𝑴𝑨𝑹𝑻𝑰𝑵𝑨 — she/her ; italian ; 25 ; sociology student ; obsessed with tlou like it's the oxygen i breathe ; when i don't write gay fics i'm probably writing gay music ; my reqs are open <3
𝒃𝒆𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌 — this is a sapphic blog and I don't wish to traumatise children, so men and minors do not interact. thank you.
i have to say that even though i had some insider info about the chapter before it came out hehe, it absolutely did not lessen the emotional impact for me whatsoever. it still hit so incredibly hard. i feel like i tell you this always but i love how real and human the emotions in your writings are. it’s something that you absolutely nail every single time. it’s evident that dear ellie is crafted with so much love and care 🥹 and i just adore you
i really wanted this inbox to be insightful but i was so gut punched by the emotion that i can’t even think of specific points to address 😭 one thing though is my heart absolutely aches with how caring ellie is. she’s not some detached, devoid girl… she never has been and she never will be. she’s so thoughtful and she IS caring… going to be the certified ellie lover and glazer that i am and say that i think people often forget in canon that ellie truly has such a big heart. and i love that we can see that in this story, also. i’m literally about to cry again, like i love her so much 😭
and i know i got sneak peeks (yeah guys im lucky asf) but god it still hit—ellie saying reader’s name?? the hand holding?? it’s so tender. i can literally feel like the ache of longing in the pit of my stomach.
i really love ellie’s pov. i am SO picky (😓) and i just cannot get enough… it all reads so naturally.
i love u so much and thank u for sharing ur gorgeous passion with us 💗💗
- elle <3
ahhh i think im gonna scream 😭😭😭
the emotions are the things i always focus on, describing them at best is always my main goal when i write, so if you YOU say i nailed it? omfg biggest validation ever
and yes, ellie is so so so caring and i wanted to capture that, especially how can go right in hand with trauma and grief and how one single person can carry both of those things in one single heart. i hope i did it justice... how grief can paralyze someone while still yearning and craving affection and to be seen deep inside.
i love writing ellie's pov, truly. it does something to me :((
i love YOU so so much elle, truly adore you. thank you for always taking the time to send me these messages because they do good to my heart <33
content :: mdni 18+ content ;; sexual themes, fluff, angst, comedy, forbidden romance, good old lesbian yearning (lots of it), homophobia (openly expressed/implied), closeted reader, afab reader ⸺ men dni, swearing, bullying, mild violence/fighting, descriptions of injuries, typical highschool drama, ellie is insanely conflicted, reader being an ass, reader's boyfriend ALSO being an ass (x100), greg returns and crashes out, modern au, songfic, multiple part fic,, lmk if i've missed anything !!
word count :: 13.9k
series masterlist | next chapter
synopsis :: it starts the way most disasters start: quietly, and in a school cafeteria. ellie williams has a problem. it isn't the bruises, or the skipped classes, or the journal she really should have held onto more carefully. it's the girl across the lunch hall — the one she can't stop looking at, the one who looks back like it costs her something, the one who is, by every reasonable measure, the worst possible person to feel this way about. she knows that. she has always known that.
it doesn't seem to be helping.
THE CAFETERIA WAS LOUD, the way school cafeterias always were — a wall of overlapping sound, trays clattering, chairs scraping, someone three tables over laughing like a foghorn someone had taught to be obnoxious on purpose. It was the kind of noise that didn't just fill a room but colonised it, pressed itself into every available corner and set up permanent residence. A living, breathing thing made entirely of chaos and the smell of overcooked pasta.
Ellie didn't hear any of it.
You were the still point at the centre of a spinning room.
That was the only way to make sense of it — the way the afternoon light came through the high windows at just the right angle, just the right moment, and found you like it had been searching. Like it had crossed ninety-three million miles of empty, freezing, indifferent space with one singular destination in mind, and that destination was you. It poured into your hair like liquid gold being tipped from a jug, pooled at your shoulders like it was reluctant to go any further, gilded the edges of you until you were less a girl eating lunch and more a Renaissance painting that had gotten up, gotten dressed, and decided to haunt a school cafeteria for reasons of its own.
The noise, the chaos, the aggressive institutional ugliness of the room itself — none of it touched you. It broke around you the way water broke around a stone. You had your own atmosphere. A separate, sovereign one, with a pressure system all its own and weather that Ellie had never once been able to predict.
You were talking to your friends, gesturing at something with one hand — laughing, maybe, it was hard to tell from here, which was a tragedy that Ellie felt in her actual ribcage — and even the gesture was a small catastrophe, a grenade with the pin pulled, because you moved like punctuation. Like every motion was a sentence that knew exactly where it was going. Even a wave of your hand was a complete thought.
"Ellie."
The rest of the room had become scenery, a painted backdrop, a film set that existed purely as context for you, and the light kept doing what it was doing and you kept being what you were, this impossible, incandescent, gravity-bending —
"Ellie."
— thing, this force, because that's what it was, that's the only word that fit, a force, the kind that couldn't be reasoned with or negotiated with or looked at directly for too long without something in Ellie's chest doing something embarrassing and structural, like a building developing cracks along its foundational walls, and she was aware, distantly, the way you're aware of weather through a closed window, that she was staring, that she had been staring, that staring was an understatement for what she was doing, which was closer to orbiting, helplessly, uselessly, like a satellite that had long since run out of fuel but kept going anyway because gravity didn't care about her situation —
"ELLIE."
The world detonated back into existence.
"What —" She startled so violently she nearly launched her lunch tray off the table like a trebuchet, one hand slamming down on it a half second before disaster, her elbow catching the edge of her drink hard enough to send it rocking, and a fork went skidding off the edge and clattered across the linoleum with the specific kind of loud that made three nearby tables look over at once. "Jesus — Greg —"
Greg was watching her with the serene, comfortable expression of a man sitting in a lawn chair watching someone else's house burn down. He had his chin propped in his palm, his lunch sitting half-eaten in front of him, and he radiated the energy of someone who had been attempting this intervention for a deeply unreasonable amount of time and had made his peace with the wait.
"You were gone," he said. Not accusatory. Almost impressed. "Like, not just checked out. Like, evacuated. I was one minute away from checking you for a pulse."
"I was thinking," Ellie said, and she said it with the dignity of a person who had not just nearly catapulted a fork across a public space.
"Yeah." Greg's gaze drifted, slow and inevitable as a tide going out, over Ellie's shoulder. She knew the trajectory. She watched it arrive at its destination. She watched his face conduct a rapid and unflattering series of calculations. "About her."
Ellie did not turn around. She retrieved her fork from the floor, set it back on the tray with surgical precision, and took a long, unhurried drink of water. Buying time. Building a wall out of nothing.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Ellie. I could trace your eyeline with a ruler."
"I was zoning out. It happens."
"In the exact direction —"
"Greg."
"— of the girl who is, conservatively, so far out of your league that the concept of a league is no longer a useful framework —"
"Greg."
"— like we're talking different sports, different continents, she is playing chess and you are, with an enormous heart and terrible odds, playing Go Fish —"
"I know," Ellie said.
And that was the end of it. The words landed flat and definitive, a period at the end of a sentence that had already been written and wasn't looking for edits. Not angry. Not wounded. Just the particular heaviness of something that had already been turned over so many times in her hands that all the sharp edges were worn smooth. She knew. She had always known. She kept the knowing in a locked box in the basement of herself and did not go down there on purpose, and on the occasions she found herself there anyway, she turned the light off and went back upstairs.
"I'm not doing anything," she said, quieter. "I'm not trying anything. I'm not an idiot."
Greg looked at her for a moment. The entertainment evaporated off his face and left something more honest behind.
"I know you're not," he said.
"Don't," she said.
He closed his mouth. He understood, which was why she kept him around.
She stood up and grabbed her tray. "Come on."
They wove through the thinning cafeteria toward the tray return, moving in the comfortable tandem of two people who had been navigating spaces together long enough to do it without thinking. Greg had pivoted to a detailed critique of the comic run Ellie had lent him last week — specifically, and incorrectly, the third act — and Ellie was in the process of constructing a rebuttal like a lawyer who had been waiting for this cross-examination, because the third act was a masterpiece and Greg's problem was not with the writing but with his own constitutional inability to sit still for a slow build, which was a character flaw she had been documenting for years and intended, eventually, to cite formally —
"Hey."
A beat.
"Loser."
Time did not stop. Ellie would not say time stopped, because that was dramatic and she was not dramatic. What she would say was that the word hit her nervous system like a match to a fuse, that her heartbeat went from baseline to a full sprint in the space between one syllable and the next, that her hands flooded with cold sweat against the lunch tray and her face became a furnace and every hair on the back of her neck stood at attention like soldiers who had been called into service and were extremely aware of it.
She didn't need to hear it twice. She didn't need context or confirmation. She knew that voice the way she knew her own name — better, maybe, in some humiliating biological sense, the way a compass needle knew north, not by choice, not by any conscious arrangement, but by something deep and structural and completely indifferent to her feelings on the matter.
She turned around.
There you were.
Three feet away, wearing an expression like a knife that had learned to look decorative. Your posse arranged behind you the way shadows arranged themselves around a light source: instinctive, inevitable, orbiting without meaning to. You were looking at Ellie with the lazy, half-lidded assessment of a cat watching something cross the floor — mildly curious, entirely unbothered, already certain of the outcome.
