time slowed down

She sat against the headboard with her legs stretched beneath the blanket, one of your magazines open across her lap as she moved through its pages without much interest, her fingers lifting each one by the corner before allowing it to settle against the next with a quiet, papery sigh. Every so often, she paused on an advertisement or an article, though her eyes never seemed to linger long enough for her to actually read it. She looked comfortable there, more comfortable than you expected her to be, and the sight of it made something warm and painful settle beneath your ribs.

You were curled near the end of the bed, close enough that your shoulder nearly brushed her ankle whenever you shifted, though you had made a point of keeping enough distance between you that it would not seem like you had moved closer on purpose. The mattress was wide, and there was more than enough space for you to stretch out beside her, to let your legs tangle with hers beneath the blanket, to lean against the headboard and pretend that it was ordinary for the two of you to spend mornings together in your room, but you stayed where you were anyway.

You kept your body small without meaning to. You tucked your knees close to your chest and rested your arms around them, allowing the blanket to gather around your legs as though it could hide the fact that your heart had been beating too hard since the moment you realized she was there.

It was ridiculous, really, the way Max could make you feel as though you had forgotten how to exist properly.

You had never been shy around other people. You could talk yourself out of trouble when you needed to. You could make someone laugh when the room became too uncomfortable. You could look Steve directly in the eye and tell him he was being dramatic, even when he was towering over you with his hands on his hips and an expression that suggested he had already decided you were impossible.

With Max, though, all of that seemed to disappear before you could reach for it. The clever things you thought of saying became tangled somewhere in your throat, and the confidence you carried so easily everywhere else seemed to slip away in her presence, leaving you painfully aware of every movement you made and every breath you took.

It was not that Max had ever asked you to be smaller.

If anything, she had always seemed to appreciate that you were not afraid to speak your mind, that you could meet her sharpness with your own and refuse to back down when she tried to challenge you. She had laughed at your jokes, even the ones that were not funny. She had looked at you in those rare moments when the rest of the world had gone quiet, her expression softening in a way that made you wonder whether she truly felt that something too.

But wondering was dangerous.

You knew that better than anyone.

So you had learned to keep those thoughts to yourself recently, to bury them beneath the safety of friendship and shared glances and the kind of closeness that could always be explained away if someone asked too many questions. It was easier to pretend that you did not notice the way your chest tightened whenever she smiled at you. Easier to tell yourself that you only missed her because everyone had been busy lately, because life had become crowded and strange and difficult in ways none of you knew how to talk about.

Seeing her had become rare enough that you had stopped allowing yourself to expect it.

Still, when she was there, sitting in your bed with your magazine in her hands as though she had always belonged there, you could not help but want to preserve the moment for as long as possible.

You did not remember her coming over.

The thought arrived so quietly that it did not frighten you at first.

It only made you pause.

Your eyes drifted toward the bedroom door, which stood closed across from the bed, its white paint chipped near the handle from years of being pushed open with careless hands. You tried to remember hearing it open. You tried to remember Max knocking, or Steve calling up the stairs to tell you someone was there, or the soft sound of her shoes moving down the hallway.

Nothing came to you.

You could remember waking up.

You could remember the warmth of your blankets and the faint pressure of sleep still resting behind your eyes. You could remember turning your head and seeing Max beside you, already settled against the headboard, her hair bright beneath the morning sun.

But everything before that was gone.

You told yourself it did not mean anything.

Maybe you had been half asleep when she arrived. Maybe Steve had let her in and forgotten to mention it. Maybe Max had knocked softly enough that you had not heard her, and when she saw you asleep, she had simply let herself in and waited for you to wake up.

That sounded like something she might do.

Did it not?

You looked back at her, waiting for some small sign that she had noticed your silence, but she continued to turn the pages in her lap with the same slow, absent movement. The magazine had been open to the same page for longer than you could remember. A bright advertisement filled the paper, though you could not make out what it was selling from where you sat. Her fingers rested along the edge of the page, perfectly still.

The room felt colder than it should have.

You shifted beneath the blanket and glanced toward the window, expecting to see the sun sitting high above the houses across the street, but the curtains were only partially open, and the light coming through them had a strange dullness to it. It was bright enough to make the room visible, but it did not feel like sunlight. It did not carry warmth. It lay across the floorboards and the walls in pale strips, flat and colorless, as though someone had painted the shape of morning across the room without bringing any of its life along with it.

