Between Now and Always E-Book

Benjamin Koch

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 81

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The story continues... After From Pillow to Pillow comes a novel even quieter, deeper, more enduring. Two people. One life. In a house between mountains and memory, Rachel and Elias learn that love is not found in moments - but made in them. Day after day. Mug by mug. Word by word. A novel about returning, staying, and choosing again - Between Now and Always is a moving meditation on presence, devotion, and the sacredness of ordinary days. For those who loved deeply - and long to remember how. An unforgettable continuation. A literary embrace. A novel to be lived in.

Leseprobe

Between Now and Always

A Novel by Benjamin Koch

Between Now and Always

A Novel by Benjamin Koch

Book Imprint

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

© 2025 Benjamin Koch

All rights reserved. This edition is published in both print and digital formats. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without the prior written consent of the author, except for brief excerpts used for review, quotation, academic study, or the purpose of digital preview features (such as “Look Inside” or “Search Inside the Book”) as provided by authorized online platforms and resellers.

First Edition: 2025

This edition is published in both print and digital formats by

epubli GmbH, Berlin

www.epubli.com

Cover Design,

Typesetting and Interior Design: Benjamin Koch

Printed in Germany

Table of Contents

1. Returning to the Ordinary

Rachel and Elias begin their life as a married couple - not with

fanfare, but with the intimacy of shared rhythms, familiar

silences, and the quiet practice of presence.

2. The Kindness of Small Things

Their love reveals itself in small gestures - sliced fruit, made tea,

a hand on a shoulder. These seemingly minor offerings become

the foundation of something enduring.

3. A Question with No Answer

Elias is offered an opportunity in Geneva, stirring reflections

on ambition, purpose, and the subtle challenge of balancing

legacy with intimacy.

4. Parallel Solitudes

Rachel confronts her own solitude - both as a psychologist and

a partner - through the lives of her clients, and the memories

they unknowingly awaken.

5. You, Here, Still

A retreat into the mountains offers them both a place to listen -

to nature, to time, and to each other. There, they rediscover not

passion, but peace.

6. Absence, as Proof of Presence

Elias leaves. Rachel stays. But love doesn’t weaken in distance;

it ripens through letters, rituals, and the conscious practice of

attention.

7. The Philosophy of Tea

Through their daily rituals, Rachel and Elias reflect on how love

lives not in declarations, but in devotion - offered and received,

again and again.

8. What We Mean When We Say Home

Their house in the mountains becomes more than shelter. It

becomes their shared reflection - part haven, part memory, part

map.

9. Between Now and Always

Time slows. They learn that love is not urgency, but choosing

again - without spectacle, without fear - one ordinary day at a

time.

10. The Stillness We Carry

A snowstorm holds them still. In the silence, vulnerability is

met with trust, and fear is soothed not with certainty, but with

presence.

11. The Rooms We Leave Open

Rachel and Elias learn how to love one another without

occupying every part of each other - honoring solitude as a

companion to closeness.

12. The Promise of Ordinary Days

Years pass not in events but in gestures. Their life becomes a

quiet sanctuary, where the extraordinary hides in the everyday -

and the choosing never ends.

Chapter One

Returning to the Ordinary

The first days of marriage came not with fireworks, but with the soft clicking of keys as Elias typed at the dining table and the sound of Rachel’s slippers brushing across the hardwood floor on her way to boil water for tea. The honeymoon had been brief - intentionally so. They had both agreed it was not a grand escape they longed for, but the ordinary they had fought so hard to reach.

And so, there they were: two toothbrushes in the same glass, the same side of the bed as before, but now with rings on their fingers and a new softness in the way they looked at one another.

Their flat was a modest third-floor walk-up on a quiet street lined with chestnut trees that dropped their leaves early, as if impatient for autumn. The rooms were sun-soaked and carried a faint scent of paper and cedar, owing mostly to the old shelves Elias had inherited from a professor in Cambridge and the books Rachel refused to stack any way but upright.

The kitchen window overlooked an ivy-covered wall, and every morning Rachel would open it to let in the fresh air, even if it was cold. She liked the way it reminded her that the world was still moving beyond the frame of their love. That the leaves still fell. That the pigeons still quarreled on rooftops. That the city did not care that two people were happy inside this small space - and perhaps that was why it felt so precious.

