I hate how comforting the routine feels, how easily we fell back into orbit around each other, even without words. Our bodies still seem to remember each other even when our pride doesn’t want to, like some default system setting neither of us knows how to shut off.
We’re just two stubborn idiots circling the wreckage because neither of us knows how to fully walk away from it yet. I convince myself I’m not making decisions so much as responding to timing, that there’s no real pattern here.
The lie is getting harder to swallow every single day.
In the last few days though, now stretching into a full week, he isn’t there.
Not in any of the days that somehow become part of my fucking rhythm without my permission. It’s just nothing where there should have been something.
At first, I tell myself I don’t notice. That’s become my setting with George. Pretend first. Deal with the consequences later.
By midweek, it stops feeling subtle. The absence sits under my skin like low-level interference I can’t tune out. Every morning my eyes flick toward the entrance automatically before my brain catches up and tells me to knock that shit off.
Pathetic.
He disappeared before. He can do it again.
I keep my head down harder than usual that week. Drink way too much of the shitty coffee from work just to have something to hold onto that wasn’t this gnawing, restless feeling. I don’t ask Valerie if she’d seen him. I don’t check my phone. I don’t go looking.
Because that’s what this had become—small, controlled pieces of comfort I should’ve shut down months ago, like some invasive species settling into the ecosystem before you realize it’s choking everything else out. And now the space where he used to be feels wrong.
What did I expect? That he’d just keep showing up forever?
I tell myself this is probably a good thing. Maybe he finally got bored, or that he realized I’m not interested in whatever the hell this was supposed to be.
Maybe he finally came to his senses and thinks I’m never worth it.
The thought should make me feel better. Two months of him slowly dismantling the version of moving on I’d spent so long forcing myself into. It’s not with grand gestures or promises, more like just showing up often enough that my life adjusted around him again before I could stop it.
Now, he’s gone. Again.
I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m just stupid enough to still be disappointed by it anyway. I keep waiting for the irritation to turn into relief.
It doesn’t.
I drive back to Marcus’s apartment from work with the radio on low. The city slides past the windows, indifferent, packed with people who aren’t dealing with any of this shit.
When I walk in, my brother is in the kitchen. Something’s simmering on the stove, and he’s moving around it with that coiled tension when he’s been chewing on something all day and has finally decided tonight is the night.
I drop my keys on the counter and go to the fridge.
“Was he there again?” Marcus asks, still facing the stove.
I pause with my hand on the handle. “Nope.”
Neither of us says anything yet. I grab a water bottle and drink half of it standing there.
“You haven’t seen him?”
I close the fridge. “All week.”
Marcus nods once, his back still to me. It should end there, and for a beat I think it will, but it doesn’t.
“You’ve been picking up extra shifts.” He keeps his tone even, like this isn’t going to turn into anything. “You worked six days straight,” Marcus says.
“We’re short.” That much is true. Staffing issues never go away.
“You do it on top of mom and Hearthside work.”
