I got home at 1 AM to an apartment that smelled like trash I’d forgotten to carry down four days ago. I kicked off my shoes. I stood in the dark kitchen for a long time.
For the first time in my career, I wished somebody had shown up.
Calliope had made enough pasta to feed a small nation, which was her signature move before she was about to stage what she probably thought was a very subtle intervention.
The wine sat on the table. Three bottles, arranged like soldiers. Sierra sprawled on the couch, freshly showered and radiating the energy of someone delegated to this plan. Raven drained her first glass like it was water.
“What’s the occasion?” Which was stupid because I already knew. The way everyone was too careful with their smiles told me.
“Movie night,” Calliope chirped, which was her tell. She only had one tone for lying, and it was that one. Bright and cheerful, like she was reading from cue cards.
We ate pasta in her living room. The movie started. It was a romantic comedy, which was such an obvious trap that I almost respected it. Two hours of beautiful people falling in love with perfect dialogue and plots that resolve in under 120 minutes. Stories designed to make you believe in timing, in perfect moments, in the promise that saying the right thing solves everything.
Raven was on her second bottle. Her dark lipstick had faded to something more honest. She watched the movie as though she were testing it for lies.
“This is garbage,” she announced during a scene where the couple had a meet-cute over a shared coffee order. “Nobody meets like this. It’s all calculated nonsense designed to make you believe in destiny.”
“Let her have the fantasy.” The bright tone had drained from Calliope’s voice.
The movie played. Nobody was really watching.
“You’re a ghost of yourself,” Calliope announced during a scene where nothing important was happening. “I need you to hear that. You’re becoming translucent. If I put my hand through you right now, it would pass straight through.”
“That’s just how I look when I’m sad.”
“No.” Sierra kept her voice even. “That’s how you look when you’re not fighting back. Ellis looks like someone who hasn’t slept in weeks.”
I didn’t ask how she knew this. I already knew the answer. She’d been keeping a thread open with him. The way Sierra always kept threads open with people she refused to lose.
“He’s the one who left,” I argued.
“He asked for a pause,” Calliope corrected. “That’s not the same as leaving.”
“It feels the same.”
Raven drained her glass. She slammed it down like a declaration. Sierra put her hand out as if to stop what she was about to say.
“Tell us what the actual fight was.” Sierra’s voice was even. Not a question.
I didn’t want to say it out loud because saying it made it real. I’ve been working hard to keep it theoretical. “He said he couldn’t figure himself out while terrified of losing me. He said the fear was too big, that loving me was too big, that he couldn’t become who he was trying to be while gripping me this hard.”
The words sat there between us.
“That’s not a reason to leave,” Raven said. “It’s a reason to work through it together.”
“He didn’t see it that way.”
Sierra shifted on the couch. She had the expression of someone about to detonate something carefully. “I talked to him.”
My whole body went very still.
“He told me…” She paused, like she was making sure she had the right words. “He said, ‘I don’t need certainty. I need him. I’d rather be uncertain with him than certain without him.’”
The room tilted. The words contradicted everything I’d been thinking, the opposite of what made him ask for a break. If he doesn’t need certainty. If he’s just terrified. If he’s sitting in that apartment with my hoodie on hisbed, then I could…
I didn’t call him.
This was new. The old me would have dialed before Sierra finished the sentence, shown up at his door in twenty minutes, saying things at volume, trying to convince him through sheer will and hysteria. But something in me had learned that rushing toward someone doesn’t accelerate desire. It shrinks you. It made every inch of distance between you visible.
