Novel & Cerita 10 Year Gap

I tried to make it sound like a joke. “Dad, come on. There are couples with thirty year age gaps.” I laughed nervously. “Some even have forty.” He looked at me seriously. “That’s them, son.” The laughter disappeared from my face. “For you? Anything more than ten years is too much for me.” I swallowed. “Why is that?” “Because I don’t want you to end up in a situation where there is too much imbalance between you and your partner.” He walked closer and squeezed my shoulder.

As if knowing that his goddamned chattering hit a bad spot in me, he went silent. Did he really just say “ten years” now? He really looked for me around the world for ten years and couldn’t find me? Now, that’s laughable. The paparazzi definitely didn’t do so much hard work as looking up the whole world before they found me and bloody shamed me.

How can I forget someone who was good to me in my bad days? It was a spark of a moment, we were happy to see each other in such an unexpected way. Nearly after ten years, yet when we talked it felt like those ten years were never there between us as if we just yesterday bid goodbye to each other at a farewell party and met tonight. We didn’t feel odd for the long gap we had. After that party, we met several times and shared what is up with our lives.

That night wasn't going to happen again in this life. I went home and dug out my old diary that I'd hidden in a deep corner of my wardrobe. I was ten years old, homeless and wandering the streets at night when Graham—18 at the time—took me in. He was cold and aloof with everyone else, but he was very gentle with me. I knew that I had fallen in love with him when I was old enough to realize it. However, it was a secret that I could never reveal to anyone else. I grabbed the diary and tore it to pieces, shredding every page. Then, I threw the scraps into the toilet and flushed them down.

"I thought the orphanage would..." I cut him off. "No.Don't insult my intelligence." The waiter returned with our drinks. Neither of us touched them. The moment he walked away, I continued. "Tell me something." I leaned slightly forward. "Did grief stop you from searching for me?” Dennis looked away. "I..." "For ten years. Ten long years, not one phonecall, birthday, Christmas, not even one visit. You didn't even bother finding out whether I was alive, Do you know what I went through?”

Eliza's POV Ten years. A decade since I'd walked out of Scott's office and into Adam's car. A decade of war and peace, of loss and rebuilding, of watching Clara grow from a baby into a young woman who looked at the world with her father's steady eyes and my stubborn chin.

My name was Quinn Clarke. I was 26 years old. I had a great figure and good looks, and I worked as a teacher at a private middle school. But underneath all of that, the truth was that I was just a wife who had been starved for a very long time. My husband, Garrett Weber, was getting older. His performance in the bedroom kept getting worse, and his interest in me was fading. He could not satisfy me anymore. Even when I wore my finest lingerie and paraded around in front of him, he could barely get hard. Every night, deep in the dark, I had to take care of my own needs.

“I’ve been up and down this corridor lots of times.” “You have?” Jo was surprised to hear that. “Yes, I think I know how to get out.” “Yeah, for the first… I don’t know how long… I kept trying to figure out how to get out, but after a while, I just sort of gave up, I guess. How long have I been gone?” Jo cleared her throat. “Ten years. Ish. Give or take.” Cadence gasped. “Really? God! You do look older than fifteen, but… you’re twenty-five?”

{Vanessa’s POV} Ten years. That’s how long it had been since I last saw him. Ten years since his family packed up and left, their house swallowed by silence. Ten years since Vincent — the boy down the street who once sat broken on his porch — vanished without a goodbye.

“We’ll be celebrating our anniversary this coming month.” Anniversary? My heart skipped a beat. Really? It didn’t feel like we’d been together that long, yet when I thought about it, I realized just how much time had passed. I’d run away from him—ten months. Ten months, spent building my career, trying to heal and manage my grandmother’s cabin in Finland. It had felt like a lifetime of distance, but now, here we were. Still in this honeymoon phase, still learning from each other, still new.