— healthy habit || l.s.k
pairing: leon x fem!reader
tags: age gap, mentions of sex but nothing explicit, lots of angst etc. etc. ive never gotten over anything ever this is proof of that
summary: To him, it is a sort of incorporeal fantasy; watered-down and a ghost of the truth he is capable of. To you, he is the gospel you live your life by.
word count: 5.8k
a/n: inevitably i am back in the building again lol. this is pretty half-assed but i needed to write my feelings out. not written with any particular leon in mind but re9 moreso just cuz i've been playing it recently (obviously)
playlist ⭑AO3
Loving Leon came easy for you.
That, in its own right, was the hardest part.
Looking back now, you don’t know how much of it was real, and how much of him lived in your head; a part of you hates him for that, but a part of you has never stopped loving him despite it.
In your memory, the engine idles lamely at a red light. The city is just waking up, a blush-pink sunrise flirts with the city skyline, and you’re sitting in Leon’s car. The sharp smell of something faintly citrusy, the worn smell of leather. You like the contradiction. You decide it suits him.
You’re curled into the passenger seat with your bag at your feet, knees angled towards the centre console in hopes Leon’s hand might slip off the gear and onto your thigh.
The heat hums quietly through the vents, and when you shiver, Leon reaches over without looking and turns it up a notch.
“Cold?” he asks.
“A little.”
He’s always like this, too much care hidden under layers of what comes across as faux disinterest.
“You eat anything?” he asks then, it comes out simple, like a parent checking in. From anyone else the needless concern would come across as pitying, but from Leon, it’s like the universe.
You shake your head minutely. “Didn’t have time.”
Leon’s jaw ticks as the light turns green, he takes the turn with one hand. “You’re going to wither away on me,” he murmurs, a tried and true line you’ve heard a hundred times over.
“I’ll grab a coffee before class,” you say as if it’ll suffice.
“That’s not how that works, sweetheart,” he glances at you, a small smile playing on his lips. The combination makes your heart flutter, the pet name, the affection he saves just for you, you, you.
Truthfully, you barely even liked coffee before Leon. Couldn’t stomach anything more than a mocha with extra chocolate, hated the burnt, bitter taste it’d leave behind in your mouth.
Leon had corrected you on that, of course. Told you it meant you’d only had bad coffee, showed you how to use the lavish coffee machine he keeps at home. You had pretended to understand it at first, like you could already tell the difference between what he considered real coffee and the watery stuff you used to buy on campus.
But now you can. You catch yourself doing the same thing he does, the same ways he does. It’s funny, how he’s weaselled himself into your life like that. Quiet little alterations that you didn’t even notice happening at first.
Small habits, preferences. Little pieces of him.
You absorb them all, drunk on him, desperate to unravel the clockwork parts of his mind. To pull them apart and put them back together. To feel woman enough to be the one to do it.
Each little truth, each thing you learn about him, feels like proof that being close to him has changed you. Sharpened you, maybe. Like knowing him has added something to the person you’re becoming.
And it makes you want him more.
Not just because he’s older, but because being near him pulls the world a little wider open in front of you. So when he looks at you like this now, in the soft glow of the rising sun spilling through the car windows, with that faint private smile you like to imagine is only for you, you get the dangerous feeling that maybe he likes what you’re becoming, too.
It is the most intoxicating thing about him.
And so, that’s how you like to remember him. The moments where he was your entire universe, your centre of gravity. Where he made you feel safe, needed, wanted. Like you mattered to a man as magnetic as him.
But all overtly sweet things spoil with time, and for you, Leon’s milk-sour promises became a staple in the shelf life of your relationship.
He tends to promise you a lot of things. That he’ll do better, that he’ll stop drinking, that he’ll remember to grab groceries on the way home. Following through proves to be futile for him.
It’s close to midnight when the door finally opens.
The mechanical click of the lock, the shuffle of shoes, the rustle of his jacket being hung up.
