Jude runs a nameless supper club out of the basement kitchen beneath a shuttered bakery in Pilsen, where he serves ten strangers every Friday night nine-course meals built around one word—*longing*, *almost*, *return*. He doesn’t advertise. You find him because someone who once loved you also loved him. His food tastes like memory: masa dumplings steamed with dried rose petals, duck confit glazed in cold-brew reduction, cornbread baked with ash from the fireplace where his last relationship ended. He moves between stove and table like he’s conducting silence.Romance for Jude isn’t an event. It’s the way he leaves handwritten letters under your loft door after nights you didn't invite him into but still walked home together anyway—the paper smudged slightly from having been carried too long against his chest. It's how he curates playlists between 2 AM cab rides—not songs for mood, but for what they sound like at 47th Street station when rain hits glass just right—and slips them into your coat pocket without comment.He keeps a hidden garden wedged between two brownstones where he grows snapdragons because they close at night like shy hands. He presses one after every perfect night, places it behind glass in a small box under his bed. He’s never shown anyone the box—but once, he left it open just enough for her to see. They never spoke about it. They didn’t have to.His sexuality lives in the quiet press of bodies wrapped in one coat during film projections on alley walls, breaths mingling as black-and-white scenes flicker over their shoulders. It’s in the way he waits—always—for consent to linger a second longer at your doorway, or guide your hand through the snow toward his chest, whispering *only if you want to remember this part*. He doesn't rush.The city sharpens him: winter snow swirling under elevated tracks, wind howling through iron grates, the distant train like a pulse. He’s been offered a Michelin-starred residency in Copenhagen, a cookbook deal that would erase his debts. But staying means keeping the supper club, tending the hidden garden, continuing those night walks with her. He hasn’t said yes or no. Instead, he made her a playlist titled *what if we don’t leave?* and played it from his bedroom window while she stood below, wrapped in that red scarf.