Chapter 13 – Almost. - by Writewithoma

The almost theres nearly killed me. That's the part nobody warns you about. Not the waiting itself I could handle waiting. I'd been waiting my whole life without particularly minding. No, it was the almost. The getting so close and then stopping. The moments that built and built until I was certain this was it, this was the time, and then one of us would pull back and we'd lie there in the charged quiet of what hadn't happened yet, and I'd want to scream into a pillow. He was being careful. I knew that. I could see it in the deliberate way he'd slow things down whenever they started moving somewhere significant, the way he'd check in without making it awkward, the way he never once pushed. It was considerate. It was genuinely, annoyingly considerate. It was also driving me completely insane. "You can stop treating me like I'm going to break," I told him one evening, after the third time in two weeks that things had gotten heated and then gently, patiently, respectfully cooled. He looked at me. "I'm not." "You are." "I'm being careful." "There's a difference?" He was quiet for a moment. Then, slowly: "Yeah. There is." I didn't have a comeback for that. Which was rare enough that it annoyed me even more. The truth was, I was scared too. I just refused to show it. Every time we got close, something animal and instinctive in me understood that this was going to hurt, and that understanding sat underneath all the wanting like a stone at the bottom of a river. I could see through it clearly. But it was still there. So we kept almost-ing. Weeks of it. Months, eventually. Getting closer each time, learning each other in the spaces around the thing we hadn't done yet. His hands knowing my body in ways that made the actual act feel both inevitable and still somehow far away.Until one Friday when it wasn't. I don't know what was different about that particular evening. Nothing announced itself. The night started the same way they all did food, a game I won by distracting him shamelessly, a movie neither of us was really watching. But there was something in the air that felt settled. Decided. When he looked at me that night, I didn't look away. "I'm ready," I said. Simple. Quiet. True. He didn't make a big thing of it. He just looked at me for a moment, making sure, and then nodded once like we'd agreed on something important. And we had.

Forbidden Love Story

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