I set the phone down. The apartment is quiet again, but different now. Heavier.
The apartment feels too small suddenly, too close. I stand, joints cracking from two hours in my podcast chair, and move without thinking toward my bedroom. Past the whiteboard. Past the graveyard of half-drunk coffee cups with lipstick kisses on the rims.
My closet door doesn't latch properly. It never has. I tug it open, push past the dry-cleaning bag I've been meaning to pick up for six months, and there it is.
Gray. Soft. A gas station logo across the chest that's faded from too many washes—not by me. By him, before.
I pull the hoodie out and hold it. The cotton is pilled under my fingers, worn thin at the cuffs. It smells like dust and something fainter underneath. Something I can't quite name anymore but would recognize anywhere.
Two years. This thing has lived in my closet for two years.
I should throw it out. I've told myself that approximately nine hundred times. It's just fabric. Just threads and stitching and a gas station logo from a town I'll never visit again.
Except it's not.
It's proof.
Proof that for one night, someone looked at me—really looked, not at the performance or the punchlines—and didn't look away. Proof that I can be that person, the one who stays, the one who's honest, the one who doesn't fill every silence with a joke because jokes are armor and armor is safe.
I was her for eight hours. Then I woke up with his arm across my waist and I looked at his face in the gray pre-dawn light, and I thought—
He's going to figure out I'm not this.
That the woman he talked to all night, the one who laughed without performing and listened without planning her next line—she was a fluke. A one-time anomaly. And when he woke up and looked at me in actual daylight, he'd see the real version. The one who's too much and not enough all at once. The one people leave.
So I left first.
I always leave first.
I told Riley about it a month later. Sat on her couch with a bottle of wine and said, "I met someone in Vegas and I think I ruined it."
She didn't ask for details. Just said, "Oh, B," in that way she has, and handed me more wine, and we watched four episodes of a dating show where everyone made worse decisions than me.
She didn't push. She never does. That's why I can tell her the almost-truth—because she holds the almost and doesn't demand the rest.
The rest is this: I kept his hoodie because it's the only evidence I have that I can be soft. That I can stay. That somewhere, under all the armor, there's a person worth knowing.
I just don't believe it most days.
My phone buzzes on the desk in the other room. I don't move.
It buzzes again.
I carry the hoodie with me when I go to check it, which is a choice I don't let myself think too hard about. The screen glows:
MIRA CHEN (Sports National): Call me. Torres profile just came up. You're my first choice.
I stare at the text. Then at the hoodie in my hands. Then back at the text. What the fuck is happening.
My thumb hovers over Mira's contact.
I don't call back.
Instead, I fold the hoodie—carefully, corners matched, the way I always do—and carry it back to the closet. Slide it behind the dry-cleaning. Close the door as best I can, which isn't all the way.
It never closes all the way.
Just like the rest of it.
