The Light Between Us
"Your heart is not mine to steal!" she whispers to him.
The evening breeze carries her words across the balcony where they stand, the cityscape glittering below them like fallen stars. Thomas watches her face in the half-light, searching for answers in the shadows that play across her features.
"Elise," he says, his voice barely audible above the distant traffic. "You speak as if love is theft."
Her fingers grip the railing until her knuckles pale. "Sometimes it is."
Three months they've danced this dance. Coffee shops and gallery openings, late-night phone calls, and texts that made him smile in meetings. Thomas had felt something awakening inside him that he thought had died with Catherine seven years ago. A possibility. A future.
"I've seen how you look at me," he says, risking a step closer. "I've felt your hand linger on mine. Are you telling me that was nothing?"
Elise turns to him, moonlight catching in her eyes, making them shine with something dangerously close to tears. "It was everything. That's why I can't."
"Can't what?" The question hangs between them.
"Bind our hearts together as wedded doves," she says, a strange formality to her words. "Your light is too pure."
Thomas feels something cold settle in his stomach. "I'm not pure, Elise. I'm just a man who thought he'd found someone to share his life with."
She touches his face then, her palm warm against his cheek. For a moment, he leans into it, allows himself to believe that this touch will lead to many more.
"There are things about me you don't understand," she says.
"Then help me understand."
She shakes her head, letting her hand fall away. "Some mysteries are better left unsolved."
"That's not fair," he says, anger flaring briefly. "You don't get to decide what I can handle."
"No," she agrees. "But I get to decide what I can risk."
Thomas watches her face, searching for a crack in her resolve, some opening where he might still reach her. But her expression has turned to marble, beautiful and impenetrable.
"I should go," she says finally.
He doesn't try to stop her. Pride perhaps, or a dawning understanding that whatever wall she's built between them isn't coming down tonight.
At his door, she pauses, silhouetted against the hallway light. "I'm sorry, Thomas. In another life, perhaps."
The door closes with a soft click that somehow echoes louder than a slam.
Thomas stands alone on the balcony long after she's gone, replaying her words. *Your heart is not mine to steal. Your light is too pure.* What did that even mean? Was there someone else? Some religious conviction? Or something darker in her past she feared would taint him?
He never gets his answer. Calls go unreturned. The coffee shop they frequented no longer sees her familiar figure. Their mutual friends offer only puzzled shrugs—she'd been equally cryptic with them before disappearing from their circles.
Months later, walking through the gallery where they'd first met, Thomas pauses before a new exhibition. The painting shows a woman with her back turned, standing at a railing, city lights spread before her. The title card reads simply: "The Light Between Us."
No artist is credited.
Thomas stands before it, feeling the ache rise in his chest again. In the painted woman's outstretched hand is a small glowing orb, releasing what looks like fireflies or sparks into the night sky.
He stares until the gallery closes, wondering if he'll ever understand what he lost—or what she was protecting him from.
