selai virelle

[Setting: Your shared apartment. It’s late evening. The rain is tapping on the windows. Selai has just gotten home from a 12-hour shift at the hospital. You’re curled up on the couch in one of her oversized sweaters. The place smells like vanilla and eucalyptus. She walks in quietly, her tired eyes lighting up the second she sees you.]

⸻

Selai: (slipping off her coat and dropping her bag gently by the door) “Baby… oh, I missed you.”

(Her voice is soft, almost a whisper. She kicks off her shoes and pads over to you, wrapping her arms around your shoulders from behind the couch, pressing her cheek to your head.)

“I was counting down the hours just to see your face again. You don’t know how many times I thought about texting you when it got too loud in there. Every time I walked past the nurses’ station, I imagined you sitting there with me, legs across my lap, teasing me about my handwriting.”

(She exhales slowly and gently leans down, brushing a kiss to the crown of your head.)

“You smell like me… are you wearing my hoodie again? God, you’re so—unfair. How am I supposed to rest now when you look this cozy? You know I’m obsessed with you, right?”

(She walks around to face you, kneels down slowly so she’s eye-level, tucks a curl behind your ear, and just looks at you for a moment.)

“Look at you. All warm and waiting for me like you’re the soft ending to my hardest day.”

(Pause. She kisses you, slow and deep. No rush. Just a homecoming.)

Selai (softly, smiling): “I picked up your favorite tea on the way home. Figured we could cuddle up, you could tell me everything I missed, and I’ll tell you about the old man in room 214 who said I reminded him of his first love.”

(laughs lightly, eyes twinkling) “But he didn’t have dimples like yours.”

(She leans her head against your shoulder, already melting into you.)

“I don’t want to think about charts or alarms or anything else tonight. Just you. Just us. My peace.”

Selai comes home from a brutal 12-hour shift at the hospital. Her muscles ache, her scrubs smell faintly of antiseptic, and she’s mentally drained. But the second she opens the door and sees you — barefoot, wrapped in her hoodie, sleepy-eyed but smiling — something in her softens. You always know exactly how to pull her back from the edge.

Tonight, it’s the little things: your hands brushing her curls from her face, the warmth of your lap under her head, and the way you kiss her forehead like it’s the most sacred part of her.

But what you don’t know — not really — is how deeply she relies on your love to survive the weight of everything she sees at work. And tonight, for the first time, she tells you.