You know he knows what waits for him. The hallway light gives it away: you, waiting up for him, you, expecting him, you, expecting more of him.
He pauses in the space between the living room and dining room regardless, like he can sense the tension waiting for him, coiled and patient, like you’ve made your home a minefield.
“You’re still up,” he says, already defensive, moving to busy himself with something pointless. You don’t bother to look up.
“You said you’d be back early,” your voice is calm despite your stormy eyes.
There’s the smallest exhale from him, practiced in its control—the sound of a man bracing for impact. It makes you wonder how many women before you had tried to get through to him the same way you do now, how many times he’s exhaled just like that in light of being told what he’s done wrong. It makes you feel stupid.
“Work ran late.” It’s the economy of it that irks you. Three words, clipped and entirely airless, as if the explanation should be self-sustaining enough.
You let the silence stretch long enough to share with him the discomfort of your disappointment. You don’t even look at him, you don’t have to. The minute shift of his weight, the scuff of his heel against the floor is proof enough—the image of him standing there, braced for impact, impatient with it.
“You could’ve texted.”
Leon exhales through his nose, drops his keys into the ceramic dish on the counter with a crack that ricochets through the room. “I didn’t have time.”
You hum, noncommittal. Leon hates that sound, you know he hates it, it’s the one he knows means that you’ve passed outrage and instead have settled into assessment. Like you’ve accepted that he will do nothing but disappoint you, that you’re not even angry enough to argue, that instead, you are taking inventory of his actions and filing him away under predictable.
“You don’t believe me,” he says.
“I believe you didn’t try.”
That’s when he finally looks at you. His eyes carry a sort of premature exhaustion, a man aging in real-time under the fluorescent light of your dining room. For a flicker of a second, guilt sows its seeds.
It doesn’t root.
“You knew what this was when you got involved with me,” his tone grows snappy, but the last half comes out under his breath, a dry, half-serious afterthought that rankles more than a full-on insult. “No refunds, sweetheart.”
It’s the offhanded way he says it, flippant and defensive, making a joke out of how hurt your heart is. His half-hearted attempt to keep you both from falling too far into anything too real.
You stare at him then, anger brightening behind your eyes, is it so hard for him to stay simple and steady? For him to take you seriously for longer than a moment?
“Not funny,” your voice comes, low and furious.
He shrugs, that infuriating half-tilt of his shoulder. “I’m just saying. I don’t exactly work a nine-to-five.”
It’s not until his eyes meet yours, that you think he realises the tone your voice had taken, one he knows he can’t charm away. The self-satisfied half-smile on his lips slips away, and for a heartbeat you see him recalibrate—his mouth softening, the sarcasm retreating like a tide.
“What do you want me to say?” he asks, suddenly too earnest, too exposed. “That I’ll do better?”
“I didn’t ask you for any of that,” you say softer now; you don’t raise your voice when you speak, you never do, because you’ve learnt that restraint drives him crazier than yelling ever could. “I asked you to come home.”
Fighting words.
The guilt flashes across Leon’s face fast, but you catch it. The drop of his lips, the softening of his gaze. Again, you feel almost guilty.
“That’s— that’s the same thing.” He fires back. “With you, it always is.”
“Right. So why do you keep promising then?”
He turns away, and you know the words have landed. A clean shot.
Leon runs a hand through his hair like he can scrub the frustration out of himself. “You like doing this,” he mutters. “Pushing until I lose my temper.”
“Maybe,” you say, “At least then I know you feel something.”
Leon whirls back around, and his tongue is sharp. A thousand words he could make fitting, immature the first on his mind. But the truth of it is almost laughable, you, half his age. Immaturity is a given. Goddamn, Kennedy, what have you gotten yourself into?
“Well gee, sweetheart, you really know how to flatter me,” he scoffs, and you know this is his last defence, when the bitter sarcasm finally surfaces. Enough for you to maybe think you’ve won.
