🐍𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖉𝖔𝖜🐍

April 2nd.

The morning light is the first thing that wakes you up, soft but insistent in the way it can be only when you’ve spent hour after hour with your knees drawn up to your chest and curled in your chair until your hand started to cramp midway between the third and the fifth draft.

There are at least five crumpled pieces of paper scattered all over your desk, made of words that you’ve discarded, thoughts left unfinished and doubts you still haven’t found the answer for. They just sit there, like witnesses of a night you’ve spent for the most part sleepless, restless like only someone who’s trying to make every word count, every single loop of letters intertwining with one another to draw a picture that means more than just ink on paper.

Care laced with understanding.

You’ve taken all night trying to find the right words, torn between not sounding like too much and the urge to hide behind the façade of someone you’ve never been, almost like week after week you had found some kind of refuge in taking the shape of another, making their words yours, their actions something that comes natural when—as soon you would set the pen down—you’d go back being not even the shadow of what you had carefully crafted.

It’s like slowly, through the years, you had stopped knowing what it was like to be you. As if you’ve never known words or acts that showed—without any trace of doubt—that being yourself was something worth cherishing, appreciating, and desire. As if there has never been a single person that made you feel worth keeping unless you meticulously adapt every inch of what you are to what you think they might need. Like the price to pay for someone to stay was to let go of your soul, which only served the purpose of letting you forget—agonizingly slowly—its shape.

Because that’s what you’ve been taught for the wholeness of your life, in the quiet of rainy nights and the loudness of shattering ceramic: do everything you can not to let them go, no matter the cost.

And that’s the reason why you stayed up, because now it was a matter of not only of knowing someone, of finding out what’s that thing that’s relentlessly chewing them up from the inside out, but also a battle of finding yourself again. So you did. Word after word, discarded thoughts after discarded thoughts, it felt like asking to see and to be seen, like a plea at the same time begging quietly for the other not to run, not from themselves but also… not from you.

Slowly it became easier to find that lost thread, easier to stitch the pieces of you back together until they became somewhat recognizable, only because of one thing and one thing alone: you still had somehow a place where you could hide whether that would not be accepted: a pen, a piece of paper, and the fact that—at least for now—the shape of your face was still something that for Ellie remained unknown.

Maybe it was easier being yourself if you could still pretend that the hand holding your pen was one that she had never held before.

What you missed though—lost in your mind and the endless spiral it had dragged you into—was that soft buzz next to your bag, your screen lighting up with words you still haven’t read and that only your walls are already aware of.

So when you finally let your eyes open and your pupils adjust to the soft glow that’s bathing your room in sunlight and the first thing you do is picking up your phone where you tossed it on the nightstand before collapsing between your sheets somewhere around four and five in the morning, what you see—between email notifications and whatever TikTok Jackie had sent you before going to bed—is something you weren’t expecting. Not so quickly at least, and surely not for the reason the texts are claiming.

(555)01##:

hey austen

its ellie

maybe we can see each other again without your best friend threatening my entire existence?

It takes you quite a second to fully register them as for what they are, blinking slowly at the glow on your screen that’s making your eyes squint a little. Moments that you take to read those words again, as if maybe you’re just making them up in your head in the traces of a night poorly and barely slept and—when you’ll blink the right amount of times—they will disappear and become something else.

But your eyes didn’t betray you, the words stay, just as their meaning does. And that’s enough to make you immediately jolt, sitting up on your bed with the sheets turning rumpled and half falling off from your legs and onto the edge of the mattress, tangling just as the thoughts inside your head in this exact moment.

Part of you needs to be reminded that—maybe—Ellie doesn’t mean anything deep, is not looking for anything more than what you’ve already shared in the quiet of her dorm room: just touches that linger enough to make you wonder but not enough for them to mean anything solid. But then again, your mind wouldn’t be yours and your head wouldn’t be attached to your own shoulders if—for the time it takes to let yourself dream—you didn’t actually stop, read those texts again and make yourself believe that there’s a chance, a small possibility that in between the lines, there’s a deeper need, a deeper meaning, something that you can cling onto and let yourself believe. Believe that there’s always something underneath the surface, believe that there’s more to uncover, believe that the words you’ve read in the letter that’s still open on your desk are the explanation to something you need to understand.

And the part of you that simply believes in all of that has always been the more alive one inside of you, the one that screams louder, the same that brings you to kick the sheets off your legs and stumble out of your bed on your way from your bedroom to the door across from yours.

You don’t even knock like you usually do, not when there was so much urgency in the few steps that you took towards the handle you’re harshly pushing down, barging into Jackie’s room where the blinds are still drawn, bathing the room in darkness where the shape of your best friend jolting up is barely visible.

“What the fuck?!” She gasps, voice raspy in the way it always is when she’s only barely half awake and her eyes haven’t even fully opened yet.

“Jacks!” You exclaim, barreling in with your phone still clutched tight in your hand, carefully avoiding every pile of tossed clothes that you manage to see on the floor. “Jacks, Jacks, Jacks. You’ll never guess what.”

“What?!” The ginger echoes again while making space on her bed, seeing you crawling on top of it, completely ignoring the way she’s looking like something in between freaked out and mildly irritated from having been woken up when she was clearly deep asleep. “Just what?”

The only answer you give her is not even a spoken one, you just unlock your phone and hand it over to her. Jackie takes the phone from you with a sigh, rubbing her eyes with her other hand, still trying to compute the reason behind a kind of excitement that she never shows in the morning.

As her eyes skim through the message thread with Ellie that’s still left unanswered, at first she doesn’t react outwardly, just squints at the words that are making her freckled cheeks glow and takes in the type of breath that could mean anything and that always leaves you wondering if the words that are going to come out of her mouth will be ones that you’ll like to hear or not.

When Jackie glances up at you again and hands the phone over, you’re still holding your breath, one foot into bracing, the other still lost in a leftover puddle of lingering excitement.

“Did she just throw shade at me?” She deadpans while handing your phone back.

“Help me answer!” You move on, completely ignoring her question.

Jackie’s mouth twists, one brow raising so high that a few strands of her hair falling across her forehead hide it. “...What?” 

“She’s asking me out. Help me answer.” In seeing your best friend’s mouth twist and already knowing what kind of words could be coming from her mouth, you don’t even give her a chance to answer. “Please, Jacks. I’ll do your laundry. Cook you breakfast. Whatever you want.”

Your best friend doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she just slumps back against the headboard, a movement that you follow carefully, and glances up to the ceiling for a moment, almost like she’s chosen to weigh her words more carefully than what she would’ve probably done in different circumstances. And maybe it’s because she’s promised it, maybe it’s because she’s still too tired and couldn’t be bothered to protest, but regardless of the reason, Jackie just gives in.

“Fiiinee,” she concedes, her eyes shifting on yours again. “Just be yourself. If you wanna see her just tell her when you’re free and ask what she had in mind. Dunno.”

The look you give her is an unconvinced one, with your shoulders sagging and your mouth twisting into what could be described as a pout. “You’re not very helpful right now,” you mumble out.

“Babe. I don’t do this stuff,” she sighs. “I just match with people on Tinder and they ask me to go to their place, we fuck and I leave. Simple as that. I don’t do lots of planning.”

Your body finally slumps backwards, landing on the soft pillows stacked together against the headboard of her bed. It takes you a while to speak again, sorting out your thoughts and keeping yourself from asking the kind of questions that you know you’ll never find the answer for if directed to the girl sitting beside you rubbing her eyes to try waking herself up.

 “Okay,” you eventually declare, bringing your phone from your chest into your hands to type out a few words for her to judge. “What about this then?”

You:

Hi Ellie!

Sure. What about tomorrow?

Also, your dorm again?

Once Jackie is done reading she gives you a small hum, a sound followed by the rustling of the sheets as she turns fully towards you, one arm casually landing across your stomach while her head rests on your chest.