In your hand, held up with the casualness of someone displaying a particularly boring trophy, was a journal. Thick, soft-cornered from years of being shoved into backpacks, colonised by stickers from a collection that Ellie had been curating since she was eleven. Her name was written on the inside cover in her own handwriting.
Her brain, normally a loud and opinionated instrument, went briefly and completely silent.
"Forget something?" you asked, and your voice was warm the way a lit match was warm: pleasant right up until it wasn't.
"I —" Ellie started.
That was as far as she got.
"I," you repeated, tasting the word, turning it over in your mouth like you were deciding whether it was worth swallowing. The syllable became a scalpel in your hands. A small, precise, devastating one.
Ellie's face was a bonfire. Her brain came back online in fragments.
"Yes," she managed, and it exited her mouth at half the intended volume and twice the intended vulnerability, thin and breathless as a thread pulled too tight. "Can I — that's mine —"
She stepped forward. This was reasonable. This was rational. She was simply recovering her property; this was not a big deal; her heart was not trying to punch its way out of her chest cavity like something in an action movie.
Behind you, your friends had formed a small, murmuring parliament of cruelty. A sound drifted over — something about the jacket, probably, or the shoes, delivered in the specifically calibrated register of not-quite-quiet, the kind of cruelty that wore plausible deniability like a coat — accompanied by laughter as thin and sharp as paper and just as capable of leaving a cut.
Ellie's jaw locked. She kept her eyes on the journal.
"Sure," you said, and the word was a door being closed politely in someone's face. You pivoted the journal out of reach as naturally as breathing, as if your arm had always intended to be somewhere Ellie couldn't quite reach, and flipped it open with the air of someone settling into a very good armchair with a very good book. "Oh, this is — hm. This is interesting."
"Give it back," Ellie said, and the panic was a live wire dragged straight up her spine, white-hot and instantaneous, burning the last of the embarrassment off her clean. She stepped in with her hand out, reaching — "Now —"
You stepped back. Ellie followed. You turned, still reading, unhurried as a Sunday morning, and what unfolded next was not in any way a graceful sequence of events. It was not choreographed. It did not reflect well on anyone. It ended with Ellie's chest pressed to your back and her arms stretched forward, hands closing over yours where they held the journal, the two of you stacked together and frozen mid-reach like a sculpture depicting something its artist was still working out the title for.
The cafeteria became a distant concept.
The noise fell away like wallpaper peeling off a wall.
Ellie could feel the warmth radiating off you through two layers of fabric — could feel it the way you feel sunlight through a window, in the places it touched and the places it didn't, could feel the arrested stillness in your frame like a held breath, the sudden awareness of two bodies that had not consulted each other before arriving here, at this precise and inadvertent geography, pressed together like two notes accidentally played at the same time that turned out, improbably, to be a chord.
Her lungs had forgotten their job. Her ribs felt like they were made of glass.
And your face — she couldn't see your face, not from this angle, not with her chin nearly at your shoulder, but she could see the tip of your ear from here, and the tip of your ear was the deep, telling pink of something that had not been prepared for this either, a bloom of colour as involuntary as a confession, and Ellie filed it away in a compartment so far beneath her conscious mind that she could almost believe it didn't exist.
Almost.
"Hey."
The word fell into the moment like a stone into still water, and the ripples were immediate and violent. They jumped apart like they'd been defibrillated — Ellie backward, two full steps, landing unsteadily; you forward, spine snapping upright, shoulders squaring, the whole architecture of your expression rearranging itself in the half second it took for the situation to demand it.
Asher (your dickhead of a boyfriend) materialised like something the room had grown specifically to be inconvenient. He was leaning against the nearest table with his arms folded across his chest, a physical equation that was trying very hard to add up to something intimidating, all jaw and crossed arms and the specific energy of a person who considered his own arrival a statement. He was looking at Ellie the way you looked at something sticky on the bottom of a shoe.
"She got a problem?" he said, and the she was a dart aimed directly at Ellie's general existence, casual and contemptuous and entirely comfortable with itself.
"No," Ellie said.
It came out the way water came out of a tap. No temperature, no texture, no particular feeling about itself. She looked at him the way she looked at a blank wall — registered the surface, found it offered nothing of interest, moved on. It wasn't hostility. It was the total, undecorated absence of it: the specific brand of indifference she reserved for things and people who had not earned the dignity of her actual disdain. He blinked. He'd been expecting a different kind of reaction, the kind he could do something with, and she'd handed him a door that opened onto nothing.
She watched him recalibrate. It was not entertaining enough to be interesting.
You, meanwhile — you were not looking at him.
You were looking at Ellie, and your expression was doing something that Ellie's brain started reaching for and then abandoned, because it was shuttering closed too fast, the way curtains got drawn against the light, a smooth and practised motion that left no evidence of what had been there before it. Whatever it was, it was gone. You looked at Ellie the way you looked at a finished conversation. Then you held out the journal.
Quietly. No theatre. No ceremony.
Ellie reached out and took it.
Your fingers did not immediately let go.
One heartbeat. One single, suspended, airless beat where time seemed to hold its breath and fold itself in half — the journal floating between you in the space where both your hands met, your fingers against hers, a contact so small and accidental and fleeting it barely qualified as a thing that had technically happened.
It was the loudest thing in the room.
Then your fingers fell away like autumn, like something letting go on purpose. You turned, reached back, and looped your hand through Asher's arm with the brisk efficiency of someone closing a tab they'd had open too long. He said something; you didn't look like you were listening. You moved, and your constellation moved with you — a brief, ungainly scramble of heels and murmurs and people rearranging themselves like iron filings following a magnet — and then the cafeteria swallowed you whole, and you were gone, and the room left behind by your absence was a smaller, flatter, considerably less interesting place.
Greg appeared at Ellie's elbow like a dog who had been sitting at the door for a while.
"Hey." His voice had shed every last layer of amusement. He was watching the direction Asher had gone with an expression that had real structural integrity — the kind that was built out of something other than a passing feeling, something load-bearing. "You okay?"
Ellie looked down at the journal in her hands. Turned it over once. Pressed her thumb to the corner of the cover.
"Yeah," she said. "Fine."
She tucked it under her arm, and they walked out, and the noise of the cafeteria closed over them like water over a stone, and that was that.
Except.
Except that Ellie Williams, who was not an idiot, who had told Greg less than ten minutes ago that she knew better, who kept the box in the basement and did not open it —
— smiled.
Not a performance of a smile. Not the sarcastic, armoured, public-facing smile she used as a deflection tool. This was something that happened without her permission, small and private and stubborn, living only in the corners of her mouth and the interior of her chest, where it had no witnesses and she could maintain, in good conscience, the polite fiction that she was absolutely fine and none of this was happening to her.
Your fingers against hers had been a spark. A stupid, accidental, three-second spark.
It burned in her chest all the way to fourth period, faithful as a pilot light, small as a star seen from a very long way away.
It did not go out.
The parking lot in the middle of the school period was its own kind of quiet.
Not the quiet of absence — the school was still full, still breathing, still running through its daily machinery of bells and syllabi and thirty-something students staring at whiteboards and willing the clock to move faster by sheer collective force of misery. The noise of it bled through the brick in a low, institutional hum. But out here, between the rows of cars baking slowly in the afternoon heat, the air had a different quality. Looser. Unsupervised. The kind of quiet that belonged to people who had made an executive decision about how to spend their Tuesday and were at peace with the consequences.
Ellie was at peace with the consequences.
She was sitting on the concrete kerb at the far edge of the lot, the secluded corner where the English teacher's ancient Volvo created a natural wall against the sight lines from the main building's windows — a discovery she had made in ninth grade and guarded with the same devotion other people reserved for good parking spots. Her skateboard was on the ground beside her, one wheel spinning idly in the breeze like it was bored. Greg was next to her, both of them nursing vending machine drinks and the mutual, comfortable warmth of two people who had agreed wordlessly that whatever was happening in this period could happen without them.
"He reads off the slides," Ellie was saying, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict after a very long deliberation. "Like, verbatim. Word for word. He prints the PowerPoint, puts it on the projector, and then reads it back to us like we're not all sitting there looking at the exact same words in real time —"
"He does the thing," Greg said, pointing at her, nodding with the intensity of a man who had been waiting for permission to bring this up. "The thing where he pauses and looks at the class like he just said something profound —"
"Like he's waiting for applause —"
"Like he expects someone to weep —"
"I was there for thirty-five minutes last Thursday," Ellie said, with the dead-eyed sincerity of a trauma survivor recounting the incident, "and I learned nothing. Genuinely. I came in knowing nothing, I left knowing the same nothing, except I was also tired —"
"You were asleep for twenty of those minutes —"
"I was resting my eyes —"
"Ellie, you snored."
"I breathe loudly —"
Greg laughed, that full-body thing he did where it seemed to involve his entire skeleton, and Ellie let herself grin, let the afternoon settle around them like a blanket, let the tension of the cafeteria — the journal, the journal pressed between your hands, the pink tip of your ear — slide off her back for the first time in an hour. This was good. This was normal. This was the world as it should operate: just her and Greg and the sun on the asphalt and nothing that required her to feel anything complicated.
