He just saw her, using the pay phone outside Kahala Mall. He thought nothing of it.

Then, a week later, they're being introduced to each other through mutual friends.

He never thought, 14 years later, they would be married and moving to Oregon together.

But that's exactly what happened with Dana Lyons and Tricia Ching.

They first met as sophomores in high school. She was going to Maryknoll, he was attending Moanalua. They hung out with the same friends but were never really close. They never even talked on the phone.

About seven years later, Lyons and Ching, both English majors at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, joined the study abroad program. He went to London, she went to China.

When they returned that summer, they wound up at the same party again. This time, though, they exchanged phone numbers.

"For me, there was immediate chemistry," said Ching, a 28-year-old Realtor associate. "He was just really handsome. At first I didn't recognize him. ... Then we started talking and we really hit it off."

For Lyons, though, Ching was the same girl he remembered — and had a crush on — from high school.

"She was beautiful and fun and outgoing and assertive," said Lyons, 29, a law student at the University of Oregon. "She's still that way. ... (My feelings) were rekindled."

They may seem like complete opposites — she's gregarious, he's reserved — but they have more in common than meets the eye. They share a fondness for books, traveling, poetry and hip-hop. And neither one cooks.

"This is what makes our relationship so solid and strong," Ching said. "We have opposite personalities. I'm more outgoing and he's more quiet. But we have such similar interests and our personalities balance us out."

Living in Japan together — they both taught English there — sealed the deal for Ching, who believed co-habitating before marriage would prove their compatibility. And for that year, they got along perfectly.

"For me it was important (to live together) because my mom always said that you really get to know a person when you live together," Ching said. "For me, divorce is not an option. I wanted to see if we were compatible. And we are. He cleans and I don't!"

Lyons didn't have to live together to know that Ching was The One. He brought an engagement ring with him to Japan and hid it in their apartment for about three months before proposing.

On the morning of their third-year anniversary, she left him a small orange for his breakfast before going to work. He decided to leave her a bigger orange with the ring wrapped up in a magazine cut-out of her dream engagement ring he had saved. When she came home that evening, she opened up the magazine and read the note: "You can have all the big oranges your heart desires. I love you."

Then he got on his knee in their kitchen and asked her to marry him.

But once wasn't enough.

While planning for their June 11 wedding at JW Marriot Ihilani Resort & Spa, Lyons took Ching to Sunset Beach on the North Shore. After snacking on cheese, fruit and wine, he read her a poem he wrote and proposed again, just as the sun was setting.

Romantics at heart, the couple planned a classic/contemporary-style wedding titled "A Love Supreme," after John Coltrane's seminal masterpiece. Their favors were bookmarks in a library sleeve stamped with the date of their union. On the bookmarks were one of their favorite poems, "Variations on the Word Sleep" by Margaret Atwood.

One part summed up how they feel about each other:

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

"It's about being one with each other," Ching said. "I'd like to be that (to him), unnoticed yet necessary."