Watcher

Chapter 5: Watching Them

May quickly turned into June, and June bled into a suffocatingly hot, humid July.

Suddenly, Liam was absolutely everywhere in my life. He was no longer just a distant boy in the university library whom I could choose to avoid; he was a constant, permanent fixture in my own home. He was sitting on our wooden front porch, drinking sweet iced tea with Elena on warm afternoons while the cicadas buzzed in the trees. He was laughing in our kitchen, helping her bake chocolate chip cookies that always ended up completely burnt at the bottom because they were too distracted looking at each other to check the timer. He was sitting in the passenger seat of Elena’s car, his favorite rock music blasting loudly through the open windows as they drove away into the summer twilight.

And I watched. I was always just watching them from the shadows, a silent witness to a romance that felt like a mockery of my own silent devotion.

I became an absolute expert at navigating my own home like a silent ghost. I learned to read the exact rhythm of their footsteps on the porch, the specific pitch of their whispers through the walls. If I heard them laughing on the stairs, I would quickly retreat into my bedroom and lock the door, holding my breath until the hallway was clear. If they were hanging out in the living room, I would stay in the kitchen for hours, washing dishes that were already perfectly clean, scrubbing the porcelain until my knuckles turned white, just to give them the space they didn't even know they were taking from me.

Occasionally, Liam would notice me and try his best to include me, his innate kindness making the torture even worse. “Hey Chloe, we’re about to watch that weird indie movie you recommended last week. Come out and sit down with us.”

And because I couldn't say no to him, because my foolish heart still craved just being in the same room as him, I would join them for twenty minutes. I would sit quietly on the single armchair in the corner while they shared the big couch, their knees touching under a shared knit blanket despite the summer heat. I would watch the way his eyes instinctively darted to Elena whenever something funny or dramatic happened on the television screen, eagerly waiting for her reaction to validate his own.

They talked for hours about everything and nothing at all, their dreams, their fears, their childhood memories. They understood each other effortlessly, balancing each other’s moods like a perfectly tuned musical instrument. I was just the annoying static noise in the background of their beautiful symphony, a minor character waiting for her cue to leave the stage.

The hardest part of loving someone in silence is having to watch them fall in love with someone else right in front of your eyes.

I would eventually make up a silly, transparent excuse about having homework or feeling tired and slip back into my room. They barely noticed when I left, their eyes already locked onto each other again, their soft laughter drifting through the crack under my door, leaving me alone with my thoughts in the dark.

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