10 reasons not to tell him I love him (and why none of them were enough)
pairing: John Logan x reader fem
summary: so the guy kisses you. after months of whatever-the-hell-you-two-were, after every unsaid thing and every rule you made up just to feel safe, he kisses you. and what's the most logical, reasonable, emotionally mature response your brain comes up with? running. literally running. out the door, into the cold, full sprint from the best and worst thing that's ever happened to you. naturally, this leads to: months of pretending you're fine, a whiteboard titled "operation livers", becoming his unofficial relationship coach for the girl that isn't you, and eventually saying everything you should've said the night you ran — way too late, in the worst possible moment, to the worst possible outcome. a love story, technically. just not the kind anyone would put on a poster.
warnings: angst, late confession, not good ending
a/n: okay so i wrote this in TWO DAYS without stopping because i could physically feel the idea slipping away and i knew if i didn't get it out i was never going to write it and it would just live in my head forever haunting me. i'm still reading all your requests i promise i see every single one and i WILL get to them — also still taking more dean requests because i simply cannot stop myself!!! anyway i really hope you guys like this one, i put my whole heart into it (and lost some sleep over it but that's fine that's fine). I'm sorry if u see any mistakes, my first language is spanish, sryy. Lots of love for you all xoxo 🤍
btw 13,265 words this time. i think i got a little carried away. jiji
Maybe you're right, maybe this is all that I can be — but what if it's you, and it wasn't me? What do you want from me?
— The Neighbourhood, W.D.Y.W.F.M?
(nothing to say this time. i messed up.)
I love it the way you love a movie: from the most comfortable spot on the couch, with a blanket over your legs and something warm between your hands. You clap at the good parts, cry a little at the bad ones, and when it ends, you turn off the TV and go on with your life. No consequences. No one can hurt you.
I watched my parents’ love fall apart. I watched my best friends get their hearts broken. I saw my mom’s frustration. I saw people crying over “love.”
So I drew my own conclusion.
Love is beautiful precisely because you can watch it from the outside. From there, it’s safe—you can study it, admire it, understand exactly why it works without having to put any of yourself into it. You’re a spectator. And spectators don’t lose anything when the lights come on and the theater empties.
From that seat, I loved everything.
I loved the movies where they meet in the rain. I loved the novels where someone crosses an ocean for another person. I loved the Taylor Swift albums Fran would play at two in the morning after one of her epic romantic disasters—which were frequent. I loved Fran, who falls in love every two months with an intensity I almost see as a form of bravery—though I’d never tell her that, because it would go straight to her head. I admired her from my seat, with my blanket and something warm between my hands.
I never wanted to step inside.
But here’s the part I’ve never told anyone.
The problem was never just the fear of losing. The problem was something smaller and harder to explain: deep down, I had never placed myself inside the equation. Other people’s love was something they built together, specific and unrepeatable, like a song that only works when those two particular voices sing it. I watched from the outside and thought how beautiful, the same way you think how beautiful standing in front of a painting in a museum—with sincere admiration and the calm certainty that it’s not yours and never will be.
Fran fell in love every two months with an intensity I saw as almost brave, though I’d never tell her that because it would go to her head. She had this ability to love people with an ease I observed like a language I had never learned to speak. And I watched them all and clapped from my seat.
Never once asking if there was a leading role waiting for me on the other side.
Because there wasn’t. Those things happened to other people. People who knew how to receive that kind of love without freezing completely. People who didn’t need fifteen minutes of mental preparation before someone took their hand. People who didn’t catalog every kind gesture looking for the trap.
Love was for other people. I was the spectator. I had always been the spectator, and that was perfectly fine.
What I didn’t calculate was that there’s a difference between choosing not to step inside and discovering you’ve already been inside longer than you realized.
That there are people who settle into some part of you without asking permission, without announcing themselves, without doing anything extraordinary. That one day they’re just the guy you see to satisfy a purely primitive need, the one you had strict rules with: No feelings. No jealousy. No exclusivity. No emotional relationship between us. No kissing. We weren’t even “friends with benefits.” I thought he was too talkative for my taste, pretty irritable. He always broke the “no emotional stuff” rule. He used to piss me off on purpose so I could take it out on him however I wanted on our weekly day. I never really knew when it became a problem.
That irritation and something completely different can feel almost identical when you’ve gone long enough without wanting to see the difference.
We had always been part of the same group—Fran (my best friend, who was in a pretty stable relationship with John “Cute” Tucker), Garrett Graham and his gorgeous girlfriend Hannah, Dean Di Laurentis and his wild, charming girl Allie, John Tucker, and him. Same university, same social circle, same parties. John Logan had been the background noise of my life for as long as I could remember—constant and inevitable, like the cold in January.
And I had never looked at him any other way. We were… fuck buddies? No. Fuck-something. I didn’t even know what we were.
Until I did. Imagining him with someone else was driving me insane. And that’s when I realized it was already too late to go back to my seat.
