Chapter 19 – Fault Lines.

The fights started small. They always do. A comment that landed wrong. A tone that came out sharper than intended. A silence that stretched thirty seconds past comfortable into something that needed addressing and didn't get addressed. Small things. The kind of things you brush off once, twice, five times, and then one day you don't brush off and suddenly you're in the middle of something that feels much bigger than the thing that started it. Because it was bigger. The small things were never really about themselves. They were about the accumulation the missed Fridays and the shortened calls and the distance that kept appearing in different forms and the fact that neither of us had said any of it out loud yet. He had a way of going quiet when something was wrong that I found maddening. Not cold he never went cold exactly but contained. Like he'd pulled something in and closed a door over it and was waiting for the moment to pass. I, on the other hand, had a way of sharpening when something was wrong. My mouth got faster, my edges got clearer, and I'd find myself saying things with a precision that wasn't quite cruelty but wasn't kindness either. We were bad for each other in arguments. Or rather, we were bad at them. Too much pride between us, too much sharpness, not enough of the thing that made us good at everything else the ease, the hearing the thing beneath the thing. In arguments we both stopped listening for the underneath. There was one night a call that had started normally and then tilted, the way they'd started doing, into something tense where he said something dismissive about something I'd said, and I felt the heat rise in me so fast it almost surprised me. "Say that again," I said. Quiet. Dangerous. "I'm just saying" "No, say exactly what you just said. Again." He didn't. Which was smarter than repeating it but also, in the moment, more infuriating. We went back and forth. Not screaming we weren't screaming people, usually but sharp and pointed and getting nowhere fast, and at some point I said something I knew would land like a blade and I said it anyway, and there was a silence after it that had a different quality than all the others. Then he said, very evenly, "I'm going to go." And he did. I sat with my phone in my hand for a long time after that. The anger was still there but underneath it something else had cracked open slightly. A worried thing. A thing that knew we were good at a lot but not at this. He called back two hours later. Neither of us apologised directly. We weren't good at that either. But the sharpness had gone out of both of us and what was left was something tired and something that still, underneath the tired, wanted to fix it. "I hate fighting with you," I said eventually. "Then stop starting fights," he said, but there was no heat in it anymore. "I hate when you go quiet." A pause. "I know." "It makes me think" I stopped. Restarted. "It makes me feel like I'm outside something." Another pause. Longer. "I don't mean to do that," he said. Quieter now. "I know," I said. We stayed on the call for another hour after that, not talking about any of it anymore, just existing in the same space the way we used to. Eventually he prayed, low and quiet, and I listened and felt the worst of the tension drain out of me like water. It wasn't resolved. Not really. The things underneath were still there, unexamined, waiting. But we'd found our way back to each other for the night. We were good at that part, at least. Finding our way back.

Forbidden Love Story

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