Just her name. Nothing added to it. No “hey” or “sorry” or “funny seeing you here,” just her name in his voice, which has always had this particular quality of sounding like it came from somewhere unhurried.
She turns.
Up close, the wrinkle in his shirt is even more familiar. There is also a small smear of something — olive oil, probably, from the mezze table — on the cuff of his left sleeve, and she has the absurd, treacherous impulse to point it out the way she used to, the easy shorthand of two people who have spent enough time together to narrate each other’s small disasters without cruelty. She does not point it out. She says, “Delroy,” in a voice she hopes sounds neutral, and watches something shift very slightly in his expression.
Around them, the wedding finds its rhythm. Petra’s aunt has commandeered the bouzouki player into something faster; three of the younger cousins are attempting to learn a dance from a man old enough to be their grandfather, and failing loudly and happily. Yeon Lin — Delroy’s sister, who Odette has always liked more than she probably should admit — materializes briefly at Delroy’s elbow, takes one look at the two of them, and says, “I’m going to go be extremely interested in that cheese table,” and disappears. Neither of them laughs, though it is almost funny.
They stand beside each other at the bar. The silence between them is not comfortable, exactly, but it is not hostile either. It is the silence of two people who know too much about each other to pretend they are strangers and too much about the damage to pretend they are fine. Odette sips her wine. Delroy drinks his water. The bouzouki picks up tempo and the lanterns sway and somewhere on the other side of the square, Petra laughs her enormous, unselfconscious laugh, the one that has been the same since she was nine years old, and Odette feels something loosen in her chest at the sound of it — the involuntary ease of being in a place that is genuinely, stubbornly joyful.
“She looks happy,” Delroy says quietly, watching Petra.
“She does.”
A pause. The music moves through the square like something warm and physical.
“I’m glad she made us come,” he says, and it is such a small thing, such a careful, minimal thing, but the “us” in it lands somewhere tender and Odette does not answer immediately, because she is not sure what answer would be honest.
They end up walking. It happens gradually, without agreement — the party is loud and the square is ringed with narrow streets that slope toward the water, and at some point they are both moving away from the noise, not toward anything, just away from it together. The streets here are the white and blue that photographs have made almost unreal, but at night, with the festival sounds drifting down from above and the cats moving silently between doorways, they feel specific and actual and a little like a secret. Odette’s sandals make a small sound on the stone. Delroy’s shoulder is close to hers without touching it.
This is the thing about Delroy that she had never been able to explain cleanly to anyone, including herself: it had never been dramatic. They had not burned each other down. What had happened between them had been quieter and in some ways harder to name — a slow accumulation of small misalignments, two people who loved each other and could not quite agree on what that meant in practice, what it required, what it was allowed to cost. She had wanted him to say certain things and he had not said them. He had needed her to wait in ways she hadn’t known how to wait. They had ended without a scene, which had felt, at the time, like proof that it had not mattered enough. She had spent eight months revising that theory.
“Yeon Lin called me boring,” he says, out of nowhere, as they reach a low wall above the water. He says it lightly, but she can hear the thing underneath it.
“Yeon Lin is usually right.”
“Yeah.” He looks out at the water. “I think I’ve been waiting for something to feel less — I don’t know. Less unresolved.”
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