I recounted the story to them.
When I was done, Britney jumped off the bed. “I’ll kill Noah. I will shove this box of cookies down his throat, make him choke on the only thing good in this world, and then?—”
A laugh escaped me. “No, no, we don’t need to kill him.”
“Or waste a perfectly good box of cookies,” said Ariadne through a mouthful of chocolate.
Britney huffed dramatically but sat down again. “What do you need us to do then?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just stay with me a while longer.”
Ariadne smiled and threaded a hand through mine. “That we can do.”
Tomorrow will be better.
And if not, I’ll keep saying it until it’s true.
Noah
The rhythm of my footsteps barely drowned out the chaos in my head.
I’d barely slept the last few days. Instead of staying in bed this morning, I laced up my running shoes at dawn and took off, hoping I could outrun the thoughts clawing at my brain.
Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.
My ankle was doing much better, but I welcomed the pain of the dull ache today.
The park was quiet this early, with only a few other runners and dog walkers scattered along the trail. The air was crisp, the kind that bit at my lungs in a way that almost felt good. Like maybe if I pushed myself hard enough, I could burn through the ache sitting heavy in my chest.
But every stretch of pavement, every curve in the path, felt like a new place to replay the last few months.
Macey and I had walked through this park once. It was after a press dinner that went too long, and neither of us wanted to go home yet. She had kicked off her heels and made some grand speech about howbloggers weren’t afraid to walk barefoot in the city.I’d called her a lunatic, she’d called me a snob, and we had ended up on a bench, sharing a bag of convenience store peanut M&M’s at midnight.
The same bench passed by in a blur.
I picked up my pace.
Macey wasn’t wrong last night. Ihadmade decisions for her. I thought I was protecting her, but I was just deciding for her, as if I knew better.
She was right about something else, too. I had suggested the fake relationship because it made sense. Because it was mutually beneficial. Because we could both get something out of it.
But somewhere along the way, it stopped being about that.
I stopped thinking about the benefits and started thinking about her.
How she made everything feel lighter. How she challenged me, pushed me, made me laugh even when I didn’t want to. How she looked at me like I was someone worth trusting.
Except she didn’t now.
I exhaled hard, shoving my hands onto my hips as I slowed to a stop near the water’s edge. The lake was still, the surface reflecting the sky above.
The whole point of this run was to clear my head, but all it had done was solidify what I already knew.
I wasn’t ready to let her go.
And I sure as hell wasn’t going to let our last conversation be the way this ended.
After running as much as I could before my ankle—and, let’s be honest, my lungs—needed a break, I checked my phone’s notifications, only to be flooded with missed calls from my sister. For someone who claimed to have phone anxiety and got nervous calling the dentist’s office, she had left me an unsettling number of messages. I scrolled through them with mounting dread, my stomach tightening with each notification.
