Category: Daily Dose of Romance
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Thursday Mornings
He brought her the crossword. Every Thursday — she didn’t know if he sought it out or if it was just the paper, but somehow there was always a printed crossword on the kitchen table on Thursday mornings, and they did it together over breakfast, badly. They were both poor at crosswords. This was irrelevant.…
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Forgiving Tuesday
They’d had the argument on a Tuesday, which is why Tuesdays had been vaguely bad for three weeks. It hadn’t been a large argument. No raised voices, no ultimatums, no dramatic exits. Just a conversation that went wrong somewhere in the middle and left both of them feeling subtracted from. She’d apologized. He’d apologized. They’d…
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The Fitting Room
He waited outside the fitting room without complaint. This was, in Ingrid’s experience, rarer than it should have been. Previous partners had lasted approximately twelve minutes before starting to check their phones with increasing visibility, before making comments about time, before suggesting she just get the first thing. As if the exercise were a chore…
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What He Remembers
He remembered things she’d forgotten she’d told him. This had startled her several times over the years. She’d make an offhand reference to something — a teacher she’d had, a neighbourhood she’d lived in as a child, a fear she’d mentioned once in passing — and he’d respond with specific, accurate detail, which meant he’d…
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The Storm
She was afraid of storms. Not thunderstorms — those were fine. Metaphorical ones, too, she could handle. She was afraid of literal storms, the kind with serious winds, the kind that made the windows shudder and the lights flicker. It was leftover from childhood, specific and irrational, and she’d carried it for thirty-five years. Tobias…
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Parallel
Some evenings they just existed in the same space and did different things. She was working — editing something, her laptop open, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair where she kept forgetting them. He was cooking, something with a lot of garlic, a podcast playing quietly from his phone on the counter. They…
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The Note
She still found them in her pockets. Seven years and they’d tapered off — from the daily ones early on, in the slightly embarrassing pink-cloud phase, to the occasional ones now. But they still appeared. Inside coat pockets before winter trips. Tucked into laptops on work travel. Under her coffee cup on difficult mornings. Always…
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The Reading Habit
He read over her shoulder. Not literally — that would have driven her to violence — but he read everything she recommended with a seriousness she found quietly staggering. He kept a list on his phone of books she mentioned, shows she referred to, things she said had changed the way she thought. He’d been…
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The Move
Moving day was a disaster, which was not unexpected. Three things broke, one of which was irreplaceable and two of which she had specifically said to handle with care. The weather turned at noon. One of the friends they’d enlisted disappeared for an hour without explanation and returned with sandwiches, which was both maddening and…
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The Language Class
He’d been learning Portuguese for eleven months. He hadn’t told her why. The classes were Wednesday evenings — he’d said it was for work, which wasn’t entirely a lie because he did have clients in Lisbon, but it was a lie in the way lies are when they’re protecting a surprise. He told her on…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 