Your gaze moved to the vinyl player beside your dresser.

The record on it was turning.

You could see the black surface catching the light as it spun beneath the needle, slow and steady, the label at its center circling around and around, but no song came from the speakers. There was only the faintest sound of static, so quiet that you almost mistook it for the rush of blood in your ears.

The static seemed to fill the room.

It was not loud, but it was everywhere. It came from the speakers, from the air around you, from the corners of the ceiling where the shadows gathered in soft gray shapes. It reminded you of the sound an old television made when the channel had gone out, thin and distant and wrong enough to make your skin prickle.

You waited for Max to say something about it.

But her focus was completely elsewhere.

Outside your window, the street had gone still.

That was when you finally began to feel uneasy.

By this hour, your street should have been awake. Someone should have been pulling out of their driveway. A lawnmower should have been coughing to life somewhere down the block. You should have heard the distant shout of a child being called inside, or the low rumble of a truck passing through the neighborhood, or at least the birds that always gathered in the trees outside your window.

Instead, there was nothing.

The silence pressed against the glass.

You found yourself looking toward your door again, listening for any sign that the rest of the house existed beyond it. Steve was never quiet for long. Even when he was trying to be, there was always something that gave him away, the sound of a cabinet closing too hard in the kitchen, the television playing in the living room, his voice carrying down the hallway as he argued with Robin about something that did not matter.

But the house had become so still that you could hear the faint movement of Max’s fingers against the magazine page.

You looked at her again, slower this time, as though some part of you already knew that if you stared long enough you might catch the exact moment something in the room shifted, though you could not have said what you expected to see or why the thought made your stomach tighten so suddenly.

Max had not turned the page.

She was staring at it now, her face unreadable in that way that was somehow worse than if she had been angry or amused or even bored, because there was nothing in her expression to hold onto, nothing familiar to steady you, only the stillness of her features and the fixed, distant look in her eyes as they remained on the paper as though the magazine had become the only thing in the room that existed at all, as though she had forgotten you were sitting beside her, forgotten the bed, forgotten the sunlight, forgotten everything except whatever silent thing had caught her attention.

For a moment, you thought about saying her name, because it felt like the only sensible thing to do, the only small, ordinary sound that might pull the room back into place and remind her that you were there, but the word caught in your throat before it could fully form, lingering there with a strange, helpless weight that made you feel suddenly aware of your own breathing, of the way the air seemed too thin and too quiet around you.

Then the record player crackled louder, the static rising all at once in a sharp burst that made your shoulders tense, and Max finally looked up.

For a second, Max only looked at you.

The magazine remained open in her lap, forgotten now, its glossy pages catching the thin, lifeless light that had settled across the bed. The static from the record player softened again, though it did not disappear. It hung beneath everything, faint and constant, a low electrical murmur that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the speakers.

You waited for her to say something.

You expected her to roll her eyes at you, maybe ask why you were staring, maybe make some dry remark about the record player acting up and tell you to fix it before it ruined one of your favorite albums. Any of those things would have made sense. Any of them would have been enough to return the room to itself.

Instead, Max’s gaze moved over your face with a quiet, unreadable patience.

Not the way someone looked at a person they knew.

The way someone might study a photograph.

“You have been thinking about this for a long time,” she said.

Her voice was soft.

So soft that you almost wondered whether you had imagined it.

Your fingers tightened around the blanket in your lap, though you did not realize you had moved until the fabric had gathered painfully against your palm. You looked at her, waiting for the rest of it, waiting for some explanation that would make the words less frightening than they sounded.

Max did not offer one.

Her eyes stayed on yours.

“You always do that,” she continued, and there was something almost thoughtful in the way she spoke, as though she had been considering the subject for a while and had finally decided to be honest. “You sit there and make up all these little meanings for things that do not mean anything at all.”

Your mouth parted, but nothing came out.

It was not that you did not have an answer.

It was that the answer had vanished before you could reach it.

Max glanced down at the magazine for a moment, her thumb tracing the edge of one of the pages. “A look. A joke. Somebody sitting too close to you because there is nowhere else to sit. You take all of it and turn it into something else.”

The words did not strike all at once.

They settled.

