She'd gotten a job as a travel writer some months after, somehow lucking into the position. Her tutors had all told her that she could come back, that she needn't worry about the class work, that she would only need to sit the exams, but Meggie felt that going back would feel somehow wrong, she didn't think she could face sitting in that lecture hall again, the sun slanting through the windows.
The last time she had been happy.
She started out on small pieces, mainly within her own state, sometimes taking trips out to the coast to write up on exclusive golf resorts or quaint little lodges hidden in the foothills of the mountains. Sometimes he would go with her, sitting quietly beside her as she drove, watching the world go by with a fascination that never faded.
She would go out in the day, touring around the tourist sites, making notes and taking photo's, idly framing paragraphs in her head ready for when she returned to the hotel. He was never there when she got back, but it didn't worry her, instead she took the time to write out her article's, struggling to stay within the word limit.
He always came back in the middle of the night, smelling of soot and the outdoors. She never asked him what he did with his time, and he never told her.
She always ordered rooms with twin beds, to ask for anything else would be like drawing a definitive line under an already uncertain relationship. He had never come to her, would instead ready himself for sleep wherever she was not, and wait for her to come for him. She came every night, without fail, her hand seeking his in the dark and drawing him down beside her, her body soft and warm beneath the covers as she settled in against him with a familiarity that he had come to depend on.
Sometimes she would toy with the idea of not reaching out to him at all, just to see what he would do, but she knew, deep down in that small cold part of her heart, that he would leave her to lie alone. It was a depressing truth that clouded the edges of her mind, knowing that night after night she would find herself lying in the arms of a man who was quickly becoming the very reason she got up in the morning, knowing that he only held her because he thought she needed the comfort of another's presence.
So no, nothing more had ever come from it, despite the creeping yearning of her heart. But Meggie wasn't stupid, she knew what whispers followed her around the small town she lived in, of the rumours of that poor young girl and her father's friend. But to look at them one couldn't assume, many would mistake their silence towards each other as animosity, not an unspoken understanding that they never needed words to speak to one another.
She had wanted to refute them, could remember a time when she had caught a look between two women at the market, their sly glances and nudges as they looked at her then him, she had been laughing at him frowning at a pineapple, his face saying it all. She'd wanted to wipe the smirks off their faces, to shout at them and tell them 'so what!', but there was nothing to refute, nothing but the simple comfort of being held in his arms, shielded from her nightmares by the warmth of his embrace.
Sometimes the futility of those thoughts drove her to tears, but she always hid them well, and turned her face from him when he tried to see.