The Scent of Limerence

The smell of your room drapes over me like a quilted blanket, wrapping around me until I’m cocooned and safe. Like the candles flickering from your desk and nightstand, the warmth of your presence beside me sparks in the pit of my stomach, coursing through me like hot flashes every time you shift just a little closer. Can you feel my presence? Does it suffocate you the way that yours does me? Does it feel like being set free at the same time? Are you subconsciously leaning into it when you inch closer?

Your hair swishes a little too close to my face the next time you move, and the smell of your lavender curl cream fills my nose. Something about it just ties in so completely with the rest of the room. I inhale a little too hard on accident, and you wash over me in waves. The sweet scent of your candles and body wash mixing with the books stacked in every spare space, ones that I know you haven’t read yet and ones that I know you’ve read three or four times. The air in here is clean but occupied, the lemon dust spray you use every week when you clean with your sister, and fresh coffee that you’ve drained and refilled six times since I got here a couple of hours ago. Everything here smells like you, from corner-to-corner; I feel so drenched in all of the little secrets that make you up as I sit here and just live inside of the space that you call home.

I curl into your bed, press my face against the pillow and inhale the vanilla body oil that you use before you climb under the covers every night. My body relaxes instinctively, muscles losing the stress of the week until I’m swathed in the easiness that you provide. I could fall asleep here, pass out in a comatose state that I don’t ever feel safe enough to embrace anywhere else.

My boyfriend—fiancé—hates that; he hates when I spend the night here. He doesn’t understand why I like it so much, why I look forward to our weekly sleepovers more than I look forward to the last minute dates that he throws together every few weeks.

When I told you that, you said that he felt threatened; you insisted that I needed to have a conversation with him about it.

I haven’t done that, yet. I don’t know why I keep putting it off.

Tonight, like so many others, you’re sitting on the bed beside me with a book propped against your arched knees. Your phone sits on top of the pages with Archive of Our Own pulled up. You gave up on reading the actual book about an hour ago, once the candle began to burn too dim to provide light; I thought that you might turn on the lamp, but instead you grabbed your headphones and wordlessly dove straight into the 300K word fanfic that you were telling me about on the phone last night. You don’t notice me watching you—you never do.

I don’t know why I do it; there’s just something so comforting about you being beside me.

You once told me that someone had described your aura as “sleepy”, and then you proceeded to tell me that you didn’t understand what they meant by that, which struck me gobsmacked. How can you possibly not see it? You’re a perpetually sleepy person, always making yourself small by contorting your body to fit into the corners of couches and chairs, yawning widely with coffee tucked safely between your hands; I’ve never known your energy to be loud and exaggerated, it’s always simple, calm like the lavender and vanilla scents that take up your bedroom. And the second that you open yourself up with someone? Well, it’s like the air in your room, a safe aura that consumes that person until they feel it in their brains. I don’t think they were talking about how you as a person are sleepy, but how you as an energy source are calm and relaxing. The feeling of your presence washes over me, it sucks me in and hugs me tight until I feel like everything will be okay, like sleep is inevitable because rest is forever what I need and I only ever seem to realize that when we’re in the same room together.

It irks me that others get to see this side of you to the point that they can say it out loud, but I’ll never admit it.

What is it like, having that pull to those around you? Soft and gentle in a way that you try your best not to be. I listen to you talk about yourself sometimes and I can’t help but scream in my own head: How? How could you possibly think that you are the worse when everyone that truly knows you knows that you are the best? You see yourself on the dark end of a greyscale, but I see you like a rainbow after the worst of storms, the moon on the darkest of nights, the golden hour sun first thing in the morning when I’m too tired to appreciate the world’s beauty. You are everything and you see yourself as nothing, and I wish that I could fight whoever made you feel as such.