They found their way beneath your ribs with the slow, terrible certainty of something you had already feared might be true. You felt your face grow warm, then cold, and you hated that she could see it happening. You hated that she could look at you so plainly, as though every careful thing you had kept hidden had been laid open between you without your permission.

Your knee shifted against the mattress.

It was barely a movement, only a small involuntary twitch beneath the blanket, but it made you feel exposed anyway.

Max noticed.

Of course she did.

“You don’t even have to say it,” she said. “You think you’re good at hiding it, but you aren’t.”

The room seemed to pull farther away from you.

The walls remained where they were, your posters still pinned crookedly above your dresser, your clothes still spilling from the chair in the corner, but everything looked distant now. Like you were seeing your room through a pane of glass. Like you had been placed inside it and left there, unable to touch anything familiar enough to prove it was real.

You wanted to tell her she was wrong.

You wanted to tell her that she did not know what she was talking about, that she had no right to take something so private and hold it in her hands like it belonged to her.

But Max’s expression did not change.

That was what stopped you.

There was no anger in her face. No embarrassment. No confusion. There was only a kind of tired certainty, as though she had finally grown exhausted with pretending not to notice something that had always been obvious.

“I knew,” she said.

Your breath caught so quietly that you were not sure she heard it.

Max leaned back against the headboard, her eyes never leaving yours. “I knew every time you looked at me and then looked away when I caught you. I knew why you got quiet whenever Lucas was around. I knew why you always acted like you did not care when I left, even though you would spend the rest of the day looking like somebody had taken something from you.”

Your fingers went numb.

You could feel them still holding the blanket, but they no longer felt like they belonged to you.

She knew.

The thought moved through you with a coldness that seemed to reach every part of your body at once.

She knew, and she had said nothing.

She knew, and she had let you sit beside her, let you laugh with her, let you believe that there might have been moments when she understood you in a way nobody else did.

You could not make yourself look away.

A tear gathered at the corner of your eye, blurring the shape of her face. You blinked quickly, desperate to stop it before it fell, but it slipped free anyway and traced a warm line down your cheek.

Max watched it happen.

Her face remained still.

“I don’t know why you thought I would ever feel the same way,” she said.

The static rose.

It filled your ears so suddenly that you could barely hear the words after that, though you saw her mouth move, saw the calm shape of each sentence as it left her.

“You made it up because you wanted it to be true.”

Your chest tightened.

You tried to breathe through it, but every breath felt too shallow, as though your body had forgotten how to take in enough air.

“You made me into somebody I am not,” Max continued. “You took every normal thing I did and ruined it by making it about you.”

The tear on your cheek reached your jaw.

You did not wipe it away.

You could not.

Your arms had gone stiff around your knees, your shoulders drawn so tightly inward that they ached. Somewhere beneath the blanket, your foot trembled against the mattress in small, uneven movements, and you pressed it harder into the bed, trying to force yourself still.

Max’s eyes flicked downward.

Then back to your face.

“You are scared because you know I am right,” she said.

The words seemed to press directly against the place inside you that had always been afraid of this, the part of you that had spent so long turning every feeling into something smaller, something safer, something you could carry alone without anyone seeing. You had told yourself that it was enough to care about her quietly. You had told yourself that loving her from a distance was better than losing her entirely.

But Max was looking at you as though even that had been too much.

As though you had taken something innocent and made it ugly just by feeling it.

“I would never want you like that,” she said, and the words came out so evenly, so almost gently, that for one confused second you thought you had misheard her.

The room did not move.

Nothing shattered.

Nothing changed.

That was almost worse.

The sunlight still lay across the bed in those pale, colorless strips. The magazine still rested in her lap, open to the same page. The record still turned in slow, silent circles beside the dresser, the needle dragging through the groove with a faint, dry hiss that sounded suddenly too loud in the stillness.

And yet the words had gone through you with such force that you felt something inside your chest give way all at once, as if a hidden seam had split clean down the middle. You could not understand how the rest of the world had stayed standing when you had not.

Max looked at you for a long moment without blinking.

Then her voice lowered, not in anger, not in pity, but in that same calm, measured way that made every syllable feel deliberate.

“I do not like girls.”

You stared at her.

She did not look away.

She did not soften.

