So Close But Yet So Far Novels & Stories

Sometimes, an emotional affair hurt worse than a physical one. The silver lining in this mess was that I pulled out early enough. As I stood before the sea I had seen so many times in my dream, I took a deep, greedy breath. The sea tasted like freedom. I texted my friend, and he called me right away. "Having fun at the beach?" Without missing a beat, I answered, "You don't know the half of it." My friend fell silent for a moment. Then he stammered, "Uh, man, I'm just asking, but… are you sure you and Sonia can't go back?"

To make things harder, Julia wants her to sit next to her – that means she needs to sit next to Gale as well. She didn't have any energy to make an excuse and wordlessly took a seat next to him. They were not touching, but the familiar feeling of him was emerging from deep within her heart. The feelings that were once buried and forgotten entirely. The yearning to be as close as possible. Ava wondered whether he felt the same way as he did in the past whenever he was near her – the urge to reach out. He always liked to touch her and keep her close to him.

“There’s so much to do. Even when we’re together, I don’t feel close enough to you.” She nodded. “I know what you mean,” she said. “We may be in the same room, but we’re so focused on the fire we have to put out, we may as well be a million miles apart.” There was no point in beating around the bush. “Sometimes I feel like you’re pulling away from me,” I said. Thea scooted up, so we were eye to eye. She took a deep breath in and let it out.

It felt like a fist squeezing my chest. "I'm sorry, but your balance is zero. You're not our client. Our staff are busy. We're not searching the streets for a non-client." "Two kilometers? Even if you were two feet away, your balance would still be zero." Her voice went flat. "Sorry, Ms. Keyne. I have work to do. Please come recharge as soon as possible." Click. The line went dead. I stared at the endless line of red taillights. Despair hit from deep inside.

And if we keep reaching like this, just slightly off, just slightly late… I don’t know if we’re getting closer. Or slowly learning how to miss each other again.

Bare walls, just a bed, a basin for water, flames leaping in the hearth. Here, closeness isn’t something snatched in quiet moments - it settles like dust after a long journey. One glance, then another, and the act begins to fade. Roads stretch ahead, just us inside this car, no audience left. Distance strips things down, layer by layer, until there’s nothing to hide behind.

I smothered the doubts in my chest again and again, forcing myself to believe it was just an act, nothing more. However, I never imagined that once the first crack appeared in the heart, the dam would burst faster than you ever thought it could.

I stayed close. Not close in the way that proximity can become its own form of pressure when it is performed or purposeful, but close in the way that someone who has decided to maintain a tether is close, present at his shoulder in the briefing room sessions without requiring anything from the presence, across the table at meals in the apartment, beside him at night with the full awareness that the distance between his interior state and mine was significant enough that the physical proximity was doing work that presence alone could not fully accomplish but was the only available tool and I was going to use it completely.

But I swear the world feels closer now. Like it’s listening again. And somewhere far beyond this controlled silence— Someone is still saying my name. And I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.

"Hate and desire have always been close cousins. They're two sides of the same coin. The line between them is razor-thin, and people traverse it far more often than they'd like to admit." He walked over to her again, but this time he didn't touch her immediately. He simply stood close, letting the tension build like electricity in the air before a storm. The distance between them felt charged with potential energy, with the promise of something explosive if either of them took one more step closer.