Still nothing.
I considered turning around. Walking back to the house. Accepting that whatever fragile thing we’d built had collapsed before it ever had the chance to settle. That I’d be alone again.
Then he spoke.
“You don’t get it.”
It was barely more than a breath. If the wind had stirred the hedges, I might’ve missed it.
“It didn’t change for me,” he continued, fingers worrying at the rhinestones embedded in his vape. “It ended.”
I lowered myself onto the bench beside him, slow and careful. The stone was cold even through my sweats. I kept the blanket folded in my arms.
“I’m not adapting to a new version of my life. There isn’t one.” He made a small, sharp gesture at himself. “I’m just... this. Broken.”
I didn’t contradict him. Didn’t rush in with platitudes orcorrections. It wasn’t my place. Even if I didn’t agree, his pain was real. We were both here for a reason.
“You still get to go back out there,” he muttered. “You still get the noise, the lights, people looking at you like you matter.”
His shoulders sagged as he exhaled, and he finally lifted his head. His eyes were dry now, but the green still caught the fading sunlight.
“I don’t.”
I let the words settle. Really listened. This wasn’t anger, not really. Or not just that. It was grief. Loss. Jealousy, sharp-edged and unfair but painfully human. Whatever had happened to Iggy hadn’t reshaped his life. It had taken something from him. Ballet. The stage. That feeling of being seen for what he could do. He envied that I could still touch the thing I loved, even if I’d grown distant from it.
I shifted and reached into my pocket, unfolding the crumpled page I’d torn from my sketchbook. When I laid it between us, his breath hitched.
“I drew this a few days ago,” I said quietly. “During music therapy. You wouldn’t sit still.”
“Figures,” he scoffed, but his mouth twitched like he was fighting a smile.
I traced the edge of the charcoal carefully. The drawing showed him seated at the battered Yamaha keyboard, posture straight, slender fingers hovering over the keys. But my favourite part was his face. Head thrown back in laughter, hair flying, eyes bright, mouth wide with joy, even as he butchered Chopsticks for the hundredth time.
It hadn’t mattered to him that he got it wrong. He’d kept trying anyway. And when he finally played it through without mistakes, it was clumsy and uneven, the way a child plays their first song.
It had been perfect.
“You don’t look broken here.”
He reached out, tracing the curve of his own elbow with a painted fingernail.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said softly.
“I know.” I didn’t push. “It just means you were alive in that moment.”
I thought back to everything I’d said inside. About emptiness. About control. About feeling disconnected from the thing I loved. I didn’t want to hurt him again. I just wanted him to understand that pain didn’t have to look the same to be real. I wanted him to widen his world, just a little. And maybe, selfishly, I wanted him close. Wanted him to be my anchor while we were here, both of us battered and drifting, trying not to sink.
“This is what I’ve been chasing. Not the music. The feeling.” I leaned into Iggy’s shoulder, closing the small but stubborn distance between us. “You still have that.”
He stiffened at first, then slowly relaxed against me, sagging like the fight had finally drained out of him. Like he was tired of swinging at everything—other people, his addiction, himself. What was left felt like bone-deep exhaustion.
“You don’t get to tell me what I still have,” he muttered, and I had to bite back a smile. Even wrung out like this, Iggy still had a spark of defiance tucked away.
He wasn’t wrong, though. Not even a little.
“You’re right,” I said, nodding. “But I do get to tell you what I see.” I tapped the page between us. “And I don’t see someone who stopped existing.”
He rested his head against my shoulder, and I felt the small hitch in his breath as he swallowed.
