According to Link, he and Rhett met at a coffee shop near the IBM building Link worked at.
Rhett had kept sitting at Link’s table - the spot Link had decided was the optimum seating, that somehow managed to be by the window and yet closest to the counter and maintaining the ideal temperature.
So of course Link took matters into his own hands and asked the man if he’d be willing to share the table long-term.
Talking to Rhett felt good. Rhett didn’t seem to mind that Link offered no childhood stories in response to the hilarious tales Rhett told about him and his childhood best friend. And he was a great storyteller. A lot of the time, Link pretended that he was Rhett’s childhood best friend.
The next week, Link asked Rhett out (“we don’t have to go anywhere. We can just stay here, except it’s a date instead of just sharing a table”).
Rhett’s story is different. To Rhett, he had met Link in 1984, on the first day of first grade.
In 1999, Link had an accident that left him with retrograde amnesia. Link didn’t remember his friends. His girlfriend. Most importantly, he didn’t remember Rhett.
It changed everything. Slowly, those friends moved on. His girlfriend moved on.
He worked terrible night shift jobs that made no use of his engineering degree and was terrible for his back, but he didn’t care. He needed the day for something else.
When Link asked him out on a date, Rhett almost said no. He said yes only because it was the perfect opportunity to spend time with his best friend.
And then Link kissed him for the first time, a month later. Rhett waited until he’d driven Link home before locking himself in his bathroom and breathing into a paper bag. The kiss made him re-evaluate his actions. He thought he’d agreed to date Link because he didn’t want to lose his best friend. The hard-on he got kissing Link said he agreed for a different reason.
The desperation he’d felt at the loss of Link in his life transformed his feelings of friendship into something deeper. He was in love with his amnesiac best friend, who Link thinks he met at a coffee shop a month ago, instead of fifteen years earlier.
It doesn’t matter as much as he thought it would.
A year later, Rhett took Link on a holiday to the Netherlands, where he asked Link to marry him in the only country that would allow it. After Link’s exhilarated ‘yes’, Rhett had to go through the terrifying task of telling Link the truth. All the while he thought about Link’s anger and feared that Link would break off an engagement not even 30 minutes old.
Link didn’t look angry, and he told Rhett very seriously that he still wanted to marry him.
Fifteen years later, Link would tell a ten million internet audience how his heart had grown three sizes at the thought of Rhett calculating what table Link would sit at so they could meet. How the breath still left him whenever Rhett’s back is hurting because of the night job Rhett had taken so he could spend every day with Link.
Link had lost his memories, and Rhett had lost his best friend, and Rhett worked his ass off to make sure they managed to find all of those things again and more.
