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The book in her hands was good, and that was the problem. It was exactly the kind of story that usually swallowed Evamae whole: quiet, character driven, a little sad, the kind of melancholy that felt familiar instead of crushing. Instead, tonight the words kept blurring, smearing into long black strokes on the page as her mind looped back, over and over, to the same man and the same five years.
Julian.
She pushed her thumb harder into the crease of the paperback, her old couch groaning under her shifted weight. The springs poked just enough to be annoying, but not enough to throw out. The fabric was worn smooth beneath her bare legs. On the coffee table in front of her, a mug of green tea had gone cold. Her apartment smelled faintly of the vanilla candle she kept lit. She tried again. One sentence. Two, but by the third, her eyes had drifted to the photo on her lockscreen of her and Julian. They were both sun dazed and smiling with arms thrown around each other at some carnival. She remembered how sweaty she felt during the mid summer, how she’d wanted to hide the redness in her cheeks, how he’d just pulled her in and said, “You look perfect. Stop worrying.” Nineteen year old Eva had believed his words like they were gospel. Twenty five year old Eva believed him a little less now.
She set the book face down on her lap and toyed with her necklace against her sternum grounding herself with that little movement. It had become a small coping mechanism for times she felt she had no control. Three months since his trip. A month long thing for a college class he wasn’t too eager about over in Paris. He’d joked about coming back with an accent and she’d laughed and kissed his cheek, making him promise to text her every night.
He did. At first.
Thinking about it, she realized that was when the distance started. It was small, almost invisible. Just a missed call here and a “Sorry, I fell asleep” there. The way his texts gradually shifted from rambling paragraphs about what he did that day to one word answers. The blue from her side stacking up on each other a little more than she was used to. He’d come back different. Still Julian of course, but blurry around the edges. As if someone took sandpaper to him, smoothing out the warmth and the little bursts of silliness. What was left was quiet, distracted, and miles away.
“Stop it,” she thought to herself, pushing up from the couch.
Her apartment felt too quiet. Her tiny kitchen & the cramped living room with the bedroom just off the hall. She padded over to the window and tugged the curtain aside. The city passed her by outside. Cars passed as she heard a distant siren, feeling like the hum of life she never quite felt part of. Growing up, she’d never quite belonged anywhere. Too quiet and too weird. Too Mexican for her white peers yet not “Mexican enough” for her community. Her Spanish was laughed at yet her English was corrected. Friends who weren’t really friends and a mother who never wanted to stay.
Julian had been the first person who didn’t feel like a placeholder or a lesson in her life. The only one who didn’t make her feel as if she was on the verge of being abandoned. He had asked her what book she was reading as she took a break from studying. Her brows furrowed as she looked around, making sure she was the one being spoken to. He had remembered her answer and where she sat, showing up the next day with his own copy. She thought it was sweet. He kept showing up again and again. Until five years had gone by and she’d gotten used to being loved without the fear of being abandoned.
She let the curtain fall and leaned her forehead against the cool wall. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe grad school stress and that stupid trip had just gotten in his head. People changed. Relationships evolved. It didn’t mean-
A knock sounded at her door.
Eva flinched heart jumping into her throat. She stared down the hallway until the knock came again, softer this time. Her stomach did that awful swoop. Before she checked the time on the microwave,10:13 p.m., before she walked over and peered through the peephole, she knew who it was. Julian.
He stood in the dim hallway light with his shoulders slightly hunched, like he was bracing for impact. His dark hair was messier than usual, curlier from the drizzle outside. A bouquet of flowers, roses and baby’s breath held awkwardly in his hands. Her palm felt suddenly sweaty on the doorknob as she opened the door.
“Hey,” he said softly.
His green eyes found hers immediately, and for a second her brain short circuited. There he was, her Julian. The one who’d kissed her in the library when they were supposed to be studying. The one who held her while she cried about another family gathering from her mother’s absence or on days where she felt like an outsider in her own skin. She missed those times.
“Hi,” she answered, voice a little too thin. They stared at each other for a beat.
