Then I blink, and he’s gone. The fort is empty.
I jerked awake, breathing hard as if I’d been running. My throat was tight. My eyes stung. I wanted to go back.
Back to when everything felt simple. Back to when love was just friendship with no rules. No weight. No damn consequences. That just wasn’t possible anymore.
So I grabbed the pen again. And this time, I wrote one word.
"Sorry."
Then I ripped out the page, balled it up, and threw it at the wall. It landed on the floor with an unsatisfying sound instead of the rage-filled thunk I needed.
Even in dreams, I couldn’t keep him.
CHAPTER 8
TRU
Once upon a time we were best friends. Now we’re strangers with memories and a shared past.
It had beena year since the closet. A year since the kiss. A year of learning how to survive without my other half. I’d turned fourteen in that silence, like crossing a line no one else could see.
I caught him watching me, and I stared back, hoping he’d give me the smallest smile, just a slight nod of his head, anything to let me know he didn’t hate me. Anything to prove that the Darien I knew was still in there somewhere.
But Dare didn’t smile. He didn’t nod. He leaned in close to the guy standing next to him and whispered something. Then they both looked at me.
They pointed and laughed. I was the punchline to a joke I’d never get to hear.
All I’d done was exist. And somehow that was enough tomake me the enemy. Just breathing the same air as him and his golden-boy friends was a crime now.
The Darien I used to know—the one who used to link pinkies with me during movies and write his name in Sharpie next to mine under the skateboard ramp—he would’ve cut out his own tongue before laughing at me like that.
But that Darien didn’t exist anymore. And maybe the version of me he once loved—if he ever really did—didn’t exist anymore either.
His friendship had shaped me once, molded me into the kind of boy I wanted to become. But his absence had carved me into someone else entirely.
Someone I didn’t recognize. Someone I disliked—desperate and naïve, and at times, hopeful. Someone I despised almost as much as I was coming to despisehim.
I used to be soft. Trusting. Forgiving. Now? Now I held onto my newfound bitterness with both hands, clenched tightly as if it was the only thing keeping me upright. Because it was the only part of us I had left, and it was a heck of a lot better than hope.
My tray clattered when I set it down at my usual table, the one in the far corner, half-shadowed by the vending machines and mostly ignored by the rest of the room. I didn’t sit yet. I stood there, pretending to check my phone, anything to avoid glancing back at him.
But I sensed him—a splinter just beneath the skin. A laugh echoed across the room. Not loud, but sharp enough that my name might as well have been stapled to it. My chest pulled tight.
I sat down slowly and stared at the food on my tray like it might explain something to me. Soggy fries. A sandwich too dry to swallow. A warm bottle of water. I wasn’t hungry, but I forced a bite down anyway, just to prove I could.
Just to show them all—show him—that I could keep surviving, even when it felt like I was unraveling under the force of being stared at as if I was less than nothing.
A chair scraped the floor across from me. For one electric second, I thought it might be him. My heart thudded. I lifted my eyes, but it was just some kid, fumbling with his tray, eyes glued to his phone.
I looked back at my sandwich and tried not to let the disappointment show. Tried not to let it seep into the cracks I kept patching over with bitterness. I should’ve known better.
Hope was just a new way to bleed.
At the other end of the room, Dare threw his head back and laughed at something one of his friends said. The sound carried over the noise, piercing through my heart. His hand clapped another guy’s shoulder like they were brothers.
That used to be me.
My stomach turned cold and hollow. My chest tightened so hard I couldn’t pull in a full breath. I shoved my hands into my pockets to keep them from shaking, nails biting my palms.
