Adrien #4
She tries to hold it in, but fails adorably. A laugh escapes her too, bright, altering my brain chemistry.
“And I also don’t own any overalls,” I add.
She looks me up and down.
“Of course you don’t,” she mutters.
Then she crosses her arms, head tilting again.
“So let me get this straight,” she pauses, holding her hand up like she can’t believe this irony. “You spend your free time patching plaster like someone’s retired uncle?”
We both end up in genuine laughter.
The moment saves itself in my head like something that was missing for far too long. Her laugh echoes through the old stone around us and even though we are in church, this is the thing that feels really sacred to me.
Then her smile begins to fade. Her eyes shift past me, toward the half-creaked door to the back room.
Oh no.
Not that.
She tilts her head, the way she always does when she senses something unfinished, something hidden. And before I can even think of a distraction, she’s already moving quickly and determined, like she just solved another piece of the puzzle.
I step in front of the doorway instinctively, blocking it with my body.
“Don’t go there,” I blurt out too fast and too defensive.
Which, obviously, makes her want to go there more.
She pushes past me without effort and stops at the threshold of the room I used to hide my dirty money in as a teenager.
And now we just stand there.
Staring.
The room is dim, lit only by a narrow slice of gray daylight slipping through the small window. Dust hangs in the air. Shelves are crowded with old religious books, broken frames, a few statues leaned awkwardly against the wall. Forgotten and abandoned things.
And then—
The mattress. Thrown on the floor like it doesn’t belong in a place like this.
For a split second, I almost laugh at how absurd it looks. Holy relics. Books and statuettes. And a goddamn mattress.
“Look, some homeless guy probably found this place and—” I start lying nervously.
But she’s already walking toward it.
She bends down and picks up my sweatshirt from the edge of the mattress, studying it thoughtfully.
“Don’t touch that,” I say quickly. “That’s probably from some junkie who broke in here.”
She lifts the sweatshirt to her face and inhales. Then she turns toward me, amused.
This is so embarrassing. The lowest point of my life.
“That’s funny,” she says dryly. “The junkie has the same perfume as you.”
She reaches down and picks up my cigarette pack lying beside the mattress.
“And look,” she adds, holding them up. “He left you a present. Your favorite brand.”
I swallow and nod once.
“He apparently has good taste in…” I pause, searching for anything that sounds less pathetic, but I’m entirely lost. “Smells.”
This is so embarrassing.
She drops the sweatshirt and cigarettes back onto the mattress and crosses her arms, waiting, just looking at me.
A thin layer of sweat breaks along the back of my neck.
“Why are you sleeping here?” Her voice isn’t mocking anymore. It’s tender.
I think for a moment.
I wouldn’t call it sleeping. But after a couple of times waking up slumped over a wooden bench with a hangover splitting my skull open, it felt logical to drag a mattress in here.
The back pain was getting unbearable. I’m probably getting too old to wander into this church in the middle of the night, hallucinate about the day she married me here, and pass out on hard wood like some tragic idiot.
She’s still staring at me. The humor is gone now, completely.
My eyes flick between hers, searching for something safe to say.
Yet I stay silent.
Then something shifts in her expression, like a realization. She steps forward suddenly, closing the space between us, and without hesitation her hands slide into my front pockets.
The touch startles me enough that I freeze.
She checks one pocket, then the other. Then she moves to my back pockets and takes out the key from the church, lifting it up between two fingers in front of me, her face not just serious now, but fragile in that way when she tries to hold tears in.
“Stop the act,” she says sharply. “What is happening here?”
Her eyes glaze over the second the words leave her mouth.
“I couldn’t let this place go,” I say quietly, waiting for her reaction, but her chest just starts moving visibly faster.
“Why do you have a key?” she forces out.
I don’t answer.
“Why do you have a key?” she repeats it, but her voice is breaking around the words.
My mind races through every possible outcome of this. Every version of this moment that ends wrong.
“I bought it.”
The room goes still.
“What?” It’s barely a sound. More a movement of her lips than a word. Her voice has fully abandoned her.
“It’s mine,” I say slowly and watch it land, my fingers trembling lightly. “And yours.”
Silence.
She just stands there, holding the key, staring at me like I just shifted the axis of something she thought was fixed. The pressure in her face visibly eases away when she lets one tear slip out.
“It’s ours,” I correct.
She blinks once and another tear slips free. And then she bolts.
She shoots past me without warning, out of the back room, her shoulder brushing mine hard enough to knock the air sideways in my lungs.
Then instinct takes over and I go after her.
My heart is already racing from fear of what this is about to trigger inside her.
I didn’t want her to find out like this.
Not like some dramatic reveal. Not like I’ve been secretly building a shrine to us in the dark.
I didn’t want to confuse her. Didn’t want to hand it to her like a bouquet wrapped in guilt and varnish.
She stops in front of the altar.
For a split second, it looks like she might bolt straight out of the church, like she’ll choose open air and distance and to never look back. But something inside her collapses mid-motion. Her body just… gives. She drops, her knees hit the cold stone before I can reach her.
“Nat—”
She’s kneeling, breathing wrong, not breathing—breaking. Her chest heaves violently, air catching and tearing in her throat. Each inhale is too shallow and each exhale too fast. Like she’s drowning in something invisible.
I drop behind her instantly, mirroring her posture, my knees hit the stone too and I wrap my arms around her waist from behind and pull her back into me, anchoring her before she can fold forward completely.
Her hands clutch at nothing, fingers curling and uncurling like she’s trying to grab onto the air itself while she’s shaking.
“Baby,” I murmur, my mouth close to her ear, but careful—so careful—not to overwhelm her again. “Breathe.”
She can’t.
Her breaths are fractured and scraping up her throat like broken glass. As if too many emotions have collided at once and her body doesn’t know which one to process first. I tighten my hold, one hand flattening over her stomach, the other bracing her ribs, trying to feel the rhythm of her lungs.
“You’re okay,” I say, even though I don’t know if that’s true. “I’ve got you.”
Her head falls back against my shoulder but her breathing doesn’t slow. It’s too fast. Panic. This is panic. I press my forehead gently beside her temple.
“Match me,” I whisper. “Slow. In.”
I exaggerate it so she can feel the movement of my torso through her back.
“In.” I draw a long, steady breath. “Hold.” Her fingers twitch around my arms. “Out.” Another slow exhale.
“In.” Her ribs expand under my palm this time. “Good. That’s good.”
Her whole body feels like a live wire. Trembling and overloaded.
“I’m not forcing anything on you. It’s just a building. It’s just walls.” I say quietly, because I know what she might be thinking.
It’s not just walls. But I need her to believe that she’s not trapped.
“You don’t have to decide anything. Not today and not ever.”
Her breath stutters again, but it’s deeper now and less frantic.
“I didn’t buy it to trap you,” I continue, my voice lower now. “I bought it because I couldn’t let them take this too.”
Her shoulders jerk once, like a sob tried to claw its way out and got stuck halfway.
She leans back harder into me, like her spine can’t hold her upright anymore.
The church is silent around us except for the faint tapping of that branch against the glass and the echo of her fractured breaths filling the hollow space.
“You don’t have to forgive me,” I murmur into her hair.