“You don’t talk to me,” you continue, pressing firmly, deliberately, poking a bruise that won’t quite heal now. “You disappear, you shut me out, and then you come home expecting me to just— what? Be grateful you showed up at all?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to.”
His voice hardens, “You’re acting like a child.”
And there it is, the money line. It makes you shut up real fast, the way you press your lips together quickly, the way your jaw ticks. Leon knows you hate when he brings up your age. He thinks it bothers you because it threatens your intelligence, because you’ve always been the girl who believed she could outgrow the blueprint handed to her. The type of girl who watched her mother settle and promised herself she would not. The girl who swore she would choose wisely, love wisely, and never tether herself to a man like him..
What he doesn’t understand is that it isn’t your pride or your ego that stings, but the implication that you should know better, and yet you are still here. It is like a reminder that no matter how steady you try to sound, you are still, in his mind, unfinished. Still standing in his living room, heart pounding, asking a man twice your age why he won’t come home to you when he says he will.
“Then stop letting me stay,” your voice is paper thin. “If I’m such a mistake to you, stop keeping me.”
The silence that crashes down between you is heavy and absolute.
For a moment, you think he might actually do it. That this is the night he heeds your advice, that he’ll stop being selfish and tell you to go.
But instead, you watch the fight drain out of him in increments. Regret manifests in the slope of his shoulders, guilt in the shape of his eyes.
“Jesus,” he mutters, hanging his head low. Not at you, you realise, but at himself.
You soften with it, and bitterness bites your tongue; you hate how easily he gets to you. This man before you is not what you wanted, you wanted his sharp edges, proof that you still mattered enough to provoke him, to mean something to him.
Instead, he is trying to round himself out right before your eyes. Trying to assemble something gentler from the wreckage you had caused. Rebuilding in real time, brick by careful brick.
“I’m not good at this,” he admits, voice rough, rough, rough, words painfully foreign on his tongue. “I don’t know how to be what you’re asking me for.”
Your own words rise and stall, lodged somewhere behind your ribs, they are thick as smoke, and you do not trust your own voice to not sell you out. Afraid that if you open your mouth, it will come out more like a plea instead of a point.
“I don’t— I don’t want to be something you come back to so you can feel less alone.” You force yourself to say, tacking onto the end, “it’d be a waste of my time,” just so he knows this is not you being vulnerable. No, never that. This is you setting boundaries. This is you being the bigger person. This is you, meeting him where he stands.
His jaw tightens, but there is no bite in the line of it anymore. He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t say anything at all.
The absence of his answer hurts more than if there had been a denial of your truth.
Despite it he moves towards you, quick enough that you can’t react, can’t make a show of pushing him a way, can’t make a show of not needing him.
You don’t know at which point you had stood up, but his arm wraps around your shoulders tight, almost punishing in their intensity, and he pulls you into his chest.
Your anger melts on contact, it always does—it is nature to you. His body is his apology he doesn’t know how to say aloud, his grip the confession of his wrongdoings. You hate how quickly your body forgives what your pride will not.
So you press your cheek to his chest and listen to the beat of his heart; fast, uneven, pitiful bursts.
“You scare me,” he admits quietly, slipping out of his mouth like he doesn’t mean to say it out loud.
It startles you, the way you can hear the truth in his voice. You don’t look up, don’t dare move in case his walls rebuild themselves.
His chin rests on the top of your head.
“You make this hard.”
“You make it harder.”
A ghost of a laugh leaves him.
His hand moves up your back slowly, smoothing over the tension he helped create. It’s the same rhythm every time: spark, flame, ash, and then… this. This reconciliation that feels more intimate than the fight itself.
“I’ll do better,” he says.
There it is. The promise.
You hear it for what it is, and you think Leon does too, but, regretfully, you nod anyway. Let yourself fall into the falsities of the comfort he provides you. So you close your eyes, because this is the part you’ll remember later.
