They stopped at a food stall and ate cao lau from paper bowls — thick noodles and crispy croutons and pork, smoky and rich, the kind of food that demanded your full attention. The silence between bites was comfortable in a way that made her chest ache. This was the thing she had never quite managed to replicate with anyone else: the ease of him. The sense that she didn’t need to perform.
She had spent seven years not thinking about that.
“Are you still—” she started.
“No,” he said. “We ended it four years ago. Amicably. She’s happy now. Remarried.” He said it simply, without drama, the way you state a fact that has long since stopped being painful. “And you?”
“No one serious.” She poked at a noodle. “I kept finding reasons.”
“Reasons to leave?”
“Reasons it wasn’t right.”
He was quiet for a moment. Around them, the market hummed and glittered. A child ran past with a small lantern shaped like a fish, its orange light swinging. Somewhere nearby, someone was playing a single-stringed instrument — a plaintive, wandering melody that seemed to have no intention of resolving.
“Filipa,” Sylvester said. “Do you remember what I said? In London. Outside Birkbeck, in the rain.”
She looked at him. “The lantern.”
“I’ve been in Hoi An for three months,” he said. “I’ve thought about it. I kept thinking — it’s a ridiculous thing to think about. It was years ago. You’re not here.” He paused. “And then you were.”
The thing about forbidden feelings — the ones you’ve been disciplined enough to keep folded away — is that they don’t actually diminish. They just wait. She had known this, intellectually. She had not quite accounted for what it would feel like to stand in a Vietnamese night market at thirty-one, holding a paper bowl, and have that knowledge become suddenly, viscerally real.
She set the bowl down.
“Then we should float a lantern,” she said.
They bought one from the stall where she had first heard him say her name — a round lantern, pale yellow, the color of old paper. The vendor showed them how to light the small wax disc inside, and they carried it together to the bank of the Thu Bon, where the river was dark and calm and already scattered with a dozen small lights drifting slowly toward the sea.
The lantern was awkward to hold between two people. Their hands kept bumping, adjusting, and at some point they stopped adjusting and simply held it together, her fingers alongside his, the warmth of the flame rising up between their palms.
“What are we supposed to wish for?” she asked.
“I don’t think it’s a wish,” he said. “I think you’re just supposed to let something go.”
She thought about that. About the careful, measured life she had built. About the very specific shape of the space she had left unfilled, and how she had told herself, year after year, that the shape didn’t mean anything.
They released the lantern together.
It rose slowly — unsteadily at first, tilting, catching the river breeze — and then it found its balance and climbed, joining the slow procession of lights above the water. Filipa watched it go and felt something shift in her chest, not painfully, but the way a door shifts when the latch finally gives.
Sylvester’s hand was still close to hers. He didn’t move it.
“I have a flight tomorrow afternoon,” she said.
“I know.” A beat. “I have until the end of November here. And then I’m back in London.”
“I’m in Lisbon.”
“I know that too.” He turned to look at her, and in the warm, scattered light of a hundred paper lanterns, he looked exactly like the person she had spent seven years almost forgetting. “Filipa. I’m not asking for anything tonight except — is this still something? For you? Because I’ve been very careful, for a very long time, and I’m tired of being careful about this particular thing.”
She looked at the lantern, now small and distant above the river.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s still something.”
He exhaled — a long, quiet breath, like a man setting down a weight he’d been carrying so long he’d stopped noticing it.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy first contact first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply