Loyalty

He wasn't seeing anyone. She knew that. He told her once, plainly, because he wanted her to know that the space she occupied in his life wasn't a placeholder. It wasn't a gap between other things. It was the thing itself.

He said: I'm not talking to anyone else. I want you to know that. Not because I'm expecting you to say the same. Just because it's true and I want you to know.

She didn't reply for an hour. He figured she was processing. She processed things by holding them at arm's length and staring at them until they stopped being scary.

She said: I'm not either. For the record.

He said: You don't have to.

She said: I know. But I'm not. I haven't been. Since before we started talking, actually. I just. Stopped. Everything felt like a transaction and I was tired of being currency.

He said: That makes sense.

She said: Does it? Because sometimes I think I'm broken. Like the part of me that is supposed to want physical closeness is just. Off. Or damaged. Or something.

He said: You're not broken. You're careful. There's a difference.

She said: You keep saying there's a difference between things.

He said: Because there is.

She said: Okay. Fine. There's a difference. I'm careful. Not broken. I'll put that on a t-shirt.

He said: I'd wear it.

She said: Of course you would. You'd wear anything I made.

He said: Yes. I would.

She went quiet. He could tell she was smiling even though he couldn't see it.

He thought about what loyalty meant when there was nothing to be loyal to. No label. No commitment. No contract. Just two people talking across an ocean with no guarantee of anything.

He was loyal to her the way you are loyal to a direction. Not because someone told you to be but because you chose the direction and once you chose it, everything else fell away. Other women existed. Dating apps existed. The world was full of people he could meet for coffee or drinks or dinner. He didn't want any of them. He wanted her. The one he couldn't have coffee with. The one he couldn't take to dinner. The one whose hand he couldn't hold across a table.

It was absurd when he thought about it. A thirty-eight year old man, alone in his flat, loyal to a woman he had never touched. Turning down opportunities he didn't even let present themselves. Deleting apps he had redownloaded in weak moments. Choosing, every single day, someone who existed in his phone and his head and nowhere else.

But it didn't feel absurd. It felt like the most rational thing he had ever done.

She was worth more than every woman he could have met and he knew that with a certainty that lived in his bones. Not because the other women were less. But because she was her. Because no one else wrote the way she wrote. Because no one else laughed the way she laughed. Because no one else had ever made him feel like staying up until four in the morning was a gift rather than a sacrifice.

He was loyal to that. To her. To the thing between them that didn't have a name but had a weight and a presence and a gravity that kept him in orbit.

She told him once about a man at the restaurant who had asked her out.

She said it casually, the way she said most things that she expected to provoke a reaction. Testing. Watching. Waiting to see what he would do with it.

She said: One of the new cooks asked me out. I said no.

He said: Why?

She said: Because I didn't want to go.

He said: Why not?

She said: Because I'm talking to someone already and even though we're not. You know. I'm not. I don't want to.

He could hear the discomfort in her voice. The way she was trying to say something without saying it. The way she was admitting to a loyalty she hadn't been asked for and didn't know what to do with.

He said: You don't owe me that.

She said: I know I don't owe you it. That's not why. I just. Don't want to. He's fine. He's perfectly nice. But when I imagined going out with him all I could think was that he's not you and that sounds insane because you're there and he's here and you're. I don't know. This is stupid.

He said: It's not stupid.

She said: It's stupid. I'm being loyal to a man I've never met. My best friend thinks I've lost my mind.

He said: Have you?

She said: Possibly. Probably. But I don't care. I don't want anyone else. Is that enough? Can that just be enough?

He said: That can be enough.

She said: Good. Because it's all I've got right now.