“Look good, babe,” she mumbles. “Just be yourself.”

Funny how a sentence so simple, so easy to get past someone's lips in the shape of an advice is actually the one thing you’ve spent the entire night trying to understand how to do. Words that would be so easy to turn into practice, if you weren’t one who’s spent her entire life shaping herself around the mould of another, to fit it as best as she could. But you don’t voice any of that, because there’s something fragile in your best friend supporting what you know she thinks is not good for you and you’d cut your own tongue off before letting it go.

So you just stay there, with the screen of your phone turning back to black and Jackie’s weight growing heavier on the side of your frame. Until—surprisingly—the quiet chime of your ringtone reaches your ear and your hand to shoot towards it.

Ellie Williams:

tmrw works

4:00pm

i was thinking we could go to the quad if thats okay w u

You stare at the words for a while, taking them in, making sure your brain has processed them right and it’s not just something your own head has birthed out of the blue to satisfy something that you won’t name quite yet. Although, eventually, you decide that they’re not gonna budge from your screen, that they’re gonna stay right there and that—maybe—this is actually the chance you’ve been hoping for all along.

A chance that you take before it’s too late and it can slip off from your hands.

You:

Sure thing!

See you tomorrow then

April 3rd.

For some reason, everything feels aligned.

Some people would call it fate, others destiny, some just a mere coincidence. But whatever name one would choose and beside being blinded by the way your heart is running eight miles per hour inside your ribcage, it feels way too ideal nonetheless.

Mainly because the weather seems to be on your side: the wind isn’t too strong—just the perfect amount of breeze that doesn’t make your hair a bother or has you constantly run your fingers through it to get it off your face; the sun kissing your cheeks doens’t feel burning, but rather a gentle caress, almost like it’s inviting you to be outside, telling you that you’re at the right place at the right time. It feels like everything you were hoping for, almost as if someone looked right into your brain during one of those sleepless nights you like spending indulging in dreams and fantasies and simply built this exact moment for you to actually live in for once outside of your head and underneath your very feet.

But no matter how romanticizable waiting underneath the oak tree that stands tall at the centre of the quad of your university could ever be, that doesn’t stop the hammering inside your chest and the growing, gnawing pit that sits at the centre of your stomach. Maybe because it doesn’t matter how much time one could ever spend daydreaming about something, when it actually happens sometimes it’s hard to understand what to do with it. Almost like it’s something far too fragile and precious and when something feels like that the fear of ruining it is louder than any kind of excitement would be.

Still, despite the nerves and the way your knees feel suddenly unable to sustain the weight they’ve carried throughout your life, you still wait, like you’re waiting to be proven to be deserving of standing there with your heart on your sleeves for someone to catch and—hopefully—hold without tossing it away.

It’s between nervous, shaky exhales and somewhere between the third or fourth time you smooth down the sweater that Jackie helped you pick, that movement pulls at the corner of your eyes, making your chin tilt up and your eyes meet green and freckles dusted over cheeks.

Ellie walks towards you like someone who clearly put way less effort than you before coming here: half bun messy on the back of her head, hands stuffed inside the pockets of jeans ripped at her knees and a blue, checkered flannel which sleeves she's rolled up to her elbows. Yet, she doesn’t look disheveled, rather just like someone who hasn't the pretense of appearing to be seen, and that's enough to feel your breath catching in your throat and every muscle in your body tensing up.

“Austen,” she greets the second she’s close enough. Her hand comes out from her pocket, eyes falling onto a simple watch on her right wrist with a small crack on the glass that’s definitely too big on her. “Am I late?” She asks almost sheepishly. “You waited too long?”

It takes you a second to fully gather yourself together enough for your answer not to sound trembling. “Hey,” you murmur eventually. “Don’t worry. I just got here.”

Her lips stretch, hand falling right back where she was keeping it. “Good then.” After a beat, enough time for her to bring her backpack forward and unzip it just a crack, she continues, “I thought I’d bring you somethin’.” Then, just under her breath that it’s almost not audible: “Hopin’ you haven’t read it yet.”

You only have the time to tilt your head, eyes following every single one of her moments, but it doesn’t take you long to finally have her hand outstretching right in front of you the copy of a book that you’ve only seen in the bookshelves of the library or in syllabi of classes you have yet to take but that you’ve never even opened before in your life. 

“The Double?” You ask softly as your hands wrap around the edges of the book, feeling the frayed cover coarse against your skin, the corners where dog-ears have left their marks on the yellowing pages, the weight of something that’s been held multiple times before you’ve got the chance to do the same and—for a moment—you allow yourself to wonder if this is something that’s always belonged to the girl in front of you and you’ve been granted to hold something that’s entirely hers or if she’s just another owner after a long list of others. But the thoughts get interrupted when Ellie’s voice reaches your ears again.

“Yup,” she confirms. “It’s the best from Dostoevsky if you ask me and nobody else.” Your eyes lift enough to catch her huffing a laugh while she keeps rummaging inside her backpack. “Think of… 1984 ‘n Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde havin’ a baby. That would be it.”

Finally, though, the last thing she was apparently looking for finds its way to her hands and out of her pack and—as she swings it back— what your eyes land on is enough to make you completely freeze before her and forget whatever examination you were making the book in your hands go through.

Because what Ellie’s holding is something that you’ve spent years looking for, only read in libraries and begged Dotty god knows how many times to find you but that—although her best efforts—was something that could never find its way to you and the shelves of your home. 

“Oh my god,” you gasp “Is that Juvenilia?!” A snort slips from Ellie before the book travels from her hands to yours and right on top of the other you were holding. Your hands clasp it as if pages in your hands have suddenly become something foreign that you’ve never had the opportunity to touch before, so much that you’re treating it as delicately as you would with something as fragile as glass. “Oh my fucking god, Ellie. This is like— this is a first edition from 1922. Oh my god, do you know how rare this copy is? Where did you get it?”

When you lift your eyes to finally look at her, Ellie’s are wide, blinking slowly, but there’s this small, amused smile that’s tugging at her lips. "Thrift store,” she shrugs. “It seemed fancy but I didn’t think it was special or anythin’.”

The breath you take in is sharp, almost like you’re not really believing how casually the words are rolling off her tongue. “You’re joking,” you reply before titling your chin down and opening the book gently, skimming carefully the first few pages. “Look, here.” You take a step closer, then another not even thinking about how your shoulders now touch and how close you actually are, too focused on showing her the page you’re on, your fingers tracing the letters that you’re both looking at right now. “New York, Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers. Frist. Edition. 1922. This is huge! And you found it… there? Abandoned?”

When you look up Ellie hums and the sound you let out right after is something between disbelief and frustration. “Utterly barbaric,” you declare eventually, with the kind of finality you leave for not many things in the world.

But the words that come next from the freckled girl next to you are something that you would’ve never expected before.

“I just picked it ‘cause you told me Austen’s your favorite ‘n I thought I should give her another chance.”

It’s in the moment that you register fully what she’s just said that you actually realize how close you’re standing, how—if you leaned even just an inch more—your lips would meet. Lips, that you end up glancing at the same exact moment she does the same thing. And that’s enough for warmth to creep up your cheeks and feel a tight knot starting to tangle inside your throat.

“Yeah?” You ask fleebily, reverting your gaze back to her eyes, a question to which Ellie only responds with another hum. “What about The Double, though?”

The auburn-haired clears her throat, the sound of it scratching the back of her throat as finally she takes the smallest step back. “I thought we could, dunno, read,” she replies before forcing her lips to curve into something far less serious and far safer. “Unless you wanna skip to the part where we go to my room and have sex. That’s fine too.”

“No,” You blurt out as fast as you can, only to lower your voice the second after, almost afraid of having sounded too desperate, too eager, too impatient to actually get inside her skin and have the chance to know the shape of another piece of her soul, no matter how small.  “I mean, later, yeah. But I’d love to read with you.”