Not the excuses, or the temper, or the anger that curdled you so violently. Instead, you will remember his half-hearted kindness, and you will forget his inability to admit to his mistakes. You will remember the way he held you like he was afraid of losing you, someone he had never truly made the effort to keep.
He confuses you deeply, so much so you will spend the next six months trying to come to terms with what he means to you. How much you know and how much you don’t. What parts of him are really him and what is a facade you are forcing yourself to believe.
All you know, for now, is that when he finally loosens his grip on you, when he presses a tired kiss to the crown of your head, and mutters, “come to bed,” like a white-flagged truth, you follow blindly.
When you lie beside him, watching the steady way his body rises and falls, tracing the slope of his shoulders with your gentle gaze again, and again, and again, you will tell yourself it’s the real him. You will tell yourself the rest is just collateral, and somewhere between the anger and the hope that he will be better, you decide—again, fruitlessly—that you will stay.
Cognisance becomes something transient to you; you begin to live in the afterglow of almost; between maybe’s, and sometimes’, and blind hope.
You remember, despite the way the memory of him slips through you like smoke, how safe you felt in his arms.
A cool summer’s morning after a warm summer’s night, you lay beneath the press of Leon’s body and against his cold sheets. His arm is locked beneath your waist, fingers brushing up your side absently as he kisses you like he has nowhere else to be.
There is nothing heated about the way he is with you now, nothing desperate, nothing more than the soft presses of his mouth to yours, unhurried, like this is something you’ve done a hundred times before, and will do a hundred times more.
You sink into it, into the feel of him.
Your hand slides up his chest, fingertips grazing his collarbone, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing beneath your clammy palms. He hums into your mouth when you deepen the kiss, his arm coiling tighter around you, keeping you close, keeping you safe.
It feels easy, a could-be normal.
This is the Leon you wish you could keep. The version of him that seems to only exist on occasion.
Your eyebrows draw together, and the tears come without warning. You feel the sting of them, the tightening of your throat, and you pull back, the air in the room is suddenly syrupy-thick.
“Hey,” Leon murmurs, brushing a thumb beneath your eye so tenderly you wince. “What’s wrong?”
You shake your head, trying to get the words out around your trembling lips and twisted tongue. “Nothing, I just—”
Your voice catches, you laugh weakly in embarrassment. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”
His expression shifts, concern deepening in the wrinkles between his brows, and he pushes himself off you enough to study your face properly.
“Did I hurt you?” He asks quietly.
“No,” the answer is immediate. Certain. “No, it’s not that.”
Words fail you now, so instead you seek the warmth of his shoulder, nosing into the crook of his neck and wrapping your arms around him. His hand moves instinctively up your spine, slow, steady, safe, safe, safe.
“I’m sorry, it’s stupid.” Your voice comes, muffled by the press of your lips to his skin.
“It’s not stupid,” he counters almost immediately, voice lower now. Gentler.
His hand slides into your hair, doesn’t pull away but keeps you closer. “You’re okay,” he continues. “I’m right here. Nothing’s happening. It’s just us.”
Just us, just us, just us.
You melt against him once more; pliant and trusting, your heartbeat slows, and the storm passes as quickly as it came.
“Sorry,” your voice is tender now.
His, the same. “Don’t.”
And Leon understands now—with terrible, precise clarity—what this is doing to you.
What’s been hovering just out of reach, something a part of him has known for a while, but his cowardice has never let him fully admit, slides into focus: You aren’t just staying for the thrill of it all, for the heat of it. You have begun, quietly and stubbornly, to build something holy around him in your head. Something that is steady, something capable of lasting.
It has been doing the work for him, that cowardice, keeping him from naming what it is he can’t quite give you. He sees, finally, and uncomfortably, that he does not know how to be the man your scaffolding requires, to live up to the version of himself you have replaced him with in your head. Not consistently, not for you.