“These are for you.” He lifted the flowers, as if he’d just remembered they were there,“I saw them and thought…you’d like them.”
Her hand reached out around the stems pulling them close to her chest feeling bittersweet. Julian wasn’t a bad boyfriend to her, but he knew she always loved daisies. She stepped aside letting him in. He smelled like rain and that cologne she’d helped him pick out on a random shopping day. Her apartment seemed to shift around him, filling with something that had been missing these past few months. He walked past her, careful not to brush against her shoulder and she noticed. Eva closed the door with more force than necessary.
“So-” she started.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted at the same time.
She paused. She folded her arms over her floral tank top. The apology hanging in the air. She felt unsure if she wanted to acknowledge it or not, feeling foreign to the feeling. She was never the one who got the apologies. She started to believe she didn't deserve them. “What’s going on? You’ve been…weird.”
“Right.” he nodded slowly, gaze dropping to her hardwood floors as his left hand came to the back of his neck. Green eyes then slid back up to her brown ones. He looked tired just not his usual grad school tired. Faint shadows under his eyes and something jittery in the way his fingers tapped against the back of his neck then stilled.
“I’ve been off,” he said. “Distant. I know, but I’m sorry.”
Eva’s throat tightened. “What happened?” she asked softer now. “Just…tell me. Please.” Eva felt as if she wasn't just pleading for the truth, but for their relationship.
He hesitated. Then swallowed.
“It’s just been a lot. With school and then that trip.” His voice came out rough, honest enough to be convincing. “I don’t know. It's been messing with my head a lot more than it should.”
Her eyes softened, her worry pushing aside her hurt. “You could always talk to me. You know I-”
“I should’ve talked to you,” he interrupted, stepping closer. “Instead of shutting you out. It’s just, I got scared I guess.” His jaw clenched.
“You know I’m here for you because I choose to be, right?”
The words hit harder than she meant for him, because she did choose him. Again and again, despite every voice, external and internal, that told her it was stupid to trust this much. Stupid to have moved towns for him so she could be by his side as he continued his path into grad school. Hours away from her father, the only family she still had. He’d been the first person to look at her and not see too much or not enough. She was hopelessly devoted and that’s exactly what he needed.
He lifted his hand and cupped her cheek. thumb brushing beneath her eye. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “This is all me, okay? And I’m fixing it.”
“Fixing it?” she echoed, searching his face.
His gaze held steady, even as something inside him twisted. “I promise.”
He’d always told her that. Whenever he raised his voice a little too harsh for her liking, whenever his stare lingered a little longer at girls who looked nothing like her, when he repeated behaviors she asked him to change. That he’d fix it.
“Okay,” she whispered. Believing his word like scripture. Like always.
She leaned into his palm, closed her eyes for half a second. The warmth of his skin, the familiarity of his touch, the way his fingers automatically slid into her hair. None of that felt distant. It hurt how much she still wanted this. How much she still wanted him.
“Stay?” she asked, before she could stop herself. “Just for tonight?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stay.”
Relief softened her shoulders all at once. She stepped forward, slid her arms around his waist pressing her face into his chest. For a moment he froze, every muscle tense. Then he wrapped his arms around her and held on. He could feel her heartbeat through the cotton of his shirt, fast but steady. He remembered that same rhythm from late nights in her dorm room, from afternoons they’d spent tangled on a too small bed and mornings he didn’t want to get up because she was warm, real, and his.
“I missed you,” she mumbled into his chest.
He shut his eyes. “I missed you too.”
“Do you want tea or something?” she asked as she pulled back. “I made green but it’ probably gross by now.”
He shook his head. “I’m good. Are you tired?”
“A little,” she admitted. “I was trying to read but my brain had other plans.”
“Overthinking?” His mouth twitched. “You know that’s your thing.”
Her lips curved, reluctant but real. “Yeah.”
They moved through the small apartment in a well-worn pattern. She poured the old tea down the sink and set the flowers in the only vase she owned, a Goodwill rescue. She placed them in the center of the table. Julian watched her, memorizing the way she fussed with the stems to make them sit just right.
