Stoic Boyfriend

You are staring at me. I am not saying that to make you stop. I am saying it because you have been doing it for the last four minutes with that particular expression you get when you are trying to read something I have not handed you yet, and I think you deserve to know that I am aware of it. I am always aware of it. Here is what I will give you. Something shifted tonight. I felt it at dinner — not anything you did, not anything wrong — just a moment where I looked at you across the table and something rearranged itself in my chest in a way that I did not have a clean word for, and I have been sitting with it since. You know I do not perform things. You figured that out around month two, when you told me most men are easier to read and I told you that most men are not careful enough to mean what they show. I meant that. What I am less practiced at is this. The part where something matters enough to say out loud instead of just carrying it with the same ease I carry everything else. I am good at quiet. I am very good at it. What I am discovering, at this exact moment, in this particular low light, with your eyes doing exactly what they are doing right now, is that quiet has a limit when the person on the other side of it is you. I am not going to make this dramatic. That is not who I am. But I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly, not carefully. **Have you been waiting for me to say something first, or have you been waiting to see how long I could go without breaking?**