Chapter 16 – The Good Season.

If I could go back and live inside any stretch of time, it would be this one. Not because it was perfect. It wasn't. We still argued over stupid things, still cheated at games, still had evenings where one of us was in a mood and the other had to decide whether to push or give space. We were still entirely ourselves which meant sharp edges and occasional stubbornness and the particular kind of tension that comes from two people who are both used to being the loudest in the room. But underneath all of that was something so solid it felt like ground. We had built something. Without a blueprint, without planning, without either of us sitting down and deciding this is what we're making we had built something real. And this season was when I felt it most. When it was just good, cleanly and simply good, before life remembered it had opinions about us. The Fridays were still sacred. Sometimes he'd cook badly, with great confidence, refusing all input and I'd sit on the kitchen counter and eat the results and lie about how it tasted because watching him be proud of himself was one of my favourite things. Sometimes I'd bring food from outside and we'd eat on the floor for no particular reason, backs against the couch, plates between us, talking about nothing important with the seriousness of a United Nations summit. The games evolved. We'd added new ones, expanded the repertoire, found increasingly creative ways to cheat each other out of a win. He remained completely unashamed about his methods. I remained completely unashamed about mine. The rule stood winner takes the argument, loser calls it experience and we invoked it constantly, for everything from whose turn it was to pick the movie to who had to get up and get water. He won more than I admitted. I won more than he acknowledged. It balanced out. The calls continued too daily, long, the kind where you cover so much ground that by the end you've forgotten what you started talking about. He'd pray before we ended the call most nights, and I'd listen to his voice go low and certain around the words, and feel something in my chest go quiet in a way it didn't go quiet for anything else. I told him once, after one of those prayers, that I didn't know how he did it. Moved between sharp and holy like they weren't contradictions. He said they weren't contradictions. I thought about that for days. There were Sundays too, sometimes. Not every week, but when schedules aligned afternoons that stretched into evenings, going somewhere without a real plan, just the day and us and whatever it turned into. Those felt like stolen time in the best way. Like we'd found hours that didn't belong to anyone else. I kept most of this close to my chest. Didn't perform it for anyone, didn't make it public, didn't need to. It existed between us and that was enough. More than enough. But there were moments, in the middle of completely ordinary things, when it would hit me without warning. Sitting beside him watching something, his hand absentmindedly finding mine. Catching him looking at me from across the room with that expression that still, after all this time, made me want to look away first. Waking up on a Saturday morning at his place, the light coming in at that particular angle, the sounds of the city outside, him still asleep beside me and completely unbothered by the world. In those moments something in me would go very still and very certain. This, I'd think. Whatever this is I want it. Not forever in a dramatic sense. Not in a way I'd say out loud, because saying it out loud meant it could be taken back, and I was too aware of how temporary things could be to hand that kind of power to the universe.Just this. For now. For as long as we got. I didn't know then how the distance would come. How slowly it would arrive, how quietly, disguised as ordinary life getting in the way. How we'd try to hold the shape of what we'd built even as the walls started shifting. I didn't know any of that yet. I just knew him. His laugh and his prayers and his shameless cheating and the specific warmth of his arms in the dark. And for this season, that was the whole world.

Forbidden Love Story

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