She did not rush to explain herself or take the edge off what she had said. She simply let the words sit there between you, plain and final, as though she had placed them carefully on the bed and expected you to understand exactly what they meant.

Your throat tightened so hard it hurt.

“I do not like you.”

The second sentence landed with even less effort than the first, and somehow that made it worse. There was no hesitation in it, no flicker of uncertainty, no trace of regret that might have made it easier to survive. She said it the way someone might say they did not like the taste of coffee, or the sound of rain against a window, or the way a shirt fit across the shoulders. Casual. Certain. Unmistakable.

You felt another tear slip free.

Then another.

You hated that she could see them. Hated that your face had betrayed you before you could force it still. Your throat burned from holding back every sound that wanted to break loose, every humiliating little gasp and sob and plea that crowded behind your teeth. Your hands had gone cold beneath the blanket, but your skin felt too hot everywhere else, as if your body could not decide whether it wanted to freeze or burn.

You were shaking now.

Not enough for anyone else to notice, maybe. Not enough for Max to have to comment on it. But enough that the mattress trembled faintly beneath you, enough that your knees pressed harder together and your fingers curled so tightly into the fabric that they ached.

She noticed anyway.

Of course she did.

Max’s eyes moved over your face with that same quiet attention, as though she were watching something she had already expected to happen. There was no surprise in her expression. No guilt. No mercy. Only a kind of detached patience that made you feel smaller with every second she kept looking at you.

“You really thought,” she said softly, “that this was something else.”

The words were not loud. They did not need to be.

They slid under your skin with the slow certainty of a blade finding its way between ribs.

You could not answer.

You could not even breathe properly.

Max tilted her head a little, studying you with a calm that felt almost clinical. “You kept making it into something it was never going to be. Every look. Every joke. Every time I was just being nice to you, you took it and turned it into this whole thing in your head.”

Your stomach turned.

The room seemed to narrow around you, the walls drawing closer without moving, the air growing thick and difficult to swallow. You wanted to tell her she was wrong. You wanted to tell her she had no idea what she was talking about, that she had no right to stand there and dissect you so neatly, so cleanly, as if she had not been the one to make you feel seen in the first place.

But the words would not come.

Max’s gaze stayed fixed on yours.

“You should have known better,” she said, and there was something almost weary in her tone now, as though your feelings had become an inconvenience she had finally grown tired of pretending not to notice. “You should have known I was never going to look at you that way.”

That hurt more than if she had shouted.

It hurt because she said it like it was obvious.

Like it had always been obvious.

Like you had been the only one foolish enough to miss it.

Your lips parted, but all that came out was a tiny, broken breath. You hated yourself for that sound. Hated the way your body kept trying to betray you with every small, helpless reaction. Your eyes stung so badly you could barely keep them open, but you did anyway, because looking away felt impossible and looking at her felt like punishment.

Max’s expression did not change.

“I mean,” she said, almost thoughtfully, “what did you think was going to happen?”

The question was so quiet it barely seemed real.

And yet it struck harder than anything before it.

What did you think was going to happen?

The answer rose in you instantly and painfully, all the stupid, fragile hope you had spent so long pretending was not there. That she might understand. That she might feel something too. Maybe the softness in her voice, the way she lingered near you sometimes, the way she looked at you when she thought no one was watching, meant something you had been too afraid to name.

But Max was looking at you now as though those hopes were not only wrong, but embarrassing.

As though she could see every private thought you had ever hidden and found them pathetic.

“You made me into something I am not,” she said. “You took every normal thing I did and decided it was about you.”

Your chest tightened so sharply it felt like pain.

You could feel your heartbeat in your throat, in your wrists, in the base of your skull. The room had gone strangely distant, as if you were no longer fully inside it. As if you were watching yourself from somewhere far away, curled up on the bed with your face wet and your hands clenched and your whole body trying not to come apart.

Max’s voice remained calm.

That was the cruelest part.

She did not need to raise it. She did not need to sneer or spit the words at you or make a scene of it. She delivered each sentence with the same measured composure, and that composure made every word feel heavier, more final, more impossible to survive.

“I do not want you,” she said again, slower this time, as if she wanted to make sure you understood. “I never did.”

Your breath caught so hard it hurt.