To him, it is a sort of incorporeal fantasy; watered-down and a ghost of the truth he is capable of. To you, he is the gospel you live your life by.
But, despite himself, he cannot bring himself to move away. Instead, he only presses his lips to your hair again, holding you like you are diaphanous, capable of slipping right through his fingers if he isn’t careful enough. Like he isn’t already aware of the fracture line running straight through the permanency you’ve disillusioned yourself into believing.
“Go to sleep,” his voice comes, soft as rain.
You nod, entirely trusting. In the stillness that follows, with your heart wide open against his, he understands fully the truth he’s been avoiding:
He is leading you somewhere he himself cannot follow you to.
And it is after many months of this push and pull, of the arguments and the fallouts and the makeup sex, that Leon comes to terms with the fact of the matter. He cannot keep you. He cannot have you in a way that matters. Not in the way you want him to.
He tells himself over and over, every night, that this will be the one where he lets you go. That he will make the decision, be the bigger person, save you the heartbreak that builds steadily with each day that passes.
He rehearses it in his head; he’ll say you deserve more, he’ll say he’s too set in his ways, he’ll say this isn’t fair to you.
He practices the words like a pastor memorises bible verses, flattening the emotion out of them until they sound reasonable, mature, inevitable. And he thinks, each time, that it sounds just right.
But then he looks at you and he remembers how you were when he first met you. Bright, in that reckless, shimmering way only someone as young as you could be. Sweet, yes, but not soft—there had been a sharpness to you even then, a dangerous sort of curiosity that made you lean into things most people would’ve had the sense to step away from. You had been alluring in the careless way girls your age are: old enough to know better, but hungry enough to want.
Hunger. That’s the word he would’ve used.
You had it in the way you spoke, in the way you looked at him when he explained something about the world like he knew it better than anyone else. How you made him feel knowledgeable, powerful, like you ached to know what went on inside his head. Your wanting was violent, your desire to be wanted moreso.
At first, Leon thought he was just humoring you. A kid with a crush, a wishy-washy phase that would pass once you realised he wasn’t nearly as interesting as you’d made him out to be.
But your persistence proved unwavering.
The shape of your want was disastrous. Monstrous. For every horrifying thing Leon had fought, conquered, killed, your want he could not.
And quickly, without warning, he was struck by the strange, unfamiliar feeling that someone actually cared whether or not he was in the room.
You wanted him.
It had been the part that unsettled him the most.
Leon had seen enough of the world to recognise a girl who thought she was clever, who believed she had outgrown the mistakes of the women before her. Awfully enough, he had seen straight through you from the beginning. Seen straight through the stubbornness, the blind way you mistook intensity for devotion and devotion for love. The way you thought the act of choosing to make the wrong choice, of knowing better and doing it anyway, made you smarter, made you capable of self-control, capable of being able to stop the situation when it became too scorching to hold any longer.
He knew, even then, that he was simply the lucky pick—the man you had chosen to sink those newly sharpened adult teeth into. A proving ground. Just another story you would tell yourself later three years down the road; about the first man who made you feel like a woman.
He should’ve let you go right there and then, should’ve known better.
But he remembers. He remembers, remembers, remembers.
The way you looked at him, saw him, saw through him, saw more of him.
Like he could be something solid, something steady. Like he was the kind of man worth orbiting. He had lived off that look for longer than he should’ve.
He still does.
Because the truth—the one he hates most—is that his life has never been something he could control. Not the work, not the ghosts that trail him home, not the way the world seems determined to keep dragging him through one fire after another.
But you? You were the one thing that chose him first, the one thing that made him feel like he had any ounce of power left.
And he hates himself for how much that matters. How you’re the only one who has ever made him feel man enough.
He remembers how it had been after one of the worse fights, one that didn’t end so much as collapse in on itself. You’d arrived home late, hair and skin and coat pebbled by the rain. You, too tipsy to think straight, you’d fallen straight into his arms as soon as he’d opened door, as though gravity had decided he himself was the safest place to land.
