The Waiting Room
A free C1-level English story for language learners, readable online in English, with an option to listen via the free Storyteller app.
Waiting alone while his girlfriend undergoes a medical scan, Felix realizes how long he has been postponing a conversation about their future and decides not to wait any longer to say it.
Nadia had been in the imaging room for forty minutes. That left Felix alone with a waiting-room chair, a muted television running a home-renovation show neither of them would ever watch, and roughly two years of things he had never gotten around to saying. They had been together long enough that "together" had started to feel like an insufficient word for it. They had also been together short enough, apparently, that he had convinced himself there was no urgency in finding a better one.
The referral had used the phrase "just to rule things out," which he understood, intellectually, to be the reassuring version of the sentence. It hadn't stopped him from spending the drive over doing the specific, useless arithmetic of a person imagining a future collapsing before there was any evidence it needed to.
What struck him most, sitting there, was not fear exactly — it was the sudden, unwelcome clarity of realizing how much he had been treating their relationship as a draft. Somewhere in the last two years he had begun thinking of the conversation about moving in together as a thing to have eventually. It would happen once his lease ended, once work settled down, once some vague and endlessly renewable "once" had finally arrived. Had he actually believed they had unlimited time, he supposed that postponing might have made some sense. Sitting in a plastic chair under fluorescent light, he no longer believed anything of the kind. Not once, in two years, had he actually said any of this to her plainly.
She came out paler than she'd gone in, though she managed a small, tired smile before he could ask. "They want a follow-up scan next week. Probably nothing. The doctor used the word 'probably' four separate times, which either means she's very confident or very careful."
"Which do you think it is?"
"I think it's a doctor covering herself. I try not to read too much into doctors' adverbs."
He laughed, more from relief at her voice sounding like her own than at the joke itself. Then, before he could wait for a better moment — a nicer restaurant, a calmer week, some more cinematic version of this exact sentence — he said the thing he'd been rehearsing for two years.
"I want us to actually live together. Not eventually. Not once my lease ends. I don't want to keep treating this like something we're still deciding on."
Nadia looked at him for a long moment, in a waiting room that was, by any reasonable standard, an almost comically unromantic place to say something like that. "You're doing this now? In a room that smells like hand sanitizer?"
"I don't think I trusted myself to do it anywhere nicer. I'd have found a reason to wait."
"Ask me again next week," she said, "once we actually know something." Then, quieter: "But don't wait longer than that."
