She had ended it. That was the plain fact. The end of their second year, before the summer that would have taken them to different cities for different fellowships, she had looked at him across that same table and said she thought it was better if they didn’t try to hold on to something that distance would only pull apart. She had said it clearly and without drama, and she had believed every word of it. She had believed it for years.
She believed it slightly less, sitting here, with the bandoneón doing what it was doing and the amber light doing what it was doing and Marwan’s hands resting on the table, very still, close enough to touch.
A couple moved onto the dance floor. They were not young — the woman’s hair was silver, the man moved with the careful precision of someone who had learned to compensate for a bad knee. But they danced as though the music had been written specifically for the distance between them, for the way her hand rested at his shoulder blade, for the particular gravity that pulled his cheek toward her temple. They danced like people who had chosen each other again and again across a long span of time.
Iryna watched them and felt something shift behind her sternum.
She had been afraid, she understood suddenly. Not of distance. She had managed distance fine — she was excellent at distance, she had built a very competent life out of managing it. She had been afraid of the other thing. The thing those two people on the floor were doing without any apparent fear at all. The sustained, deliberate act of staying.
Marwan saw her face change.
He had spent eight years being careful. Careful about what he remembered, careful about what he hoped for, careful about what it meant that he had kept her email address across three different accounts and two phone replacements. He had told himself the email three weeks ago was about a promise, about integrity, about being the kind of person who followed through. And it was those things. It was also, completely, about her.
He reached across the table.
Not for her hand. He touched just the edge of the wine glass, stilling its rotation.
“Iryna.”
She looked at him. The chin-lift was gone. The careful steadiness was gone. She looked the way she had looked once, very late, in a library with broken heating, when she had read a line of poetry aloud and then gone quiet because it had meant more than she intended.
“I didn’t end it because of the distance,” she said. Her voice was low. “I ended it because I was frightened of how much I didn’t want to.”
The bandoneón resolved into something slower, softer.
Marwan did not say anything for a moment. Then he stood, and he held out his hand — not as a question exactly, more as an answer to one she had been carrying for eight years.
“Then we’ll learn,” he said. “Someday is now.”
She took his hand. They stepped onto the floor. They were clumsy at first, finding the rhythm, finding where their weight belonged. But the music was patient. The room was warm. And Iryna, for the first time in a very long time, did not try to manage the distance between them.
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 female protagonist 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