Leo kissed her temple. “I’m not most people.”
“The bridge hold up?” she asked.
For weeks, their relationship existed in the margins of his lunch breaks. He’d bring coffee. She’d teach him how to talk to his plants (“Whisper, Leo. They hate condescension.”). He’d fix her wobbly shelving. She’d draw tiny, furious faces on the nursery pots of plants that weren’t selling.
Elara set down the soil. She walked around the counter, stopped a foot away from him. “You’re not terrible at people,” she said quietly. “You’re terrible at letting people be terrible with you.” maturessex
“That’s not nothing,” he said.
They orbited each other in a comfortable, unspoken rhythm. It wasn’t a romance novel. It was better. It was real. Until it wasn’t.
The bridge was finished on a Tuesday in November. Leo stood on its deck, wind whipping off the river below. It was perfect. Strong. Silent. Immovable. It was everything he’d ever wanted to build. And he hated it. Leo kissed her temple
“I was wrong,” Leo said. “The project wasn’t everything. You were. And I built a wall because I was terrified that if you saw me fail—if I couldn’t fix your rent, couldn’t fix my time, couldn’t fix us —you’d realize I was just a guy who’s good at math and terrible at people.”
“No,” she agreed. “It’s a beginning.”
That was the beginning of their first storyline: The Plant Curator and the Engineer . He’d bring coffee
The silences grew long. The texts grew short.
“I can’t promise I won’t disappear into my work again,” he said.