That, more than anything.
Maeve has always been… Maeve. Loud. Warm. All sharp edges wrapped in affection. She takes up space like it’s her birthright.
At first, Nora stayed near Maeve, seeking permission for every inch.
Then one day, she leaned in to catch something Maeve whispered, her hair grazing Maeve’s shoulder, and she didn’t pull away. One afternoon, she corrected Maeve on a movie detail—soft, but unapologetic. And then there was the moment Maeve slung an arm around her shoulders without thinking, and Nora didn’t recoil. She gave in to it, just a fraction, letting herself rest there.
They laughed together now. Teased each other. Shared looks across the room that carried entire conversations without a single word.
Watching them together eased me. It felt easy. Natural. This was how it had always been meant to unfold.
They didn’t need to fill every space with noise. They could sit in the quiet together. I never learned how to do that.
Silence has always scared me.
I rarely admit that. It feels like pulling back my sleeve—exposing the part of me I’ve spent my whole life keeping hidden.
Silence was never just silence.
It stretched. It waited. It watched.
Silence meant attention turning toward me. It meant people noticing what I wasn’t saying, what I was avoiding, what I was trying so hard to keep contained. It meant curiosity creeping in, slow and inevitable.
And curiosity always led somewhere.
To questions.
To voices asking, pushing, digging just a little deeper each time. Questions I didn’t want to answer. Questions that pressed against places in me I kept locked down for a reason.
In silence, there was nowhere to hide. No distraction to reach for. No way to redirect, to deflect, to slip past unnoticed.
Just me. Exposed. Waiting for the moment someone would ask the one thing I couldn’t handle. I never knew when that moment would come.
So I learned early to fill it. To talk, to joke, to tell stories. To keep the air moving so nothing could turn toward me for too long.
I’ve been doing it my whole life without thinking about it.
The words come before I think. They rush in, one after another, easy, effortless. I keep conversations alive, keep them light, keep them moving so no one lingers long enough to look past the surface.
Except with her.
The first time we sat together during the fifteen-minute break and neither of us spoke, the urge rose up fast and familiar. It crawled under my skin, restless, insistent. I reached for words out of habit—some comment, some throwaway line, anything to keep the moment from stretching too far.
I held it back.
She was looking out at the street, her expression open, untroubled. No expectation crossed her face, no glance in my direction begging me to fill the space. She seemed completely at ease just being there.
The stretch of time passed without strain. It didn’t close in on me. It didn’t twist into discomfort. It stayed exactly what it was—two people sitting side by side, sharing the same moment without forcing it into conversation. The quiet sat between us like a pale, sun-bleached cloth, porous and soft.
I became aware of my own body in a way I usually wasn’t. My shoulders eased. My breath slowed, deepened, no longer pushed forward to outrun the next pause. I wasn’t waiting for the shift where I’d have to step in and carry the weight.
The next day, it happened again. We sat in the same place, the same stretch of time opening between us. And again, she didn’t reach for it. She didn’t look to me to carry it either. There was no expectation to entertain, no pressure to keep things moving, no need to prove anything.
She simply shared the space with me.
I always thought silence meant danger. Something to run from. A space ready to snap its jaws shut the second I lingered.
With her, it stayed open.
