The years folded softly around Elara, like pages pressed too tightly together. France, once strange and unforgiving, had become familiar, yet she felt a hollow somewhere inside her that familiarity could never fill. University blurred into adulthood, and adulthood blurred into a modest teaching post at a small coastal school. She lived carefully, always within lines drawn for her own safety. Her students adored her gentle manner, her calm voice, the quiet patience that seemed endless. But when they asked about her own dreams, she had none to offer. Nothing to set her pulse racing, nothing to make her heart betray the careful life she had constructed.
She married young, to Julien—a kind man, steady, practical, endlessly polite. She thought love might grow over time, that desire might come later. But it never quite bloomed. He touched her hand; she smiled, polite and warm, because that was what one did. She kissed him goodnight, leaned into his embrace, and felt nothing. Inside, something slept, buried beneath years of routine and propriety, a fire she had long ago learned to keep locked away.
Yet the letters remained. Beneath her bed, the box sat quietly, a brittle archive of a life she had almost lived. Some nights, when Julien slept beside her, she would retrieve one, smoothing the folds, inhaling the faint scent of ink and memory. She traced the words with her fingers, lingering over his loops and curls, imagining the warmth of his hands, the press of his lips, the electricity of a touch that had lingered far too long in her memory to ever truly fade.
She remembered the boy who had promised "Always." She remembered the brush of his hand on hers, accidental—or perhaps not—lingering longer than it should, the stolen kiss in the lilac-scented dusk, the tremor in his voice as he whispered something she could not yet understand but would never forget. Those moments were sharper now, sharpened by the dull ache of time and the weight of a life that had moved on without him. And yet, in the quiet, they were alive, pulsing in her blood like a hidden current, a fire she had never allowed herself to fully feel again.
Sometimes, when the night pressed against her window, when Julien's steady breathing filled the room, she let herself imagine him there instead. She imagined his hand tracing her jaw, fingertips gentle but urgent. She imagined his lips brushing the hollow of her neck, the shiver that would travel down her spine, the gasp caught in her throat as desire flared, unbidden and dangerous. And for a heartbeat, she let herself remember what it was like to want, to ache, to burn with someone who could see the secret of her body and her heart, someone who could make her pulse betray her better judgment.
Her longing was a physical thing now, a phantom ache that no comfort could soothe. She pressed the letter to her lips, imagining his words as a caress, imagining the heat of his presence, imagining the small, forbidden closeness that had haunted her dreams for decades. She envied him—not for the life he might have built, but for the freedom to feel, to burn, to follow desire without restraint.
And yet, with that longing came regret. Regret for the life she had chosen, for the hands she had pressed into polite stillness, for the lips she had folded into smiles instead of passion. Regret for the boy whose warmth had once promised a universe, now reduced to ink and memory. She wept quietly for the ache she carried, for the fire she had never dared to awaken again, for the ghost she could almost touch but never hold.
In the silence of the night, with only the wind and the distant waves as witness, she realized the cruel truth: her heart had never left Leeds, never left him. And sometimes—just sometimes—that ache, that lust, that memory of what could have been, felt more alive than the careful life she had built around it.