“No,” I said quietly.
“No?”
“I can’t do that to us. I can’t watch you build this amazing life in Europe while I’m stuck covering township meetings and high school sports.” I took a shaky breath. “And I can’t ask you to turn down Berlin for me.”
“You’re not asking,” he said. “I haven’t even talked to my father yet. There might be a way to adjust the internship.”
I reached for his hands. They were warm and steady in mine. “You have to take that job. It’s your future.”
“You’re my future.”
The words landed hard enough to knock the air out of me. For one reckless second I wanted to grab onto them and refuse everything else. I pictured him staying. A smaller apartment.Fewer doors opening. The look he’d get, months from now, when he realized what it had cost him.
“Your father isn’t moving the company for you,” I said. “Berlin isn’t negotiable.”
I looked at him and understood that Berlin wasn’t an interruption. It was the blueprint. His life was about to stretch across countries and time zones, and even if he came back in two years, he wouldn’t come back smaller. He’d keep moving.
“It’s not just the two years,” I said. “It’s what comes after. You’re not going to finish Berlin and suddenly want a quiet life in one place. That’s not you. And my work… it only makes sense if I stay somewhere long enough to belong to it. We’d spend our whole lives asking each other to compromise something fundamental.”
“You could come with me,” he said quickly. “I grew up in Berlin. It’s full of English speakers. You’d land on your feet faster than you think. And if it didn’t work, we’d reassess. It doesn’t have to be permanent.”
“How?” The question came out sharper than I’d intended. “I learn German and hope someone will hire me to write for an English-language expat magazine? Sit in an apartment all day waiting for you to come home from a job I don’t understand?”
He flinched, and I hated myself for being right.
He was quiet for a long time, staring down at our joined hands like the answer might be written there.
“There has to be a way,” he said finally.
I wanted to agree. I wanted to invent a version of the future where neither of us lost anything. But every path I traced ended with one of us smaller than we were meant to be.
“Maybe there is,” I said. “But we’re twenty-one years old, and we’ve been together for three months, and we can’t see it right now.”
“So that’s it? We just give up?”
“We’re not giving up. We’re being realistic.” I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed his knuckles, memorizing the shape of them. “I love you. That’s why I can’t let you sabotage your future for me.”
His fingers tightened around mine. “What if I want to sabotage my future for you?”
My throat closed. It would have been so easy to say yes. To let him choose me and call it courage.
“Then I love you too much to let you,” I said.
For a long time neither of us moved.
We were still sitting on the futon, our hands tangled together like nothing had changed. The room was quiet except for the hum of the radiator and the traffic outside. I kept waiting for one of us to say something that would undo what we’d done.
Jonathan leaned forward first and pressed his forehead against mine. His shoulders were shaking before I understood he was crying.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
The apology was unbearable. I shook my head and pulled him closer, because there was nothing to forgive and nowhere else to put my hands.
We held each other like that until the position became uncomfortable and we shifted automatically, fitting together the way we always had. The familiarity of it hurt more than the argument. My body kept forgetting that this was the last time.
At some point the clock on my stove clicked over to three in the morning. Jonathan laughed softly against my shoulder. “We’re going to hate ourselves tomorrow,” he said, and for a second it sounded like any other night.
Neither of us mentioned that there wouldn’t be another one.
