Page 28 of Love Letters from a Libra
He held up a plastic bag that smelled like heaven. “I was in the neighborhood and didn’t wanna go home without seeing you.”
I leaned against the doorframe, eyebrows lifted and arms crossed, in what I hoped was equal parts of explain yourself and I’m not impressed.
Jules’s mouth quirked up at the corner. “Thai from that place with the green curry, extra spicy that you mentioned you liked.”
The fact that he remembered this detail, something I probably said once in passing, was simultaneously irritating and endearing. I wanted to be mad at him, but instead, I found myself stepping back and opening the door wider.
“I guess we can’t let good curry go to waste.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly as he stepped into my space, and I noticed the fatigue in the way he carried himself, a subtle heaviness that wasn’t there before. Whatever he’d been doing the past few weeks wasn’t just avoiding me. Something was weighing on him.
We ended up on the floor sitting cross-legged on opposite sides of my coffee table, with the food containers spread between us. The Pad Thai was steaming hot, and the noodles were tangled like my thoughts. The green curry was indeed extra spicy, making my eyes water, as it gave me plausible deniability for any emotions that might’ve slipped out.
Jules passed me a fork. He remembered I hated using chopsticks, and our fingers brushed. The same electric current I’d felt since our first meeting zipped up my arm, annoyingly persistent despite my best attempts at emotional self-preservation.
“Your place is how I imagined it,” Jules commented, looking around my apartment. His eyes lingered on my vision board, propped against the wall, a collage of handwritten affirmations, magazine cutouts, and photos of places I wanted to visitsomeday. Next to it was my corkboard, where I pinned tarot cards that felt significant.
“Should I be concerned that you’ve been imagining my apartment?” I joked, scooping up a forkful of curry.
“Nah, I mean your space feels like you but in stereo.”
I couldn’t help the laugh that escaped me. “What does that even mean?”
Jules gestured with his hand.
“It means everything you are but amplified louder, but it’s beautiful.”
The compliments slid under my skin, warming places that had been cold since his texts turned distant. I hated how easily he did that, disarmed me with simple observations that somehow felt more genuine than elaborate praise other men had offered.
As we ate, questions hung in the air between us, asked and unanswered. Still, as the food disappeared and our initial hunger faded, space for those questions grew.
I set my fork down, looked directly at him, and asked what I’d been wanting to know since he appeared at my door. “Were you going to ghost me?”
My bluntness caught him off guard. His hand froze halfway to his mouth, and he slowly lowered the food back to the container.
“No, but sometimes I pull back when things feel too good. It’s not you. It’s my history.” There was no hesitation in his voice or shifting of his eyes.
His admission hung between us, heavy with everything it didn’t say. And I thought about my own history, the key around my neck, the empty apartment, and learning early that people left when they didn’t mean to. I wondered what lessons his past had taught him and what walls he had built for protection that kept out the very thing he might want.
“Too good? Most people run when things feel bad, not when they feel good,” I commented.
“I’m not most people,” he said, not as a boast but as a fact.
“No, you’re not.” I agreed.
Something shifted between us—a door opening, not all the way, but enough to glimpse what might be on the other side, enough to create possibility. He reached across the coffee table, palm up, and invited rather than demanded. After a moment of hesitation, I placed my hand in his, and his fingers closed around mine.
“I’m trying,” he said. And those two words contained more vulnerability than any elaborate explanation could have. I heard in them everything he wasn’t saying—that his connections scared him, and he was fighting his own instincts to be here, that showing up tonight cost him something, yet I didn’t understand.
“Okay, then I’m trying too.” I squeezed his hand.
We left many things unsaid and fears unvoiced, but we unlocked something new, a fragile honesty that felt more valuable than grand declarations or passionate promises.
His thumb traced the circles on the back of my hand, and I allowed myself to believe that people could sometimes surprise you by showing up instead of fading away.
We migrated to the couch, the empty food containers abandoned on the coffee table. My legs ended up draped over his lap, casual and intimate, as if my body had decided that comfort trumped caution tonight. The quiet between us didn’t feel empty. It felt like a conversation, all its own, spoken in the language of our shared space.
Jules took my hand in his, turning it up. His fingers traced the lines in my palm. He etched the life, heart, and fate with the gentleness that made something flutter beneath my ribs. His touch was deliberate and intensive, like he was reading a map of places I’d been and places I had yet to discover.