She picked up her skateboard and set it across her knees, running her thumb along the edge of the deck out of habit, the worn texture of it as familiar as a heartbeat.
"Mr. Peterson, though," Greg was saying, warming to the subject with the enthusiasm of a man who had been storing this grievance for weeks. "He talks about himself. He will segue from mitosis — mitosis, Ellie — to a story about his lake house, and no one has ever once questioned it, we all just sit there and let it happen like we've been hypnotised —"
"The lake house," Ellie echoed reverently. "We know more about that lake house than we know about anything on the curriculum. I could pass a test on that lake house. I could write a thesis —"
The doors of the school opened.
Not the way doors opened normally — with the casual, mundane swing of someone who had somewhere to be and was going there. These doors opened the way things opened when they were preceded by intention, flung wide with the particular momentum of a group of people who had decided on a direction and were not planning to be stopped by something as minor as a fire door. The bang of it carried across the parking lot like a starting pistol.
Ellie heard it. Her thumb stilled on the edge of the deck.
Four of them came through first — Asher's usual architecture of loyalty, the specific collection of broad shoulders and performative swagger that trailed in his wake the way debris trailed a comet. They came down the steps with their eyes already moving, already scanning, already locked onto the target with a speed that meant this had not been an accident, that someone had looked out a window, that the secluded corner had been found. They moved across the parking lot with the kind of coordinated, purposeful energy that turned a group of boys into something with a different name, something that rhymed with mob and felt like a weather front.
Ellie was on her feet before she knew she'd decided to stand.
"Greg," she said.
"Yeah," Greg said. He was already up. His voice had flattened out, gone careful. "I see them."
They came fast, spreading out as they approached, a net tightening around its catch, until they had formed a loose but deliberate ring around the corner — one on the left, two coming from the right, cutting off the gap between the Volvo and the kerb with the practised ease of people who had done this before, who knew the geometry of cornering someone and applied it without needing to think. Ellie assessed the exits in the half second available to her and found them all closed. Beside her, she felt Greg go very still, the way prey went still, the deep animal instinct of something that understood what was happening and was calculating on its feet.
Then Asher came through the doors.
He didn't rush. That was the thing about Asher — he never rushed. He had the kind of confidence that didn't need to hurry because it had already decided how things were going to go and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. He came down the steps with the unhurried, heavy-footed certainty of a man crossing a room he owned, hands relaxed at his sides, jaw set, eyes moving across the parking lot until they found Ellie and stopped.
He walked over. His friends parted for him without looking.
He stopped two feet in front of them.
He was tall in the way that had always seemed specifically designed to be used on someone — not incidental height, not just the result of genetics, but height that had been weaponised, deployed, stood up to its full advantage and pointed at the world like an argument. He stood in front of them and looked down, and his gaze did a slow, pendulous swing from Greg to Ellie and then settled there, on Ellie, with the weight and precision of a pin through a butterfly.
The silence stretched like taffy. Like something being pulled past the point it wanted to go.
"Cafeteria," he said finally. Just the word, dropped in front of them like a coin on a counter. His voice was low, conversational, the kind of low that was a performance of casualness, wearing it the way a fist wore a glove. "What was that."
Ellie's hands were steady. Her heartbeat was not. "Nothing," she said. "She had something of mine. I got it back. That's it."
"Hm." He tilted his head. Considered her the way you considered something you hadn't decided what to do with yet. "See, here's my thing. My thing is, she doesn't like you. She doesn't wanna be around you. And I've seen the way you look at her." He paused, and the pause was a shovel. "I know what that is."
"Then you know it wasn't a problem," Ellie said.
Something moved across his face. Not a flinch. More like a gear catching.
"Let me be clear about something," he said, and the conversational register dropped away entirely, shed like a coat, leaving something colder and more architectural underneath. He leaned forward, just fractionally, just enough to shrink the two feet between them into something that felt like inches. "You don't talk to her. You don't look at her. You don't exist near her if you can avoid it. Because girls like you —" and he dsaid girls like you the way people said things they had decided were self-explanatory, the way people said things they considered too obvious to require completion, and he left it there, in the air between them, to do its work. "She doesn't need that around her. You understand me? Keep your issues to yourself."
The words were rocks dropped into still water. Ellie felt the ripples move through her in a straight, cold line from her throat to her stomach to somewhere deeper than that, somewhere the words found the places she'd already worn thin and pressed down on them with deliberate, knowing weight. Her jaw tightened. Her hands found each other at her sides and she pressed her knuckles together and breathed through it, slow and even, the breathing of someone who had learned, through repeated occasions, to absorb this particular kind of hit and stay standing.
She was fine. She was fine. She had been called worse, implied worse, had the shape of herself outlined in uglier terms, and she was fine, she could take it.
Then Asher turned to Greg.
And said what he said.
It was quick. It was almost casual. It was the kind of comment that arrived with no fanfare, no escalation, dressed in the same tone as everything else — a flat, offhand, contemptible thing delivered the way you delivered trash, which was to say without ceremony, because it didn't require any. Just words. Just a sentence. Just Greg's most personal geography laid out and stepped on by someone who hadn't earned the right to know it, let alone flatten it.
And well, that’s all she could remember.
The thing that moved through Ellie was not anger, exactly — anger was something she had a relationship with, something she could negotiate with, something she could put on a leash and walk. This was different. This was the thing underneath the anger, the subterranean thing, the fault line going — and she thought about Greg's face, what was on Greg's face right now, and she didn't look, she couldn't look, because if she looked she would see it and then it would be worse and she couldn't afford for it to be worse —
Her fist connected with Asher's face with the full force of every last gram of it.
The sound was a single, sharp, declarative crack, as definitive as a full stop, as satisfying and as catastrophic as a window shattering from the inside. His head snapped back. He staggered — one step, two, genuinely staggered, not performed, not for effect, but rocked back on his heels by the geometry of a hit he had not, in his fundamental and structurally unsound confidence, seen coming. For one bright, blazing, fleeting second that Ellie would store in a separate compartment from everything else — the good compartment, the one without a lock — he looked genuinely surprised.
Then his hand went to his face.
Then the parking lot became a different place entirely.
It happened the way natural disasters happened: with a speed that outpaced comprehension, with a force that didn't wait for consent, with the kind of scale that reduced the individual to a small thing caught inside a much larger motion. Asher's friends moved like a single organism, a flock of something with no good intentions, and Ellie had time for one sharp, preparatory breath before the first hit landed, and then it was just sound and motion and the hard, specific language of a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon being used for something parking lots were not designed for.
She took three hits before she stopped counting. They came fast — face, shoulder, ribs — each one a blunt, percussive argument, each one the sound of knuckles meeting bone with the particular intimacy of violence, which was to say without any distance at all. Her face became a series of points of impact, her eye socket a lit fuse, her cheekbone a bruise still in the process of deciding its final shape. She did not go down. This was the thing about Ellie — and she was not proud of it, because she knew it said something about the kind of life that had made her — she did not go down easily. She was built for absorbing things. She was architecture designed for load-bearing.
She went down on one knee. Her palm hit the asphalt.
To her left, Greg was fighting a different battle — fighting to move, which was the more maddening one, two of them holding his arms back and behind him in a vice grip that was not about hurting him so much as making him watch, which was crueller, which was the point, and the bruises blooming up his arms from the grip of their fingers were the colour of storm clouds, deep and spreading and wrong against his skin in a way that made Ellie's vision go briefly, incandescently red even through her own pain.
"Greg —" she started.
"I'm fine," he said, tight and breathless. "Ellie, I'm fine —"
Asher crouched down to her level. His nose was a swelling event. There was a satisfaction lodged in Ellie's chest that not even the current circumstances could fully dislodge, stubborn as a splinter. He looked at her from six inches away with his jaw working and his eyes doing something flat and final, and he stayed there for a moment the way you stayed somewhere to make sure the point had been made.
Then he stood up.
"Stay away from her," he said, and it came out nasal and compressed and considerably less authoritative than it had been ten minutes ago, and that too went into the good compartment, filed under small victories, cherish these.
He walked away. His friends unpeeled themselves from Greg and followed, the whole assembly retreating across the parking lot with the energy of something that had said what it came to say and was ready to be done, and the sound of the doors closing behind them was an ending the same way a curtain dropping was an ending — definitive, institutional, this portion of the programme is now concluded.
The parking lot settled back into its Tuesday afternoon quiet.
Ellie stayed on one knee on the asphalt for a moment, breathing. Just breathing. Cataloguing. The side of her face was a symphony of wrongness, two or three distinct movements playing simultaneously in the key of this is going to look terrible tomorrow. Her ribs were filing a formal complaint. Her eye was beginning to swell in the unhurried, committed way of injuries that had decided to take this seriously.
Greg appeared in front of her, folding down to the ground, and she saw his arms — the dark thumbprint bruises already stamped into his skin like signatures — and her stomach turned over hard.
"Don't," he said, reading her face with the accuracy of four years of practice. "I'm fine. They were just holding me. I'm fine."
"Your arms —"
"Ellie."
