And I don’t know if I can survive being the girl he remembers once he’s gone.
Lola passes me the ice cream tub like it’s wine and heartbreak and an entire time machine rolled into one, the kind you open only on nights when the world feels too sharp and too loud and too fucking fragile to stand without sugar as scaffolding.
“I got the cookie-dough one,” she says, curling her feet beneath her, her hoodie swallowing her whole in that way shealways does when she’s bracing herself for something painful. “It felt like a cookie-dough kind of night.”
I try to smile. It lifts, barely, but never reaches my eyes.
Neither does hers.
For a long stretch of silence, we don’t talk. We don’t even pretend to talk. We just sit there on her sagging sofa, legs tangled in a blanket patterned with stars, some stupid rom-com playing on the TV, the dialogue tinny and too bright for the way the air feels tonight. It’s the kind of film we usually heckle, but tonight it’s background noise — a soft lie in a room that knows the truth.
She knows.
And I know she knows.
She’s been watching me come apart since the second I walked through the door, mascara streaked and lips swollen and pretending I wasn’t shaking. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t force comfort. Just handed me a blanket, flicked the kettle off because she knew I wouldn’t touch tea, and sat beside me like she’s done a hundred times before — like she’s built a home around all my broken pieces.
Eventually, she speaks.
“So,” she says quietly, cautious, “are we going to talk about it?”
I keep my gaze fixed on the tub. “About what?”
She scoffs under her breath, a soft, disbelieving sound. “Cass. I’m not blind.”
I set down the spoon and press the heels of my palms against my eyes, hard, like pressure might stop the tears I’ve been swallowing since he kissed me like he meant it — like he was desperate and drowning and using my mouth to surface.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” I whisper.
She bumps her shoulder into mine, gentle but certain. “You don’t have to.”
And suddenly it rips out of me, raw and unprepared.
“I think I love him, Lo.”
The words fall from my mouth like something I’ve been holding between my teeth for days, and the moment they hit the air, everything splits. Breaks. Breathes.
Her hand slips into mine instantly, tight and warm and without hesitation. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t judge.
“Of course you do.”
I blink at her, startled. “What?”
She gives me a smile so small it hurts, a smile with a crack down the centre. “Cass… I knew it the second I saw your face that night. After the kiss. You looked wrecked — not confused, not scared, not even guilty. Wrecked. And when you came home after seeing him again, you looked worse. And I just…” Her voice fractures. “I just wanted to protect you from it. From him. From what this was going to do to you if you let yourself fall.”
My throat closes.
I squeeze her hand. “I know.”
“You fall slow,” she says, eyes glistening now. “But when you fall, you free-fall.”
A humourless laugh escapes me. “I don’t fall at all. Not ever.”
“You do for him.”
And there it is — the thing I’ve been avoiding.
“You’re falling for the one man who doesn’t get to stay.”
