Anya feels the lost in her bones even as she holds Raven tighter. She hopes even if she can't say it or even admit to herself that she let Raven drift apart from what they had, she wants Raven back. Damn Luna for being the person Raven deserves. Anya isn't one to plot, not with someone as intelligent as Raven, but maybe there is a way to win her girl back.
Silently and out of her control, a tear slips down her cheek. It betrays her, just as Raven pulls back slowly and wipes it away.
Then, there is a look. Anya swore it was there, when Raven smiles as if everything was back to normal, but it fades into something else as she leans into Anya once more.
Will that one tear convey what her heart couldn't when it would have mattered?
Anya found herself in the living room long after the thumping pop music had faded to a whisper, replaced by sleepy, sentimental B-sides drifting from a lone Bluetooth speaker in some distant corner. Her red Solo cup dangled between two fingers, the plastic creased from hours of nervous grip. The rest of her hand throbbed, as if she'd been trying to squeeze answers from the cup all night.
The living room was not empty, though it seemed built for emptiness: wide bay windows facing a starless suburban sky, a sagging L-shaped couch, a persian rug punctuated by glints of broken chip, and the usual party trash—napkins gone papery from spilled mixers, an upturned bowl, a single sandal with a flower on the strap. The fairy lights tacked above the window frame glowed soft and sickly. Raven sat contentedly on the rug near the stereo, half-illuminated and tucking an unlit cigarette behind her ear, despite the host’s no-smoking rule. Her other hand moved absentmindedly, gently working away the persistent soreness in her troublesome leg. Her fingers pressed and kneaded the tender spot where the edge of her brace frequently pressed uncomfortably against her skin, leaving a lingering ache that seemed to settle deep into her muscles.
They hadn’t spoken in over an hour, except for Anya’s awkward attempt at making conversation (“You good?” she’d asked, “Yep,” came Raven’s equally awkward response), and Raven’s question about the party’s alcohol selection (“Do you think there’s anything else to drink around here besides stale beer?”). And yet Anya stayed, because the mass of guests had dispersed into the kitchen and out the back porch, and only the very stoned or the recently heartbroken clung to the living room at this hour, like ghosts staging a last stand.
Anya watched the other girl closely, examining all the ways she’d changed over these past few months since their split. It was the smallest differences that caught her off guard, the incremental shifts that only someone who’d spent a year sharing inside jokes and stolen kisses could spot. Raven’s hair, once a tangle of dark, chocolatey split ends, was now chopped into a sharp, precise line just above her shoulders and decorated with strands of sun-bleached highlights. It framed her face in a way that made her seem both older and more childlike, depending on the angle of light from the fairy bulbs.
Her lips, which Anya remembered as full and soft and rarely without a layer of strawberry chapstick, were now painted with a smudge of berry-red. Raven grinned at something on her phone—a meme from Clarke, maybe, or a casual text from her new girl, wondering where she’d disappeared to—and the smile was familiar, but there was a brightness to it that startled Anya. It was a quality that hadn’t been there during the last dismal months of their relationship (if you could even call it that), when every conversation felt like a dog paddling against a rip current. She wondered if this was how Raven had always been, or if breakups physically altered people, pressing them into new molds so their exes would barely recognize them.
The air between them was thick with old habit, the kind of silence that two people could wear like a weighted blanket. She tried to distract herself by examining the detritus of the party: a slow drip of condensation gathering at the base of her cup, the whisper of a conversation floating in from the kitchen. She nervously shifted her weight from one foot to the other, feeling suddenly oversized and awkward as she stood, a dark looming figure in sharp contrast to the warmth of the living room. Anya sipped from her cup, but the liquid was syrupy and flat. She spat a melting ice cube back into the cup and set it on the arm of the nearest couch. She found herself crossing the room before she'd even decided to move, her body making the choice her mind couldn't commit to. Each step, both deliberate and inevitable, like a tide drawn to shore.
She wasn’t sure if she was walking toward reconciliation, or just toward the only person in the room who might remember her favorite pizza topping, or the way she once cried at a movie trailer. Maybe it didn’t matter. She made it across the rug, the nap of the fibers catching slightly at her ankles, and when she reached the spot where Raven sat, every memory of their shared months snapped into focus—sleepy mornings in cramped beds, a turquoise hairbrush, the way Raven’s eyes went glassy when the pain in her leg became too much.
For a moment, she stood over Raven, as if unsure how to breach the invisible barrier that had grown between them. She felt herself wanting—desperately—to make this seem easy, to laugh and flop down beside her and pretend old jokes were still funny. Instead, she cleared her throat and forced her mouth to move.
“Hey,” Anya managed, but the word came out warped, her voice thin and sharp around the edges, brittle enough to snap if she tried again.
Raven looked up from her phone, startled, as if she hadn’t noticed anyone approaching. Her face was flushed, not with alcohol but with the slow-blooming embarrassment of being caught in a private moment. For a split second, she seemed poised to retreat, to fold inward and disappear into herself, but then she met Anya’s gaze and something softened. She tucked her phone under her thigh, fingers lingering on the edge of the screen, and let out a breath she’d obviously been holding.
“Hi,” she said. The word was barely a whisper, surprised and a little disbelieving, as if she'd expected Anya to slip away with the rest of the party.
