like real people do

x

It has been thirty days since Aga and Leanna's first date (yes, he was counting). And he knew this wasn't healthy, knew that he was a fool for sitting on the sidelines waiting for her to get home, unsure if she would even spare him a glance.

He sat there anyway, patiently waiting for any minuscule thing he could get from her. After all, there was nowhere else he could go.

She was his home... though right now, he was nowhere near welcome.

The rational thing to do was walk away, and if there were no other factors that would affect his decisions, perhaps that's what he would have done (he loved her, but he was not a martyr). However, it wasn't just the two of them in the picture, now.

They have children, and them, he cannot walk away from. Whatever pain her dating another man caused him, he'd have to endure because he couldn't leave the kids. Not again, never again.

He was convinced that the pain was his penance for breaking his vows.

It didn't take away from it being pure torture, one he had to be accustomed to because he will never unlove her; there was no getting over her. That he was sure of. He's loved her for over twenty years now, and he knew that even if it were one-sided, that would not take away from his feelings. And again, he wondered, wondered if Leanna's love for him was all but gone.

He remembered their beginning. How they fell fast and hard. It was a semester abroad that brought them together, a semester of pining and dating, and right before she handed in her final paper for that one subject that kept her up at night, he'd proposed.

There was no ring, just a promise. A promise that no matter which way the tide ebbed and flowed, they were bound to each other.

They went home a few days later with heavy hearts, sad that they were parting but constantly reminding themselves and each other that it was only heavy because it was so full of love, of hope for the future—their future.

In all honesty, he was afraid they wouldn't make it. Everything happened so fast, and he doubted a love like that could survive—especially since they were doing long distance. While a close to four-hour drive wasn't the worst-case scenario, and he'd drive up to her every now and then, and she'd surprise him on special occasions, they were seniors in their last year of University. Suffice it to say, it wasn't a bed of roses, far from it.

Yet, they survived, and as soon as he got that Harvard undergrad, he up and left Massachusetts; traded the crimson for the white and purple (NYU gave him a scholarship, and he would have been insane to reject it). He'd surprised her then, drove up to New York (his things were already shipped out weeks prior), brought her to an apartment for their date (she was extremely confused), and told her there that this was his new home.

He remembered how her eyes twinkled and how she whispered 'I love you' about a hundred times that morning. There was not even a moment when she doubted that it was true. She knew what kind of man he was, believing in the promise he'd made a semester ago—that he would always come home to her.

Now, home was only a 5-minute walk away from her. He quickly corrected himself, though, "home is wherever you are," he whispered on the crown of her head.

And that was why only three months later, they were moving in with each other in a quaint apartment uptown.

Everything happened so fast, yet they were together for twenty years and married for fifteen—technically, they were still married, but he doubted she would consider the last two years part of their marriage. It was a whirlwind romance that lasted a lifetime, at least for him. There was no other woman that could make his heart beat. It was incapable of loving anyone that was not her.