Iris decided she wouldn't look for him again.
It wasn't a dramatic decision.
It wasn't brave.
She simply decided it, the way you decide things that seem obvious once something has already slipped slightly out of place.
It wasn't fear.
Or not only that.
It was the discomfort of having said too much. Of having left something open that she had always kept carefully closed. And now she didn't know how to close it without making it obvious.
So she did what she knew best: she adjusted her routine.
She changed schedules.
Took different streets.
Avoided places that hadn't meant anything before.
It worked… on the surface.
Because even though she didn't see him, she thought about him.
Not all the time. Not like a clear obsession. It was more like an intermittent, irritating presence. It appeared when something was said too openly, when a silence stretched too long, when she felt the urge to speak and forced herself not to.
There he was.
Not as a person.
As a crack.
---
Ethan noticed the distance without needing confirmation.
Days passed without crossings. Without casual encounters. Without shared silences. And at first, that felt right.
Necessary.
He had crossed a line.
And the logical thing was to step back.
The problem was that stepping back didn't take him anywhere.
She kept showing up in what he wrote.
And worse, in what he didn't.
He closed a file halfway through a sentence when he realized he was describing something that wasn't his. It was someone else's reaction. A way of staying quiet that didn't belong to him.
It irritated him.
"This isn't healthy," he muttered.
But he didn't stop.
---
They saw each other four days later.
It wasn't at the café.
It wasn't planned.
Iris was waiting for the subway, standing with her arms crossed, her gaze fixed on the wall. She wasn't thinking about anything specific. She was just there.
Ethan recognized her from a distance.
He stopped.
He could have turned around.
He didn't.
She felt him before she saw him. Like the air tightening slightly.
She lifted her gaze.
She didn't smile.
She didn't look surprised.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
The word sounded more careful than before.
They stayed a few steps apart.
"I thought I wouldn't see you again," Ethan said.
"I thought so too."
It wasn't a reproach.
It was a fact.
The train hadn't arrived yet.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
Iris looked at him.
"That's not a fair question."
"I know."
"Then don't ask it."
He nodded.
Silence.
It wasn't the same as before.
This one was cautious.
"I've been avoiding you," Iris said.
"I noticed."
"It's not personal."
"It never is," he replied.
She frowned.
"That's not true."
"No," he admitted. "But it sounds convenient."
Iris exhaled slowly.
"This is getting complicated."
"It already was," Ethan said. "We just aren't ignoring it anymore."
The train arrived.
"This isn't my car," Iris said, stepping back.
"Neither is mine."
They looked at each other for one more second.
"Take care," he said.
"You too."
She stepped into the next car without looking back.
---
That night, Iris realized something she didn't like.
It wasn't that she missed him.
It was that the distance hadn't closed anything.
It had only made everything clearer.
Ethan wrote a sentence before closing the file:
*Avoiding something doesn't mean you've escaped it.*
He didn't delete it.
Because he was starting to understand that crossing a line doesn't always feel like a mistake.
Sometimes it feels like the beginning of something you don't yet know how to stop.