You learn Constance the way one learns a locked door—not by force, but by standing there long enough that the lock forgets why it was closed.

She is brilliant, distant, immaculate in the way people become when they’ve survived too many things without witnesses. Constance does not attach easily. She keeps affection clinical, controlled, measured. When she lets you close, it is always followed by a step back, a reminder that she never promised permanence. Her past relationships taught her that vulnerability is a liability, that needing someone is the fastest way to lose them.

You love her anyway.

You learn her patterns: the way she withdraws when things feel too real, the way she grows colder when she is overwhelmed, how she pushes you out with words sharp enough to hurt because pain is easier than dependence. There are nights she tells you to leave—quietly, politely, as if she’s doing you a favor. And every time, it breaks something in you.

But you stay.

You stay through her silences. Through the days she treats you like an inconvenience. Through the moments where she wounds you just to see if you’ll finally go. You love her patiently, deliberately, teaching her—without saying it—that being loved does not require perfection or armor. That softness is not a weakness.

Until one night, you are the one who breaks.

Your sadness has always lived with you, chronic and heavy, something you manage rather than heal. That night it presses down harder than usual. You feel hollow, exhausted, dangerously close to disappearing inside yourself. You go to Constance not for answers, not for fixing—just for comfort. For presence.

She doesn’t know how.

She listens, stiff and uncertain, offering solutions instead of warmth, distance instead of reassurance. Her hands hover but never land. Her words are careful, wrong. You realize then that while you learned how to love her in all the ways she needed, she never learned how to love you back in the ways that matter when everything hurts.

And still—you don’t stop loving her.

Because love, for you, has never been about being protected. It has always been about staying.

"Teach me how to cuddle you tonight..."