Page 62 of The Friend Request

‘Are you sure nothing happened with Lisa at the party?’

I asked him on the phone that evening. I asked him on Saturday, sitting on the wall outside the leisure centre while he kicked at the gravel with his trainers and stared at the ground.

‘Kim, I’ve told you. How many times do I have to say it?’

‘I know, I just⁠—’

‘Nothing happened. Lisa’s a mate. She was hammered. I was being nice. That’s it. End of.’

End of. He said that a lot. End of, full stop, done, can we move on? He’d close the subject the way you’d close a cupboard door – firmly, with a click – and I’d stand on the other side of it knowing I hadn’t finished but unable to reach the handle.

The problem was that every time he shut it down, the doubt didn’t go away. It just went underground. It burrowed into the back of my mind and sat there, breeding, and by the time it surfaced again – usually late at night when I was alone, when I’d replayed the scene one more time and noticed some new detail I was probably inventing – it was bigger and angrier and more desperate than before.

I became someone I didn’t recognise.

I hated it. I could feel myself doing it – the clingy texts, the needy phone calls, the way I’d scan his face for clues whenever Lisa’s name came up in conversation. I hated every second of it, but I couldn’t stop. It was as if first the girl at the nightclub, then Lisa at the party had cracked something open inside me and the fear was leaking out. And no amount of reassurance could seal it because Ross’s reassurance wasn’t reassuring. It was impatient and slightly contemptuous, and it left me feeling worse each time, not better, like pressing a bruise to check if it still hurt.

‘You don’t even care that I’m upset,’ I said once, sitting on his bed while he packed his rucksack for football.

He didn’t look up. ‘I do care. I’ve just said the same thing fifteen times and I don’t know what else you want me to say.’

‘I want you to say it like you mean it.’

‘I do mean it.’

‘You don’t sound like you mean it.’

He zipped the bag shut and turned around. His face was tired, and he looked older than seventeen. For a second, I felt a flash of guilt so sharp it almost cut through the anxiety. I was exhausting him. I could see it. I was draining the colour out of him with my questions and my tears and my constant, gnawing need to be told that I was enough, that he wasn’t going anywhere, that Lisa meant nothing, that the girl he loved was me.

But the guilt only lasted a second. Then the fear rushed back in and filled the space, and I opened my mouth and asked again.

‘Do you promise it was nothing?’

‘Kim. For fuck’s sake.’

‘Just say it. Just say you promise.’

‘I promise. All right? I promise. Are we done?’

We were never done. That was the cruelty of it. Every promise I extracted from him was hollow before he’d finished saying it, because I didn’t trust the words any more – I only trusted the feeling, and the feeling was wrong, and no number of repetitions could fix a feeling. I knew this. Somewhere in the rational, functioning part of my brain I understood I was caught in a loop that couldn’t be broken from inside, that the reassurance itself had become the problem because each time I asked for it I was proving to both of us that the last round hadn’t worked.

But knowing didn’t help. Knowing just meant I got to watch myself fall apart in high definition.

We started fighting properly. Not the quick rows we’d had before – rows that burned hot for ten minutes and ended in kissing and apologies and the breathless relief of making up – but slow, grinding arguments that lasted hours, went nowhere, and left us both grey and exhausted. I cried too easily, and Ross went too quiet. The pattern became its own weather system, rolling through our days with a grim, predictable rhythm: I’d bring it up, Ross would shut it down, I’d push harder, Ross would go colder, and somewhere around the third or fourth pass, we’d both end up in the worst versions of ourselves – me begging and Ross staring at the wall with his jaw locked and his eyes somewhere else.

I said things I didn’t mean. I told him he was selfish. I told him Lisa was welcome to him. I told him I wished I’d never gone to that club or to the party, which was true, and that I wished I’d never met him, which wasn’t. He flinched when I said it, and I felt a sick lurch of triumph that lasted about four seconds before it curdled into shame.

He said things, too. Not cruel things – Ross was never cruel, not exactly – but worse, in a way. Dismissive things. Bored things. Things that made it clear he was running out of patience and didn’t particularly care if I knew it.

‘You’re being paranoid, Kim.’

‘I’m not paranoid, I’m telling you what I saw.’

‘You saw what you wanted to see. You always do.’

That one stuck in my ribs like a splinter and stayed there, because what if he was right? What if I was a person who invented problems, who saw betrayal in every shadow, who couldn’t leave a good thing alone without poking at it until it bled? My mum had said something like that once, years earlier, during an argument about something I couldn’t even remember – you always have to make things harder than they are – and the echo of it made me feel small and fundamentally broken, as if the flaw was in me and not in what I’d seen.

I tried to stop. I went a whole week without mentioning Lisa or the club, and it nearly killed me – I walked around with the questions backed up in my throat like a traffic jam, swallowing them down every time Ross looked at me, smiling when I wanted to scream, being bright and easy and fun because that was the version of myself he liked and I was terrified of what would happen if I showed him any other one.