[Fiction] Somewhere Between

Read the second-place entry for our week of January 26, 2025 prompt, The Spark

Somewhere Between
by Ali Abazeed

It wasn't planned. These things rarely are.

He didn't belong there. Not in the way she did. The students, the speakers who filled the lecture hall with their loud certainty. He, the passerby worker, hardly noticeable. The kind of person you stare through, not at. She, the professor you stared away from. Bright and distracting.

He saw her before she saw him.

She stood at the podium, a dark wave of hair pinned at her neck, one strand slipping free as she spoke. Her hands moved as though pulling the air into her orbit, drawing the room into her rhythm. The students nodded when she did and laughed when she wanted them to. He watched from the periphery, clipboard in hand, inspecting the doorway for structural integrity, but his eyes kept catching on her.

She glanced at him once through the doorway. Maybe twice. Imagined, he thought—a flick of her gaze, the way you acknowledge a shadow passing through.

But shadows don’t come back.

A week later, he walked past the lecture hall again to catch a glimpse. Empty this time. He told himself he would never see her again.

Four months later, somehow, they had arrived here, tangled in the half-light of her apartment, the city pressing in around them. Her coat draped over the chair, her body warm against his, the scent of her sinking into the sheets, clinging to the air between them.

Outside, the city stretched on, unfamiliar and unwelcoming. The kind of place where names disappear in translation, where streets never lead where you expect. Where he counted coins before stepping onto buses, and she sat in rooms filled with voices that did not carry the same weight of loss.

She exhaled, long and slow, stretching into the silence.

“What are you thinking about?” she murmured, voice thick with sleep.

He hesitated.

There was a time when he might have believed the feeling was new. That it began here, in the dim of her apartment, her breath soft against his shoulder. But now he wasn’t sure. It felt older, something that had been waiting, circling, long before this moment. Before the half-lit streets, the apartment, and the first word she had spoken to him. Maybe even before she had seen him at all.

He reaches for the strand of hair that had fallen loose, smoothing it back behind her ear.

She looks at him intently, as if measuring the weight of the silence. She shifts closer, fingers grazing his jaw, a barely-there smile in the dark—not wide, not bright, but something deeper. She leans into him, lips brushing the hollow of his throat slowly and deliberately. Her fingers splay lightly across his skin, cool and warm all at once. His edges begin to blur.

When she speaks, her words a mere whisper.

"You do that for me too."

He exhales without noticing.

Her hand lingers at his collarbone as if anchoring herself to the moment, though he knew she was always halfway somewhere else. He had seen it before—the way she stared past him, toward something farther than the space between them.

But tonight, she stays.

A Note From Our Guest Judge, Sareeta Domingo

I liked the sensuality of this piece, the movement from strangers to lovers and the way that can transpire between seemingly disparate people.

About Ali Abazeed

Ali Abazeed is a public health professional, educator, and writer based in Metro Detroit. The child of refugees, his work explores migration, memory, and belonging. He co-founded Coffee & Script, a writing collective for diasporic writers, and has published in scientific journals and textbooks. With eight years in government and community work, he remains committed to curiosity, imagination, and the human experience.

This piece was written in response to the prompt The Spark.