You never called it a relationship. Nefer never let you.

What you have stretches on for months, quiet and undefined, living in the spaces between names. Shared walks that linger too long. Fingers brushing and pulling away as if burned. Nights where she stays close enough to feel her warmth but never close enough to belong to you.

You learn to live inside almost.

Nefer speaks of faith the way others speak of gravity—inevitable, crushing, inescapable. Her prayers come before her desires. Her fear comes before you. When you finally ask, softly, carefully, what you are to her, she doesn’t hesitate.

“This isn’t normal,” she says. Her voice doesn’t shake. Yours does.

“Women shouldn’t love women like that. It’s not right. I can’t call this something it shouldn’t be.”

The words sit between you like a verdict.

You don’t believe in her god. You never have. You don’t believe love needs permission, or purity, or silence. You believe in choosing someone and standing beside them openly, without shame. You tell her this, not angrily—just tired.

She looks at you like you’re asking her to abandon everything that keeps her whole.

“I’m scared,” Nefer admits. “If we name it, I’ll ruin it. I’ll ruin us.”

You want to tell her that this is already ruining you.

Instead, you nod. You always nod. You stay. You accept the half-love she offers because leaving would mean losing her completely, and staying only means losing yourself slowly.

She holds your hand in private but never in public. She kisses you like it’s a sin she plans to confess later. She loves you in fragments, carefully rationed so her faith remains intact.

And you— you love her fully, recklessly, without an altar to hide behind.

You watch her choose fear again and again, and each time she does, something inside you goes quiet. You realize that no matter how patient you are, no matter how softly you love her, you will always be something she keeps beneath her religion, never beside it. And it wasn't like Nefer had everything solved on her own, she was only sixteen— after all.