A fresh tear slid down your cheek, warm against skin that felt suddenly too tight. You did not wipe it away. You could not. Your arms felt locked in place around your knees, your shoulders drawn inward so tightly they ached. Somewhere beneath the blanket, one of your legs gave a small involuntary twitch, and you hated that too, hated that even now your body was still finding ways to show how badly she had hurt you.

Max watched the movement.

Then she looked back up at your face.

“You keep acting like this is some terrible thing I did to you,” she said, and now there was the faintest edge of impatience in her voice, not enough to break the calm, only enough to sharpen it. “But you did this to yourself. You decided what I meant. You decided what I felt. You decided I was supposed to be something for you.”

The words came one after another, each one landing with the same cold precision.

You felt them everywhere.

In your throat.

In your stomach.

Behind your eyes.

In the hollow place under your ribs where all the hope had been sitting, waiting, and now seemed to be collapsing in on itself so completely that you could not tell where the pain ended and the rest of you began.

Max’s face remained almost serene.

It was that serenity that made her seem unreal.

Not angry. Not cruel in the obvious way. Just impossibly calm, as though she had stepped outside the moment and was speaking from somewhere beyond it, somewhere untouched by the wreckage she was leaving behind.

“You should have kept it to yourself,” she said at last. “You should have known better than to think I would ever be yours.”

The static from the record player began to distort.

It crawled through the room in uneven waves, thin and electric, making the air feel charged and wrong. The light near the window flickered once, then again, and for the briefest moment Max’s face seemed to shift beneath it.

Not into something else.

Into nothing.

Her eyes were still there. Her mouth was still there. But the person you knew seemed to have slipped away from behind them, leaving only the shape of her behind, something hollow and carefully worn. It was as if whatever was speaking to you had learned how to use her voice because it knew that was the one thing you would not be able to ignore.

You could not move.

You could not speak.

All you could do was sit there and take it, every word sinking deeper than the last, every quiet sentence finding a new place inside you to hurt.

Max tilted her head.

Then, with a softness so strange it made your stomach turn, she said, “Did you really think anyone could love you if they knew what you wanted?”

The room went dark.

You came awake all at once, dragging in a breath so sharp and frantic that it hurt your throat.

For one disorienting second, there was nothing except darkness and the awful echo of Max’s voice still caught somewhere inside your head, repeating itself with a calmness that felt worse than screaming. Your body reacted before your mind could catch up. You pushed yourself upright so quickly that the blankets twisted around your legs, your hands clawing at the sheets as though you had been pulled from deep water and were still trying to find something solid enough to hold onto.

A record was playing.

The sound reached you slowly, not as music at first, but as something distant and warped, a familiar melody struggling through the thick ringing in your ears. It seemed to come from far away, muffled by the lingering weight of the dream, until the room began to return around it in uneven pieces.

Your bedroom.

The pale light through the window.

The posters on the walls.

The chair in the corner with clothes hanging over it.

Your chest rose and fell too quickly, each breath catching halfway in as though your lungs had forgotten what they were supposed to do. Your throat burned. Tears gathered behind your eyes with such sudden force that you had to blink hard against them, though you did not know why you bothered. The room looked unfamiliar anyway, too bright and too still, every object in it appearing slightly wrong because you had only just watched it become something terrible.

Your eyes moved from one corner to the next, searching.

You did not know what you were looking for.

Maybe Max.

Maybe the thing that had been wearing her face.

Maybe proof that you had actually woken up.

The record continued to play, its sound growing clearer with every second, until you recognized it as one of your own. The familiarity of it should have helped. It should have made you feel safe.

Instead, it only made your stomach twist.

Your gaze landed on Mike.

He stood beside your vinyl player with one hand still hovering near the turntable, as though he had only just placed the record down before you woke. His expression had gone completely still, caught somewhere between alarm and confusion, his eyes wide as he stared at you from across the room.

For a moment, neither of you moved.

Then fear rose through you so fast it felt like it had been waiting beneath your skin.

“Get out.”

Your voice came out harsher than you intended, raw from sleep and tears and the effort it took to force the words through your throat.

Mike’s face changed immediately.

His brows pulled together, and his hand lowered slowly to his side. He did not step closer, but he did not leave either. He only looked at you as though he could not understand what he had done wrong.

You drew the blanket tighter around yourself and pushed backward until your shoulders struck the headboard. The wood pressed into your spine, solid and real, but even that did not calm you. You kept moving until there was nowhere else to go, your fingers twisted in the fabric at your chest as if the blanket could protect you from whatever might still be in the room.

