I pick up the phone and the screen wakes.
My stomach dips and there is his last message, sitting exactly where I left it.
Cassie leans in.
I turn the screen away from her. “Privacy.”
“I saw your bare ass on my couch, Skylar. We are well past privacy. We passed it about six exits ago and kept driving.”
“Cassie.”
“Fine.” She leans back, then immediately angles her head to see anyway.
I shove her shoulder without looking up, staring at the empty message box, trying to figure out what to say to him, which should not be this hard but somehow is.
My thumb hovers.
I type.
Then delete.
Then type again, different words, then delete those too.
Cassie waits twelve whole seconds, before saying, “Do you want me to help?”
“No.”
She opens her mouth.
“No, Cassie.”
She closes it.
I breathe in slowly and type again before I can talk myself out of it.
Before the old instinct can rise again to remind me of all the reasons showing someone what they mean to you is a liability.
Skylar:I don’t know what’s going on but I’m not doing silence with you. Not after the other night. If you need space say that. If something happened tell me. But don’t disappear and expect me not to feel it.
I read it once.
Twice.
My finger hovers over send and my chest is doing something I don’t have a dignified word for.
I hit send and the message leaves.
I stare at the screen.
The little delivered notification appears beneath it and my stomach turns over once.
“Maybe it was too much, Cass.”
Cassie moves in close enough that her knee presses against mine and I can smell her vanilla body spray.
“It was not too much, Sky,” she says, and her voice has none of its usual performance. “You asked the man who told you he loved you not to disappear into vague bullshit twenty-four hours later. That’s not too much. That’s the bare fucking minimum and you’re allowed to ask for it.”
Her eyes sharpen. “You are not too much because you need clarity after a lifetime of people leaving without explanation. You are not too much because old wounds still hurt when someone presses near them. That is not weakness. That’s just what wounds do.”