She looked at him. He looked back at her, steady, with the quiet and deliberate fortitude of a person who had decided how they were going to hold themselves and was holding. She thought about what Asher had said. She thought about the look on Greg's face when he'd said it, which she had seen in the half second before she'd stopped thinking and started moving, and she pressed that image down and sealed it over.
"I'm sorry," she said. Flat. Sincere. The most genuine two words she owned.
"Don't be," Greg said. "The nose was worth it."
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
"It really was," he said.
She let out a breath that was almost, in some technical sense, a laugh.
They sat on the asphalt in the thin afternoon sunlight, two people held together by years and a shared disaster, bruised and slightly wrecked, and the parking lot sat around them in its middle-of-the-day quiet, and Ellie's skateboard lay on the ground a few feet away with one wheel still spinning, idly, faithfully, like it was waiting for her to come back.
She reached over and stopped it with her hand.
Then she sat back, pressed the heel of her palm gently against her swelling eye, looked up at the sky — wide and indifferent and enormous, stretched out over the whole unreasonable mess of her life like it had all the time in the world — and breathed.
The skate park at four-thirty in the afternoon was the closest thing Ellie had to a church.
Not in the quiet way — the park was never quiet, not really, always threaded through with the percussion of wheels on concrete and the occasional sharp crack of a board meeting the lip of a ramp at the wrong angle and the distant, overlapping noise of the city doing what cities did at the end of a school day. But church wasn't about quiet, not really. It was about the particular quality of being somewhere that received you. That didn't ask anything of you except your presence. The skate park took Ellie the same way it took everyone — bruised, badly, on a Tuesday with a swelling eye — and simply continued to exist around her, indifferent and solid and endlessly, reliably itself.
She pushed off and rolled, long and unhurried, from one end of the flat section to the other, the wheels humming their low, continuous note against the concrete. Then back. Then forward. Back and forth, back and forth, a metronome that had forgotten what it was counting.
Greg, sitting on the bench behind her with his skateboard upended across his knees and a rag and a small bottle of wheel oil in his hands, was in the middle of what could generously be called a monologue and less generously called a one-man theatre production about the subject of Asher and what Greg thought about Asher and where, specifically, Greg felt Asher could go and what he could do with himself when he got there. He had been in the middle of this monologue for approximately twenty-five minutes. He was, by any reasonable metric, nowhere near the end of it.
"— and the audacity," Greg was saying, working the oil into the bearing with the focused aggression of someone who was only technically performing maintenance and was mostly just doing something with his hands before his hands did something else. "The sheer, uncut, factory-grade audacity of him walking out there like he owns the — like we're the ones who —" He stopped. Regrouped. Swore, comprehensively, in the manner of someone who had run out of regular words and needed to reach for a different register entirely. "I'm telling you, Ellie, I'm telling you, the next time he comes within ten feet of either of us, I swear to every god that has ever been worshipped on this earth —"
Push. Roll. The wheels hummed.
"— and what he said — " Greg's voice tightened around the edges, briefly, before he pried it back open. "What he had the absolute nerve to say, I have been turning it over in my head for the past three hours and every time I do I want to —"
Push. Roll.
"— because it's not even the hitting, right, the hitting I can process, the hitting is a known quantity, but the words — "
Push.
"— Ellie. Ellie, I'm saying, are you even —"
"Do you think she really likes him?"
The monologue stopped.
The wheel oil paused mid-application.
Greg looked up from the undercarriage of his board with the slow, blinking expression of someone whose train of thought had just been derailed by something that had come from an entirely perpendicular direction. The silence stretched out between them, thin and slightly bewildered.
"...What?" he said.
Ellie rolled back toward him, one foot dragging lazily against the concrete to slow herself, and came to a stop a few feet from the bench. She was looking off to the left, at the middle distance, at nothing in particular — or more specifically at the particular kind of nothing that served as a screen for the something she was actually looking at, the interior movie reel that had been running on loop since approximately noon.
"Her," she said, with the self-evident tone of someone who felt the pronoun was sufficient context and didn't understand why clarification was being requested.
Greg stared at her. "Ellie. I need you to understand that I was in the middle of a very important —"
"Her," Ellie said again, and this time she turned her head and looked at Greg, and the look said everything the word wasn't bothering to.
Greg's expression completed its journey from confused to resigned with a brief layover at of course. He set the oil bottle down on the bench beside him with the measured care of a man putting down something that needed to be put down before he could fully engage with the situation at hand.
"Are you," he said, "telling me that I have been talking to you for —" he checked his phone "— twenty-seven minutes, and your brain has been —"
"Can you just answer the question."
"— has been entirely elsewhere, specifically at the address of —"
"Greg."
"— the girl who makes your eye twitch every time she's within fifty feet —"
"I will leave," Ellie said. "I will get on that board and I will physically remove myself from this conversation."
Greg held up a hand. A concession. He looked at the sky for a moment, the way people looked at the sky when they were deciding how to deliver information they already knew wasn't going to land well, and then he looked back at her.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. You want my honest opinion?"
"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't."
"She likes him enough," Greg said, picking the words with the care of someone navigating something that had sharp edges and didn't want to be held. "Or — she likes something about the situation. The stability of it, maybe, or the way it looks from the outside, or — I don't know, maybe she genuinely —" He made a gesture that was trying to be diplomatic and mostly just looked tired. "People stay in things for all kinds of reasons, and not all of them are because they're madly in love, and not all of them are because they aren't. She could like him. She could be in it for something else entirely. She could be doing the thing where you convince yourself you like something because the alternative is figuring out what you actually —"
He stopped.
The rag went still in his hands.
He looked at Ellie.
Something had crossed his face — quick, electric, the specific expression of a thought arriving at full speed from a direction he hadn't been watching. His eyes went slightly wider. His mouth opened a fraction. He had the look of a man who had been putting together a puzzle for a long time and had just found the piece that told him what the picture actually was.
"Oh," he said.
Ellie said nothing. She was studying the ground with the focused intensity of someone who had suddenly developed a profound interest in the specific texture of skate park concrete.
"Oh," Greg said again, louder, the vowel round and full and carrying all the weight of the realisation behind it. He sat up straight. He set the skateboard fully aside. He was now giving this conversation the entirety of his posture. "Ellie. Ellie. You're not — tell me you're not actually —" He pointed at her. She did not look at the pointing finger. "Are you planning something?"
The concrete was very interesting. Genuinely fascinating. A rich subject.
"Ellie Williams," Greg said.
"You're being dramatic —"
"Am I?" He leaned forward on the bench, elbows on his knees, and levelled a look at her that could have stripped paint. "Because from where I'm sitting, you just interrupted twenty-seven minutes of completely justified grievance to ask me whether your bully — your bully, Ellie, the girl who has made it her personal mission to —"
"She's not that bad —"
"She called you a loser in front of half the school this morning —"
"That's just how she —"
"She does it regularly, with consistency, like it's a hobby she's committed to —"
"Greg —"
"And not only is she your bully," Greg continued, steamrolling ahead with the unstoppable momentum of someone who had been handed a point and intended to arrive at it regardless of the terrain, "she is also the girlfriend of the guy who just rearranged your face —" he gestured broadly at Ellie's swelling eye, which was, admittedly, making its presence felt with increasing insistence — "in a school parking lot —"
"I'm aware —"
"In broad daylight —"
"I was there —"
"And despite all of that," Greg said, spreading his hands like a lawyer addressing a jury he had begun to lose faith in, "you are sitting here — you, specifically, Ellie, with your one functioning eye — thinking about whether she genuinely likes the guy who gave you the other one." He paused. Let it settle. "Does that sound like a person who is not planning something?"
Ellie pinched the bridge of her nose with two fingers. This did not help her eye. She did it anyway, because she needed to do something with her hands and it felt approximately right for the quality of this moment.
Greg was off the bench now, pacing the short strip of concrete in front of her with the energy of a man who had been handed more than he could hold still with. "She has a boyfriend, Ellie. A boyfriend who is a nightmare, yes, an absolute portrait of everything wrong with —yes, fine, terrible person, we are agreed — but he is still there, he is a real and present entity, and you are standing here — skating here, whatever — daydreaming about a girl who called you a loser this morning —"
"She gave me my journal back," Ellie said.
Greg stopped pacing.
He looked at her.
"Her fingers," Ellie said, and then immediately looked like she wished she hadn't said that.
There was a silence.
"Her fingers," Greg repeated. Slowly. As if handling it carefully.
"Forget I said that."
"Her fingers have convinced you —"
"I said forget it —"
"— to potentially pursue a girl with a boyfriend who employs muscle, " Greg said, resuming his pacing with renewed conviction, "because her fingers touched yours during what was, by any objective measure, a bullying incident —"
"It wasn't —"
"She was reading your journal out loud in front of her friends!"
"She stopped!"
"Why are you defending this!"
"I'm not defending anything," Ellie said, and she said it too quietly, too evenly, and that was the thing that was the most damning thing about it — not the volume or the heat but the flatness of it, the calm of someone saying something that had been sitting inside them for long enough to settle. "I'm not planning anything. I just — I was just asking."
Greg stopped pacing.
