Tessa
My roommate was already halfway through a bottle of her favourite rosé when I got home, which really meant two things: she had a long day and was coping the only way she knew how. And I was about to be violently mothered with carbs and alcohol, whether I consented or not.
“TessaaAAAAA!” Dani sing-songed from the living room, dragging out my name in a pitch that could shatter windows and attract distressed raccoons. She was perched cross-legged on the couch like the gremlin queen of our apartment, hair mussed, mascara slightly smeared, surrounded by open chip bags as if she were being worshipped by offerings.
The living room was a disaster in progress. A throw blanket was half on the floor, two half-eaten spring rolls were abandoned on the coffee table, and a mug that said Girlboss held three forks for no reason. It smelled like incense, takeout, and quite possibly weed. She was usually a gummy girl, but occasionally she’d switch it up.
Dani craned her neck back so she could look at me upside down, her hair dangling like a mop in a shampoo commercialgone horribly wrong. “You look like someone drop-kicked your soul,” she said in a delightedly savage tone. “Tell Mommy everything.” Switching to her concerned tone.
I closed the door behind me, dropped my purse, my keys, and whatever dignity I had left onto the kitchen counter, and felt the emotional exhaustion hit me. “Colin proposed,” I said, my voice wooden, “and I said no.”
Dani froze mid-crunch, the chip suspended millimetres from her mouth. Her whole body went still, like someone hit pause. She blinked once, then again, and then shrieked, launching herself upright with enough force to shake the couch. “He did it? He actually did it? I knew it. I told you. I smelled the desperation on him like too much Axe body spray.”
I collapsed onto the couch, the cushions dipping under the weight of emotional damage. “It was so bad,” I murmured, leaning my head back until I stared at the ceiling like it owed me answers.
“Start from the beginning.” She shoved the wine bottle toward me with her foot, queen-like. “I’m invested. I deserve this tea.”
I told her everything as I stared at the bottle of wine in my hand and waited for her to say something.
“That motherfucker.” She shifted dramatically, her legs flopping across my lap like a Victorian heroine on her fainting chaise. “I told you he’d get twitchy. Men only ask for private conversations when they’re about to confess their undying love, propose marriage, or ask if you’ll donate a kidney.”
“He grabbed my arm when I tried to leave.”
Dani froze again, statue-still, serial-killer-in-the-room still. Her head snapped toward me, eyes widening. “He grabbed you?”
I swallowed. “Yeah.” I brushed my fingersover my arm, rubbing the ghost of his grip. The memory felt hot and humiliating.
Dani’s jaw set. She rose like a woman preparing for war, set the wine down with surgical precision, cupped my cheeks, and stared directly into my soul. “We should buy shovels.”
I choked. “No.”
“Fine,” she snapped, “if we can’t bury him alive, we might as well get drunk.” She marched to the kitchen with the chaos of a toddler in a toy store. “Tequila or vodka?”
“No tequila.”
“Great, tequila it is.” Something clattered in the kitchen, a cupboard door bounced open, and a string of curses filled the air like seasoning. “Okay,” she announced triumphantly, returning with a tray of shot glasses, salt, lime slices, tequila, and a look that said we were destroying our livers on purpose tonight. “Let the ritual of forgetting commence.”
I was more than ready to forget tonight even happened. Hell, I was more than ready to forget the week even happened. This disaster of this proposal, on top of losing my job because I argued with my boss about an equine treatment in front of a client, is something I would rather not remember.
I licked my hand, sprinkled the salt, and we clinked glasses. The tequila burned my throat, dissolving my sins in one messy gulp. By shot three, my shoulders slid down from my ears. By shot four, Dani tried to teach me a TikTok dance involving hip rolls and hand flicks, and I shoved her hands away because my coordination decided to be nonexistent.
“I hate men,” she announced loudly, kicking her legs over the back of the couch like she was auditioning for an interpretive dance, “that hot firefighter on your FYP could stay though.”
She flopped onto the couch next to me and rested her head on my shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”
“For what?”
“For saying no and leaving. For not letting a man with zero upper lip convince you that marriage was the only way you could be happy.”
“That was a lot of words.”
She nodded solemnly. “What can I say, I’m a poet when drunk.”
My phone buzzed again, then again, then again, six times in thirty minutes. Dani glared at it with venom. “Whoever that is needs to get a life.”
“It’s probably spam,” I muttered, though something tightened in my stomach. The buzzing continued, and my pulse stuttered.
“Maybe you should answer,” Dani said.
