The Third Meeting
Luka Doncic x Female OC (High School to Present)
Prologue
There is a theory about soulmates.
Not the kind scrawled in cheap romance novels or whispered over half-finished glasses of wine, but an older theory. Sadder, somehow.
It says you meet the same soul three times in your life.
The first time, they are nothing more than a passing shadow, a stranger woven into the background of your surroundings. You glance at them once across a noisy room and think nothing of it, never knowing that years later, their name will live inside your chest like a second heartbeat.
The second time, the spark catches.
But timing is wrong.
Maybe you were too young. Too afraid. Too hungry for something else. Life pulls harder than love does, and no matter how desperately your souls lean toward one another, the world drags you apart before anything real can take root. You become an almost... the kind that leaves a specific, unnamed ache. Not quite a wound. You just learn to live with it.
Then comes the third meeting.
When you've been through life. When grief has carved wisdom into your bones. When love no longer feels like something to outrun. When you no longer seek to satisfy your ego.
Just recognition.
Because some souls are destined to find each other more than once. Not to test each other,
...but to finally meet in the middle.
____________________________________________________________
The first time Isabella Rayes saw him, she wasn't paying attention.
She was thirteen, mid-laugh, mid-conversation, surrounded by the particular chaos that followed her everywhere. He passed through the background of it, a ridiculously tall, painfully lanky boy weaving between cafeteria tables with the gracelessness of someone who hadn't grown into his own limbs yet. All elbows and long strides and messy hair.
Another sports prospect probably, she thought, and returned to her conversation.
A passing face. Background shadow.
—
The second time round, she got to know him.
She was fifteen, walking into her senior Spanish class on a Tuesday afternoon, and she stopped.
He was sitting across the room. The same boy, only older, and somehow even taller, and the awkwardness had begun settling into something else entirely. Time had been working on him quietly.
Handsome, she noted, and sat down.
Every Tuesday for one hour, they shared that classroom. One hour became inside jokes murmured beneath their breath, glances held a beat too long, the kind that meant nothing and everything when you were fifteen.
"I'm going to be an NBA player," he told her one afternoon, with that crooked, unhurried grin.
Isabella raised an eyebrow. "And I'm going to travel every city worth knowing and learn every language worth speaking."
She believed him. Not blindly, she somehow knew by the way he said it. With an absolute confidence.
He was never meant to stay. That was simply what he was, for her. He was a foreigner to begin with. A kid came to Spain from Slovenia. He's always going to leave.
And he did. At the age of 16, they went their separate ways. He went on to become a professional basketball player for Real Madrid, and she went to London for higher studies.
Their story ended the way the best almost-stories do, quietly, without ceremony. No labels. No definitions. Just two people suspended in the tension of almost. Almost feelings. Almost together. Almost something that mattered.
Never nothing. Never something.
He left to become what he always said he would. She left to collect cities and languages and versions of herself she hadn't yet met.
And life happened after that, indifferent, relentless, occasionally magnificent. Beautiful things. Terrible things. Love. Heartbreak. Loss. The slow, quiet architecture of becoming a person.
Ten years turned like pages in a book she hadn't meant to finish so quickly.
—
At twenty-seven, she's now a high-end luxury concierge. Fitting for her outgoing and organized personality. Isabella was at Madrid Plaza Hotel, busy thinking about her high-end client, doing what she always did, three things at once, and making it look effortless.
Then she heard it.
A voice. A voice she would always recognize. Deeper than she remembered.
"Izzy?"
But that name. Only he calls her by it... She looked up.
She did not find the lanky boy from the cafeteria. Nor the teenager whose crooked grin once cut straight through every wall she built. The man standing in front of her was... a global superstar, the franchise player of the NBA's most storied club, six-foot-seven and built like someone who had spent a decade becoming exactly what he said he would.
Older. Broader. Even a beard now, jaw sharper beneath it. The dirty blonde hair has turned to a darker brown shade now.
The world had written itself all over him.
And yet... when his steel blue eyes found hers, something deep and long-dormant turned over inside her chest.
That same impossible feeling. That same quiet electricity, still there, after everything. After ten years of silence and cities and whole different other lives.
Her soul recognised his before her mind could form a single coherent thought.
Luka.
And here she was. Meeting him for the third time…
Read at https://archiveofourown.org/works/84946506/chapters/224240721
