He said he’d call later and she heard it the way you hear most things that don’t come with a time,
not trusting it, not dismissing it, just letting it sit somewhere loose.
The evening moved on without asking her permission. Food happened. The kitchen got messy.
She sat down, stood up, sat again, and only much later noticed how often her phone had been in her hand without her remembering picking it up.
The message came when the night was already tired.
He said he was exhausted. He added a quick sorry. He didn’t say anything about the call.
The words didn’t lean one way or another. They just existed, which somehow made them heavier.
Her fingers started typing before she had a chance to argue. The reply formed quickly, almost too quickly, polite, flexible, familiar in the way a sentence becomes familiar after you’ve used it to keep peace a few dozen times.
She stopped halfway through and stared at it, not shocked, just annoyed, like noticing you’re wearing the same outfit you always reach for when you don’t want to think.
She erased it.
She typed it again.
She erased it again.
She told herself she was being unnecessarily difficult.
That answering would take no effort at all. That nights like this didn’t need to stretch into something bigger.
Still, she didn’t send it.
She put the phone down, not with intention, just far enough away to interrupt the reflex.
She wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge even though she wasn’t hungry, stared at the shelves she knew by heart, closed it, leaned against the counter longer than needed. The urge followed her there, steady and patient, reminding her how often replying had made things feel calmer, at least for a while.
When she went back to the couch, she picked the phone up again, reread the message, felt the pull return, and put it back down, face down this time, partly because the screen was bright and partly because she didn’t want to see it waiting.
The feeling didn’t leave.
It shifted around. It thinned out. It came back softer.
It behaved the way things behave when you don’t rush to settle them.
Eventually, the room started to feel like a room again.
The hum outside. The weight of her body sinking into the cushion. Nothing had been fixed either.
In the morning, the message was still there.
She deleted the thread while waiting for her coffee and didn’t linger on it, noticed instead how quickly her attention drifted elsewhere, which felt unfamiliar in a quiet way.
Days passed. His name crossed her mind once while she was busy with something else. She noticed it and kept doing what she was doing.
She didn’t talk about it. There wasn’t a clean version of it that sounded right out loud.
Later, when someone else hesitated with her, she felt herself lean forward out of habit, already preparing to smooth the pause. She caught herself mid-movement and stayed where she was, letting the silence do whatever it was going to do without her help.
It wasn’t comfortable.
It didn’t last forever.
She stayed.
Leave a Reply