He looked at her for a long moment. The skate park moved around them, indifferent and continuous — a kid on a half-pipe in the distance, the sound of wheels, the long flat light of late afternoon falling sideways across the concrete and turning everything gold and slightly elegiac. Greg's expression had been cycling, rapid and expressive, through its range, but it landed now on something quieter. The specific quiet of someone who knew their friend better than their friend thought they did, and was choosing, carefully, how to carry that.
He sat back down on the bench.
"Ellie," he said. Gentler, now. Sanded down.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm just saying —"
"Greg. I know." She pushed off, one small, restless kick, and rolled a few feet and came back. "I know what I'm doing. Or I know what I'm not doing. I'm not doing anything. I'm just — I'm thinking." She dragged the heel of her shoe against the concrete, scuffing it, staring at the mark it left. "People are allowed to think."
Greg watched her. Said nothing. Let her have it.
"It's fine," she said.
It landed like a coin dropping into an empty jar: small, definitive, slightly hollow.
The wheel on her skateboard hummed beneath her, low and constant, rolling and rolling and going nowhere, and the afternoon light kept doing its gold, indiscriminate thing all across the park, and somewhere above them the sky stretched out in that enormous, unbroken way it had, and Ellie stood in the middle of all of it and looked at the horizon and thought about the pink tip of your ear and the ghost of your fingers and the specific gravity of a feeling she had decided, months ago, she was not going to do anything about.
She pushed off again.
Greg picked up his oil and his rag and went back to work.
Neither of them said anything else for a long time.
It was enough.
Ellie's room looked like the inside of a very specific kind of mind.
Which was to say: it looked like chaos, but the organised kind, the kind that had a logic to it that only made sense from the inside. The walls had long since surrendered to the occupation — band posters colonised every available surface from the baseboards to the ceiling, overlapping at the edges, layered in the geological way of something that had been accumulating for years, each one a timestamp, a mood, a particular Tuesday afternoon when she'd decided this mattered and put it up with tape that had since yellowed at the corners. The Misfits. Bikini Kill. Hole. A large, slightly lopsided poster of the solar system that she'd had since she was nine and refused to take down on principle, the planets faded now to softer versions of themselves, Jupiter a pale shadow of its former drama. Beside it, a hand-drawn map of a comic universe she'd been building in her head since middle school, tacked up in pieces, connected by lines of red string that had seemed less unhinged when she'd put it up and now looked, in certain lights, like a conspiracy board.
The desk in the corner was a civilisation unto itself. Stacks of comics, organised by a system that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else but was, to Ellie, as legible as a library catalogue. A half-finished drawing she'd abandoned two weeks ago. Three pens that worked and one that definitely didn't but kept getting picked up by mistake. A small potted cactus that she'd named Gerald and watered erratically and which had, against all reasonable odds, survived.
The guitar lived against the wall beside the window — an old acoustic with a crack along the body that had been there when it was given to her by her dad, Joel, at fifteen and which she'd never gotten around to fixing, partly because she didn't have the money and partly because she'd come to think of the crack as a feature, a mark of character, a thing that had a story. Its presence filled the room the way all instruments filled rooms, with a particular kind of potential energy, the sense of something that could become sound at any moment if asked.
On the floor, a skateboard she hadn't put away yet. On the ceiling, a cluster of glow-in-the-dark stars she'd put up in seventh grade, arranged not randomly but in the actual configuration of Orion's Belt, because she had been that kind of twelve-year-old and some things didn't change.
It was, in every way that mattered, entirely hers. The room of a person who had been filling space with the evidence of herself for years, who decorated like she was leaving proof.
Tonight, it felt like a very small place to contain a very large mood.
The journal was open across her knees, and the pen in her hand was moving with the furious velocity of something trying to outrun itself.
She was not writing neatly. Neat was not the register she was operating in. The words came out pressed hard into the page, the pen dragging with the specific pressure of a hand that was communicating with its whole body weight, the letters angular and fast and running slightly uphill the way her handwriting always did when she was past the point of caring about presentation. It was less like writing and more like an exorcism — dragging things out of the dark interior of herself and pinning them to the page before they could do any more damage in there, getting them outside where they could be looked at from a distance, filed and categorised and rendered slightly less enormous by the act of having been named.
Asher, she wrote, and what followed was a paragraph that would have made Greg applaud and her mother weep, a dense architectural construction of frustration and fury with its foundations in the parking lot and its towers reaching all the way up into the general, aching unfairness of how the world was organised, who it rewarded, what it permitted and what it quietly endorsed by its silence. She wrote about his face when he'd said what he'd said to Greg, the flat, casual cruelty of it, and felt the anger move through her again like a current — still live, still hot, still capable. She wrote about the parking lot and the hits she'd taken and the hits Greg had taken, and her pen pressed so hard into the paper at that part that she went through slightly, leaving a ghost of the letters on the page beneath.
She wrote: I don't regret it. And underlined it twice. And then a third time for structural integrity.
She wrote about the cafeteria, and the journal being held out to her at the end of everything, and she wrote her fingers and then went back and scribbled it out, several times, with the pen going back and forth until the ink was a solid dark bar, a redaction, a classified document. She was not writing about that. That was not the kind of thing she was writing about tonight.
She filled two more pages. She didn't time it. When she finally stopped, the pen hovering over the paper, there was nothing left to write that wouldn't be circling back to things she'd already been over twice, so she stopped.
She closed the journal.
She sat in the quiet of her room — the quiet that wasn't silence, that was the city outside the window and the hum of the light above the desk and the creak of the building settling into itself — and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes.
Breathed.
Let the anger cool the way things cooled: slowly, unevenly, the heat still present in places.
She sighed — a long, full-body thing, the sigh of something deflating by degrees — and dropped her hands from her face, and her right hand caught the side of her cheekbone on the way down.
"—hss—"
The pain fired up sharp and immediate, a lit match dragged across the bruise, and she pulled her hand away and held it in the air as if apologising to it. She reached up gingerly, instead, and pressed two careful fingers to the ridge of her cheekbone, testing the topography of the damage like a geologist assessing unstable ground.
The bruise had fully committed now, had moved from possibility to statement, a deep and spreading thing beneath her eye that she'd glimpsed in the bathroom mirror an hour ago and decided not to look at again until morning, when presumably she'd be better prepared to deal with the particular aesthetic of having been punched in the face by someone with more mass than personality.
She sat with her eyes closed.
The room was quiet. Gerald the cactus did not offer any comments.
And in the dark behind her eyelids, where there was nothing to look at and therefore nothing to choose not to look at, you arrived without invitation or preamble, the way you always arrived in the unguarded spaces — not dramatically, not with any of the fanfare you'd think something that caused this much structural damage would bring, but quietly, almost gently, settling in like a tide coming in, like a frequency she was already tuned to.
The afternoon light in your hair.
The pink at the tip of your ear.
The way your fingers hadn't immediately let go.
Ellie exhaled. Slow. Measured. The exhale of someone practising containment.
Her thumb, moving with its own agenda, was already tracing the edge of the journal in her lap. She noticed it doing this. She told it not to. It continued anyway, the way the body continued things the brain hadn't signed off on, operating on a different authority entirely — the authority of want, which didn't ask permission and didn't particularly care about consequences.
She opened the journal.
Not to the new pages. Her fingers moved backward through the book with the instinct of something that had made this trip before — back past the furious entry, back past the half-finished thoughts and the doodles in the margins, back through weeks of herself, until the pages changed quality. Until the writing gave way to something else.
She stopped.
There you were.
Spread across three pages in soft graphite, built out of the kind of careful, compulsive observation that Ellie could only justify to herself by the fact that she'd never intended to show these to anyone, ever, and therefore they existed in a separate category from things she needed to be accountable for. They were not portraits, exactly. They were studies. Fragments. The way a scientist filled a notebook with measurements of something they were trying to understand — not to possess it, but to comprehend it, to make it less mysterious by breaking it into its component parts and looking at each one.
Except the thing being studied was you. And Ellie was not, if she was being honest with herself, and she was not being honest with herself, approaching this scientifically.
There was the sketch of just your hands — the one she'd done from memory, which meant it was probably slightly wrong in the specifics and completely right in the feeling, your fingers curled loosely around a pen in third period, the particular way you held things, unhurried, like everything you touched could wait for you. Beside it, in her small cramped handwriting, a note: always looks like she's about to say something important. And below that, a bracket, and the word: doesn't. And then: or maybe she does and I'm not close enough to hear it. She'd written that last part in smaller letters, like she'd been trying to make it take up less space.
There was the sketch of your profile — just the outline, the particular architecture of your face seen from the side in the forty seconds she'd had in the lunch line two weeks ago before you'd moved and she'd had to stop looking before someone noticed. Annotated: the way her chin tilts up when she's talking to someone she thinks is boring. And then, at the bottom of the page, almost to herself, a note that she'd pressed lighter than the others, barely there, a whisper in graphite: tilted up at me once. in the corridor. didn't look bored.
There was a sketch of the back of your head. Of your hands again, different angle. Of the particular way you sat — spine straight, never fully relaxed, like you were always half-prepared for something, like rest was a performance you'd learned and not a thing that came naturally. She'd written next to that one: who taught her she had to sit like that?
And threading through all of it, the annotations of a person trying to decode a language they'd never been taught — small observations, careful and private and slightly devastating in their honesty, the handwriting of someone writing for an audience of one and still hedging.
