Chapter 11 – Ours. - by Writewithoma

There’s a version of falling in love that looks like the movies. Grand gestures. Declarations. Someone running through an airport or standing in the rain saying the right thing at exactly the right moment. That wasn’t us. Ours looked like him stealing my food without asking and acting innocent when I caught him. It looked like me calling him at midnight over nothing and him picking up every single time, voice rough with sleep, not once complaining. It looked like arguments about the most irrelevant things which route to take, whose turn it was to pick the movie, whether pineapple belonged anywhere near a meal argued with the kind of passion most people reserved for things that actually mattered. It looked like ordinary. But it was ours, and that made it everything. The Friday visits became sacred without us deciding they would be. I’d show up, he’d open The Friday visits became sacred without us deciding they would be. I’d show up, he’d open the door like he’d been waiting not anxiously, just ready, the way someone stands when they know a good thing is coming and the apartment would swallow us both into whatever the evening wanted to be. Sometimes it was loud. Games, both of us cheating shamelessly, me kissing his neck at critical moments and him retaliating by sliding a hand up my thigh until I completely forgot what I was supposed to be doing. The controller abandoned. The game still running. Neither of us caring. Sometimes it was quiet. Him doing something in the other room while I was curled on the couch watching whatever I wanted, completely at home in his space in a way that had stopped surprising me. He’d come out eventually, drop down beside me, pull my legs across his lap without asking like that was simply where they belonged. And the talking. God, we talked. About everything and nothing, the way you only talk with someone when you’ve stopped performing for them. He’d say something that made me think differently about something I’d been certain about for years, and I’d sit with it quietly, turning it over. I’d say something sharp and half-joking that held something real underneath it, and he’d hear the real part without me having to point at it. He was good at that. Hearing the thing beneath the thing. It should have scared me more than it did. The night he officially asked me out, it wasn’t dramatic either. We were in the middle of eating I was stealing from his plate, which he pretended to be annoyed about, which we both knew he wasn’t and he just looked at me. One of those looks that sat on you with a little weight. “So what are we doing?” he asked. I kept chewing. “Eating.” “You know what I mean.” I did know. I’d known for weeks. I just hadn’t been the one to say it first. I put my fork down. Looked back at him. Let the silence hold for exactly as long as I wanted it to, which was long enough to watch something flicker behind his eyes not quite uncertainty, but close. Then I said, “Asking me out properly would be a good start.” He laughed. Low, a little exasperated, like I was the most exhausting person he’d ever met.Then he asked. And I said yes in the most unbothered voice I could manage, which was not very unbothered at all. That night, when we lay in bed later him on his back, me on his chest, his fingers tracing absent patterns on my arm he said quietly, almost to himself, “Took long enough.” “You could’ve asked sooner,” I said. “You would’ve said no sooner.” I opened my mouth to argue. Closed it again. He wasn’t wrong. I turned my face into his chest so he wouldn’t see me smiling, and he tightened his arm around me like he already knew. That was us. That was how it started not with a bang, not with a grand declaration, but with stolen food and a question asked too casually and a yes that meant far more than either of us said out loud. Ours.

Forbidden Love Story

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