forbidden

chasing the forbidden(herPOV)

I used to count the days since I last saw Evan. At first, it was unconscious—every morning I’d wake up and think, It’s been three days since the park. Then it became a ritual. A punishment.

I stopped counting around day eighty-six. Not because I’d stopped thinking of him, but because it had started to hurt in new ways. It was easier to pretend it was a lifetime ago.

After everything fell apart, my mother transferred me without discussion. Bags packed, dorm cleared, phone locked away. It felt like being airlifted out of my own story. The goodbye I never got to give haunted me. There was no note, no text. Just silence. Cold and brutal. Like we’d never existed.

The thing is—we had. We had existed in the late hours, in whispered poetry, in his hands tangled in my hair, in the way he said my name like it was his final prayer. We were real. Even if the world didn’t want us to be.

But I didn’t reach out.

I couldn’t. I knew if I heard his voice, saw his name light up on my screen, I would run back. I would destroy every boundary that had been imposed between us. And maybe that’s what terrified me more than anything else—how easy it would have been to break every rule again.

So I stayed away.

And I lived. Kind of.

I changed majors. Started working with kids at a nonprofit. Moved across the country, got engaged to a man who never made me feel like a secret. He’s kind. He listens. He thinks I’m a little mysterious but never asks why. I liked that at first. The safety of someone who didn’t dig too deep.

I’m happy. Or at least, I thought I was. But sometimes, when the house is quiet or when laughter doesn’t quite reach my eyes, I realize I’m not whole. There’s a sliver of something missing. A wound that never really healed.

Because the truth is, I feel incomplete.

And now that I’ve seen him—Evan—again, all those old feelings have come rushing back. The ache in my chest, the way my skin remembers the way he used to touch me, the quiet thrill in his voice when he’d say my name. It all lives in me, dormant but alive.

Then, on a rainy Friday, I walked into a bookstore and saw a ghost.

He was holding a book, something worn, something French. His hair was longer, streaked with gray at the temples, and he had this beard that wasn’t quite trimmed. But it was him. My Evan.

He looked up, and my heart stopped. Then I saw the book drop slightly in his hand. The flicker in his eyes. I braced myself for him to come over, but he didn’t.

He left.

And it hurt more than I expected.

For a week, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Wondering if I’d imagined it. But part of me knew I hadn’t. He’d seen me. Seen us.

So I went back. Same place. Same time. Hoping.

When I looked up and saw him again, walking toward me, my entire body lit up in ways I hadn’t felt in five years. He said my name, and I almost cried.

The café felt too small for all the things I wanted to say. But I didn’t say them. I told him the surface things. That I was getting married. That I’d found work. That I was okay.

He asked why I left without saying goodbye.

"Because if I had looked at you again, I wouldn’t have left," I told him.

It was the truth. I had no armor with him. I still don’t.

When he told me about his classes, the way he read Camus out loud to an empty lecture hall, I wanted to reach across the table and kiss him. To tell him he was still the center of a universe I was pretending not to orbit.

But I didn’t. I wasn’t that girl anymore. And he wasn’t mine to claim.

When I left, I touched his hand. Just once. Skin to skin. Enough to remind him I’d never truly let go. Enough to remind myself.

That night, I sat in the bathtub, fully clothed, crying. My fiancé knocked, but I didn’t answer. I stayed in there until the water turned cold and my fingers pruned.

The next day, I wrote Evan a letter.

No return address. Just words.

"Thank you for loving me when no one else understood me. You were never a mistake. You were my miracle."

I mailed it from a town two hours away.

I never expected a response. I didn’t need one. I just needed him to know. To carry that piece of me in the pages of whatever book he was holding that day.

Sometimes, when I walk through bookstores or pass coffee shops alone, I wonder if he’s doing the same. If somewhere, in some small moment, we occupy the same air again.

I still dream of him sometimes.

Sometimes we’re in the park again. Safe. Whole. He’s reading Neruda, and I’m mouthing the words along with him.

Sometimes we’re older, gray and weathered, laughing over wine and stories that never got told.

Sometimes, we’re nothing but a silence between chapters.

But always, I wake up aching.

Because there are loves you survive.

And there are loves you never get over.

He was both.

Once.

Always.

And somehow, even now, I believe we aren’t finished.