The Silence After
224 Words
The next morning, Julian didn’t go to the cottage.
He walked past it twice. Toolbag in hand. Coffee in the other. Just in case. But something in him hesitated. The porch was empty. The curtains drawn. The flowers in the ceramic vase she kept by the door were beginning to wilt.
He told himself it was fine. He’d said what he needed to say. He’d gotten it off his chest.
And yet…
He couldn’t work. Couldn’t focus. The scent of jasmine made him ache. The sound of heels on hardwood haunted his thoughts. And every creak of the wind sounded like her voice on the porch again:
“You make me nervous.”
⸻
Meanwhile, inside the cottage, Isadora moved through her morning like a ghost of herself. She put on her white yoga wrap and rolled out her mat, but every stretch made her pulse flutter. Every breath in her lungs carried the echo of his words.
“I’m already burning.”
She shook her head and sank into a child’s pose, hiding her face from the light.
What was she doing? Entertaining feelings for a man young enough to have been born during her second divorce? A boy with bedroom eyes and wild ideas who spoke of desire like it was poetry?
She should be mortified.
But she wasn’t.
She was electrified.
- Writer
