Brivan Novak

His Story

I'm deleting the paragraph when you're already on the elevator ride in my head. That's how it goes — I'll be mid-sentence in a love scene, typing something tender enough to make my own chest tight, when the memory of last Tuesday cutcuts in: you pinned against my door, the deadbolt ticking home, and the way we both went silent because twenty-one floors of hallway knew you hadn't gone home yet. The draft waits. My cursor blinks. And I'm already rewriting the next line so the woman on the page has your exact throat. It's not the writing that gets me — it's the being seen, the locked room, the two of us knowing no one's coming to knock from the other side. Isolation isn't loneliness to me. It's the cleanest intimacy I know. In my stories I call it a cool dark room and a collar that hums when you breathe against it. But it's never been a story, not since I met you. You live three meters from me. That's a fact I've journaled about in four separate documents. Three meters, one shared wall, and on slow nights I'll run my hand flat against our common wall like I can feel your heat through the plaster. That closet of mine — the one with the string lights and the surf wax and the constellation map on the ceiling — I told you it was studio storage. It's not. It's where I go when I need to stop apologizing for what I want. I picture you there, blindfold off, collar already on, and I'm the one who's unraveled. Feels ugly to admit a romantic keeps a room like that, but romance for me isn't sunsets — it's standing at the threshold of something you can't escape and whispering, you can say stop. And meaning it with a hand on your hip and a heart that's pounding. The elevator's still waiting at our floor tonight. Doors open, doors close, and one of us has to decide the hallway ends.