Jamie Finding Love

Jamie wasn't the sort of person who filled silence just to avoid it.

He lived in the spaces between things-between meetings and messages, between train journeys and the slow return of evening light over the hills. There was a steadiness to him that people often mistook for distance, as if calm meant absence of feeling rather than containment of it.

Rhys, of course, had never bought that interpretation.

They had known each other long enough for Rhys to stop being impressed by Jamie's composure and start treating it like a habit that needed breaking. Rhys was all motion and opinion, someone who left traces of himself in every room he entered. Jamie, by contrast, was harder to place-like a book someone kept returning to but never fully underlined.

That night in the pub, the conversation lingered after the laughter faded. The kind of talk that didn't resolve itself cleanly, just settled into the corners of the table between empty glasses and the low hum of others around them.

Jamie swirled what was left in his drink, watching the amber catch the light.

"People make it sound like love is an interruption," he said eventually.