Let Me Adore You (N.H.)

25

What on earth did he mean by that? How was I stepping on his toes? It surely didn't appear this way to me. I was still far away from feeling like I knew him well.

"You don't keep me at an arms length?" I repeated, confused.

"Actually not, no." Dr. Horan admitted.

"It never took me that long to get to that person like it took me with you, yet in the last months you got to see more of me than I let people normally see. You've been in my car and in my house several times, you've seen my private space, you've sat in my office, looked at my texts. And you've been in my thoughts for a long time now."

His words were soft and sweet, like that cheap bubblegum you had when you were a kid. But how long would the taste last? And what made him tell me that?

I turned around to face him, touching his shoulder slightly. It was still hard to realise he was half naked next to me. My fingertips traced the hot skin, making me want to kiss him. And so I did. I pressed my lips against his shoulder blade, once, then twice. Niall didn't say a word, not even moving but still staring at the ceiling. The only thing he did that revealed he actually felt my lips was a deep sigh.

"You have also been in my thoughts for a long time." I told him, kissing his shoulder for the third time. This moment, it was a distant dream, consuming me whole and never letting me go.

I imagined violins, playing a harsh yet beautiful and touching melody, representing my heart and my feelings. Like a leaf on an autumn day, I fell, faster and faster, sinking to the ground. Why couldn't he see?

"But I still know so little of you and your past." I spoke my thoughts, how I laid my life out for him on display while he kept his locked away, not letting me have a look at it. And he did it again.

"That's because there's not much to know about it." I kept quiet, biting back another question or remark when I felt my professor shifting until he could look me in the eyes. The thing was, that there was almost nothing to see due to the fact that it was the middle of the night. However I saw his contours and his breath rebound against my face.

"I'm not looking for a chance to relive my past." The brunet began, one arm loosely laying on my hips.

"Not when I can live in the present."

"What about the future?" 

What about his future? What about our future?

"I don't think about that too much either. Thinking about the future is thinking about dreams and subjective perception. It has nothing to do with reality and life." The words stung more than they should have.

I dreamt my whole life, about jobs, moving away from my home, meeting my one true love, my soulmate. I dreamt about having a family, having children, having my own studio where I could paint for the rest of my life, my own library filled with maps and book, my work as a professor or a writer. I dreamt about a better life.

Where those dreams nothing? Didn't they define who I was? It was a part of reality and life, my reality and my life. Dreams made us happy when we couldn't be, when nobody could cheer us up. When did Niall stopped?

"You have to have at least some plans or wishes. Like I do." I almost begged him, trying to find a spark of the person he once had to be in his words. The person that had dreams.

"And what should those plans be?"

"I don't know, buying a house, getting married, having a family of your own, being head of department." I got louder. He wanted to be head of the department, I knew it. Niall didn't work that hard for nothing. He yearned to be acknowledged.