It’s something almost gentle, a faint trace of her guard crumbling down by the smallest inch, the smile Ellie offers at your words: lopsided, barely there like it’s asking for permission, to be granted the possibility of being there in the first place, and—for a moment—you wish you were in the position of telling her that it doesn’t have to ask to have a home on her face.

But you’re not.

The only thing you can do is a slight nudge to her shoulder and a quiet nod towards the tree and the shade it’s providing before forcing your feet to walk down the path distancing you to what you’ve truly wanted to say and the mold those words are forming on the back of your throat. And Ellie, unaware of how heavy they sit there and unable to ask for more than what she’s always allowed herself to have, just follows.

Step after step, until you’re both sitting side by side with your backs pressed against the heavy knots of a tree trunk that’s provided a place to rest against to people for god knows how many centuries before. People just like the two of you, with books in hands and legs outstretched with the soft breeze running through strands of hair that fall over the eyes, with heartbeats that are running a little too fast and that—if seen from the outside—they could be as well mistaken for lovers.

It’s easy for your mind to travel to farther places than where you are right now, to the picture that was once so clear in your head years ago when walking into Dotty’s store for the first time in your life. Except there’s no lily now that you can tuck between the pages, there’s no loving embrace and no bee that you can watch fly just inches from your nose. Despite that, though, somehow it doesn’t feel like a wish that hasn’t come true, because in sitting like this—flipping pages filled with words that will perhaps give you the right key to someone else’s heart—it feels like standing as close as you were ever allowed to that fantasy, to the imagery in your head that feels so real, so tangible.

Just a whisper of a touch and a word away from reaching for it.

Something that you’re seemingly not able to receive. So you just keep reading in silence, deciphering behind every written word before your eyes the reasons of the choice that’s brought them to stare back at you in the first place: why this book, why this author and why are you the one allowed to sit with her reading it.

It feels like something to uncover, a well-protected secret hidden behind a carefully crafted façade that you will only be able to unmask the second those words will have sunk deeper inside your mind and you’ll have found the reason why—among every story that exists in this word—Ellie Williams decided that this particular one was her favorite.

If Jackie was here, she would probably tell you how silly it is to try to understand someone just based on the one thing you’re holding, that it’s crazy, pretentious to think one holds the ability to truly see through someone based on something so abstract. Yet, she’s not here. Yet, you’re not her. And slowly, another truth starts to sink within you: right in this moment, you’re glad none of those casualties are actually reality.

And if there is something you’re even more grateful of, is being able to actually hold within your hands words that could possibly tell a greater story than the one they’re trying to convey and that has little to do with a man called Yakov and more to do with the girl sitting beside you whose shoulder is only brushing against yours ever so slightly and whose hands are flipping through pages that she picked for a sole reason:

You told me she was your favorite.

That's what is clouding your mind through every movement of your eyes across the lines and that is enough for your mind to take over, to convince you that if she’s paid attention to something so important to you, maybe she cares more than she admits aloud, that maybe you were right and the picture of her everybody seems so adamant in painting is nothing but deception made by hands that don’t care about accuracy.

So—like you always do when granted the opportunity to do so—you dive right into that small sliver of possibility to satisfy that familiar, gnawing need to dig deeper, to scrape underneath the surface. You stop caring about the passing of time, of everything that surrounds you in this moment and—guided by the thought that this could never happen again so soon—your mind does what it always does when it’s racing, running towards something that seems so close, but so out of reach at the same time: it doesn’t give space for anything else. And it’s in being so lost in chances, in digging deeper that you haven’t even noticed the breeze turning harsher, the sun getting clouded and that Ellie, still sitting right next to you, has tilted her chin up, eyes above with her nose scrunched. So when her voice finally reaches you, it’s by surprise.

“I think it’s about to—”

She doesn’t even get the chance to finish the sentence before being interrupted by a thunder that finally makes your head snap up from the pages.

“...rain,” she eventually finishes.

Reluctantly, you close the book in your lap, still keeping one finger in between the pages, as if you’re still lost between the words and the ground beneath you, but even in that space between here and there, the state of the weather finally catches up to you, although maybe it’s because of the droplet landing right on the tip of your nose.

“Yeah,” you murmur, one hand coming up to dry your skin with the hem of your sweater. “We should go back?”

You don’t even know why your words sound like you’re phrasing them as a question, maybe it’s the hope that in Ellie’s answer there will be a request to have you close just for a little longer, no matter in which way.

A hope, that doesn’t remain unanswered for long.

“My place?” The freckled girl asks. “My friend’s not there.”

Head turning towards her slowly, your eyes flutter a couple of times before you give her an answer, almost as if you weren’t expecting it, like this isn’t the whole reason why you’re here in the first place and she hadn't said the same thing half an hour ago, a reminder that echoes in your ears in the shape of Jackie’s voice, reminding you to not expect more than what was promised, not to place your hopes in the hand of someone who has never proved more than what they’ve already given.

But it’s really hard to listen to that voice when the girl next to you has also proven much more—at least in your eyes—and has done so with something in the shape of the one thing you’re still holding with one hand, resting against your bent legs. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to say yes and to lace it with the restless hope that the meaning behind that question holds something more profound.

“I’d love to,” you finally reply.

The only thing Ellie does at your words, is offering a small smile and standing up, brushing the palm against her jeans and grabbing the backpack from the grass before jerking her chin off the a path that—although you’ve only taken once before—you’ve already memorized like a trail guiding you towards the only place that can give you answers. And that trail, you follow, with the book she gave you now carefully stored inside your tote bag like it’s something far more valuable that just ink printed on paper, walking right beside her as if her steps could trace a path that doesn’t just lead to a bed and some sheets surrounded by way too thin walls.

The more steps you take, the more the sky turns gray; the more you get one foot in front of the other, the more the weather turns angrier, darker, louder and if just minutes ago there were only a couple droplets landing on your forehead, now they’ve turned into battering rain that wets the path you’re walking along, your hair and your clothes, forcing you and Ellie to quicken your paces, to use whatever you can to cover your heads with little to no success.

Somewhere along the way, the auburn-haired quickly turns her head over her shoulder, glancing at you with her eyes slightly squinting. “You good?” She asks, voice louder than probably needed.

“Yeah!” You answer quickly, although that’s partially through given how you’re soaked from head to toe. “Let’s just— hurry up, please.”

Surprisingly, the sight of you like that—hair wet, clothes dripping and your tote bag covering your head while doing practically the bare minimum to shield you—gives Ellie reason to let out a kind of laugh that would be enough to make you stop dead in your tracks: low, scratching the back of her throat, one that’s so rare hearing coming from her.

But while that’d be enough, what makes you more freeze for half a second is how she suddenly slings one strap of her back over her shoulder, careless of the rain falling all over her head, for the sole purpose of grabbing your hand, wet fingers intertwining with yours while her steps quicken ahead of you as your eyes stay locked on the shape of her shoulders and your feelings stuck on the way a gesture so seemingly simple feels like, for a moment, somewhere between your ribs a beat has been missing.

Yet—with your heart incapable of budging from your throat and your head spinning—you follow. Through the rain, the wet sounds of shoes splatting across the pavement all around you, through every body you weave through on the way to the dorms, through every inch of your skin that’s screaming because you’re scared that if you hold onto that hand too tightly, Ellie will only let go.

But she doesn’t.

The calluses on her palms and her fingertips are still pressed firmly against your skin, even when the sound of thunders is muffled behind thick walls and your feet are dragging across a hallway full of people complaining, voices that no matter how overlapping and loud they are they’re still not reaching your ears, too busy listening to the sound of your own heartbeat and—finally—the one coming from Ellie’s keys sliding into the lock of her door, the latch clicking open and then closed a few seconds after.

