She came over just to tell me the rain was dripping on me. Ten years later I still remember her laugh.

My name's Robert, American, from Florida. It was 2013, I was 56, and I was in Bangkok on one of those business trips organised at fairly short notice. The company had booked me into a hotel near Nana Plaza, on Soi 4, without anyone in the office bothering to explain much about what that actually meant, or why the receptionist smiled the particular way he did when I asked him about the area. After finishing work, around five in the afternoon, tired of meetings and still in my tie, I looked up Nana Plaza on my phone from the room and walked out towards it without much of a plan.

I never even made it to the entrance of Nana Plaza. I stopped first at the Stumble Inn, a bar open straight onto the street with tall stools along a metal railing, sat down there watching people go by, ordered a cold beer, and just stayed put, too nervous to say a word to anyone around me, feeling completely out of place still in my work shirt.

A Thai woman sitting a little further along came over unannounced and told me to move. Not because I was in anyone's way, far from it, but because rain had started dripping right where I was sitting, coming through a gap in the awning above that I hadn't even noticed. She patted the empty seat next to her, not asking permission or waiting for me to fully respond.

We started talking and she went through, one after another, the usual questions, the ones I now know by heart after so many trips but was hearing for the first time in my life back then, with no idea they were part of a script repeated every night in every bar in the area. Where are you from. First time in Bangkok. Holiday or business. I answered every single one exactly how any newcomer would, wrong, without even realising it. Yes, it's my first time. No, it's for business. Completely naive about all of it, without the faintest idea how anything around me that night actually worked.

Her name was Tuk, mid-twenties, easy smile. I bought her a lady drink when she ordered one, not entirely sure what I was actually paying for, and watched out of the corner of my eye how the whole bar tab system worked, the waitress noting things down in a little notebook, something that felt completely foreign to me at the time and that I'd only fully understand much later. I worked up the nerve, after my second beer, to ask if she'd like to come out of the bar with me that night. She said yes, but that she was expensive, said without a trace of embarrassment, and then she laughed, a clear, unguarded laugh I still remember with total clarity to this day, years and several trips later.

We finished an entire bottle between us, laughing about things I can barely remember now, and had a great night from start to finish. What I remember most, above everything else, is simply lying there afterwards, with her curled against me, sleeping soundly like a baby while I stared at the ceiling with no rush at all to fall asleep myself. I hadn't been close to a woman that way in ten full years, since my first divorce. I felt, without exaggerating even slightly, like a 56-year-old teenager on his very first real date.

She came back the following night on her own, without me asking her to in advance, something I took as a good sign at the time. I asked if she'd want to stay with me for the last two days I had left in the city before my flight home, and she agreed without much hesitation. I took her to dinner at a restaurant she chose, took her shopping for clothes at one of the shops near the hotel, she picked out three complete outfits herself, nothing especially expensive or flashy, simple things that seemed to genuinely suit her.

Back at the hotel she tried them on one by one in front of the mirror while I played improvised photographer with my phone camera, taking photos she'd review afterwards, laughing non-stop at the ones she didn't like and deleting them instantly without letting me have any say.

The next day she took me around several enormous malls, the air conditioning so strong it gave me goosebumps, and we ended up at a cinema watching a Thai love story with no subtitles whatsoever, not in English or any other language. Sitting at the back of the theatre in one of those double love seats made for couples, with her curled into me the whole time, I followed the entire film from start to finish without understanding a single word they said, going only by the music and the actors' faces to work out whether something good or bad was happening on screen.

Back home in Florida, still not fully adjusted to the time difference, I texted her every single day without fail, completely in boyfriend mode in a way I hadn't been for years. She'd send selfies in the outfits I'd bought her, smiling at the camera in her bedroom, telling me little things about her day. About a month later the replies started arriving further apart, a day late, then two, and eventually they stopped coming altogether with no explanation beforehand.

I didn't push it beyond a couple of messages that went unanswered. I knew perfectly well I was thousands of miles away, on practically another continent, and had no idea when I'd be back in Thailand, if ever in my life.

About a year later, on a different business trip I actually managed to arrange, I went back to the Stumble Inn almost out of habit. I asked one of the waitresses still working there about Tuk and was told she'd been living with her English boyfriend for months in an apartment outside the area. That explained the silence of those last few months perfectly, no mystery behind it at all.

I've been back to Bangkok close to a dozen times since then over the following decade, for work at first and later simply because I liked coming back to the city itself, beyond any particular person I'd met there. I've seen Tuk a few more times over all these years, never seeking her out insistently or with any plan, more often running into each other almost by chance in some bar or passing the same stretch of street at just the right moment. We'd have a drink together and play a game of pool in some quiet bar, no tension or expectation between us at all, two old acquaintances catching up on each other's lives.

I got remarried in the end, to a Filipino woman this time, a completely different and far more stable relationship than that first night in Bangkok, and on my last trip to the city I slipped away on my own for a while, without telling anyone else in the group I was travelling with that time, just to stop by and say hello to Tuk for a moment.

I've thought about that first night more times than I could ever count over all these years, about the rain dripping from the awning, about the pat on the empty seat, about one particular laugh no other woman I've known since has ever quite managed to replicate. It wasn't the relationship of my life, not by a long shot, and it was never really meant to be one either, not for her and not for me if I'm honest with myself.

First night in Bangkok, first time really spending time with a Thai woman, with no prior experience at all to guide me, it was never going to be anything other than unforgettable, however many years passed since.