Forbidden Romance- An intimate tale of almost missed love

September 03, 2025

Brieﬂy Infinite

By Reshmi | Learning Writer

When they moved together, it wasn't performance. It was poetry.
✍️ Reshmi | Storyteller

The Night Before Morning

The room was wrapped in stillness, the kind that holds its breath before surrendering to dawn. She lay awake beside him, watching his chest rise and fall, each breath a fragile thread tethering him to her. The ceiling fan hummed its lazy circle, slicing the silence into intervals of soft, invisible rhythm. Somewhere outside, a stray dog barked and then fell silent, as though reminded that even sound must bow before a night like this.

She turned slightly on the pillow, careful not to stir him. The shadows painted his face into sharper relief—the furrows of time, the tired elegance of a man who had lived hard, laughed often, and carried his quiet storms within. His hand rested near hers, fingers curled as if still holding onto a conversation unfinished.

She wondered how many more nights would allow her this luxury of watching him unguarded. She had learned that love was not measured in grand gestures but in moments like this: the unspoken ones, the fleeting ones, the ones you cannot explain to another soul. Love, she thought, was sometimes nothing more than the privilege of bearing witness.

But the night was not empty. It was crowded with memory.

Flashback I: The First Thread

She had first met him in a café, the sort where wooden chairs scraped against floors that had heard too many such scrapes. He was bent over a notebook, lips moving faintly, as though testing words before granting them permission to exist. She had ordered her tea and tried not to stare, but her eyes betrayed her.

When she finally worked up the courage to speak, it was something clumsy, something about the rain outside and whether he minded if she shared the table. He had looked up, his eyes both amused and tired, and said, “The table isn’t mine. The rain, perhaps, is.”

That line—half-serious, half-playful—had stayed with her longer than the tea’s taste.

They talked until the café closed. She remembered the way his laugh filled the corners of the room, not loud but certain, as though laughter was a language he had mastered. She remembered the ring mark his cup left on the wooden table, as though proof of their first conversation needed to be signed into the world.

That night, she had walked home under an umbrella, the rain drumming like an old drummer finding new rhythm. And though she told herself it was only a conversation, she knew something had shifted.

Present: The Weight of Now

She blinked, returning to the present. His breath was shallower now, or was she only imagining it? She moved her fingers closer to his, not touching, just near enough to feel the warmth leaking from his skin.

The clock on the wall glowed faintly. Each tick was a thief.

Her eyes burned, but she would not close them. To close them would be to miss a fragment of his existence, and she was greedy with fragments.

Flashback II: The Thread Returns

It was months before she saw him again. By then, she had convinced herself the café conversation belonged to a passing chapter. But fate—or whatever it is that knots threads together—placed them in the same bookstore on an afternoon where the monsoon sky collapsed into sudden downpour.

She had been standing in the aisle of secondhand poetry collections when he appeared at the other end, hair damp, eyes lit with that same amused-tired glow.

“You again,” he had said softly, not a question, more like recognition.

She held up the book in her hand—an anthology of forgotten poets. “I suppose we read the same ghosts.”

They spent the rainstorm between pages. He recited one poem to her in a voice that made every passerby pause. She had never cared for poetry until then. Or perhaps she had been waiting for the right voice to read it aloud.

When the rain subsided, they stepped outside together. The street was glistening, puddles reflecting a city that looked almost tender. He offered her no umbrella this time. Instead, they walked through the drizzle, shoes splashing, shoulders brushing. She remembered thinking: sometimes a second meeting feels less like coincidence and more like destiny correcting itself.

Present: The Ache of Holding On

She watched his lips part slightly as he breathed, the faintest trace of a smile ghosting across his face even in sleep. Did he dream of her? Or of the years before her? She would never know. And yet she wanted to believe his dreams held her, just as she now held him in silence.

The bedsheet shifted as she tucked it closer around his body. A futile act, perhaps, but love was often futile and persistent in equal measure.

She thought of the morning waiting outside, pressing its cold hands against the windows. Morning would take from her what the night had given: time.

Flashback III: The Scar

One evening, much later, when their lives had intertwined into something resembling permanence, she noticed the faint scar on his wrist.

“How did you get this?” she asked, tracing it gently.

He had shrugged at first, as if it were nothing. But when pressed, he told her about a childhood accident—climbing a wall he shouldn’t have, falling, the stone biting into him.

“Every scar is a story,” he said. “But some stories don’t deserve retelling.”

And yet he had told her anyway. She realized then that love is not only in shared joy but also in shared silence—the places where you let someone enter your private ruins and trust they will not make them worse.

Present: The Almost-Morning

Her throat tightened. She wanted to wake him, to say all the things unsaid, but she feared that words would shatter the delicate spell of the night.

Instead, she memorized him—the lines of his face, the stubborn strands of hair refusing to stay flat, the way his hand twitched slightly in sleep as though reaching.

She thought of the morning as a thief lurking at the threshold. She thought of how dawn would unmake this fragile miracle of him still breathing beside her.

And yet she also thought of love—not as an endless promise, but as a night like this, stretched against the inevitable, radiant because it would end.

Closing

The horizon began its slow betrayal. The first light crept into the room, painting the edges of curtains with pale silver. She could hear the earliest bird call outside, a reminder that time bowed to no one.

Her eyes brimmed, but she smiled through it. For now, he was still here. Still breathing. Still hers.

And so she held the night inside her, even as morning claimed it.

Because love, she knew, was not in how long you have someone. It was in the immeasurable weight of one night, one breath, one heartbeat at a time.

© 2025 Reshmi | WordedByReshmi | All rights reserved.
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