Holding Steady

The silence in the apartment was not the comfortable, companionable kind. It was a silence that hummed with unspoken questions, with the weight of all the things I hadn't said, all the things I was still too afraid to believe. Nathaniel sat across from me at the small kitchen table, the remnants of dinner – a shared pizza, picked at more than devoured – scattered between us. His gaze was steady, not demanding, but it felt like it saw right through the careful facade I’d been maintaining for years, and for the first time, I wondered if seeing wasn’t the same as judging.

He’d brought me flowers again. A small bouquet of sunflowers, their cheerful faces turned upwards as if greeting the sun. They sat in a plain glass vase on the counter, a splash of defiant yellow against the muted tones of my kitchen. Sunflowers. He knew I liked them. He remembered things. It was a small thing, really, but my mind, perpetually trained to look for the cracks, latched onto it. He remembered. What would happen when he forgot? When the novelty wore off, when something better, something easier, came along?

“You’re quiet tonight,” he said, his voice a low rumble that always managed to soothe the frantic fluttering in my chest. It was a familiar dance, this. I withdrew, he noticed, he gently drew me back. And I, like a moth to a flame I knew would burn, found myself leaning in, even as every instinct screamed at me to flee.