Silence enveloped the duo, the air between them a charged field of shared history and things unsaid. Anya felt clumsy, suddenly unsure what to do with her hands, and was acutely aware of her own heartbeat thrumming in the base of her throat. The song on the speaker bled into the next, slower and full of breathy harmonies. A lull, a catch, as if even the algorithm had run out of things to say.
“I was wondering if maybe you wanted to make everyone uncomfortable and dance with me.”
"You don't dance," Raven remarked with a mix of skepticism and amusement at Anya's suggestion.
“You’re right, but I’ve been trying to change,” Anya replies, extending her hand out to Raven. The meaning of the words was not lost on Raven, who, however reluctant, allowed herself to be hoisted off the rug and led into the clear patch of hardwood. Anya’s grip was warm and dry. Their bodies slotted together in a way that was mostly muscle memory, a hold that once required no negotiation. Raven’s head tucked against Anya’s shoulder, catching the scent of laundry soap, while Anya’s fingers spread gently yet firmly across the small of her back.
They swayed without rhythm or pattern, letting the music decide how close or how far. At first, it was clinical—a demonstration for the audience, a performance of amicable exes who had transcended something. But as they moved, the boundaries blurred. Anya’s chest pressed against Raven’s, their breathing syncing, and in the soft space where the lights pooled on the floor, Anya almost forgot that first month of radio silence, the raw exchanges over text that followed, and the mutual friends parcelled out like assets in a divorce.
“I hope Luna’s a better dancer than me,” Anya joked before asking seriously, “She dances with you, right?”
Raven huffed a laugh against Anya’s chest. “Yes, she dances with me.”
A tremor of something—relief, or jealousy, or a compound of both—sparked in Anya’s spine and ran down her legs. She wanted to say: I never wanted to hurt you. She wanted to say: I miss us so much I can’t breathe. Instead, she adjusted her grip on Raven’s waist and held on a little tighter.
The track ended, and another silence took its place, louder than the music. Anya found herself wanting to let go, but unable to move.
“Why are we doing this?” Raven whispered, not quite a question.
Anya tried, once more, for a joke. “For the drama. You always liked an audience.”
“Do you love her?” Anya asks, so softly she isn’t sure if the words left her mouth or if she only imagined the movement of her lips.
They stood there in the hush, the lights flickering, casting dancing shadows across the wall. Raven lifts her head off of Anya’s chest. Her warm eyes studied the girl before her. It was strange for her to see Anya like this; so unsure of herself. Downright nervous, even. The exact opposite of how she so often presented herself. She seemed to weigh the question for a long time, as if unsure which answer would do less harm. “It’s too early to tell,” Raven said, and the honesty was worse than any lie. “But I think I could learn to love her.”
Anya's throat cinches harshly. The question rises in her like bile, unwanted yet unstoppable. "Do you think, maybe—" she starts, then shakes her head, hating herself even as the words tumble out, "—if I'd been better, you could have learned to love me, too?" Her voice splits on the last word, and she hates how pathetic it sounds, how needy, even as she desperately needs to know.
Raven’s expression softened. She lifted her hand, as if about to shush her, but stopped and instead cradled Anya’s jaw, thumb tracing along her cheekbone. “With you…” Raven said, “I never had to learn.”
Anya blinked hard, but a tear found its way loose and streaked down, a cold river over the heat of her face. Raven caught it with her thumb, smiled, and pulled her in, laying her head back down on Anya’s chest.
Someone in the kitchen broke a glass. The shatter was crisp, the gasp and laughter afterward like a lifeline thrown across dark water. Anya felt the sound pull her back to the surface of reality. This, she thought, is what it means to hold on to a moment—one you can’t keep, but can’t quite let go.
Raven’s voice was barely above a hum, warm breath ghosting against the hollow of Anya's throat. “We were a mess, weren’t we? All tangled sheets and borrowed sweaters and arguments about nothing. It was beautiful and none of it was pretend. You know that, right?”
Anya nodded, unsure if the motion was for Raven or herself.
Raven’s lips brushed her cheek, featherlight, and then she let Anya go. They stood in the residual warmth, arms hanging loose, like actors just offstage.
Anya stood frozen as Raven retreated across the hardwood, back to her island of solitude—phone face down, half-empty cup waiting, the house settling around them with soft creaks of surrender.
There was nothing else to say, but she kept thinking of the shape of Raven's hand on her face, the weight of it—both a comfort and a brand—wanting to carry it home in her pocket like a worry stone while simultaneously wishing she could scrub the sensation from her skin before it became another memory she'd wear thin with revisiting. The urge to pocket the sensation was as strong as her old compulsion to text Raven at 3 a.m., to send some douchey message asking her if she was still up or a simple photo with no context. She wondered if that impulse would ever dull, or if she would have to white-knuckle her way through every future party and every future face until the ache finally dissolved.
For a long time, Anya stared at her own reflection in the bay window—just a smudge of movement among the fairy lights. Anya’s thoughts scattered and regrouped, cycling through every scene she’d lived with Raven: the first time they kissed on a rain-slick curb outside the library, the way their bodies tangled easily in sleep, the day Raven missed a week of classes because the pain in her leg was too much and Anya learned to draw constellations on her skin with a fingertip. She remembered the arguments, too, the nights spent shouting in the stairwell because they couldn’t stand to cry in front of their friends, the inventory of all their mutual flaws and fears. She remembered the last night, bitter and silent, neither daring to raise her voice for fear the relationship would shatter in midair. And now it had, and she was left with these fragments, sharp and beautiful and irreparably hers.
It would have to be enough.
