“Don’t even bother. I can read you like an open book,” Jon would always tell me every single time I tell him that I plan to surprise him or prank him. “I know you very well dear.”

That’s me; predictable, almost as if I was moving and acting in perpetual looping motions. Sometimes I think he knows me better than I know myself. We usually sleep early, around 10.30p.m. on most days unless it was a weekend and he was staying over for the night. That’s when we might head out for some supper or be out with his friends until around midnight.

On days he’s not with me, either one of us would suggest that we head to sleep, whoever that’s sleepier. Most of the time, the other person would simply follow suit.

I consider myself a clingy person. I want to be as close to him as I could possibly be, and be around him as often as I can. I like being in physical contact with him when we are together, even if I’m just placing my hand on his lap. I like to go to sleep when he does so that I get all the time I could with him. I’d wait up even if I could have gone to sleep earlier because I was simply idling around.

“It’s getting late,” I might tell him when it’s around 11pm and he hasn’t suggested we end the day yet. “Shall we go to sleep?”

“I’ll be working on this thing for a while more, you can go ahead and sleep first. You don’t have to wait up.” He’d reply sometimes when he’s having a busier day.

“Ah, alright.” Sometimes I would simply continue watching Grey’s Anatomy on my laptop while waiting, but some other time there really wasn’t anything that I wanted to do other than staring into space or mindlessly scrolling on Facebook. “I will just continue writing another blog post meanwhile then I guess.”

“Yeah right,” he would muse. “Say anything you want, you are just waiting up for me to go to bed. Don’t even think I don’t know that.”

Guilty.

Sometimes I really wanted to continue doing whatever I was doing and so I continue and head to sleep when he’s done with his stuff, but most of the time, indeed, I was guilty as charged.

I think that’s one of the best things about being together with someone. You start out as strangers, and you never stop learning about one another. Over time you know their habits, what they were going to think or say about a certain situation, and read you as if you’re an open book laid right before his eyes.

You learn to catch those body language signs when they are thinking about trying something, when they are just being playful or are deep in thoughts but pretending not to be. How they are having a bad day when they drag their feet just a little bit more when they walk; how they avert their eyes and talk a little awkward when they are shy but tentative about something new; how that slightly drawn out sentence indicates they have something more in their mind that they haven’t said out loud.

Sometimes you’d know when their ‘no’ means ‘no’ and there’s that, and other times when they’d say no and you know to stop asking because you know after a while they’d say “You know what, alright. Yes” simply from a higher pitch in their voice when they said no earlier.

These signs, these little secrets that are unique and known only to you, are part of the joys of being with someone even if you are only subconscious about it. You don’t know that you know it most of the time, until you sit down and reflect on what you know about them. You know when their friends are pushing their limits because those friends did not know those little signals that you do and you try to avert the conversations or calm your person down with a gentle touch down their back.

He reads me like an open book, that much is true. Meanwhile I’m just slowly flipping through his pages and noticing the tiny folds and creases around the page corners too.

Let’s read on.