Only then, everything else disappears: the deafenness, the weather turning against you and every shadow of doubt that every single person has tried to instill in your head. In this moment—with the door finally closed and Ellie’s hand still wrapped tightly against yours—there’s only your fast breathing, how your eyes are locked on green and the way they’re not wavering from yours.

One breath, one beat of the heart and the loudness of your bag dropping against the carpeted floor. That’s all it takes before your body moves on its own, like it’s decided suddenly that thoughts are just something it can’t afford anymore: your hands meet her cheeks, your mouth hers, so quickly that it seems like you’re scared that the shape of her might for a reason or another disappear from where it’s standing in front of you.

More than permission this time, it feels like a plea.

Lips moving like you’re asking her to let you see her, to let you in, to carve yourself even the tiniest bit of space somewhere between her ribs where the the guard is higher and the walls are thicker, to let you peek through the cracks that only you seem able to see, pleading they’re not fake, or made up from scratch from that desperation for closeness that lives rooted deep inside your soul.

A kind of need that—if seen from a different perspective—is so similar to hers.

Perhaps that’s the reason why Ellie is so fast in dropping her pack right next to where your bag fell as soon as the door closed and in letting her hands drift down your sides, tracing tender circles on the path to your hips where they linger for just a second, squeezing and pulling you closer while a whimper escapes you, but only to find their place on the back of your thighs and lifting you up, your feet hovering only for the time it takes your legs to circle her waist and your ankles to lock.

It’s in a haze that your back meets the softness of her sheets and in a rush that shoes get kicked off and clothes are let falling onto the floor, almost like if you don’t hurry this sliver of time where you’re being allowed to see her like this—flushed, chest heaving, restless—will disappear and the door will close forever with you locked outside it with no key to open it again. So you don’t give yourself time to stall, to think, to linger too much or let any word out, no matter how many of them are running in circles inside your head, fighting their way out your mouth. You just swallow them down and lock every escape by lifting yourself enough to hook one finger on the waistband of her underwear, making gravity let do the rest of the work for you.

Ellie lands in a leap over you, hands planted firmly at either side of your head while—for just the matter of a second—she does the complete opposite of what you’re trying to do. She reserves herself time to just look. You’re not sure at what exactly, if at the red blooming on your cheeks, the way you’re chewing on your lips like you’re scared this moment will end too fast, or if she’s just pondering if your skin slightly trembling on her hips feels like a threat or if it’s safe enough to let it linger there.

Yet, she doesn’t ask you to move, doesn’t pin your wrists above your head like she’s afraid your touch is going to scar as she did the last time you’ve found yourself smelling the sheets you’re laying above right now. There’s something, a flicker, a telltale in the way her breathing fans out against your mouth and how her eyes are glued on yours that gives you enough reason to keep touching, to let your palms graze over the freckles scattered across her collarbones until you’ll be able to remember the way it felt when you’ll walk the path back towards home.

“You’re so beautiful,” you murmur, just above the kind of whisper that’s fought its way out from somewhere between your heart and your throat, but that despite your best efforts in keeping it down it slipped out anyway.

For a moment, the fear that you might have said something that might make her pull away floods you. Maybe because of the way you can hear her breathing hitch and a lump being swallowed, the faint rustling of the sheets being twisted between her hands. 

But before you can start giving too much thought about what are the words that she is forcing down, your lips meet again, they part, tongues stroking one another in something messy, desperate and wet that—maybe—is asking you not to acknowledge the time she spent soaking you in.

So you oblige, because it’s better to do so than to lose even those couple of seconds where she looked at you and decided that your touch is safe, to lose that it’s still there, pressed against her skin, finding its way under her sports bra to feel her nipples hardening under every stroke of your thumbs until she's shivering above you while her hands fiddle underneath you, suddenly clumsy in trying to unhook your bra.

“Help me take this off,” she whispers, breaking away from your lips but still keeping her eyes fixed on them. “Lift up.”

Your back arches immediately, giving her enough space to work the clasps free and for her mouth to finally travel down from the corner of your own, to your jaw, down the slope of your shoulder and finally landing on your breasts where they latch around your left nipple, sucking and swirling her tongue around it enough to draw a sharp whimper from your lips as your hips roll against her thigh nestled between your legs.

“Please,” you breathe, nails now scraping down her back.

A loud, wet sound fills the space between you as Ellie pulls back from your chest, but this time she doesn’t stop to let herself see the soft crease between your eyebrows or the way your lips are parted in shaky breaths, she just keeps kissing down the path to your stomach as her hands hook under the elastic of your panties, dragging them down slowly while matching the pace of her lips wetting your skin until they pool around your ankles and what’s left between you is only the sound of your breathing turning more ragged and the thin layers of clothing that still hang on her body now kneeling between your legs. 

Every touch, every kiss, every slow breath that warms up your inner thighs feels like Ellie is buying herself the kind of time that she's never took before with you, that feels dragged out and that gives enough space for your mind to convince yourself that this means more than any of you is daring to say the other right now. Because there is no other plausible, sane reason behind the softness of each press of her mouth against your skin and how long it takes before her mouth finally brushes against your centre, sending shivers down every fiber in your body and making your hands shoot up to lightly twist around the auburn strands of her hair.

But it’s in the moment that her lips seal around your clit that every question ceases, only leaving space for your eyes to squeeze shut while a moan escapes you: loud, unfiltered and lost in the feeling of her tongue dragging across your folds, of her hands spreading your legs wider before hooking them over her shoulders.

“Ellie!” You gasp “R-right there. Oh god.”

“Yeah?” She whispers between strokes of her tongue. “Like this?”

“Fuck,” you manage as she sucks harder around your clit, leaving you panting harder while your hips roll, your back arches and the only thing you can do is just gripping tighter onto her hair, almost like you’re trying to keep her there as long as possible. “Y-yeah. Like that.”

A low hum slips from Ellie and that’s barely the only sound that comes out before the room fills again with solely your whimpers, the barely there words that you manage to let past your throat and the sheets moving underneath you every time you shift to chase every touch she’s giving you.

This time—when one of your hands finds its way to hers and your fingers lace together where they rest on your thigh—she doesn’t let it fall in vane, doesn’t let it find the comfort of the cotton beneath your body but the warmth coming from her own. She holds it through everything, until you’re trembling, until she can feel your muscles tensing and your breath being sucked in a sharp inhale.

“El,” you pant, “Gonna—I’m—”

The answer is wordless, only a squeeze of your hand before—with a shuddered cry of her name—you fall apart. And even after that, she doesn’t let go; instead drawing it out until your breathing slows, until you can feel your heart decelerating and your own legs fall limp from her shoulders with your toes touching the carpet where she’s still kneeling on.

Only then she pulls back, lips shining and swollen as she slowly crawls back up with her knees sinking down on the mattress, landing on just inches away from your face just to close the gap again, meeting your mouth and letting you taste yourself on her tongue. And while you’re still trying to wrap your head around an amount of things that are difficult to chase, your hands still shift, still land on her sides and then down to her hips.

It’s tentative the way your fingers slip underneath her underwear, like you’re testing the waters before they turn into a storm, but this time Ellie doesn’t stop you. She lets you wander, lets you feel her skin on your fingertips, kiss her until you’re finally tracing across her folds and all that your mouth is swallowing is a sharp inhale and the barely there whimper she lets out.

“Is this okay?”You ask gently, watching closely the tremble on her lips. “I can stop.”

At first, the only answer is a shake of her head, followed by a quiet, “S'okay, don't stop.”

Only then you truly keep going, moving slowly, almost like you’re afraid of startling her, as if you’re moving across grounds you didn’t think you would’ve ever been permitted to. Still, the more the pads of your fingers keep going in their slow tracing, careful over her clit, the more Ellie’s breathing quickens, the more she seems to be chasing your touch, until she’s pulling back from your lips and resting her forehead against yours.

