A Gillovny RPF

Submitted by someone who wants to stay anonymous ❤

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Five and a half months – six if he counted the couple of weeks of promo at the end of filming – which had, when he had first received the schedule, seemed like an eternity and which now, seemed nothing more substantial than the blink of an eye.

Time spent together merely an illusion of what they had once had, an echo of now distant memories as unattainable as they were fleeting.

To feel her, to hold her, to claim her once again as his own had lulled him – had lulled them both in misplaced security, protected as they were inside the safety and familiarity that had transported them effortlessly and completely back in time when nothing mattered anymore other than whispered promises made in the dark of night, skin on skin, limbs, entwined, fevered breath on dampened hair and words that spoke of love and hope; of small things lost but now regained.

And for a while they had believed again, for a while they were able to push aside the outside world and just be.  Refusing always to acknowledge that an end was in sight for both of them, the future stretching before them as unattainable and tenuous as it had ever been.  She would leave again, crossing an ocean to return to a life that seemingly no longer required his presence to complete it, to complete her.

The urge to just pull her to him in front of the worlds press, to hold her so tightly that she couldn’t leave even if she had wanted to had overtaken him so completely he could barely even bring himself to look at her on this final day, afraid beyond measure that what she would show him would destroy him, a question in her eyes that he wouldn’t be permitted to answer and which would finally send him to his knees with the pain of it all.  This woman who had held him in her thrall for almost twenty-five years, walking away from him and leaving yet another piece of herself behind;  shattered and wanting, unwilling or unable to admit a truth that had swirled between them for so long and he wondered how long it would be before she simply had nothing left.

It had been easier for them both to say their goodbyes by phone.  To put space between them lest one or both betrayed themselves and resolve weakened.  But he had known, somehow he had known that it wouldn’t be enough; that it could never be enough when they owed each other so much more than that.

And he had been unsurprised when she had come to him, knowing she was there in some inexplicably certain way even before he opened his eyes.  The slight dip in the mattress as she perched on the edge of the bed, his body tilting naturally toward her even as he reached out to gently smooth his palm across her back, wincing in spite of himself at the sharp angles beneath the thin sweater she wore, wishing he could somehow quieten the turmoil that raged below the surface of her rigidly controlled exterior.

“Why are you here?”

The question softly whispered, hanging suspended in the air between them as she shook her head.

“I don’t know…..I just…I just….I….please would you just hold me for a few minutes.”

And he had folded her body into his, wrapping his arms around her as she trembled against him, wondering how they had found themselves here, in this living nightmare that had no beginning and no end, where nothing seemed right when they were apart and yet they still couldn’t find enough reason to be together.  Where love and hate blurred lines that drew them together but also pushed them apart.  Two lives half lived for a quarter of a century with answers as elusive now as they had ever been.

But she came to him, enough of a need still burning within her that time and space and distance has never managed to fully extinguish and with it, a hope that somehow they will one day get things right.

“What are we doing?  Why are we like this?”

He sighed against her then, as always unable to find the words to make things better for her, tightening his hold on her lest she fall into the sky and flee from him.  A thousand promises broken but a thousand more yet to make.

“I don’t know” he tells her.  “But I know one day we’ll figure it out.”

End