Forbidden Devotion

Chapter 19: The Boundaries of Reality.

Chapter 19: The Boundaries of Reality

​ The pressure of the upcoming second semester examinations hung heavy over the entire university campus, a suffocating cloud of textbooks, late-night cramming, and nervous energy. Elena sat at her desk, her notes spread out before her, trying to force formulas and theories into a mind that was already entirely consumed by a completely different kind of stress.

​Amidst the academic chaos, her phone vibrated on the table. It was a text from Marco, checking up on her to see how her studying was going.

​Lately, Marco had been attentive, his calls and messages arriving with a predictable regularity. Whenever his name flashed on the screen, a practiced routine took over. Before she could even think about replying, Elena’s fingers moved automatically to her messaging apps. With a few swift, cold taps, she began deleting chunks of her chat history with Julian—specifically the messages filled with late-night vulnerabilities, the whispered longings, and the deep, emotional confessions that she knew would cause an absolute explosion if Marco ever laid eyes on them. It was a necessary survival tactic. She was archiving her soul in pieces, erasing the evidence of her true heart to maintain the fragile peace of her reality.

​That reality became even more claustrophobic when she went to visit Marco at his apartment. Sitting on his couch, surrounded by his things, the digital world she shared with Julian felt dangerously close to colliding with the physical one.

​While she was at Marco’s house, Julian’s calls would inevitably come through. The phone would light up, vibrating against her thigh like a ticking time bomb. Every single time, Elena’s heart would leap into her throat, but she would deliberately press the silence button, watching the screen dim back to black. She couldn't answer. She absolutely refused to let Marco hear the tone of Julian’s voice, or worse, hear the way her own voice shifted into something softer, gentler, and infinitely more alive whenever she spoke to him. To answer Julian in Marco's space was a risk she couldn't afford.

​In those tense, quiet moments of rejection, a cold clarity would wash over Elena.

​She forced herself to believe that she belonged with Marco. It was the only conclusion that kept her sane. Marco was flawed, he was a liar, but he was a man of the world, and she was a woman of the world. They fit into the ordinary, terrestrial order of things. Julian, on the other hand, belonged to God and His sacred work. A man clothed in that kind of destiny was not supposed to have anything to do with a woman—not intimately, not romantically, and certainly not permanently.

​It became a heartbreaking, unspoken cycle: Julian was always there the moment Marco stepped out of the room. The second the heavy door of Marco’s apartment clicked shut and she was left alone, she would reach for her phone, desperate for the comfort only the seminarian could provide.

​But the truth remained, carved into her mind like a commandment. They could not be together. They could indulge in the beautiful, tragic romance of their late-night midnight calls, exchanging pixelated smiles and breathless confessions across the digital divide, but they would definitely never end up together in the real world. Their love was a beautiful ghost, thriving only in the dark, destined to vanish the moment it tried to step into the light of day.

The silence of Marco’s apartment while he was in the kitchen always felt like a vacuum, pulling the air straight out of Elena’s lungs. She stared down at her phone, the screen completely dark. There would be no sudden lighting up of the display, no vibrant ringtone cutting through the room, because she had already turned on her phone's Do Not Disturb mode on her way over. It was a calculated, necessary shield. By keeping her phone completely silent, she ensured that no unexpected calls from Julian could enter her device while she was here, leaving Marco with absolutely nothing to suspect.

​When Marco walked back into the living room, tossing a bag of chips onto the coffee table, he looked entirely oblivious to the silent wall of protection she had just built. He slumped onto the couch beside her, draping a heavy, familiar arm over her shoulders.

​"You look stressed out, babe," Marco said, glancing at her open textbook. "Don't kill yourself over these exams. You're going to pass."

​"Yeah," Elena murmured, forcing a small, tight smile as she leaned into his side. "Just trying to make sure I remember everything."

​Holding onto him felt like anchoring herself to a stormy but solid port. Marco was here, warm and physical, smelling of cheap cologne and the mundane reality of campus life. He was a known entity. His flaws were ordinary human flaws—selfishness, deceit, carelessness—things she knew how to navigate because she had been doing it for years. Loving Marco didn't require her to think about eternity, or sacrilege, or the terrifying concept of an angry Creator watching her from above. With Marco, she was just a normal university student with a messy relationship.

​But as Marco turned on the television, the ambient noise of a random show filling the room, Elena’s thoughts drifted straight back to the seminary.

​She imagined Julian sitting in his sparse room after midnight prayers, looking at his device and perhaps wondering if she was busy studying for her upcoming examinations. It twisted something deep in her stomach to navigate this divide. Julian was sacrificing his peace for her, letting his mind wander from his theological studies to look at her videos, while she was sitting on another man's couch, actively keeping her phone locked down and erasing their daytime presence to protect a relationship she didn't even fully believe in anymore.

​The sheer hypocrisy of it made her feel physically sick. She was deleting their history message by message, like a thief burying evidence in the dead of night. Every deleted text was a tiny betrayal of the deep soulmate connection they shared, a deliberate choice to prioritize her worldly stability over their spiritual bond.

​Yet, as she watched the side of Marco's face while he laughed at something on the TV, she reinforced the wall of her inner prison. This was the right thing to do. It had to be. Julian’s hands were meant to hold a chalice, not her waist. His voice was meant to offer absolution to a congregation, not whisper romantic promises to a girl in a university hostel past midnight. If she allowed him to love her, if she let him walk out of those seminary gates for good, she would be the woman who derailed a divine calling. The guilt of that would crush her completely; she was certain of it.

​So she sat there in the quiet space between the two men, letting the digital romance thrive only when the physical world permitted it. Julian would be there later tonight, she knew. He would wait until the mandatory quiet hours settled over his campus, and once she was back in her own space and the restriction was lifted, they would finally connect. They would be romantic, they would laugh, and they would pretend, for just an hour, that the digital screen was a window into a shared future. But as Elena closed her textbook and leaned further into Marco’s side, she accepted the tragic finality of her choice: they were allowed to dream together in the dark, but they would definitely never end up together in the light.