Zach: Well, the clock was ticking till I shipped out and I was spending time with Alana a lot before leaving. We both knew that I was going to be gone for a long while. The plan was that I wouldn’t be back for two long years as I was going through selection. With all the time we spent together, I didn’t want to tell her I had caught feelings for her again, in fact, I wasn’t originally going to….Until Daniel told me I owed it to her…..yeah that guy. Well, I told her how I felt and she finally told me she felt the same. We decided that we wouldn’t officially date until I came back. Long distance and military relationships can be tough, so I didn’t want her to feel like she was stuck with me if it was too difficult. Or if either of us found somebody else and we wanted to pursue that person instead, we would. Well, you all know where everything ended up.

Alana: By the time November 2020 came around, Zach and I were texting each other quite frequently. He invited me and Daniel to Chesterfield Towne Center because he knew I felt weird about hanging out with a boy by myself, and he had plans to take Daniel home from the mall which is 25 minutes away from where they live (mind you, he lives like 7 minutes from Zach), and then drop me off at my house which is only 10 minutes from the mall and 25 minutes from Zach’s so that he could confess his feelings. But I knew he was planning on confessing, and my logical self told Zach, “It would make more sense if you dropped me off first, and then Daniel.” This foiled his plans, but that night we video-called over Instagram and he confessed his feelings, and I confessed my own. We ended up hanging out a couple more times after that in January, getting boba with a friend and watching The Greatest Showman with a few friends, and ultimately seeing each other at his going away party. Although we hadn’t been dating officially yet, we kind of were unofficially. We even exchanged our first “I love you’s” on Valentine’s Day of 2020 over a video call when the power had gone out at my house due to an ice storm.

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