All you can do is just watch: every flicker on her expression, how her brows pull together and her mouth remains ajar. You drink in everything, committing it to memory just in case the sight of her like that above you is something that might not happen again. So you memorize everything, every whimper, every curse murmured under her breath, every tremble you can feel under the palm of your hand resting lightly over her arm. The way even if her eyes are closed, it seems like they are like that to hide the kind of dampness that could be easily mistaken for the rain that has fallen over the both of you.

“Does it feel good?” You ask, eyes on her closed ones. A question that she only answers by nodding against your forehead and humming while twisting the sheets at the sides of your head harder, tighter. “Do you need more? Less?”

“No,” she finally replies. “This works, keep going.”

So you do. You keep your touch featherlight, moving in tight, slow but relentless circles over her clit until—eventually—you can feel her tensing, feel her breath stutter and hear your name being whispered against your mouth in a shaky moan that for a moment makes your own heart jump right in your throat and freeze. Maybe because of how soft, how vulnerable it sounded coming from her. But you don’t let yourself stop, drawing every second of her high out until Ellie collapses on top of you, making you slip your hand out.

For an instant, the only sounds around you are the rain angrily battering against the windows of her room, her quickened breathing warming up your neck and your own heartbeat ringing loudly in your ears. Your hands hover above her back, not knowing what would be safer right now: whether to touch her, stroke down her spine and imprint the shape of her vertebrae on your fingertips while her ribs expand in time with the heaviness of her breathing. But just as your mind was finally deciding on it and your limbs were gradually coming down to hold her, her voice halts you.

“You need to leave,” Ellie blurts out as she rolls onto her back and sits up. “I’m sorry, but you’ve gotta go.”

That’s the moment where your entire body completely locks down, frozen as if the warmth was sucked out from every corner of the room. For half a second you think that maybe she’s joking, that this is some kind of weird pun that maybe you will be laughing about in a matter of seconds, but the laughter doesn’t come. All that is there, is Ellie quickly pulling her hoodie back on as if she’s running out of time before taking your own clothes and placing them on the edge of the mattress where you’re slowly starting to sit up with one arm covering your chest.

“W-what?” you stutter. “Why? Have I done something wrong? What’s going on?”

She doesn’t answer with words, just finishes getting dressed and places your clothes onto your lap before standing. “Just—” Ellie hesitates for a moment, eyes lowered somewhere between the carpet and the tip of her own feet. “Go. Just go. Please.”

One move, that's all you take. One of your hands hovering just near her shoulder, unsure. “Are you okay?” You insist. “Talk to me, please. Did I hurt you? I didn't—”

“I said go.”

Regardless of how much you’d want to stay there, talk to her, try to understand whatever is going on in her head right now, it’s the tone in her voice that makes your hand drop onto your lap and to reluctantly slip your bra, panties and the rest of your clothes back on your body with trembling hands.

You try to retrace in your head everything you’ve said, everything you’ve done, doubting every movement that led you up to her room today from the way you greeted her when the sun was still uncovered by the clouds raging outside the windows to the way you asked if what you were doing was okay.

But there’s no answer in your head. Just a tangled chaos of doubts, of questions that will remain exactly that.

Your legs feel unstable as you finally stand from her bed, watching the shape of her shoulders as Ellie stands now in front of her window with her hands busy in some fidgeting she’s not letting you see. And—in that precise moment—Ellie looks like a girl who has let another see far too close inside her and is now terrified they’ll run as soon as they see whatever she thinks they will despise.

God knows how much you wish you could take those few steps towards her, turn her around and swear to her that you’re not afraid. But the truth is that there’s no deafest ear than the one that is scared.

So you stay silent, gather your bag from the spot on the floor and walk the steps back towards the path that on the way here felt hopeful, greeting them back with just the sound of the door closing behind you and the kind of sting in your eyes that no matter how much you’re refusing, is still there, forcing your cheeks to get damp.

April 8th.

There’s a weight inside Ellie’s backpack that’s heavier than usual. Or, more precisely, it is for the first time since this whole thing started. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the moment when one cracks their soul open—even if just on writing on the margin of a ripped pieces of paper inside a coffee shop way too late at night—the ache to discover how that will be perceived by someone who holds no expectations upon you is louder than anything else.

That’s why she’s fidgeting from the second she’s walking outside the double doors that separate the classroom from the hallway where both you and your best friend should be waiting for her.

The fact is, Ellie doesn’t really know what to do with impatience, hurry, nerves. Not when all she’s been used to lately is a quiet, dulling feeling that has made home inside her, a permanent tenant that doesn’t allow for anything else but keeping her on the thin line between hatred and guilt. That’s why novelty is frightening, the reason behind she’s all of a sudden too nervous for any witty remark and for her head to be anywhere but where her body is.

What she solely focuses on right now, is that there’s nothing she’d want more than to understand if there’s still something inside her that’s worth being understood. At least by someone she doesn’t know. And that’s the thing: that is safer than finding those answers in the voice of someone who knows her, because rejection hurts less if done by a hand she doesn’t have to know who it belongs to. 

Which is also the reason why it was so hard to turn around towards you when she made you walk away five days ago, no matter if there was something inside her—stubborn and screaming for help—that was pleading her to do so, to apologize and ask you to stay, eat the words she had spit out out of fear.

Maybe it was easier that way, maybe sooner or later you would’ve taken that same decision yourself, so it was better for her to make it happen sooner, than before the way you were looking at her from underneath her could have made space inside a part of her that she would’ve ended up poisoning either way.

Because that’s the only thing that Ellie feels like she’s good at: destroying everything soft that her hands manage to lay upon. Softness that she thinks she’s not allowed to have, not after all the weight that rightfully—at least in her head—she has to carry on her shoulders.

That’s why the letter in the bottom of her pack sits much heavier now, because anonymity is the sole refuge she managed to find for herself, which is also another explanation of why—other of being restless and needing to open it as soon as possible—she’s so nervous about walking through those doors and meeting your eyes again.

Because doing that means facing you, and facing you also means coming to terms with the parts of herself that she’s most terrified of and dealing with the guilt that comes from them. And if there’s one thing she doesn’t have any clue on how to manage, is exactly that: guilt.

However, the steps she has to take are inevitable, although dragged against linoleum and heavy as bricks weighing down her knees, like there’s a chain wrapped tightly and locked at her ankles and for which she doesn’t have a key. A heaviness that gets harder to carry as soon as she spots you leaning against the wall outside your classroom with your headphones draped around your neck and your eyes lost on the floor.

“Hey,” she murmurs, barely a whisper that gets past her lips.

Your eyes lift slowly, almost like you’re forcing them to do so instead of being something you truly want to do. “Hi, Ellie,” you greet, a forced smile on your lips.

Silence lingers between the two of you, heavy, louder than anything else and seemingly overclassing the chatter around you: the voices that are overlapping and all the usual chaos that surrounds every moment after lectures. Nothing is as deafening in this moment and—unlike you seem so able to do—Ellie doesn’t really know what to do with silences other than needing to fill them.

“Where’s Jacqueline?” She asks while one hand comes to rub the back of her neck.

“Work,” you answer curtly. “She had to rush there after class, some change in her schedule.” You take a deep breath in, trying not to make too visible the way your hand has slipped inside the cuff of your sweater to nervously pull at the thin layer of the skin at your elbow.

“I think we should meet up another time,” you continue, eyes drifting down on your shoes once again. “Best to continue the group project when there’s all three of us.”

