Chapter 10 – What We Became.

Nobody announced it. There was no conversation where we sat across from each other and decided, okay, this is what we are now. No label dropped carefully between us, no moment where he looked at me and asked the question I’d been turning over in my head for weeks. It just… happened. The way most real things do quietly, without permission, while you’re busy looking somewhere else. One day he was someone I was trying not to think about. The next, he was the first thing I reached for in the morning. The friend situation dissolved the same way. No confrontation. No dramatic scene where I had to choose a side or explain myself or apologize for something I hadn’t planned. She just became background noise, and then she became nothing at all. I didn’t bring it up. He didn’t bring it up. Life moved, and she stayed behind in it a chapter neither of us felt the need to reread. Maybe that should have bothered me more. Maybe I should have felt guilty, or at least made an attempt to feel guilty. But guilt requires believing you did something wrong, and I couldn’t locate the wrong in it. Not then. Not when everything between us felt this uncomplicated.Because that’s what surprised me most how easy it was.I had braced for something messy. Something that came with conditions and weight and the constant background hum of should you really be doing this? Instead, I got him. Just him. Steady, warm, sharper than anyone gave him credit for, and somehow, impossibly, mine. He called every day. Not the obligatory kind of call not the checking-in, saying-nothing type. The kind where you talk until one of you falls asleep mid-sentence and neither of you hangs up. The kind where he’d be on his end laughing at something I said, and I’d be on mine pretending I wasn’t smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. We went out when we could. Nothing always fancy sometimes just a drive, sometimes food somewhere quiet, sometimes the kind of outing that had no real destination and didn’t need one. It was the company. It was always the company. And at his place God, his place became its own world. We had a rhythm there that felt like it had existed long before we did. I’d come over, kick my shoes off at the door, and somehow within twenty minutes we’d be deep into an argument about which movie to watch, both of us absolutely certain the other had terrible taste. He’d pick something slow and I’d complain. I’d pick something with horror elements and he’d shake his head like I was a problem he hadn’t signed up for. We always ended up watching both. The games were their own thing entirely. He was competitive in that quiet, dangerous way never loud about it, never trash-talking, just winning with this calm expression that made me want to throw the controller at his head. I, on the other hand, was loud about everything. I celebrated when I won like I’d been waiting my whole life for the moment, and when I lost, I had seventeen reasons why it didn’t count. He thought it was funny. The fact that he found it funny made me want to win more. And when the games ended, and the movie credits rolled, and the apartment got quiet in that particular nighttime way that’s when it was just us. No noise to hide behind. No banter to fill the space.Those were the moments I held onto longest. Him sitting close enough that I could feel the warmth of him. Me pretending I wasn’t hyper-aware of every point of contact between us. Then, eventually, not pretending anymore. He had this way of touching me like he was in no rush. Like he’d decided I was worth being unhurried about. A hand at the small of my back. Fingers at my jaw. The kind of slow, deliberate attention that made it impossible to think clearly, and I considered myself a fairly clear thinker. The first time we slept in the same bed and nothing happened just slept, actually slept, him curled around me like that was where he’d always fit I lay awake for a long time afterward, listening to his breathing even out. This, I thought. This is the thing I was trying to avoid. Not because it was bad. Because it was so, so good, and I already knew, somewhere quiet and certain in the back of my mind, that good things had a way of costing you eventually. But that night, with his arm heavy across my waist and the city doing its thing outside the window, I pushed that thought down. Tomorrow could worry about itself. Tonight, I just let it be good.

Forbidden Love Story

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