“What did you notice?”
“Everything.” The word came flat. “The way he moves. How he takes up a room without pushing for it. The fact that under all that control there's something running underneath it that he keeps deliberately banked.” I shook my head once. “I kept noticing things I'd spent years training myself not to see, and each one made me angrier because I couldn't figure out which direction to aim it.”
“At him or yourself?”
“Myself. For noticing. For the fact that the anger had been covering up something I liked even less.” I met his eyes. “A decade of being furious at someone and then walking back into his house and realizing the whole architecture of it was wrong.”
“Inconvenient.”
“Extremely.”
The barista came by without being flagged, topped up our cups with the easy efficiency of someone who'd been watching the table, and left again without interrupting. I wrapped my hands around the fresh warmth of mine.
“You planning to do anything about it,” Luka asked, “or are you going to keep suffering and calling it stability?”
“I told you in London I wasn't running.”
“You did. And you're still here, so that counts.” He settled back against the booth. “But staying and moving toward aren't the same thing. You can plant your feet and still not go anywhere.”
That landed with enough weight that I didn't fire back at it. Just let it sit.
“I don't know how to do this,” I said. “Correctly. On purpose.” I looked at him. “I know how to be useful. I know how to watch someone's back and show up when things go wrong and handle threats and make myself useful in every way that doesn't require me to sit still and say what I actually want.” I turned my cup on the table. “I don't know how to just be with someone without making it functional.”
“That's a very honest thing to admit.”
“I'm having a moment. Don't read into it.”
He almost smiled. “How long have you been in love with him?”
The word hit like a fist to the sternum. I sat very still.
“I didn't say that.”
“I know you didn't.” His voice stayed even. “I'm asking how long.”
I didn't answer right away. The coffee shop noise moved around us, a low current of conversation and the hiss of the machine behind the counter and someone's chair scraping across the floor near the door. Outside, the street was starting to go white at the edges where fresh snow was coming down.
“I don't know exactly,” I said. “I've been trying to find the start of it and it keeps going back further than I'm comfortable with.” I looked at him. “At some point in my early twenties I stopped being generically angry at him and started being angryabout specific things that didn't make sense to be angry about. Like when he'd mention going on a date with someone. Or when he came home from a fight and let someone else patch him up. Things that didn't have anything to do with me.” I picked up my coffee. “That's not resentment.”
“No,” Luka said. “That's jealousy.”
“Which means the rest of it was already there and I just hadn't named it.” I drank. Set the cup down. “So yes. Probably longer than I want to think about.”
“And you buried it under the anger because it was easier to carry.”
“Anger had a story. A reason. A person to point it at.” I held his gaze. “You can't explain the other thing. There's no version of that sentence that lands cleanly.”
“You just said it to me.”
“You're not exactly a typical audience.”
“Fair.” He tilted his head. “You said you're not running this time. What does that actually look like for you? Because being honest with me in a coffee shop is one thing. Being honest with him is different.”
“I know that.”
“So what are you doing about it?”
I looked at him. The question was patient, unhurried, the kind that had room for an honest answer inside it if I wanted to put one there.
