Chapter 17 – The First Absence.

The first time he travelled, he told me a week before. Work, he said. Just a few weeks. He'd be back before I had time to notice he was gone. I said okay. I meant it. I wasn't the kind of person who fell apart over distance I'd always prided myself on that, on not needing someone's physical presence to feel secure in what we had. I had my own life. School, my own things, my own noise to fill the days. A few weeks was nothing. Except it wasn't nothing. It wasn't the missing him that surprised me I expected that. It was the specific texture of the missing. The way certain times of day suddenly had a shape they hadn't had before. Friday evenings especially. I'd catch myself around that time, somewhere in the late afternoon drift toward evening, aware of an absence where a habit had been. We called. Every day, like always, sometimes longer than before because the call was the only place we had. He'd tell me about wherever he was the work, the people, the small irritations of being somewhere unfamiliar. I'd tell him about my days, the school stress, the things that made me laugh, the arguments I'd had with people that I replayed for him in full dramatic detail because his reactions were always worth it. It felt fine. It felt normal. But there was something underneath the normalcy that I didn't examine too closely. A small, quiet shift like a piece of furniture moved an inch. The room looks the same. But you keep almost tripping. He came back when he said he would. Walked through the door and I was already there, already settled on his couch like I hadn't spent the last few weeks recalibrating to his absence, and he looked at me with that look and said, "You missed me." "I did not," I said.He smiled. Sat down beside me. Pulled me into him without ceremony, like picking up something he'd set down temporarily, and I let him because arguing would have required moving. "You missed me," he said again, into my hair. "Experience," I said. He laughed. Long and real. And something in me that had been held slightly tense for weeks finally, quietly, let go. We were fine. We were still us. The absence had bent things slightly but not broken them, and when he was back in the room the bend straightened out and I could breathe normally again. I filed it away as a one-time thing. Work travel. It happened. I didn't know yet that it would keep happening. That the trips would get longer and more frequent and the reasons would start to blur together until I couldn't always tell which ones were genuinely work and which ones were something else a need for air, a way of managing what was building between us that he didn't know how to talk about yet. I didn't know any of that the first time. The first time, I just held onto him in his living room on a Friday evening and let it be simple. It was still simple then.

Forbidden Love Story

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