“I said get out. Now.”

Your teeth clenched around the last word, though your whole body had begun to shake.

Mike swallowed.

“You told me to come over,” he said, and his voice was careful now, quieter than usual. “Steve let me in. We were supposed to hang out, remember?”

The words reached you, but they did not settle.

You stared at him.

He looked like Mike. He was wearing darker clothes he had probably put on without thinking too much that morning. His hair was slightly messy. His shoulders were tense in that familiar way they always became whenever he did not know what to do with himself. He looked frightened, but not in the way Max had looked at you.

Not empty.

Not distant.

Still, your heart would not slow down.

“Mike,” you said, and your voice broke around his name before you could stop it.

He looked at you more carefully.

“Is that really you?”

The question seemed to confuse him more than anything else had.

His face softened just slightly, though the worry did not leave it. He nodded once, slow and uncertain, as if he was afraid any sudden movement might make you panic again.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is me.”

Something inside you gave way.

You did not decide to move. Your body did it before you could think through it, throwing the blankets aside as you stumbled off the bed and crossed the room too quickly. Mike barely had time to react before you reached him, your arms winding around him with a desperation that made your chest hurt.

For a second, he stood completely still.

The suddenness of it had caught him off guard. His arms remained awkwardly at his sides, his body rigid beneath yours as though he was trying to figure out whether he was allowed to touch you or whether doing so would only make things worse.

Then your breath hitched.

The first sob broke loose before you could hold it back, followed by another, and another, until your whole body trembled against him.

Mike’s expression changed.

You could feel it even without looking at him.

His arms came around you slowly, uncertain at first, his hands settling against your back with a hesitance that made it clear he had no idea what he was doing. But when he felt how tightly you were holding onto him, when he felt the trembling that would not stop and the tears soaking into the shoulder of his shirt, he pulled you closer.

Not perfectly.

Not smoothly.

But firmly enough that you could feel he was trying.

Your grip tightened around him.

You held onto him with more strength than you realized you had, your fingers clutching the back of his shirt as though letting go would mean waking up again, as though the room might disappear if you gave it even the smallest chance to.

Mike did not say anything for a while.

He only stood there with his arms around you, tense and quiet, his chin hovering awkwardly near the top of your head because he did not seem to know where else to put it. You could feel him breathing, uneven but steady, and the simple proof of it began to anchor you in a way nothing else had.

He was warm.

He was real.

He was Mike.

Your tears continued to soak through his shirt, dampening the fabric beneath your cheek, but he did not pull away. He did not ask you to stop. He did not tell you that you were scaring him, even though you knew you were.

Instead, his arms tightened around you when yours did.

It was not a perfect kind of comfort. It was not the sort of thing either of you knew how to do without feeling awkward or exposed. But he mirrored you anyway, holding on because you were holding on, trying to give you something solid when he did not have the words to explain what he thought you needed.

The record played behind you.

And somewhere beneath the music, beneath the sound of your uneven breathing and Mike’s quiet attempts to stay steady, Max’s voice still seemed to linger in the back of your mind.

You did not want to tell him what she had said.

You did not know if you could survive saying it out loud.

After a few moments, when your breathing had slowed enough that each breath no longer seemed to scrape painfully against your throat, Mike shifted beside you and guided you back toward the bed. He did it carefully, without making a big deal out of it, one hand resting lightly at your arm as though he was worried that if he moved too quickly you might pull away from him again.

You sat down near the edge of the mattress, the blankets still tangled and half fallen onto the floor from the way you had thrown them aside. Mike sat beside you, leaving a small space between your shoulders, though his knee remained close enough to yours that you could feel the warmth of him there.

For a moment, neither of you spoke.

The record continued to play from across the room, its familiar melody filling the silence with something softer than the quiet you had woken into. You kept your hands folded in your lap, staring down at them because looking at Mike felt too difficult. Your fingers were still trembling slightly. You tried to hide it by curling them together.

Mike pulled away from you slowly.

Not because he wanted to.

You could tell that much from the way he hesitated before doing it, as though he had been trying to decide whether letting go would make you feel abandoned. Once there was space between you, he turned toward you and looked at your face with a seriousness that made your chest tighten again.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

The question was quiet.