Ellie takes her time to actually answer, too busy in letting the dark circles under your eyes speak instead of your words, the way you try to keep your nerves hidden under a layer of polyester but that despite your best efforts still makes your hand moving underneath it visible, at least to the eyes of someone who knows what to look for. And all of that combined only serves the purpose to make Ellie feel like there’s a pit in her stomach that has nothing to do with hunger and a lot more to do with how there’s something familiar twisting there, something that’s getting heavier to carry the more days go by.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out eventually. “I didn’t—” A pause, a sigh, a tilt of her head. “I didn’t wanna hurt you last time. I just—fuck—I dunno. I—”

“It’s fine, Ellie,” you interrupt, finally pushing away from the wall behind your back. “I mean it. We’re good. That’s all there is after all, right? Just sex. I just thought—” you swallow visibly as your hands finally fall limp at your sides. “Doesn’t matter. Really. It’s… all good.”

Once again, silence stretches, the pain in Ellie’s stomach tightens to the point that she actually believes she’s gonna be sick, because the traces of the girl that looked at her so tenderly, that held her while looking right straight in her eyes like there wasn’t anything in her that could scare her away are almost not there anymore, just faint reminders in the way you’re still trying to force a smile, in the way your voice doesn’t sound full of hate or accusing, but it’s just there. Still there. And that’s what probably hurts the most. That despite her hurting you, you're still not looking at her with hatred in your eyes, even if you should.

It would be easier if you did, if you were angry at her and limited yourself to cursing her off and going on with your life. Yet, you’re not. You’re standing in front of her and telling her that pain is good, that being hurt is fine and Ellie doesn’t know what to do with that other than nodding and lowering her gaze because sustaining it feels like something she can’t handle right now.

“Okay,” she finally breathes “Alright, Austen.”

The smile that you obviously force on your lips only causes that tightening, churning feeling spreading all over her stomach to worsen, making the guilt hanging on her shoulders feel even heavier than it already is. But there’s also some part within Ellie that is glad her eyes are witnessing it; it’s unfortunate that it’s buried deep under thick layers of a very specific feeling that doesn’t let her feel anything but how the good things are exactly the ones she doesn’t deserve.

So she pretends that the quiet knocking she feels inside her is only there to remind her that this is yet another thing she ruined with her own hands, unbeknown to her that it’d be actually so easy to make that stretch on your face not so forced: just a graze of her knuckles on your cheekbones, or merely a softer word than just the okay that managed to slip past her lips seconds ago.

And the chance she gets to do so, to try and make comfort linger a little while longer slips from her fingers and—like a curse—Ellie is once again a little bit too late to the things she truly wants.

“Right,” you then whisper. “I’ll text you to arrange something next week then.”

You don’t even wait to say goodbye, or wave a hand, or do anything to make time linger between the two of you and give her more chances than the ones she already had and let go of. All that you do is turn around, with your hand visibly tight around the strap of your tote and with Ellie’s eyes lingering on your shoulders and every step that she could stop but doesn’t.

All that’s left is for her to remember that weight at the bottom of her pack and place all of the things she can’t bring herself to say in the hands of a stranger whose eyes she won’t have to see leaving with hurt and disappointment clear in them. So she hikes the strap higher up on her shoulder and shuts everything off the way she always does when it becomes too much to handle, walking towards the only refuge she found: the comfort of not being known or perceived, the lack of the risk of ruining everything her hands end up laying upon.

The bar—as Ellie walks past its doors—is stranger at this time of day when there’s no shadow to hide her frame on her walk there, no chilling breeze making the thin hair on her arms raise above goosebumps on her skin. Not even the man working at his laptop is there at his usual spot in the corner, cursing or sighing under his breath to hide his frustrations from the rest of the world.

The girl behind the counter making drinks for a crowded clientele waiting at the register is different as well, and honestly Ellie would love to be anywhere else but here when it’s so full of voices that only make her head louder and there’s no actually space to breathe in the scent she usually comes here for; but—at the same time—there’s also no other place she can go: Dina is probably studying in their room, submerged by more textbooks that she can hold in one bag alone but with questions that surclass each one of them and that would make feel Ellie like she’s drowning all over again and to which she probably doesn't even have an answer for; the library is off limits and—for a reason neither she was expecting—the quad feels like it is, too.

Especially the spot under the tree where she used to love spending her afternoons, lighting one cigarette after the other like her lungs won’t ever risk the chance of getting sick.

So this is the only space she has left, the only one where she feels a semblance of safety because its scent still brings her back to a time where she felt like she was actually that. Safe.

That’s the reason why—despite every odd that would usually make her turn on her heels—she’s still heading inside and trying to find an empty spot among the crowd where to sit before heading to ask for a coffee she’ll barely sip to a waitress who doesn't remember how she pretends to like it.

Once that cup is steaming on the scraped wood of the table she miraculously managed to find and her brain can finally pinpoint the scent of toasted beans to a specific face whose eyes she can’t seem to remember anymore now, her body finally lets her exhale a breath that feels like it was being held since the moment your back found its time to leave a permanent mark in her memory. Not because the sight of it feels less heavy right now, but because this is the only place where she can pretend that nothing can touch her and that hurt, pain, regret and guilt are something she can actually talk about without them burning her skin.

It doesn’t matter if she won’t drink the coffee, it doesn’t matter if the person with whom she used to grimace at its taste she never managed to say goodbye to, and it doesn’t matter if she can’t bring herself to be touched gently without recoiling the second after.

Here, she can be the person who can talk about all of those things and let them linger in the fragile space between truth and the excuses all of this will still allow her to use in the occasion where the blank face on the other side of the paper will find her words something deserving of being rejected like she keeps rejecting herself.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t waste a second to start rummaging inside her backpack where she dropped it on the floor earlier until her fingers finally wrap around the white envelope, snatching it out and bringing it to the table only for that paper hiding the words inside it to be ripped off urgently, with her fingers shaking and with the dampness on her cheek that—up until now—she’s denied herself to feel.

Almost like this is the only thing she has when everything around her feels completely ruined, maybe because—at least like this—she can still get something out of her soul and not be afraid that’s going to slowly kill someone else.

But just as her eyes start to skim through the first few words they land on—careless at first, just enough to gather evidence that she will ignore in favor of using a blank space on a torn page from her notebook to pour everything she doesn’t let herself to feel otherwise—she stops. Suddenly, unanticipatedly, almost like her brain has finally caught up with what her eyes were reading, something breaks loose, as if getting shot somewhere inside her that she believed was guarded safely, kept bolted shut where no one would have been able to reach it anymore.

And yet—word after word—everything starts to crack.

Dear Stranger,

It’s 3 in the morning and I haven’t been able to close my eyes for even one second because I keep rereading your words.

You say that you’re writing back as if it means something, but all I can think about is that it means way more than that.

I hate that people convinced you that you need to be someone else to be worthy of being seen, that unless you’re breaking apart loudly for everyone to hear it nobody notices you’re hurting. At least, that’s the impression I have got and I’m sorry if it’s the wrong one. One thing I’d hate doing, is misinterpreting someone who’s fighting like hell to be heard.

One question I keep asking myself as the paper is wrinkling beneath my fingers the more that I hold it, is who made you believe that home was something you had to deserve. Who taught you that love was a reward handed out only to people who got everything right?

I don’t know what happened to you, what kind of grief or loss taught you to carry guilt and love in the same hand, but—and I hope you’ll forgive me for letting myself believe these are the words you need to read—I’m one to think that losing someone isn’t evidence that you failed, it just means you were there to love them enough for their loss to be significant.

Maybe that’s easy for me to say because I’m not the one sitting in that bar, but I just wish you could read those words the same way I’ve read them. I wish I could be that someone who instead of believing you’ll survive anything because that’s how everyone else sees you, just asks you how heavy it gets, what it’s costing you. Mainly because I think that the one thing you’re really pretending not to be, is the version of you that still exists when they’re not looking. I’m sorry if this is strange. After all, I’m just a face you don’t even know the shape of and maybe when all of this is over we’ll truly go back to our lives and pretend none of it mattered. For what it’s worth though, the letters I keep in the drawer of my desk are enough proof  that it did matter, at least to me.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to answer them in the moment you need it the most, sitting across from you instead of on the other side of a piece of paper.