The farther away love stays, the less it can leave you with empty hands.
The covered garden in December had that cold the glass roof made bearable but didn’t eliminate. From here you could see the snow falling like drizzle. The white lights we’d wrapped around the columns gave everything an unreal glow that made familiar places feel momentarily outside of time.
Inside, the Wham! song was on what must have been its fifteenth loop.
I heard the door open and turned my head to see who it was.
Logan stepped out, hands in his pockets, that casual posture he always had, like nothing ever affected him. Great, I thought, annoyed. John Logan, coming to bother me as usual. Because that was our thing: we pretended to hate each other—constant jabs, sarcastic comments—like we couldn’t be in the same room without clashing. In private, we craved each other.
He didn’t look drunk, but what did I know? The vodka had me foggy, and maybe he just wanted to chase me down to make some joke at my expense.
But when he spoke, his voice was soft, worried. He frowned slightly as he approached.
“Hey. I saw you leave with a face like something bit you. You okay?”
I shrugged, rubbing my arms against the cold, not wanting to admit that my parents not being able to—or wanting to—spend this time of year with me had hit me hard.
“Just… my stomach feels off. I got nauseous,” I murmured, staring at the floor to avoid his eyes.
“You lie terribly,” he said, coming over to the railing and leaning beside me. He gave me a gentle, playful nudge with his elbow. I turned toward him, surprised for some strange reason. “But okay, I won’t push. Want to talk about something dumb to distract you?” he offered, with that lopsided smile. It wasn’t that weird—we were acquaintances, after all, even if we constantly poked at each other.
“Sure,” I gave in, sitting on the nearby bench. The cold from the wood seeped through my dress. He sat next to me, close enough for me to feel his warmth, but not invasive. “Like what?”
He smiled, pleased I’d agreed, flashing a huge grin as he joined me on the bench and leaned back with an exaggerated sigh. He started telling stories from his childhood, how he used to pretend he was his dad’s boss. I laughed in spite of myself. The sound came out freer than I expected as I pictured him as a bossy little kid. I burst out laughing, the knot in my chest loosening a bit. He was actually great when he wasn’t busy being an asshole.
Logan noticed the shift. His expression softened, and he nodded with understanding, letting his hand rest gently on my thigh, tracing circles with his thumb, trying to comfort me.
Uh… he was achieving everything but comfort. Damn, you’ve got some hands, buddy.
He went quiet suddenly. The air thickened between us. His laugh died in his throat like something had hit him from the inside. He didn’t say anything else. He just… looked at me.
“What?” I asked, wiping away the tears my little laughing fit had caused. His sudden silence made me look straight at him.
His dark eyes traced my face, brow furrowed, like he was searching for something that had escaped him, something he couldn’t name. It wasn’t his usual playful look. It was deeper, glassy from the alcohol and whatever else had been released inside him. His eyes moved over every inch of my face—the curve of my lips still trembling with laughter, my cheeks wet with tears that weren’t just from laughing. And then, without warning, he took a strand of my hair between his fingers, gently, almost reverently, twirling it slowly, all while never stopping looking at me.
“Nothing,” he said, but his smile twisted, that mole moving with it. He shook his head, thinking about his next words. “Actually, you look fucking good tonight.” He shrugged like it was the most normal thing in the world.
My heart flipped so hard I thought it was going to jump out of my mouth.
What the hell did he just say?
Okay, this was weird. I’d never heard two compliments from Logan in one night. It had to be the alcohol. It had to be the vodka.
“Did you just compliment me? Relax, bro, that’s two in one night,” I said, raising an eyebrow and crossing my arms like a shield, as if that could keep the sudden distance I felt I needed.
“Weird, right?” he murmured, his voice low, almost amused, but with something else underneath.
“Truth be told, I don’t know how to take it,” I replied, trying to sound sarcastic. “You’re so drunk you’re seeing me like one of those cheesy posters you have stuck on your bedroom wall.”
He stepped closer, that playful smile that always disarmed me curving on his lips, but now it felt heavier, more real. His voice came out hoarse, low, like he was confessing something he’d kept for too long.
“I feel drunk every time you walk into a room. So I don’t think it’s new.”
The air grew thick, sticky. His cologne—that mix of wood and citrus that always smelled like him—wrapped around me, mixed with the whiskey on his breath. The world tilted a little, but it wasn’t the alcohol. It was him. It was the way he looked at me, like I was the only thing that mattered on that freezing night.
What the hell does he think he’s doing? I thought, my heart racing like I’d run a marathon. This isn’t real.
But then he said, almost in a whisper:
“You’ve had me crazy since the day I met you. You have no idea how much.”
And he kissed me. Breaking the most important rule of our deal.
His hand moved from my thigh to my cheek, warm against my cold skin. A soft brush at first, then deep, desperate. His lips against mine like he’d been waiting years for this moment.
