The Things We Don't Say

They exchanged numbers that morning. Daniel typed his into her phone with careful precision, adding a small star emoji next to his name that she noticed immediately and said nothing about. She texted him that afternoon — just a photo of a coffee stain on a white mug with the caption: Thinking of you. He replied with a single laughing emoji and then: Are you always this dangerous around hot beverages?

She typed back: Only around people I like.

She stared at it for ten full seconds before she hit send, her heart doing something it hadn't done in a very long time.

His reply came in three minutes: Good to know.

Just that. Nothing more. But she read it four times.

✦ ✦ ✦

The weeks that followed were soft and unhurried, the way early winter could be before the cold really set in. They started sitting together on the morning bus. Daniel would already be there when she boarded, and he'd look up from his book when he heard the doors open — just briefly, just enough — and something in his expression would settle, like a held breath released.

Maya noticed everything. The way he folded down the corner of his page before he put the book away, even though she'd once gently told him that was a crime against literature. The way he drank his coffee black and too hot, burning his tongue every single time without learning his lesson. The way he'd sometimes get very quiet mid-conversation and look out the window, and she'd learned to just let him be quiet, because he always came back.

"What are you reading now?" she asked one morning. He tilted the cover toward her. It was a novel she didn't recognize, the spine so cracked it was barely legible.

"Is that falling apart?" she asked.

"It's well-loved," he corrected, with great dignity.

"There's a difference?"

"A significant one." He turned a page. "Things that are well-loved show it."

Maya looked at the book, then at him. She thought about that for the rest of the day

★★★

They were not dating. Maya knew this. She also knew that she thought about him more than she thought about most things, that she woke up on bus mornings with something lighter in her chest, and that she had started carrying a better thermos lid purely because she couldn't bear the thought of destroying another of his hoodies.

(She had also, not that she would ever admit this, looked up the title of every book he'd been reading. She'd read two of them. They were good. She understood now why he mouthed the words.)

Her best friend Jess noticed immediately, because Jess noticed everything.

"You're different," Jess said one evening, squinting at her over a bowl of noodles.

"I'm exactly the same."

"You're humming."

"People hum."

"You don't hum. You haven't hummed since—" Jess tilted her head. "Since Caleb."

The name landed like a cold drop of water. Maya put down her chopsticks.

Caleb. Two years ago. A relationship that had started bright and ended quietly, the way fires sometimes did — not in a blaze, but in a slow dimming that you only recognized was dying when the warmth was already gone. He hadn't been unkind. He had simply been elsewhere, always elsewhere, even when he was right beside her.

"It's not like that," Maya said.

"What's his name?"

A pause. "Daniel."

Jess smiled. It was the kind of smile that said everything without saying anything. Maya picked her chopsticks back up and stared at her noodles and tried very hard not to hum.

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