You’d asked him all sorts of thoughtless questions, words loose and careless, like the cheap drinks you’d got yourself tipsy on, they bubbled up past your throat with little restraint, all of them too naked to be asked sober. \
Did he love you? Does he need you? Why, out of all the things he could have chosen in his life, does he keep choosing this?.
And Leon, well he had not been in any condition to soften the answers. The day had worn him thin; selfishly taken away the patience he kept aside just for you. And thinking about it now, with the distance only memory provides, he knows you should have left that night. Any sensible person would have.
Because he had told you the truth. Or at least parts of it, enough to wound, to see if you had the self respect to get up and leave.
That he keeps you around because it’s easy. Because you fit into the empty holes of his life without asking for anything he could not give. That he didn’t see this becoming something permanent, something that was capable of holding the shape or future or the weight you clearly wanted to place on it.
You’d cried viciously, with a raw, relentless grief that frightened even Leon. Hours of it. Your voice breaking and hitching and spluttering as though your body had forgotten how to regulate itself.
And when Leon had tried to escape the gravity he himself had created, you’d followed him into the bathroom.
When he turned the water on, hotter than needed, a burning exorcism, thundering down over his shoulders until the air was dense and difficult to breath, he remembers you—
Settling down on the cool tile floor, draped over the lip of the tub like a woman in black mourning her wedding dress, eyes red and shining.
The room was suffocating, he was suffocating, and still, still, still, you did not leave.
Instead, your hand slipped through the opening in the shower curtain, reaching blindly until you found him. His own hand closed around yours, he thinks about how small it felt in his grip, not physically, but emotionally. How stubbornly you’d held on despite the way his words were made to cut. Despite the truth he had laid bare between you, ugly and undeniable.
You’d stayed there, sitting on the bathroom floor as the steam curled around you, cloying and thick, the tiles leeching the warmth from your skin.
Your hand remained threaded with his through the flimsy plastic shower curtain, your grip as unwavering as your loyalty. As if that single point of contact would be enough to anchor him to you. As if, should you let go, he might simply dissolve into the rising heat and disappear from you entirely.
Because to you, even then, leaving him had seemed less bearable than staying.
And he’d left you there after, gone to get dressed, and come back to you falling asleep with your head knocking against the tile.
He’d carried you to bed, but the jostle of your body had scared you awake, and you’d clung to him and cried somemore. Your breathing only steadied after he began to repeat it—
I love you.
Over and over, he’d said it until he’d forgotten the meaning of it.
The first few times, the words felt more like an offered necessity, something to placate an unmoored child, than out of conviction. But Leon doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the way you looked at him, with such wounded disbelief, that he’d said it again, again, again.
Over and over until the phrase softened and melted on his tongue. He kisses it into your mouth, across your eyelids, until the tremor finally left your shoulders, until, slowly, your belief restored itself in you.
And you had believed him. So completely, in fact, that it made something ugly twist inside his chest. Because he had watched you fold yourself back into his arms like that was the safest place in the world to be.
Like he was worth forgiveness after all he had done.
Leon stands in the quiet of his apartment now and looks at you across the room, and the memory presses in around him like a weight.
How could he let you go after all that?
How could he give up the one person who ever looked at him like he was something worth staying for?
Meanwhile, you speak in plurals. A concert in the fall, a trip in the spring. You fold him into your sentences as though it is the natural syntax of your mutuality—we could, we should, when we go. You build a future that assumes he’ll still be standing beside you when it unequivocally arrives.
There are nights Leon feels like giving in, where he teeters on the edge of his guilt, where he almost reaches for your hand to explain to you that he is too old for this, too tired, too worn down to keep pretending he can offer you the fantasy you want.
But before he can do it, you will laugh something small and stupid that catches him off guard, your eyes will shimmer with adoration when he tells you how the world works, and he thinks… not tonight.