Ellie looked at the pages spread across her knees and felt something move through her that was the internal equivalent of stepping off a curb you hadn't seen — that sudden, weightless, stomach-dropping moment of oh, this is happening.
You did ballet. She knew this the way she knew most things about you — involuntarily, through the osmosis of proximity, information that arrived without being asked for and then refused to leave. She'd seen you come out of the gym once in the early morning with your hair up and a bag over your shoulder and the specific, turned-out way you walked that she'd catalogued and filed and told herself was nothing. Ballet. Pink and precise and entirely incompatible with the girl sitting in her room right now with a bruised face and band posters and a cracked guitar and a cactus she'd named after a middle-aged man.
She was a punk. She owned three shirts in any colour other than black and wore two of them ironically. She had skated so many times she could feel the specific texture of the park's concrete in her sleep. She read comics by lamplight and knew the names of every star you could see from the roof of this building and had strong, extensive, practised opinions about guitar riffs.
And you — you were the opposite of all of it. You were the negative image of her. You moved through the world like it had been arranged for you ahead of time, like the lights came on as you walked and went off when you left, like everything that touched you either belonged there or briefly believed it did. You were held together at every seam. You were the popular girl with the popular boyfriend and the posse and the rich, perfect family.
You were so completely, utterly, structurally different from her that it should have been a closed case. A non-starter. A door that had never been open in the first place.
And yet.
And yet here were three pages of graphite evidence, pressed into the paper with varying degrees of pressure and annotated in small handwriting by the specific, traitorous hand of a girl who knew better.
"Oh, come on," Ellie said aloud, to no one. To the room. To Gerald.
She slammed the journal shut.
The sound was a verdict. Sharp and final and slightly embarrassing, muffled by the room's soft clutter, absorbed by the band posters and the solar system and the three-years-worth of herself layered on every surface. The journal sat in her lap with the smug, inanimate energy of something that knew exactly what it contained and had no feelings about it.
She pressed both palms down on the cover. Held them there.
You don't even like me, she thought, and the thought was directed at the journal, at the pages inside, at the graphite studies of someone who called her a loser in public and held her journal out of reach and looked at her with an expression that shuttered closed before Ellie could read it. You don't even — I shouldn't even — this is so —
She groaned. A full, low, ceiling-directed groan, the sound of a person losing an argument with themselves that they'd been winning for months and had now, clearly, decisively, completely lost.
She fell back onto her bed. The journal went with her, clutched to her chest. She stared at the glow-in-the-dark Orion's Belt on the ceiling, which had not yet charged enough to glow, just sat there in the dark in the plain and patient configuration of three stars that had been called a hunter for thousands of years by people who needed the sky to make sense.
She understood the impulse.
She closed her eyes.
You shouldn't like her, she told herself, with the firm, reasonable authority of someone delivering a memo to a department that had already stopped listening. She is your bully. She has a boyfriend. She is the opposite of everything you are. You are going to get nothing from this except an inventory of the ways it doesn't work out. You know this. You have known this for months. You have the knowledge. You have the evidence. You are an idiot for even thinking that you have a chance—
The tip of your ear. Pink as a secret.
"Shut up," Ellie whispered, to herself, to the ceiling, to the three stars she'd arranged up there at twelve years old because even then she'd been the kind of person who needed to put things in their right places and call them by their names.
Outside her window, the city moved through its evening, unhurried, enormous, deeply uninterested in her predicament. Gerald sat on the desk in his usual posture, which was the posture of a cactus and therefore involved no feelings about the situation. The guitar leaned against the wall, all that potential sound locked inside it, waiting.
The glow-in-the-dark stars, slowly, began to glow.
The morning had the particular quality of mornings that had not yet decided what they wanted to be.
Grey at the edges, the sky outside the school's narrow corridor windows the colour of a thought that hadn't finished forming yet, the light filtering through the glass in thin, uncommitted strips that fell across the linoleum and did nothing especially interesting with it. The hallway between second and third period was its usual organised catastrophe — a river of shoulders and backpacks and the overlapping percussion of lockers being opened and closed with varying degrees of emotional investment, conversations fragmenting and reconnecting like mercury, the whole thing operating on the specific frequency of two hundred teenagers who had been awake for two hours and were deeply unconvinced it had been worth it.
Ellie stood with her back against the locker beside Greg's open one, one foot propped against the metal, watching the hallway with the detached observational energy of someone standing on the bank of a river they had no intention of entering. Greg was elbow-deep in his locker, conducting what appeared to be an archaeological excavation of its contents, narrating the discovery of each item with the running commentary of a man to whom silence was a personal affront.
"— and I genuinely don't know when I started keeping a granola bar in here, but it's been here long enough that I'm emotionally attached to it —"
"Throw it away," Ellie said.
"I can't, it's like a roommate at this point —"
"It's a granola bar, Greg."
"But it's been here longer than some of my friendships —"
She was listening. She was mostly listening. Some percentage of her attention was on Greg and his emotional support granola bar, and the rest of it — the percentage she would not have been able to name without incriminating herself — was doing what it always did in crowded hallways, which was run a quiet, automatic, completely involuntary background process. A scan. A search function she hadn't installed and couldn't uninstall, running on a frequency she didn't choose, returning one specific result.
Her eyes moved across the hallway.
Found your friend group first — the constellation without its sun, gathered in the usual corner with the usual architecture of performance: someone doing the talking, someone doing the agreeing, phones out, hair touched, the elaborate social machinery running at full operational capacity.
Her eyes moved across the group.
Moved again.
Her brow furrowed.
You weren't there.
The group was complete in every other respect, the full roster present and performing, but you — the axis, the fixed point, the thing the whole arrangement orbited around — were absent. The constellation without its brightest star, still going through the motions of being a constellation, slightly less luminous for the gap at its centre.
Ellie's gaze swept the hallway with the efficiency of something that had done this before.
Then it snagged on the other absence.
Asher wasn't there either.
The realisation settled into her stomach the way something unwelcome settled — not loudly, not dramatically, but with a quiet, uninvited weight, a stone dropped into still water with no splash, just the rings spreading outward and the thing sitting at the bottom, heavy and unreasonable and not prepared to be reasoned with. It was jealousy, plain and ugly and domesticated, the kind that had been living inside her long enough to know its way around, and she hated it the way you hated something that knew too much about you — personally, and with a specific resentment reserved for things you couldn't evict.
She looked away.
Looked at the ceiling. Looked at Greg, who had located his textbook beneath what appeared to be three months of other people's futures and was now regarding it with the expression of a man encountering a distant relative he hadn't expected at a family gathering.
"There it is," he said. With feeling.
"Incredible," Ellie said. Flat. Meaning it.
The bell rang, cleaving the hallway noise in two.
Greg closed the locker with the definitive thud of a chapter ending and turned to her, already re-organising his bag. "You've got math," he said, with the tone of someone delivering a piece of information they already knew wasn't going to be well-received.
Ellie's expression underwent a brief, specific journey. "I have allegedly got math," she said.
"Ellie —"
"The keyword being allegedly."
"You've already missed it three times this —"
"Three is a coincidence," Ellie said, pushing off from the locker with her foot. "Four is a pattern. I'm not ready to be a pattern."
Greg looked at her with the resigned, sun-weathered expression of someone who had stopped fighting a tide a long time ago and was now simply observing it with documentary interest. "You're going to fail," he said.
"Not today though," she said. "And today is all I've got."
He opened his mouth.
"Go to class, Greg."
"I'm just —"
"I'll see you at lunch."
He pointed at her. The point said: we're going to talk about this. She pointed back. Her point said: no we aren't. They had an entire conversation in the space between their index fingers, and then Greg sighed the sigh of a man who had made his peace with a great many things and walked away, absorbed into the thinning river of the hallway.
Ellie walked.
The hallway was emptying out in the rapid, purposeful way it emptied when the bell had technically rung and the window between acceptable lateness and actual consequences was closing by the second. She moved against the current of the last stragglers, unhurried, hands in the front pocket of her hoodie, the bruise under her eye making its daily editorial comments about her life choices.
She passed your friend group on the way.
She didn't look at them. This was a practiced art — the deliberate, forward-facing non-look of someone who had learned that acknowledging a thing gave it power and had therefore developed an aggressive policy of visual neutrality. Eyes ahead. Jaw easy. The posture of someone who was simply a person moving through a hallway, which was all she was, which was absolutely and completely all she was.
"Nice jacket," said a voice from the group, in the particular register that made nice mean the opposite of nice, the word hollowed out and repacked with something else entirely.
Ellie did not break stride.
"Does she buy those at the men's section, or —"
She did not look. She did not slow down. She let the words move over her the way weather moved over a landscape — it happened, it passed, the landscape remained. She had built herself to be the landscape. It had taken a while, and there were still storms that found the cracks, but on a Wednesday morning in a school hallway about a jacket, she was fine.
She was fine.
She rounded the corner, and the voices dissolved back into the general noise of the school.
She was fine.
The plan was simple. The bathroom at the end of the east wing was the jurisdiction of no one, a neutral zone, tucked past the art rooms in a corridor that smelled like turpentine and ambition and where the traffic dropped to near-zero once the bell had rung. She'd skipped in worse places. She'd skipped in better places. The bathroom was comfortable. She'd read half a comic in there last Thursday and nobody had come in the whole time.