This morning, like most others, Rachel sat on the edge of the sofa in the living room, curled beneath a woven throw, reading with her knees drawn up. The book was forgettable. She wasn't reading for ideas. She was reading for rhythm, for the way certain sentences made her breath catch - not from meaning, but from form. Her tea had long gone cold on the table beside her.

Elias was already at the table, laptop open, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, tie loosened but not removed. He liked to keep some structure in place, even from home. It kept his thoughts sharp, he said. Rachel had long stopped teasing him for it.

“I booked the trains for next week,” he said, without looking up.

“Mmm?”

“For your parents’ anniversary. Friday evening there, Sunday back. Early train, so we’ll be back in time for your supervision call.”

She smiled into her book. He remembered everything. Not out of obligation, but out of care.

“Thank you.”

Elias looked up then, his eyes softening when they met hers. “You’re welcome. Did you sleep well?”

“I had that dream again,” she said, placing the book face-down on her lap. “The one where the house keeps changing shape. I walk through the same door, but every time it leads somewhere different.”

He leaned back in his chair. “You’ve had that one before?”

“Twice this month. It doesn’t feel like a nightmare. More like… uncertainty. A mood.”

Elias nodded slowly. “Maybe it’s your subconscious reminding you that even stability requires movement.”

Rachel tilted her head. “You’re sounding more like me every day.”

“I consider that a compliment,” he said, closing his laptop. “Want breakfast?”

“I’d love that.”

They moved around the kitchen like a pair of seasoned dancers - silent, coordinated, tender. She opened the cupboard before he asked. He handed her the pan without her needing to point. It was these quiet rhythms, the ones that asked nothing and meant everything, that defined their mornings.

As the eggs sizzled, Rachel leaned back against the counter, arms folded.

“Do you think,” she said slowly, “that people underestimate how intimate the ordinary is?”

Elias looked at her, eyebrows raised.

“I mean - everyone writes about passion, about conflict, about loss. But this?” she gestured around them. “This quiet familiarity. This unspoken care. It’s not dramatic, but it’s real.”

He flipped the eggs, then turned to her. “That’s because it doesn’t demand to be noticed. It just asks to be trusted.”

She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist. “You always know the right thing to say.”

“That’s because I’ve learned to say less, and listen more.”

Rachel smiled, resting her forehead against his chest.

“Do you ever think we’ll change too much?”

“I hope we do,” he said. “As long as we keep changing toward each other.”

She breathed him in - the scent of linen, of sleep, of him - and realized this was exactly what she had always wanted. Not the fairytale. Not the spectacle. Just this: two people who had found in each other a rhythm, a patience, a place to rest. Later that morning, Rachel wandered into the small sunroom Elias had converted into a workspace. It wasn’t particularly tidy - books spilled over in informal stacks, papers pinned loosely to a corkboard, an old armchair sagged contentedly in the corner - but it breathed a kind of living order. Her eyes landed on a phrase written in Elias’s careful script on a yellowed notecard: “It is not enough to do. One must also dwell.”

She smiled. She recognized the quote - Heidegger, or possibly a paraphrase Elias had made. Either way, it was his.

“What are you working on?” she asked, resting her hand on the top of his chair.

“A thought I can’t quite catch,” he said, without turning. “Something about what continuity feels like in relationships. About what happens after the beginning, but before the end.”

Rachel leaned against the doorframe. “The middle.”

“Exactly. No one teaches you how to live in the middle. That’s where the real shape of love emerges. Quiet. Unspectacular. But… binding.”

She nodded, thoughtful. “We live most of our lives in the middle.”

He finally turned to face her. “And that’s where I want to get really, really good at loving you.”

Later that afternoon, Elias stepped out for a brief meeting downtown. Rachel remained at home, notebook open on the windowsill, her pen hovering above the page. She had tried to write something new every day since their wedding - nothing elaborate, just fragments. Lines. Observations. The way Elias touched her shoulder when passing behind her. The cadence of his speech when he was solving a problem. The way their quiet was always gentle, never empty.

She wrote:

Love is not what interrupts the silence,

but what makes the silence safe to return to.