busy, sometimes stressful jobs; she was an elementary school special education teacher and he was a physical therapist trying to get his new practice off the ground. They’d be forgiven if they spent their weekends lounging on the couch in their pajamas as so many of us have a tendency to do, but then they wouldn’t be different and we wouldn’t have a story.

Their love was fierce. It was strong and unbreakable and had been growing consistently since they meet at fifteen years old—that’s right, Natasha and Taylor were high school sweethearts, the kind of couple young girls imagine telling their grandchildren about having been part of with their unshakable adolescent love—except theirs was real.

She was a grade above him in school, but he didn’t mind. She had impossibly curly hair and an impossibly confident air about her. She was smart, funny, and sweet and he was drawn to her like an industrial magnet to a steel frame. The pull was intense, irreversible, and potentially dangerous for anyone who dared to cross its path.

So he decided to pursue her. It was easy. She liked him too. He was tall, compassionate, and on the wrestling team. He was handsome in that lanky teenage boy way and when he smiled, his whole body smiled.

It really was a no-brainer. He asked her out and she said yes. There was a cool casualness about them that could only signify that what they were doing together was meant to be, so they let it be.

They stayed together all through high school and when she graduated and went away to college, they got even stronger. He spent his senior year applying for college, wrestling, studying, and spending time with his friends. She spent her freshman year learning and exploring who she really was, where she was supposed to fit in, and how she could make everything work. She studied fashion and found herself. She felt confident in her relationship and when they got to see each other on the occasional weekends, their time was precious.

When Taylor graduated, he opted to go to a different college than Natasha, hundreds of miles away. His school gave him wrestling and academic scholarships that he couldn’t pass up, not that Natasha would’ve let him if he tried.

They always put their individual dreams first and that’s where they got it right. They went to separate colleges, led separate lives, pursued different goals, and became their own people.

Natasha and Taylor had couple friends from high school. They always seemed so frantic and weathered compared to their own simplicity and Natasha often wondered if maybe they were doing it wrong, if maybe it was supposed to be harder to be happy together because that’s how everyone else acted. These young couples aged themselves, telling anyone who’d listen that good relationships take WORK and that they were BUILT ON A SOLID FOUNDATION, but no matter how strong that foundation was, their walls all inevitably came crumbling down, revealing deep fissures that no amount of putty could fix.

Taylor often wanted to tell his friends that it shouldn’t be hard, that the ease of loving someone right for you was profound, but he felt like he’d just be rubbing their own failing relationships in their faces. He thought it wasn’t his place. He thought they’d get it right eventually. And with each end of a couple, he felt more secure with Natasha.

It was the same for her. She mourned the end of her friends’ relationships and wondered how their dissolutions would shape their friendships. She worried that she’d lose someone along the way, but understood that the wheels of life kept turning and sometimes people got off the bus before her. As long as she had Taylor, she knew it would be all right.

When she graduated, she got a job working as a recruiter for an investment bank in the city. She was making good money and with Taylor’s graduation on the horizon, she allowed herself to dream about what their adult lives would be like, how they’d spend their time together, and who they’d grow to be in their togetherness.

Then something changed within her. Her dreams didn’t match up with her reality. When she imagined their life together, she saw a modest light blue colonial in the town they grew up in, bathed in sunlight, surrounded by lush greenery, and kept safe by a white picket fence. She saw Taylor clearly: an accomplished physical therapist who spent his days working hard to help young men with sports injuries and old women who suffered from strokes, and spent his nights loving her.

She was fuzzy in her own dreams, though. She couldn’t reconcile that fuzziness, and then one day it came to her like a slap in the face: she wasn’t doing what she was supposed to be doing with her professional life. Once she acknowledged that, she began coming in clearer and clearer in her dreams. She saw herself as a teacher for very young, very special children. Her heart swelled at the thought of it.

So she went back to school. And so did he, but this time, they lived together. She pursued a master’s degree in early childhood education with a concentration in special education and he was working toward his DPT.

It worked out and their dreams were becoming realized. He always imagined they’d be in a situation where they could feed off of one another’s strengths to get through their graduate schools’ grueling assignments. He was a wall for her to lean on, she was a leg for him to stand on, and when they were finished, they moved back home.

They found the little blue house, he found a practice to work in, and she found a school to substitute for. They were beginning and everything felt real and true. Five years later, the little blue house was just how she always imagined it, Taylor was opening his own practice, and she had her own classroom ful of thirty eight-year-olds, buzzing with excitement at the beginning of each new day.

But then things got hard. Taylor’s grandmother got sick. Natasha’s brother lost a baby. Taylor’s sister got hurt in a car accident. One of Natasha’s students passed away from a rare medical condition. Each instance felt like a crack in their foundation. Work wore on them and it showed in each strained conversation.

They still loved each other and felt like there was a way to come back from this, but they had been swept up by a torrential downpour in the middle of the night and they just couldn’t find it yet.

Weekends were their favorite. For fifteen years, they were just Taylor and Natasha time. When they were in high school, they canoodled in the hallways during the week and couldn’t wait to really see each other on the weekends. In college when things were feeling off, they always had the weekends to set things straight. During grad school, the weekends were their precious times to put their responsibilities aside and just be kids. When they began living together as adults with careers, weekends were their time to sleep in on Saturdays, bodies so intertwined that they couldn’t figure out whose leg was whose in the foggy moments of waking. Sundays were their days to rise early, go running, ride bikes along the river, and explore the farmers’ market for local delicacies.

But then things got hard and their weekends took a hit. They began leading separate lives, lost in their private thoughts, while lying next to each other in the same bed.

It was on a Sunday that the rain stopped and they found their way out.

Taylor slept in, so Natasha got dressed quietly and took her basket to the farmers’ market. She searched the stalls aimlessly, missing the face he made when he smelled the good bread that Mrs. Potter’s Bakery always offered. When she came to the fruit stand, she stood and stared at the blackberries, tears welling in her eyes at the memory of a night not so long ago when they were mashing blackberries to make jam and Taylor had somehow gotten the purple muck all over their white kitchen walls.

She reached for the carton at the same time that another person had. She looked up, confused that someone would be going for the same one as her when there were so many others on the table and she saw Taylor standing there with two cups of coffee balancing in his left hand as he held tightly to the blackberries with his right, brushing the tips of his fingers against hers.

He grinned and his whole body grinned. She drowned in that look, happily, not wanting to come up for air.

“Let’s go home and make some jam,” he said.