"Who. Is. He?"
"He's nobody, he's just someone who came up to the bar?—"
"You were laughing."
"I was doing my job, Hayden?—"
"You were laughing," I say again, and I hate how it sounds. I hate every single thing about the way it sounds, but I can't stop it. "Like it was easy. Like everything is just fine. Like you didn't?—"
I stop.
My jaw tightens so hard I feel it in my temples.
She's looking at me with those beautiful eyes and I want her to stop, I need her to stop, because the way she's looking at me is the same way she used to look at me and that was before, that was when I thought I knew who she was and I was wrong, I was completely wrong, and I have the scars to prove it.
"Like I didn't what?" she says quietly. She knows what she did, and she’s asking to punish herself.
"Like you didn't destroy my life." The words come out low and even and they carry everything I've been holding since the moment she walked back into this city. "You took away time of my life. You did it because of whatever the hell you decided I was worth to you."
Her face crumples at the edges. "Hayden?—"
"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Don't do the face. Don't stand there and look at me like that."
"I'm not?—"
"Is that what I was?" I ask. The question has been sitting in me since the night Miles told me about the note and I've been refusing to look at it and here it is, out in the corridor, ugly and lit up. "Is that what the whole thing was? You needed someone to make you look good, someone useful, someone you could throw away when you were done with it?"
"That’s not?—"
"Because from where I'm standing that's exactly what it looks like." My voice is quiet, but it is absolutely not calm. "I was your best friend. I was… I gave you everything. And you looked me in the eye and you?—"
I turn away from her, my hand on the wall, and I breathe through my nose, and I wait for the thing in my chest to go back down to wherever it came from.
The corridor is quiet. I can hear the muffled bass of the music through the door.
"You don't get to laugh like that," I say finally to the wall. "Not here. Not in front of me."
Silence.
Then her voice, very small: "Hayden."
"Go back to work."
"Please just let me?—"
"Go back to work, Olivia."
A long pause.
Then I hear her exhale. Slow and shaking, then the sound of the door, and she's gone.
I stay facing the wall for a long moment.
My hand is pressed flat against the plaster, and my jaw is set and somewhere in the room on the other side of that door sheis walking back to the bar, back to the lights, back to whatever version of fine she's been performing since she got here.
I push off the wall. I go back upstairs, slamming the door as I ignore them all.
“Did you fuck your anger out?” Mason asks, and Declan and Miles both start laughing, but I ignore them both.
