His words were simple, “That must have felt good.” And in their casual delivery, he captured something profound. It had felt good. That acknowledgment resonated, freeing a part of me I hadn’t realized was bound.
Days later, in the quiet of his room at 3 a.m., exhaustion pressed down, but my mind raced on. He watched me, a steady gaze I tried to evade by burying myself in the pages of his book. My ride was minutes away when Utsav finally spoke, voicing the feelings that hung in the air between us. There was a caveat: a month-long retreat loomed, a boundary against new romantic entanglements. His proposition was a bridge – to see each other until his departure, then a clean slate.
“I think there’s a lot you could learn from me, and I from you,” he stated, a declaration that struck me as audacious, yet undeniably true. I was annoyed by his perception, precisely because it mirrored my own unspoken thoughts.
Why did I agree? Even now, the reasons aren’t sharply defined. Perhaps it was simple curiosity, the pull of the unexplored. Maybe it was the fear of regret, the haunting “what if” that can linger in the silence of missed chances. Or perhaps, deep down, an intuition whispered that this unexpected intersection would alter the trajectory of who I was becoming.
There was an unexpected lightness in releasing the weight of long-term projections. I didn’t have to navigate the labyrinth of external opinions – the judgments of friends, the expectations of family, the imagined blueprint of a shared future. Yet, this wasn’t a shallow encounter. The absence of future commitments didn’t diminish the depth of our connection; it simply existed outside the conventional framework of relationship progression.
That same night, after laying bare his feelings, he voiced another concern, “I’m also worried about you. You drive yourself with such fierce intensity – it’s admirable, but I fear it’s unsustainable. And honestly, I don’t trust you to nurture yourself.”
