The apartment smells like cheap coffee, Cassie’s vanilla body spray, and whatever takeout container she left in the fridge and is now refusing to acknowledge, apparently because she has decided that making eye contact with leftovers gives them power.
Four days, and some part of me has already slipped back into its rhythm like a language I never actually forgot.
Cassie yelling at the kettle because it boils too slowly.
Me stealing the last clean towel and maintaining total ignorance of its whereabouts when she comes looking for it. Her leaving sticky notes on the bathroom mirror in her handwriting, little fluorescent yellow squares that say things like “hydrate bitch,” and “you are that girl so act like it”, and, this morning’s one that reads, “if you change your mind about the man with the cheekbones and the criminal history, I will put on my good jeans and come with you, no questions, no judgment, limited commentary.”
I stood in front of that mirror for a full minute, reading it.
It feels almost like old times.
Almost.
Except I am not eighteen anymore, freshly cracked open by Zane Rivera, running on cereal and the specific, desperate bravado of a girl who has not yet learned the difference between surviving something and actually getting through it.
Cassie is not that age either, not the girl who appeared with a garbage bag of everything she owned, both eyes full of tears, threatening legal action if they fell.
We are older now. Sharper in some places. Softer in others, that neither of us would ever admit out loud without at least two glasses of wine and a power outage.
I know what the last two years were like.
I can see it clearly now, from the other side of it. My heart was broken when I met Damien, and I knew it was broken. I still chose him anyway, not because he was my prince charming, but because he was safe, uncomplicated, and nothing about him was going to reach into the places that were already damaged.
I didn’t understand that a heart that is still broken is not ready to let anyone in, safe or otherwise.
But none of that has stopped Damien from trying.
The buzzer sounds.
Cassie appears from the hallway, hair sticking up on one side, yesterday’s mascara smudged under her left eye, wearing a shirt that says emotionally unavailable but well accessorized in block letters across her chest.
She walks to the intercom and presses the button.
A familiar voice comes through, saying, “Skylar, open the door.”
Damien.
I freeze in the kitchen, a spoon in my hand, cereal halfway to my mouth.
“Who is it?” Cassie asks in the tone of someone who already knows and is simply being an asshole.
“Cassie,” Damien says her name as if it tastes cheap.
“Wow.” She tilts her head. “Wrong answer. We were looking for “‘fuck off”. So come back tomorrow and try again.”
“Let me speak to Skylar.”
“She’s busy.”
“With what?”
Cassie looks at me across the kitchen.
I’m holding a spoon, wearing the expression of someone who has just been asked to defuse a bomb and has no fucking idea where to start.
She turns back to the intercom. “She’s in the middle of an intimate moment with Captain Crunch. Very physical. Lots of tongue.”
“Cassie.”