It should have been easy to answer.

Instead, you sat there with your gaze fixed on your hands, feeling the words from the dream press against the back of your mind. You could still hear Max’s voice if you let yourself think about it for too long. You could still see the emptiness in her eyes. The calmness in her face. The way she had looked at you as though she had known every fear you had ever tried to hide.

Everything was not okay.

You were terrified.

You were terrified that it had felt real. You were terrified that some part of you believed it. You were terrified that if you closed your eyes again, you would find yourself back in that room with Max sitting across from you, saying all of those things in the same voice she used when she was really there.

But you could not tell Mike that.

Not all of it.

You trusted him. You had trusted him for a long time, even when neither of you said much about the things that mattered. He had always been there in the ways that counted, steady and familiar, someone who understood the strange silences between people without demanding that they fill them immediately.

Still, there were parts of you that felt too fragile to place in anyone else’s hands.

There were things you had never said out loud.

You nodded slowly.

Your eyes remained lowered, and you hated the way you seemed to shrink beneath his attention, your shoulders curling inward as though you could make yourself less visible if you tried hard enough.

Mike watched you for a moment.

Then he looked toward the record player, rubbing his hands together once before speaking again.

“I did not mean to scare you,” he said carefully. “If that’s what happened.”

You looked up at him briefly.

He was choosing his words as he went, you could tell. He had always done that when something felt important, when he was afraid that saying the wrong thing might make a situation worse. His brow had furrowed slightly, and his eyes kept moving between you and the floor as though he was trying to organize the memory in his head before giving it to you.

“You told me to come over today,” he continued. “You said to come early, remember? So I told Steve we were hanging out, and he said you hadn’t woken up yet, but that I could come upstairs and get you.”

You did remember telling him that.

At least, you thought you did.

The idea of it felt distant now, buried beneath the dream and the panic that had followed it.

“So I came in,” Mike said. “And I tried to wake you up.”

Your stomach tightened.

He glanced at you again, uncertain.

“I was just going to mess with you a little,” he admitted, his voice quieter. “I shook your shoulder, but you didn’t move. Not even a little.”

You felt cold despite the warmth of the room.

Mike continued before you could react.

“Then I opened the blinds because I thought maybe the light would wake you up, but you didn’t even flinch.” He paused, looking toward the window as though he could still see the moment. “I didn’t know what else to do, so I put a record on.”

A faint, nervous smile touched his face.

“I figured The Cure would fix it. You always say they fix everything.”

The attempt at humor was gentle. Careful.

You took in every word he had said, but instead of comforting you, they made something colder settle in your stomach.

You had not felt him shake you.

You had not seen the blinds open.

You had not heard him come into the room, had not heard him move beside your bed or touch the record player, not until the music had somehow reached through the nightmare and pulled you back.

The thought made your fingers tremble again.

You could not tell him that either.

Mike was not the kind of person who pushed when someone clearly did not want to talk. He could be stubborn, and he could be relentless when he believed something was wrong, but he knew the difference between wanting an answer and being ready to give one. You knew that if you told him you were fine, he would not force you to explain.

So you tried to gather yourself as quickly as you could.

You wiped beneath your eyes with the heel of your hand, brushing away the last dampness from your cheeks before he could see how close you were to crying again. Then you drew in a slow breath, forcing your shoulders to loosen, forcing your mouth into a small smile that felt fragile and unfamiliar on your face.

“Nightmare,” you said.

The word sounded too simple for what had happened.

You swallowed.

“I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Mike’s eyes stayed on you.

You could tell he did not believe that it was only a nightmare. Not completely. He had seen the fear in your face when you woke up. He had heard the way you asked whether he was really himself.

But he did not say that.

Instead, you stood from the bed, moving a little too quickly as though getting on your feet could put distance between you and everything that had happened. You smoothed your hands over your clothes, avoiding his eyes again.

“Should we start getting ready?” you asked, trying to make your voice sound lighter than it felt.

The smile you gave him was small.

Mike looked at you for a long moment before standing too.

“Yeah,” he said.

He did not ask another question.

He did not reach for you again.

But he stayed close as you moved around the room, and even without looking at him, you could feel that he was watching you with the quiet, worried attention of someone who knew you were hiding something and had decided, for now, to let you hide it.

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