The Sin Between Us

Chapter 13: Still Thinking About Thursday

Then I said it back.

"I think about you too. Every single day. More than is reasonable for either of us."

Something shifted in his face immediately fast, unguarded, real in a way I hadn't seen from him before, not even in the wine bar, not even that first night in my aunt's living room.

All that careful composure he wore like a second jacket seemed to slip for one full second, and underneath it was just a man standing on a sidewalk who'd finally heard the thing he'd apparently been bracing not to hear.

He reached out slowly and tucked a piece of my hair back, the same unhurried motion as that first Thursday outside this exact building.

His thumb traced the line of my jaw on the way down, slower this time, like he was in no rush to let the moment end, like he'd decided the street could stay empty around us for as long as he needed it to.

"Go inside," he said.

His voice had dropped lower than I'd heard it go before, rough at the edges in a way that undid something in my chest.

I went inside.

I pressed my back flat against the cool metal of the lobby door once it clicked shut behind me and closed my eyes, standing there in the dim entryway for a full minute, maybe longer, just breathing, feeling my own pulse in my throat, in my wrists, everywhere at once.

The building was quiet around me, someone's television murmuring faintly behind a door down the hall, the elevator humming somewhere above, and none of it touched the noise going on inside my own headEventually I pulled out my phone. Opened his name.

Typed..I know you're still outside.

Three seconds passed.

Yeah.

Go home, Jude.

Working on it.

I stood there another minute, phone in hand, half expecting the lobby door to open behind me, half hoping it would. It didn't.

Four minutes later, one final message arrived, no lead-up to it at all

Next Thursday feels too far away.

I read it standing exactly where I'd been standing the whole time, my back still against that door, and I didn't have a single sensible thing left in me to say back to that no careful deflection, no joke to soften it, none of the usual tools I reached for when things got too close to true. So I just typed the only honest reply available to me:

I know.

And meant it more than I'd meant anything I'd said all week, maybe more than I'd meant anything in longer than that. I stood in that empty lobby for a while after I hit send, phone still lit in my hand, listening for footsteps outside that never came, and something about the not-coming felt like its own kind of promise that whatever this was between us now had a shape, even unnamed, even hidden, even entirely against every reasonable instinct either of us still had left.

Upstairs, I didn't turn on the overhead light.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with my coat still on, phone resting face-up on my knee in case it lit up again, and thought about the particular way he'd said “go inside”, like the words had cost him something to get out.

I thought about how easy it would have been for him to say nothing at all tonight, to let another Thursday pass unspoken the way the first four had, and how instead he'd chosen, deliberately, standing under a streetlight with nothing but cold air between us, to hand me the one thing neither of us had dared put into words before.

I didn't sleep for a long time. I lay there running the whole night back from the beginning… the checkered tablecloths, the bread basket, the moment I'd leaned too far across the table without noticing, his hand at my jaw, his voice gone low on my doorstep and somewhere in the replaying of it I stopped bothering to pretend I didn't already know exactly where all of this was heading.