Until then,

— Yours, whoever.

By the time Ellie’s eyes reach the last two words, the soft hitching in her breathing that was barely kept at bay stops, the stinging in her eyes stops feeling like a threat and the trembling that was a minute ago visible in her hands disappears. Because—sometimes—when walls crack it happens through quiet, with time feeling like it’s stopped ticking. Especially when everything has been loud for so long.

That’s exactly how Ellie feels right now. Quiet. The one she’s been craving, yearning, searching for like someone who’s been parched for too long and is finally handed a cold glass of water. Like a pair of hands has been placed over her ears when hers have been feeling filled with holes, unable to block any kind of sounds, especially when it’s her head that’s been so deafening.

And in seeking that kind of quiet that those words are suddenly providing, she gets lost, trapped between every curve the ink makes on the paper that her thumbs keep absently brushing over and over again, trying to make them soak into her skin until they can stay with her longer than the time it took for her eyes to finish reading, going over them again and again, as if she could actually summon whoever is behind them and actually make them listen, actually have them to answer to a wound that she can’t seem to be able to mend on her own.

When the thought seeps through—quiet, but violent, raw, carrying a need she didn’t know she could still feel—Ellie’s hands are already deep inside the bottom of her backpack, rummaging through in the search of something, anything that will be enough for her to write.

After all, the words that need to get out from the tip of her pen and bleed onto the white of whatever piece of paper, aren’t as long.

April 15th.

It’s been seven days made of avoided glances and silences that stretch way too loudly for a mind that has been craving closeness since the day it began existing, that clings to the smallest acts and gestures and picture them as something bigger than what they probably are. A mind that suffers in words left unsaid and only wishes to be held, comforted and reassured when doubt creeps in.

Some people would call you anxious. Jackie definitely did once or twice in the past, but not this time. To your surprise, since the day you came back home with your face marked with the traces of tears you refused to acknowledge almost two weeks ago, she’s been acting very differently from what you could’ve anticipated. She didn’t speak the three words you were dreading to hear when you saw her smile disappearing from her lips as she was waiting for you to walk through the door, curled in her corner of the couch, but she only stood, walked the short steps from where she was sitting to where you were frozen by entryway table and wrapped her arms around you.

Not a single question about what had happened was whispered, not a single word that could break whatever fragile equilibrium you’re still so desperately holding onto. Just presence; the only solid, safe and guaranteed one you’ve ever had throughout your whole life.

Despite that, though, you’ve also noticed how the blue in her eyes lingers on your side profile more late in the evening when the TV glows across the living room, how coffee is always ready in the morning before you even get the chance to step out of your bedroom and the casualty she tries to force in her words when she asks if you want to sleep in her bed, an offer that every time you’ve refused because it was much better to curl up in your own sheets wearing a hoodie that still smells like rain and the girl who shut you out in a moment that felt like beginning.

Maybe because that piece of clothing was your only way to feel close to her after feeling like having ruined it with your own hands, somehow.

To be frank, Jackie has been the only constant during these days that prevented you from going inside the usual loop your head puts you through when you feel like your heart has been irremediably broken once again. But it doesn’t matter sometimes how much support you have, when the heart screams and the mind doesn’t find a coherent reason for it, the routine always becomes the same, a vicious cycle that no matter how many years you’ve spent subjecting yourself to, it will never vanish completely: wake up in the morning, try to get as decent looking as possible to hide the fact that you haven’t batted an eye throughout the whole night, walk to class while carefully avoiding looking anywhere but your own laptop and go back home to that same hoodie without worrying your best friend too much.

Which is exactly how today went, at least the first half of it. The only difference sits in how fragile and precarious is your hold on the small piece of paper your hand is wrapped around.

“What’d’you think your creep has written this time?” Jackie teases while sliding the keys of your apartment inside the lock, still keeping one arm safely wrapped around yours, almost like she’s scared that if she doesn’t stay glued to you enough you’ll end up in a pit where not even she will be able to reach. “I hope it’s not as bad as mine. Like, I haven’t told you how damn hard it was for me to read the last letter. Straight up bullshit, I swear to god.”

But you’re not even fully listening, the words reach your ears as something incredibly distant, muffled, as if she’s speaking to the mere shape of your body but not your mind, unable to focus on translating the sound of her voice into something coherent. And the reason for that can be found in how much that small, rectangular shape in your hand feels like it’s burning your skin off, stripping it away more than anything that has happened that day where the rain was dripping off your hair and all that existed was the taste of Ellie’s lips and how her hands felt like they’re were finally trusting enough to let you in.

There’s no actual reason for you to be scared of the words hidden behind this envelope: she doesn’t know that the hand behind the pen reading her thoughts is the same one who grazed her skin like it was made of glass, no reason for whatever she’s written to be something harmful, for it to feel like a door slamming an inch from your nose.

But all of this doesn’t matter when the one who knows, is you. And there’s so much fear that lies in the privilege of knowing.

By the time the door is finally closed behind you and you’re toeing your shoes off by muscle memory alone, letting the warmth of your home welcome you with the usual scent of whatever scented candle Jackie had chosen to lit this morning, your hand is only shaking harder. Jackie’s voice feels even more distant than it was before, words that sound like she’s talking somewhere even further away than just a different room.

That, until finally her hand reaches your shoulder and squeezes it tight.

“Babe?” She asks, brows pulled together and head tilted to the side. “You good?”

Finally, your eyes snap up to hers, wide and startled. “Wh-what?” You stutter. “Oh. Yeah. I’m good.”

The look the ginger gives you isn’t the one she’d have if you sounded convincing enough. Apparently, not even the lies that used to come off so naturally once are working the way they should, although Jackie has always been one to see right through them even when nobody else would notice the subtle crack in your voice.

Still, she doesn’t pry.

“C’mon, then,” she encourages. “Let’s read these shitty letters. It’ll help you take your mind off She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

Apparently, that’s enough to at least steal the faintest twist of your lips from your expression. “We’re quoting Harry Potter now?”

“Sure,” she grins, guiding you towards the couch with one arm back where lately it’s found a comfortable home. “If it makes you laugh and then talk my ear out about how shitty J.K. Rowling is.”

“She is shitty,” you mutter as the back of your legs finally hit the cushions of the couch beneath them.

“Oh, babe. I know. You’ve told me all about it,” Jackie muses as she stretches her legs upon the coffee table in front of the both of you, her head nuzzling onto your shoulder as she untucks her own envelope from somewhere deep inside her bag. Before opening it, though, she lets her eyes lift up to meet yours. “But I’ll hear it all over again if it helps.”

For a second, you don’t answer, just letting yourself stare down at her, at least for the time it takes to feel the pit in your stomach shrinking even if just by the tiniest inch. Eventually, though, and with a sharp inhale, you let your lips stretch wider, nodding with a quiet chuckle through your nose.

“Deal.”

With that, your gaze finally lowers to the letter you’re still gripping, sitting on your lap like a threat. Wasn’t it for Jackie, it would’ve been already tossed on your desk, left like a warning, a reminder that once again you’ve let yourself open your heart to someone who couldn’t care less of how much it can carry, or how capable it is. An heirloom from another disappointment that you seem so eager to collect just for them not to leave a lesson behind afterwards, impatient now to actually remember that—maybe—people are just exactly as they look. Nothing more and nothing less.

But Jackie is here, and for some reason that’s enough to bring you to face the one thing you were dreading the most since the last time you’ve actually heard Ellie’s voice: the chance that the words on paper might cut as deep as the ones she let herself speak, that they’re gonna just take the shape of another form of rejection.