You, on the other hand, know exactly what this is.
You know what it means when his eyes linger on you, gaze filled with an apology in and of itself. You know what it means, every time he holds you a fraction tighter than the last, like he is bracing for impact, waiting for this to break, shatter, dissolve into nothing.
You know, deep down, he is trying to leave before you do.
You just don’t know if you’ll let him. If you can.
Because for all the hurt, all the biting words and midnight standoffs, there are mornings.
There are mornings where the light spills over both of you in warm rays, where his arm is heavy over your waist and he doesn’t pull away when you trace the line of his jaw. Where he kisses you slowly, absently, like it is easy. So, so easy.
There are evenings on the couch where your feet rest in his lap, and he massages the arch of them without thinking, reading glasses sliding down his nose while his eyes remain on the pages of a book you lent him, domestic in a way that feels borrowed from someone else’s life.
There are nights when he holds you after the fallouts— after heat, and anger, and violent, terrible, wanting—and talks you down from the swell of your own feelings, his voice low and steady in a way nobody has ever built with you before.
You live inside those moments, you stitch them together into something that resembles a future.
And, against either of your will, it comes one night.
You are lying in bed, watching the slope of Leon’s shoulders as he gets undressed, moonlight spilling across tiled floors. He pauses, and you watch his shoulders tense with finality.
“I can’t give you what you think this is,” he says. It comes out easier than you imagined it would.
Your reply is just as easy. “I know.”
He turns to face you then, brows knit. “You know?”
And you turn away, unable to face him, sitting up, looking out the window instead. “I know you’re not… you can’t be forever. I just don’t know if that means we have to stop now.”
The honesty is not what Leon expected. It disarms him.You do that often.
“You’re going to wake up one day and resent me.”
“Maybe,” you can only shrug.
“You’re too young to be this willing to break your own heart.”
His words are harsh in their truth, hard to swallow. You squeeze your eyes shut.
You hear the creak of the bed, the dip of the mattress, his hand brushing against yours. “I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”
You shake your head, force yourself to meet his gaze. “I want you.”
You don’t say need, you don’t tell him you need him, that you need him to want you because being wanted by him feels like proof you are something worth wanting at all.
He searches your face for any doubt then.
He doesn’t find any, and he supposes that’s the tragedy of it.
You think, one day—years from now, maybe—that you will be standing on a street corner in a bustling city. Older and comfortable in your solitude, you will be waiting for the light to change at a crossing. And for a split second you will think you see him across the intersection.
Broad shoulders, hands in his jacket pockets, that same tired stance you won’t ever forget.
Your heart will stutter, your breath will catch, but it won’t be him. The feeling it leaves behind will be.
And inevitably, you will find him in other places too.
In the quiet of a record store when you pick up an old album he once insisted you listen to it properly, not on shuffle, he would insist, from start to finish. You’ll run your thumb over the sleeve and remember the way you would do the same to the crease between his brows whenever he got too caught up, too strung out.
You’ll find him in the scent of a stranger’s cologne drifting past you on a crowded sidewalk. Someone brushes your arm, and suddenly you’re twenty again, standing in his hallway at midnight, waiting for the click of the lock.
You’ll understand, eventually, that you were never going to get over him completely.
And a part of you will be grateful that he loved you in the only way he knew how—even if it wasn’t the way you needed.
Because he was a season, a sharp one, but a formative one.
And so, for now, he kisses you slowly, memorising something he already suspects he will have to lose. For now, you let him pull you in, you let his hands settle on your glass hips because for now, his hands are all you have known.
Maybe one day he will let you go, one day you will get tired of proving you can endure him. One day, the push will outweigh the pull.
Or maybe, you will keep orbiting each other like this —colliding, reconciling, mistaking intensity for love and the shape of tenderness for the promise of permanence.
Whether it was love, or just habit, you never quite decide.