The Space Between Us : The first time Livia saw him again, it was raining | Desire Lines
DL - Not the kind of rain that makes you run for cover, but the quiet kind the one that stays like mist on your skin, blurring the edges of memory.
She stood under the awning of a bookshop downtown, hugging her coat tighter around her as the wind whispered through the narrow street. Then she saw him, Noah, crossing from the opposite side, his hands in his pockets, his hair a little longer, his eyes just as unreadable.
They hadn’t spoken in four years.
He stopped a few feet from her.
“Livia,” he said softly.
She managed a smile. “Noah.”
There were a thousand things unsaid between them, folded like fragile letters never sent. Once, they had shared midnight coffees, long drives without destinations, and those almost, kisses that felt louder than any declaration.
But timing was cruel. She had chosen a path paved with logic and plans. He had walked away before she could turn back.
And now here they were. Older, perhaps wiser. Still unfinished.
“Do you have time?” he asked, after a silence that carried too much weight.
She hesitated, then nodded. “I do.”
They ended up at a small café a few blocks away, sitting across from each other, hands wrapped around warm cups but not touching.
“I used to pass by your apartment every Sunday,” he said, voice low.
She looked up. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe hope is a habit you don’t break easily.”
Her heart ached, not from pain, but from recognition. Because some love doesn’t leave loudly. It lingers in the quietest places, old playlists, familiar scents, echoes in the dark.
“I wrote you letters,” she admitted. “All of them unsent.”
He smiled, sad and knowing. “Then maybe we were always speaking, just in silence.”
The rain had stopped when they walked out. The sun peeked through the clouds, casting a soft gold over the wet pavement. They didn’t hold hands. They didn’t kiss. But something shifted.
Not everything broken needs to be rebuilt.
Sometimes, acknowledging the ruin is enough.
Before parting, Noah turned to her. “I never stopped wondering what we could’ve been.”
Livia met his eyes, steady and kind. “Maybe we were never meant to be a story with a clean ending.”
“No,” he said. “But it was still beautiful.”
And with that, they walked away. Not as strangers, not as lovers, but as two people who once met at the edge of something real, whose desire lines had briefly crossed under the rain.