Sometimes, though, it’s better to rip the bandaid before the wound rots underneath. That’s why you force yourself to rip the thin paper that surrounds them and reach inside it.

But—to your surprise—what you find aren’t long paragraphs or even more than a few words. What your eyes land on is something that is far smaller, far more fragile than anything your mind could have ever thought of: just this small, rectangular, ripped piece of paper that only reads as one sentence and one sentence alone:

I’ll wait at the bar on the 5th just outside campus next Wednesday at 8pm.

Only that.

But it doesn’t matter how simple the words are, they still leave you staring at them like maybe they’re going to change and—for once—instead of hoping they won’t, you’re begging they will. Silently, internally, but begging and screaming louder than you’ve ever done until the point it feels like your brain is collapsing into itself, that the pit inside your stomach is turning into a void that’s going to eat you alive from the inside out leaving behind only the imprint of your body sunk into the springs of the couch.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Jackie exclaims, her eyes wild as they run through the ink on the paper she holding precariously between her hands. “Can’t this guy gimme a fucking break for once?”

She lifts her head up, sitting straighter next to you, but just as she was opening her mouth—maybe to protest again, maybe to let your read whatever has made her so furious—she stops right away, dead in her tracks as if the sight of you frozen and gaping at the smallest piece of cellulose she’s ever seen hit her like a bat right on the back of her head.

“Hey,” she whispers carefully as her hands lower. “Everything… alright?”

Before you can actually give her an answer that would have probably never come fast enough, her head tilts, peering at the words you’re holding, and once her eyes have gone through them, they widen just as much as yours, but only for them to squint and for her brows to furrow.

“Why are they asking you to meet them?” She asks confused while glancing back up at you. “What the hell?”

Silence stretch—unbearable, tense, cutting like a blade well sharpened and pointed right at your neck, and your best friend can only take as much before she’s nudging your shoulder with much more urgency than before.

“Hellooo?” She calls out. “Am I on mute or something? Can you answer or should I reboot your nervous system?”

Finally, your answer comes, barely whispered, your voice cracking on every single syllable. “I— I dunno,” you breathe. “Must be another one of their jokes.”

Jackie only hums at first, studying the look on your face, how the tremble in your hands has only worsened and how your body feels so rigid compared to hers. For a moment, you’re scared she won’t buy into the obvious lie that you’ve just slipped out, that she’ll press into understanding why that could even be considered a joke at all, but before she can even speak her mind, you slowly turn towards her, plastering a smile on your lips while your hand crumples the paper inside it, like something you want to erase from existence as soon as possible.

“It’s probably nothing,” you reassure her while standing up from the couch, ignoring one of her ginger brows rising. “Maybe they’ve slipped the wrong thing inside the envelope, or they’re pulling a prank, y’know?”

“Shouldn’t you go and see at least? Like, I’d be curious.” She suggests while shifting on the couch to crisscross her legs as her eyes travel from your head to your feet and then back up again. “And where are you even going?”

“No,” you reply quickly. “S’okay, don’t wanna— embarrass myself.” You take a deep breath, hands raking through your hair to push it back as best as possible, almost as if you’re trying to erase something, to push a feeling out of your system instead of just strands. “I’m going to my room. I need to, uhm, bathroom.”

Jackie tilts her head at you again, the lift brow she had earlier is even higher up, almost kissing her hairline at this point. “The bathroom isn’t in your room.”

“Yeah, well,” you clear your throat, arms coming to wrap around your middle while your hands slip underneath the sleeves of your sweater. “Bedroom and then bathroom. I need to, uh, get something. And then, yeah.”

You don’t even let her add another word, you just turn on your heels, socks whispering against the carpet beneath them, and with long steps and a heavy heart you just walk towards the first door that presents itself in front of you, not even caring about where you’ll land. As of now, you’re not even sure that the fog inside your head will allow you to grasp the difference between tiled floors and hardwood ones and—to be completely honest—it doesn’t really matter when the only question that’s running laps inside your head is why.

Why would Ellie ask to meet someone she doesn’t even know all of a sudden, why would she prefer that over looking directly into your eyes when she begged for you to leave. Everything spirals, dragging you into rethinking about every word you’ve written among long paragraphs drafted late at night, when your eyes were barely open and all that was keeping you awake was the need to implore for a piece of her heart.

Among all the noise, though—while your back hits wood and slowly travels its slow descent until you’re hitting cold surfaces with your knees drawn up and pressed against your chest, your hands gripping your hair tightly—there’s one thought that’s louder than any other, one feeling that doesn’t stop nudging at you: the idea that if you’d really were to go, as soon as Ellie would see your face she’d only swing her backpack over one shoulder and leave before you’d even get a chance to get a word out, which has always been the exact reason why you’ve never said anything when you found recycled paper sitting on the corner of her desk. That no matter how much you can change to become the one thing someone else needs you’re never going to be enough to be fully wanted without carving parts of your soul out.

Maybe what terrifies you the most is the chance to become the kind of fool who'd ask to bleed twice and having hope making you crawl back to the exact place where your heart has already bled.

And to the fearful heart the only choice that’s left is to remain frozen on a bathroom floor.

Ellie doesn’t know how many cigarettes she lit up on her way to the bar, but it could’ve been as well the whole pack and she’d still wouldn’t have noticed it. Not when her heart is hammering to a beat that feels so unfamiliar and every nerve in her body is screaming at her to leave.

But for the first time in so long she chose not to listen to every voice inside her head that’s asking for her to stand from that chair and just leave, not caring whether the other person will actually show up, pleading her to spare herself from another disappointment, to open a door ajar only for it to be closed by a hand that’s not even hers.

That’s what she’s learned after all: better to close it yourself before another does it for you. That’s how she kept her heart safe. That’s also how she kept herself numb to anything that could even remotely feel good.

Maybe the reason why she’s written those simple words a week ago without even thinking, urgent to feed a hunger that has nothing to do with whatever plate she forces down her throat but everything with the need to feel seen. And if there’s something that Ellie craves deeply is to be seen without the need to be changed, for her soul—no matter how damaged—to be wanted just as it is.

So despite the ache in her lungs and the way her knee is bouncing up and down underneath the table, she’s there, waiting in the familiarity of the lack of hassle that inhabits this place late in the evening, following every single movement that catches the corner of her eye, memorizing the sound of the steamer hissing, the clack of the keyboard coming from her left and the sound her nails tapping against the scrapped wood where they’re laying on top of are making.

Every single time she sees a shadow passing by the window, her head follows and so does the quick skip of a beat that she feels between her ribcage. But no matter how much time goes by, how many hours she ends up spending waiting until her back hurts, until the man closes the lid of his laptop and the waitress ends up shooting her a look somewhere between worried and tired: the face of the only person that after so long had managed to make her feel like they could truly see past every single brick she put down to build walls up so high neither she could see past them, never ends up walking through the threshold. 

Perhaps she should’ve expected it, perhaps she should’ve listened to that voice inside her head telling her not to leave her room tonight. Yet—stubbornly, or rather desperately—she decided to ignore it. But the more time goes by, the more it starts to feel like proof, an unwanted variable inside a research she hadn’t even started: sometimes people are as good as mimicking care as she’s been at pretending she lacks it.

Which brings her to only blame herself, because the only person who instead has touched her like she meant it, is the same she yelled at to leave after taking again from her. And had she admitted earlier to herself that the comfort she truly craves is one that she’s been denying for two weeks straight, she wouldn’t be waiting in a shitty bar with a cup of cold coffee in front of her that she hasn’t touched.

So she stands, collects whatever she had brought with her and drags her legs on the way out towards the only door that she hopes she hasn’t bolted shut for good.

“We can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”

graphics by my gorgeous wife @les4elliewilliams

pictures from pinterest

a/n: hi hi hi, im sorry again this has taken so long, but please let me know what you think. i really hope it was worth the wait <3 love y'all