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Geralt’s truck rumbled into the parking lot, fresh snow tumbling through the bright cut of his highbeams, and for a moment, Yennefer considered cutting her own lights and slumping down to hide.
She could send him a quick text saying she’d gotten hung up with work and wouldn’t be driving several hours to their middle of nowhere college town to meet up for the weekend after all. Sorry about that. Catch up some other time maybe.
Nevermind that the rustic couple’s retreat airbnb cabin she had paid for didn’t accept last minute refunds and that she was already waiting in an empty parking lot on the far side of campus. That she had sent off a text less than half an hour ago saying I drive a black Mercedes now. Meet me at our old spot.
It was too late to back out now.
She hadn’t seen Geralt since summer after graduation five years ago, their last sun-drenched week together spent at his family’s secluded camp on the river. Despite the November chill and grey skies, she could close her eyes and be back there lying with him on the floating dock, her fingers trailing patterns on his bare sternum.
Yennefer had had a fancy gig waiting for her in the city before the end of the summer, but she’d spent half of their last week together wishing he would ask her to stay with him instead. She spent the second half thinking maybe she would ask him to come with her but knowing he’d say yes and suffocate there, that he’d lived out in the country his whole life and would try to make her happy and be miserable with the exhaust and muck and noise of the city.
They’d spend undergrad tangled up in each other, never quite fitting together for very long, never quite putting who they were to each other into words. They were fuckbuddies and distractions from schoolwork and moonlit nights walking to the gas station for cigarettes and hookah smoke blown behind a dorm building and drunken tumbles in Yen’s old beater in this very same parking lot.
Sometimes things got heavier, Geralt resting his cheek against her belly and shuddering out a sigh like he wanted to tell her something, wanted to ask if she’d be there in the morning, and then he’d turn and kiss her belly with a meaningful slowness that Yennefer didn’t quite know what to do with and they’d let the silence linger. Sometimes Yennefer caught him looking at her like she was likely to drift away like smoke, all raw and tight and longing.
That last summer week together, neither of them had said a word like they always did, just let the other slip away into separate post-college lives.
Life had gone on, and she couldn’t say she was displeased with it, no more than she ever had been. Still, in the quiet moments alone in her apartment with a bottle of wine, looking down over the glitter of city lights, she wondered if Geralt thought of her just as much.
His truck pulled up snug beside her car and parked.
When the door opened, a familiar ache kicked up in her chest just to look at him. He’d filled out more and his long, greying hair had gone full silver along with his beard, the awkward-looking wildlife biology major whose main hobbies had been birdwatching and D&D grown into someone who’d look at home in a gym, his flannel stretching across broad shoulders and strong arms.
But when he smiled that crooked smile and rapped tentatively on her window, she knew he hadn’t changed much, not really. She still loved this man man with a fierce flare of pain in her breast. God, she loved him.
Yennefer wondered what she looked like to him. If she had changed in his eyes.
The fond grin that lit up his face as she rolled down her window, all golden retriever puppy dog bright the way he only had ever been with her, told her what she already knew, that some things didn’t ever fade.
Stay with me this weekend, Yennefer had texted him the other day, after some light hearted catch up messages veered serious. She had rented the cabin on impulse, her hands trembling, had to go pick up the keys in an hour. Stay with me.
Ok, Geralt had replied, and she knew it wasn’t really an answer to the schism of their different lives. It didn’t mean that Yennefer wouldn’t leave Geralt in bed on Sunday afternoon and drive back to her studio apartment to sit with the lonely volume of the city echoing around her.
Stay with me too, he said with his eyes but didn’t say aloud. Maybe someday he would, and everything would be very different. Maybe she would still drive away from this again. Or maybe some forevers just took a lifetime to spell out, and they’d meet each other when they were ready.
As the snow swirled to crown Geralt’s pale hair, Yennefer felt that someday might be soon.