I breathe in a little longer than necessary, rubbing my cheek against the satin pillowcase that you bought to help keep your curls somewhat at bay. It doesn’t work, of course, because you toss and turn in your sleep until you end up pressed against my own body heat. I don’t think you even realize that you do it; I wonder what you might be like when you sleep alone, whether you search out the weighted turtle that you keep on your favorite side of the bed, or if you curl into a ball and seep heat from yourself. How do you stay warm when you keep your room so cold?

Something about the thought of you in this bed without me beside you makes me ache.

I don’t know why, it doesn’t make sense to me.

You scroll another chapter down, your chipped black nails tapping lightly against the screen as you switch out of the story to go and change the song. I wonder what you’re listening to—does it comfort you? Are you trying to match the music to the scene that you’re reading? Are you trying to make yourself feel happy or sad or somewhere in between? Where are you, right now, in your mind? How far away from me have you drifted? Will your body disappear, too, if I let you stay so far gone for too long?

Is it even my right to be the one to pull you back?

My boyfriend—fiancé—says I overthink everything, that nothing is ever as serious as I make it out to be. But sometimes…sometimes, I see it in your eyes: the desperate panic of being contained in a place that you’ll never escape. You told me once that you’re afraid of relationships, afraid of letting things get too personal, because that means there will be stakes and stakes make for a difficult getaway. I didn’t understand it, the way that you talked about being close with people. It made me sad, and a little angry at the time. Why wouldn’t you open up? Why wouldn’t you let me in? I’ve let you in. I’ve shown you all of the darkest corners of my mind and you’ve accepted me for every single one of them.

Why won’t you show me yours too?

Do you not trust me?

Is it not lonely to never fully trust anyone?

My…my fiancé says that I overthink everything, but I think that I’m right to in this moment. I know that you won’t be here forever, you’ve told me a hundred times with determination lining the set of your brows and the pull of your lips, that you will get out of this “hell of a town”. You will get out and you will never come back. I know that you aren’t joking when you say it, but it never feels as real as it does in these moments, when your eyes are faraway and you seem like nothing but a ghost. A shell of a person who’s mind is forever living on clouds that I’ll never be able to see.

My own brain feels sick for wanting to hold you back, but a part of me is selfish—most of me is selfish. I want you for myself, want you here for the rest of our lives. Someone that’s easy to reach when I need you, someone that I know will give me comfort no matter the circumstance.

A comfortable bed to land in when it gets hard and I just want to be able to sleep.

If I told you that, though, I know you’d run far and fast and never speak to me again.

So, here I sit in your bed, watching you read your fanfic and listen to your music and dream of a life far away from me.

How long do we have left together? Will this stop the day of my wedding? Will you be gone before then? After?

At what point will you stop being my shoulder to cry on?

Will you slip through my fingers until I can’t reach you anymore?

Will your words fall from my tongue? Will your touch be something that I no longer know?

Will the heat of your body forever be a memory pressed against my side when I close my eyes?

Are these the thoughts of a woman engaged?

You sigh quietly, gently, and my heart picks up in speed. I want, so badly. In this moment, there is nothing outside of your bedroom. There is nothing beyond the books and stuffed animals and coffee at 12AM and you. I want you, my favorite person, my best friend, and it scares me so much because I know more than anything that I shouldn’t.

You don’t see any of this, of course; instead you lock your phone, take out the headphones, put out the candles, and turn to face me in the dark—and there is nothing inside of me but desire and want. A life in the city that you always talk about. A life watching you write books and tell stories with a smile on your face. A life in an apartment that smells like you and fells like you and is home. A lifetime of sleep that will forever come easy to me because your bed will never be empty.

“Goodnight,” you whisper into the dark, and your voice is so soft and sweet that it makes my chest ache and my stomach twist. You’re so close to me now, I could just reach out and brush a hand over your cheek (I’m sure that your skin is just as soft as it looks). I don’t, because I know that I shouldn’t. But as the cool air of the room settles over us and you shift just an inch closer, your smell twines around me like a noose…

Gods, do I want.