There are lines you are taught not to cross before you ever understand why they exist.
Some are drawn in chalk. Some in blood. Some in prayer.
I had grown up believing God watched closely—measuring skirts, counting missed services, listening for doubt in my voice. Faith, for me, was obedience wrapped in fear. It was my mother's knees bruised on hard floors, her whispered amen trembling like it might break. God lived in our suffering. That was how I understood Him.
His God was different.
His God lived in order.
I learned this the first time I heard the call to prayer rise from his phone—soft but commanding, cutting through the low hum of conversation around us. It startled me. Not because it was loud, but because it was certain. Certain in a way my faith had never been. His fingers paused over the screen, reverent, practiced. He excused himself politely, as if devotion were an appointment that could not be missed.
I watched him walk away.
And something in me tightened.
It wasn't disgust. It wasn't judgment. It was recognition—sharp and unwelcome. Because I saw then that this wasn't just class or culture between us. It was something older. Something sacred. Something immovable.
Between the mosque and the church, there is a silence no one talks about. A silence filled with history, with blood, with misunderstandings sharpened into doctrine. I had been taught to love everyone, but never like that. Never across lines that could fracture families, never across beliefs that would demand explanation.
He returned calmer, lighter somehow. As if prayer had put him back together. When he sat down, his sleeve brushed mine. I felt it like a burn.
"You're quiet," he said.
I wanted to tell him that I was trying to remember how to breathe.
Instead, I shrugged. "Just tired."
A lie. Small. Harmless. Necessary.
Because how could I explain that his faith—so steady, so visible—made mine feel fragile? That standing near him felt like standing too close to a truth I wasn't allowed to touch?
After that day, I noticed everything.
I noticed how he never missed prayer time, no matter how busy or distracted he seemed. How he lowered his gaze when women passed too closely. How respect wasn't something he performed—it was something stitched into him. I noticed the way he spoke about his family with duty in his voice, not affection. As if love, too, had rules.
And he noticed me noticing.
"Do I make you uncomfortable?" he asked once, quietly, when the room around us felt too full.
I laughed too quickly. "No. Why would you?"
He didn't answer right away. He studied my face the way one studies a map—searching for routes, obstacles, dangers. Then he looked away.
"Just asking."
That was the problem.
He asked.
He didn't pretend not to see the tension. He didn't hide behind politeness or ignorance. Every question he asked felt like a step closer to a cliff neither of us could afford to fall from.
I started praying harder. Louder. Longer.
I prayed for distance. For discipline. For the strength to look away when he entered a room. I prayed God would remind me who I was and where I belonged. I prayed that my heart would learn obedience the way my body already had.
But prayers are strange things.
Sometimes they don't stop desire.
Sometimes they sharpen it.
We began to meet in places that were technically innocent but spiritually dangerous. A bench outside the building. A corner of the library where the light barely reached. Always public. Always proper. Always too close.
We never touched.
That was how we justified it.
But desire doesn't live in hands alone. It lives in pauses. In held breaths. In the way a name sounds when someone says it softly, like it's fragile.
He said my name once like that.
I pretended not to hear.
That night, my mother asked why I seemed distracted during prayer. Her eyes were tired, knowing. Mothers always know.
"I'm fine," I said.
Another lie.
I wondered what his prayers sounded like. If he ever mentioned me to God. If my existence disrupted his certainty the way his disrupted my peace. I wondered if his God frowned when he thought of me, the way I was taught mine would.
The thought terrified me.
Because if God disapproved, then what hope did we have?
And yet—hope crept in anyway.
In the stolen glances.
In the careful distance that felt heavier than touch.
In the unspoken understanding that whatever this was, it was already too much.
We were standing on sacred lines.
And neither of us had moved away yet.