He wondered if he’d see her again after tomorrow tonight. He wondered what “after” even meant.
In the bedroom, she changed into matching shorts ditching her cream sweat pants. She flicked on the small lamp on her nightstand, bathing the room in warm light. Posters peeled slightly at the corners on the walls. Her books cluttered one side of the dresser. A tiny framed photo of her with her dad sat next to a cheap ceramic moon she’d gotten at a street fair.
“Do you want the left side or the right?” she asked, because somehow this felt like a question, even after all these years. Especially now.
He smiled faintly. “You know I always take the left.” He shuffled through his drawer that she decided to keep for him. Clothes for when he spent the night. Nights that felt like a distant memory until now.
“Just checking.” She crawled onto the bed, the mattress creaking. “In case you had a personality transplant on that trip too.”
He flinched.
Eva noticed, but pretended she didn’t.
After replacing his jeans and shirt with his old team's basketball shorts, he lay down beside her. On his back staring up at the familiar cracks in the ceiling. She’d joked once that they looked like constellations if you squinted. Now, the cracks seemed deeper, but maybe that was just him. She rolled onto her side, propping her head up on her hand to look at him. In the lamplight, her dark eyes looked glossy with unshed tears and something more fragile. Hope.
“Julian,” she said quietly.
He turned his head toward her. “Yeah?”
“You’re really okay? Like, really?” She bit her lip. “Because if you’re not, I’d rather know than keep feeling like you will disappear.”
The words came out small, wrapped in too many years of trying to be an easy low maintenance girlfriend, just grateful just to be chosen. Guilt slammed into him so hard he almost said it. He reached out and brushed her hair back from her face, fingers catching briefly on a strand.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you doubt that. I just…needed to figure some things out. But I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe with me tonight, okay?”
Tonight. She heard the comfort and missed the warning.
“Okay,” she whispered.
She slid closer, nestling into the crook of his arm, her head on his shoulder and one leg tangling with his. He folded her in reflexively, his body remembering every line of hers. His hand settled on her back feeling the slow rise and fall as her breathing began to match his. They lay there in the kind of silence that used to feel full. Tonight it was a little thinner stretching tight over everything unsaid.
“Do you think,” she murmured after a while, voice already drowsy, “well be here still in five years”
He stared up at the ceiling.
“Of course,” he said softly.
“I think so too,” she admitted, a ghost of a smile in her words. “You make me feel like I fit. Even if it's just…” Her fingers tightened briefly in his shirt. “…next to you.”
His throat closed.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, so quietly she couldn’t hear the tremor in it.
She didn’t answer. Her breathing had evened out, lashes resting against her cheeks. She looked younger like this, less guarded. Like the nineteen-year-old who’d sat beside him in a lecture hall clutching a secondhand notebook, convinced she was already behind. Julian stared at the curve of her shoulder, the way the lamplight pooled in the hollow of her throat. His hand hovered there for a second, not quite touching. He imagined a knife and felt sick. He turned his head, pressed his lips to her hair. She shifted in her sleep, pressing closer, seeking him even unconsciously. For a heartbeat, the world shrank down to the small warm space between their bodies and the steady thud of her heart against his ribs.
Then, somewhere deep in the building, a pipe groaned.
The sound was low, almost like a distant inhuman sigh. The kind of noise you could write off as old plumbing or the settling of the structure. Julian’s eyes snapped open anyway, breath catching. For a split second, the air in the room felt thicker, heavier, like something huge had rolled over in its sleep far, far away. He told himself he was imagining it. He reached over her and turned off the lamp. Darkness folded gently around them.
Eva exhaled, long and content, the anxiety of earlier finally loosening its hold as she drifted deeper into sleep. She’d worry about tomorrow when she woke. Tonight, she let herself believe his arms around her meant safety. Just like they always felt around her before.
Liamturner119 Mon 05 Jan 2026 09:59AM UTC
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