She heard it before she reached the door.
Soft. Barely there. The kind of sound that was trying very hard not to be a sound at all — compressed and controlled, held between the teeth, with all the effort of something that had been trained to take up as little space as possible. It was the specific acoustic signature of someone crying who had no interest in being caught crying, crying the way you cried when you'd gotten good at crying privately, when the architecture of your composure was still technically standing but the foundations were doing something structural and quiet and not visible from the outside.
Ellie stopped.
She stood outside the bathroom door with her hand not quite on the handle, and the sound came through the gap and she turned it over in her head for a moment, this small, compressed, trying-not-to-be thing.
Then she pushed the door open.
The sniffling stopped. Immediately. Like a tap turned off. Like a light switch. The silence that replaced it was the specific silence of someone going very still and performing the absence of themselves, the aggressive quiet of a person trying to convince the room they weren't there.
Ellie stepped in.
The bathroom was cold and fluorescent, the kind of lighting that did nobody any favours, the kind that turned everything it touched slightly greenish and exposed. Two sinks, the mirror above them running the full width of the wall, a paper towel dispenser with a broken lever that had been broken since September. The tiles on the floor were the colour of old cream.
At the far end of the mirror, you stood.
Not crying. The crying was gone — vanished, packed away, dismantled with a speed and thoroughness that was itself a kind of performance, the performance of a person who had long practice in making themselves presentable under any conditions. Your eyes were clear. Your chin was level. You had constructed the face you wore in the hallways and you were wearing it, complete and armoured and assembled with the precision of something that knew it might need to withstand scrutiny.
The only evidence was the slight, betraying pinkness at the rim of your eyes. The kind of pinkness that no amount of composure could fully recall. The kind that stayed after everything else had been packed up, small and stubborn, the last ember of something that had briefly been a fire.
Ellie looked at you.
You looked at her.
For one unguarded half-second, your eyes went wide — just slightly, just briefly, a crack in the composure, a hairline fracture that the camera would have missed but Ellie, standing four feet away in a fluorescent bathroom, did not. It was the expression of someone who had been expecting anyone else. Anyone in the world. Anyone but the specific person who had just walked through the door.
Then it was gone. Shuttered. The curtains drawn so fast the motion was almost theoretical.
Your gaze dropped.
And landed on her face.
Specifically: on the bruise that had made its full, committed entrance overnight, spreading beneath her eye in the deep, decided colours of something that had settled in for the long haul — purpled at the centre, fading outward through red into a yellowish green at the edges, the cartography of someone's knuckles mapped in pigment onto her cheekbone. She had looked at it in the mirror that morning and felt the way you felt about weather you'd predicted correctly: grimly vindicated.
Something moved along your jaw. Subtle. Quick. A tensing, barely visible, the muscle pulling tight the way things pulled tight when they were working against something. A reflex with a latch on it. Your eyes stayed on the bruise for a fraction of a second too long before your expression reassembled itself back into its default setting, which was impeccable and slightly arctic.
"Who did that to you?" you said.
You said it the way you said most things — with the bored, ambient cool of a person enquiring about something that was mildly interesting and completely beneath them. The question wrapped in the tone of someone who didn't particularly care about the answer and was asking purely as a formality, as a social gesture, as the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
Ellie blinked.
She realised, in the same moment she registered that she was staring at you, that she had been staring at you. She pulled her gaze sideways, looked at the broken paper towel dispenser, looked at the wall, rearranged her face into something approaching functional.
"Fell," she said.
Your eyebrows rose. A millimetre. Maybe two. In the language of your face, which operated on a scale of extraordinary subtlety, this was practically a standing ovation.
"You fell," you said.
"Down some stairs," Ellie said. "It was a whole thing."
The corner of your mouth moved. It was the smallest possible distance the corner of a mouth could travel and still technically qualify as movement, and it was weighted with the specific amusement of someone who had heard something they found contemptible but couldn't entirely suppress finding funny. It was not a kind expression. It was the expression of a scalpel that had been taught to smile.
"You fell," you said again, savouring the syllables like they were something to be tasted. "Down stairs."
"It happens to people," Ellie said.
"To you apparently." You turned back to the mirror, extracted a lip gloss from somewhere with the practiced ease of a magician producing something from their sleeve, and uncapped it. "Must have been quite the fall. Stairs do all that on their own, or did you trip over your —" your eyes moved, briefly, to the reflection of her, starting at the shoes, moving upward with the unhurried assessment of a customs officer looking for contraband, "— ensemble."
"The stairs had strong opinions about my hoodie," Ellie said. "Very aggressive. We had words."
You applied the lip gloss with the focused, deliberate attention of a painter adding a final detail, pressing your lips together after in the way that Ellie absolutely did not clock and was not filing anywhere. "You should watch where you're going," you said.
"Noted."
"Especially in buildings," you said. "Buildings with floors. Which you seem to have some difficulty navigating."
"Really valuable advice," Ellie said. "Transformative, even. I feel like a different person."
You made a sound. It was the sound of something that had started to be a laugh and been intercepted and redirected into something more architecturally appropriate, something that emerged as a breath through the nose with an undercurrent of something warmer that was gone almost before it arrived, like a radio signal passing through from a distance.
You put the lip gloss away. You turned to the mirror again, ran your fingers through your hair with the particular efficiency of someone re-assembling something that had briefly been in disarray, each movement precise and practised, the ritual of a person who understood that their appearance was armour and maintained it accordingly. Ellie watched the side of your face in the mirror and thought: who taught you to hold yourself like that, and the thought arrived in the same handwriting as the annotation in her journal and she told it firmly to leave.
"There's a party," you said.
It was casual. So casual it was practically horizontal — laid out flat in the sentence with all the deliberate nonchalance of something that had been dropped in very specifically and was pretending it had always been there. You said it to the mirror. To the reflection of your own hair. To the air approximately six inches to the left of anything that could be interpreted as intention.
Ellie's brain, which had been running at a manageable pace, briefly redlined.
"A party," she said.
"Friday," you said. "At Jake Brown's place. It's a whole thing apparently."
"Right," Ellie said.
"People are going," you said.
"People tend to," Ellie agreed.
A beat.
Another beat.
Ellie felt the thing that was happening in her chest doing what it was doing, which was building toward something she wasn't certain was a good idea, and she looked at you in the mirror and you were still looking at your own reflection, still straightening up your hair with the focused indifference of someone who had not said what they'd just said, who had not brought up a party in the middle of a school bathroom on a Wednesday morning to a girl they had allegedly no opinions about.
"Are you —" Ellie started, and she kept her voice flat, kept it level, kept it from doing the hopeful, cresting, idiotic thing it wanted to do, "— are you inviting me?"
The transformation was immediate.
Like a wall going up in real time, brick by visible brick — your spine straightened, your expression cooled, and something moved across your features that was not quite disgust and not quite discomfort and was instead the specific, hybrid product of both, the look of someone who had been caught doing something they'd decided they weren't doing and was now administering a correction.
"Inviting —" you said, and the word in your mouth was a thing you were holding at arm's length, something retrieved from a surface you wouldn't normally touch. You turned from the mirror to look at her directly, fully, the first time you'd done it since she'd walked in, and your eyes were winter. "I was making conversation. It's called small talk. People do it."
"Right," Ellie said.
"I wasn't inviting you," you said. The emphasis landed like a gavel. "Why would I invite you? You're —" your gaze moved over her again, brief and merciless, "— you."
"Me," Ellie said.
"You'd show up in that," you said, gesturing at the hoodie with a hand that conveyed an entire aesthetic philosophy in a single motion, "and stand in the corner reading a comic book about the solar system or whatever —"
"I don't read comics at parties —"
"— and bore everyone within a five-foot radius with facts about space —"
"I've been to parties," Ellie said, with great dignity.
"Have you," you said, in the tone of someone granting a point they did not grant.
"Multiple," Ellie said. "I've been to several parties."
You looked at her. Something moved at the very edge of your expression — that intercepted almost-laugh again, surfacing and being pushed back down, your mouth pressed into a line that was working harder than a line normally needed to. You held her gaze for a moment, and in that moment the cold of your expression had the thinnest possible layer of something else over it, something that was almost, from a distance, in poor lighting, with a significant number of caveats, almost warm.
Then you looked away.
You turned to the mirror one final time, checked your reflection with the swift, comprehensive, top-to-bottom assessment of a general reviewing troops before a deployment, found it satisfactory. You picked up your bag.
"It's a good thing you weren't invited then," you said, and your voice had recollected itself fully, was back in its regular register, smooth and cool and armoured at every seam. You moved toward the door, your heels a clean, deliberate percussion against the old cream tiles. At the door, you paused — not long, not dramatically, just a fraction of a moment, a held note — and said, without turning around, to the door, to the air, to no one specific:
"You'd never get in anyway, loser."
The door swung shut behind you.
The bathroom returned to its cold fluorescent quiet. The paper towel dispenser stood broken at the wall. The mirror showed Ellie her own reflection: bruised eye, worn hoodie, the expression of someone who had just been dropped into deep water and was still working out which direction was up.
