Chapter 28 – The Naming. - by Writewithoma

We didn't talk about it again for weeks. Life filled in around the conversation the way water fills around a stone it was there, present, shaping everything slightly, but submerged. We went back to our normal. The calls, the Fridays when they happened, the cycle doing its cycle. On the surface nothing had changed. But I was thinking about it. And I knew he was thinking about it. We were two people carrying the same thought in separate rooms and pretending we weren't. The second conversation happened after a fight. Not a bad one not the kind that left marks. Just one of our routine ones, the sharp-mouthed kind that flared hot and died quickly, the kind we'd had so many times that we had a muscle memory for getting through them. We'd come out the other side of it and were in that particular post-argument quiet, both of us settled, the air cleared. Then he said: "I think we need to talk about what I said. That night." I looked at him across the room. "I know." "I've been praying about it more." "I know that too." He sat forward. Elbows on his knees, hands together, looking at the floor and then up at me. His face had that quality it got when something was costing him open and careful at the same time, like he was handling something that could break in the wrong hands. "I think the physical part of us" he started. "Is affecting everything else," I finished. He nodded. "It's like every time things get hard, that's where we go. And it fixes the moment but it doesn't fix the thing underneath. And I think" He stopped. "I think God is trying to tell me something about that. About what it means when the thing that's supposed to bring you closer is the thing that keeps you from building something real." I was quiet. "I know how that sounds," he said. "It sounds like you're saying we should stop," I said. Flat. Honest. "I'm saying I think we need to try." He looked at me. "Not because I don't want you. You know that's not what this is." "Then what is it." "It's" He exhaled slowly. "How do you tell the person you love that you want to build something that lasts? That what you have right now is real but it's also" He searched for the word. "Consuming. In a way that's making it hard to see clearly. Hard to hear clearly. Hard to know what this actually is underneath everything else." I stared at him for a long moment. "And you think stopping will fix that," I said. "I think stopping will show us what's actually there," he said. "When it's not the thing filling all the space." The room was quiet. I wanted to argue. I had arguments ready good ones, logical ones, ones that poked holes in the theology of it and questioned whether this was really about faith or really about fear. I had a whole case built in my head that I could have delivered with precision. Instead I heard myself say, quietly: "And if it's not enough? If we stop and there isn't something there that's enough. Without it." He looked at me. Something in his eyes was very honest. "Then we'd know," he said. "Wouldn't we." I looked away. Out the window. At the nothing outside. The thing I didn't say the thing I was not ready to say was that I was terrified of that. Terrified not of the answer being no, but of the question itself. Because as long as we didn't remove the thing that was filling all the space, we didn't have to find out what was underneath. And the not knowing, as painful as it was, felt safer than an answer that couldn't be undone. "I need to think," I said. "I know." "I'm not I'm not saying no." "I know that too." He came and sat beside me. Not touching. Just present, the way he was always present solidly, without demand. "I don't want to lose you," he said quietly. "Whatever we decide. I need you to know that." I looked at him. "Then maybe," I said, "you should've thought about that before you went and made me fall for you." Something crossed his face pain and warmth and something almost like a smile, all at once. He reached over and took my hand. Said nothing. We sat like that for a long time. Two people on the edge of something that was going to change the shape of everything, neither of us quite ready to step off. But both of us knowing, in that quiet honest place, that the stepping was coming. Whether we were ready or not.

Forbidden Love Story

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