She stood very still.
Then she turned to the mirror.
Looked at herself for a long moment — at the bruise, at the hoodie, at the face she had been born with and the expression currently living on it, which was confused and flustered and just fractionally, structurally annoyed — and she breathed.
She thought about the way you'd asked who did that to her.
She thought about your jaw, tightening at the sight of the bruise like it had done it without asking you first.
She thought about the party you hadn't invited her to.
She thought about the way the corner of your mouth had moved and the sound that had been a laugh before you'd stopped it and the way you'd said you'd never get in anyway to a door you were already walking out of, like it needed to be said quickly, like it needed to be said away from her, like the distance was load-bearing.
She straightened up.
She rolled her shoulders back.
She looked at her own reflection with the focused, calm, absolute certainty of a person who had just made a decision and felt good about it, who had identified a direction and was pointing herself at it, who had been told she couldn't and had heard, beneath the can't, in the register beneath language, underneath the cold of it all — something entirely different.
She was going to that party.
She was going to that party, and she was going to wear whatever she wanted, and she was not going to bring a comic book.
nini hi i have a stupid question because i’m slow eek. what do the titles of dear ellie refer to? because they’re so creative but i can’t pinpoint them to what the chapter is about
omg hi. first of all, not a stupid question whatsoever. secondly, i love it lmaooo so dw 💖
okay, so. prologue, invisible ink. it refers to multiple things: the fact that reader never truly found the one who left her mark yet, marching with her fantasies; the fact that every relationship she had until now was fleeting. and also it’s about how reader has always been there, watching ellie from afar, but she was never truly noticed back. so like invisible ink where the words are written, so they’re there, but they’re not visible. it’s also a subtle reference to ellie’s reputation in contrast to how she really is, where one is hidden beneath the surface.
chapter one, foreign literature. once again it refers to ellie, who for reader is still something that she needs to understand, study like a book and something… foreign. it symbolizes reader’s need to get closer and understand more about her.
chapter two, bookmark. this is the one i think that is more direct. reader gives her bookmark to ellie, but it also symbolizes everything her mom has instilled into her head. by giving it to ellie it’s not just “i’m giving you something because i can see you’re in need” but also “i’m giving you the one thing that represents my own needs, my constant research for love and closure. i’m choosing you because i saw a glimpse of who you are and i believe you’re the one who can give me that.”
chapter three, like scripture. again, reader going all in to understand ellie, to make sure she knows as much as possible about her, looking for details, every micro signal she can grasp about her. it mirrors the title of chapter one, but now that book she’s learning it like religion.
chapter four, side character. it refers to the fact that we see ellie’s pov for the first time ever, so we delve into the “side character” part of the story and it’s a reference to how ellie feels in her own life, like she’s not even the protagonist of her own story. it also reflects reader feeling the same after ellie basically went back to ignore her all over again.
chapter five, unread. this is pretty straightforward. ellie goes to the bar, waiting for the person behind the letters, the only one she felt like could truly see her for weeks and to whom she opened up to… just to be left unread with reader not going to the meet up. partially, it also implies how reader felt in being kicked out from ellie so quickly, almost like her need to be closer—when she was an inch away from getting it—got snatched from her abruptly and let unanswered.
THAT’S IT. i’m not gonna explain the others bc i don’t wanna spoil what happens next. honestly this was so fun 🥹 i could backtrack and see how the story is progressing and i loved it
I found a free version on Amazon, it took a few minutes too long to get to my kindle, I thought it didn't work, got impatient and BOUGHT another version, so now I have two...
I'm in the middle of a book atm though, so I'll let you know when I start one of these
OMG FUCK YEAH!!! do let me know yesyesyes i’m hoping you’ll love it 🥹
(collide and green yuri in there too and i’m loving it)
Okay I am desperate to know - will the actual ending of Dear Ellie be a somewhat happy ending or are you going to entirely break our hearts? I ask not because I want spoilers, just so I know how attached to get 😭
(Also I know the final chapters are far off so do not read this as pressure to finish the story asap, take your time and plz ignore people yelling at you to write faster lol)
i promise promise promise that it will have a happy ending. i won’t leave you crying after all this suffering already. the angst will be worth it, the pain will be too. have faith 🥹
next chapter is going to heal something for a little while, then complications and then epilogue yippie yay 💖
btw, i swear on my guitar that i’m not feeling pressured whatsoever, i realize that i made some ppl worried about it but i swear that wasn’t my intention AT ALL. like, i’m genuinely impatient to write all the time so that’s why i’m like— “i wanna do this so badly” 24/7. more than frustration it’s me being eager lmao
Started Dear Ellie yesterday and I feared I was missing something by not knowing what Wuthering Heights was even about considering it's mentioned that Reader was obsessively reading it
Coincidentally, it's on TV rn, but I can't tell if it does justice the book because I've never read it
OMG OMG OMG like, i LOVE wuthering heights with ALL my being, i was so obsessed with it the first time ive read it 😭 in my personal opinion it's one of the best books ever written, idk what's about it but it just left me mesmerized, speechless, rethinking my entire life for weeks after finishing it to the point where i HAD to reread it shortly after. the characterization, the depth of it it's all just so haunting in the best way. it just hits you like a gut punch. like, "why couldn’t you ever put down that absurd wall where everyone had to adore you?" ; "i hate you and I love you. and I wish the latter wouldn’t swallow up the prior like it does"
i could go ON AND ON about this book, it has my soul istg.
BUT. BUT. BUT. i've seen the movie at my local theatre and.... and... yeah. it's just... uhm. how can i say it? definitely disappointing and nothing like the book. like, don't take it as a faithful reinterpretation because it's far from it.... inspired, maybe. but even then....
How do you always manage to do this? I am literally crying and throwing up. I keep forgetting that I am reading the words on my screen and become so freaking anxious and involved in the world YOU created that it is impossible to get out of it afterwards. I was reading chapter five in a class btw, sitting like a metre away from my teacher. I was shaking and nauseous the entire time. THE AFFECT YOUR WORDS HAVE ON ME. I don't know how to carry on with my life, thanks for that!
I just want to say that you are truly gifted. Your writing style is just out of this world. all the details, the psychological and emotional state of the characters is just so deeply and thoroughly thought through and I am beyond grateful that you put so much effort in what you do, because you genuinely make me feel SO FREAKING MUCH.
I have much more to say, but Im a mess rn, my mind still has to process the pain u put me through😑. So take care sweetie❤️ never pressure yourself, know that we will wait forever for the mext chapter if we have to!
PLEASE IM CYRING. it always warms my heart up whenever someone tells me that they actually FELT my writing. it's the biggest accomplishment to me 🥹 i literally have no words to explain how much this message means to me, i'm floored, really. thank YOU for reading and loving all of this so much while also waiting patiently for it 💖 it means more than i can say, i mean it
also PLEASE don't get suspended because they catch you reading in class LMFAOO and when your brain gets quieter pls pls lmk what else you have to say, i'd love to read it
i think a lot of people tend to forget that writers are real people with real lives, not machines that pump out thousands of words of fanfiction within seconds. writing takes time and dedication, and if people can't process that, then maybe they should try writing on their own and see just how time consuming it may be.
nini ily gorgeous 🥹🫶 your writing is pure art and you're such an inspiration!! but anon, come here i just wanna talk i swear :))
aisha my one and only 😭 THANK YOU because YES, word for word. i couldn't have said it better. I LOVE YOU SO SO MUCH and ahhhh you're the inspiration! the way you write is just so precious to me, ily
𓍼 𝒔𝒚𝒏𝒐𝒑𝒔𝒊𝒔 ~ a moment finally granted to dig deeper under the surface, to be able to hold the key to a heart that's been for so long closed off from anything that could remotely speak of love. too bad fear resides exactly in the possibility of ellie's walls crumbling down.
𓍼 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒕 ~ 14.5k
𓍼 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 ~ literature student!ellie x literature student!reader. swearing, little cutesy date and me using the weather as plot, literature references, SMUT, switch!ellie, switch!reader, tiny tit play, oral sex (r!receiving), fingering (e!receiving), emotional shit, no comfort whatsoever, ellie needs a hug, reader needs to get her priorities straight, afab!reader. cis men and minors dni.
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
if op wants to read dear ellie so badly they can write it themselves, no?
don't pressure yourself over people's insistence! especially if they're this rude
i’m gonna cry, y’all are so sweet 😭 i’m grateful i swear
chapter five was gonna come out tonight either way which feels very ironic given the timing of that nonnie’s ask lmfao
honestly, i don’t pressure myself out of insistence, is just that i love being here and i genuinely wish i had more time!! i’m itching when i can’t write for too long lol
nana ilysm 😭 like, i get the curiosity of wanting to know what happens next and i REALLY wish i could just sit here everyday and having writing being the only thing i do but i physically can't 🥲
you always say you’re posting dear ellie but you never do, it’s been a month!!
i know and i'm sorry it's taking me so long :/ unfortunately i'm not a machine and i'm trying to juggle multiple things at once between uni, personal life and writing. i wish i could sit all day every day at my desk writing but there's only much time in a single day and i really need my vitamin d sometimes
regardless, i promise chapter five is coming out tonight. hope it'll be worth the waiting