My hands flew to his shoulders, holding on without thinking. I opened my mouth under his, responding with the same urgency, the same hunger I didn’t know I carried inside. Our tongues met, clumsy and perfect at the same time. I felt his low groan vibrate against my lips, his fingers tangling in my hair, pulling me closer. Our breaths mixed, ragged and hot against the cold night. I forgot everything. Only he existed: the heat of his mouth, the wild beat of his heart against mine, the taste of whiskey and Logan.
When he pulled away, panting, he looked down at my lips. The silence hit me like a bucket of cold water, sobering me completely.
I shot up like a spring, stumbling back two steps. The bench creaked behind me. The cold bit at my legs, but it was nothing compared to the fire burning inside me.
He stayed seated, motionless, but his eyes… God, his eyes followed me. They shone brighter than usual, glassy with something that seemed to hurt in his chest. He didn’t blink. He just stared, jaw tight, lips slightly parted like he wanted to say something but the words were stuck in his throat. It was the same look he had when he lost something important, but multiplied by a thousand. Sad. Lost. Like I had just broken something without touching it.
No. Don’t look at me like that. You can’t look at me like that.
“Sorry,” he whispered, his voice cracked, almost inaudible. “I… I shouldn’t have—”
“Forget it,” I cut him off, my voice shaking, sharp like a knife to keep the distance.
He tried to stand but stopped halfway, hands braced on the bench like he needed something to hold on to. His eyes never left me for a second.
“Forget it,” I repeated, louder, crossing my arms so he wouldn’t see how my hands were trembling.
“Forget it, John,” I insisted, the name snapping like a whip. “It was a mistake. We’re drunk. It’s fine. Forget it.”
He reached out toward me, slowly, as if afraid I’d vanish if he moved too fast. His eyes stayed locked on mine, bright, pleading without words, and that hurt more than the kiss itself. Because it wasn’t the look of the idiot who stole my fries or soda.
“No,” I said, stepping back again, my chest so tight I could barely breathe. “Forget it.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran out of that house without looking back, without saying goodbye to anyone. The cold slapped my face, snow crunching under my shoes, hot tears rolling down and freezing instantly.
The street was quiet. Christmas lights twinkling in the windows, roofs with a thin layer of white. The whole lifelong neighborhood looked different with the fresh snow and the late hour.
Later, once I was sure everyone had gone home, I carefully pushed open the front door. I took the stairs two at a time and went straight to my room. I closed the door slowly without turning on the light. I lay on my back on the bed without even taking off my coat. The snow in my hair melted onto the pillow and the cold from the coat seeped into my bones, but I didn’t move. I just stared at the dark ceiling and started thinking about him.
I covered my face with my hands.
In a low voice, almost soundless, against the palm of my hand:
In that exact second, as if the universe had been waiting for that confession from the girl who mocked love the most, fireworks exploded outside. It was midnight. Christmas. The sky filled with colors—reds, golds, blues—explosions lighting up my room through the window like flashes from an old movie. The light came in intermittent bursts, illuminating my tear-streaked face.
God. I’ve been such an idiot. I’ve treated him so badly all this time… I’ve been so stupid. A huge, proud, blind idiot.
I lay back down with my heart racing and my face wet, while the fireworks kept exploding.
What a fucking idiot you are.
I got up, tore off my coat like it was burning me, and quickly put on my pajamas. I slipped under the sheets and started tossing and turning like crazy, my heart beating so hard it felt like it would break my ribs. What the hell did I just do? I turned and turned, my face burning with shame and my stomach in knots, until finally, exhausted from all the inner drama, I fell into a deep sleep.
I came back from my parents’ house in January with a suitcase, an emotional hangover of biblical proportions, and the firm conviction that the new year was going to be different.
Not different in the “I’m going to change my life, do yoga, and read fifty books” way—that’s language for people who still believe in New Year’s promises with a naivety I find touching. Different in the sense that I was going to do something. I was going to stop being the spectator. I was going to sit on the other side and see if love from there would kill me or just leave me looking really, really ridiculous.
One of the two. Probably the second, but I had decided that embarrassment was an acceptable price.
I like John Logan, I told myself for the fourteenth time, testing how it sounded. The first time I’d said it against the palm of my hand, almost silently. By day three I could say it at normal volume to the empty room without my pulse racing.
The problem was that I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks.
Since Christmas night we had existed in parallel universes with apparent mutual agreement, without either of us saying it out loud—which was basically how I handled one hundred percent of the uncomfortable things in my life. He hadn’t texted me. I hadn’t texted him. Fran had asked me twice if I was okay and both times I’d said yes, perfectly fine.
I wasn’t perfectly fine. I was in that specific not-fine state where you function with apparent normality but one part of your brain is exclusively dedicated to replaying a twelve-second moment on loop.
Twelve seconds. I’d replayed it, I calculate, about four hundred times.
But now in January I had decided that was over. When I got back to Briar I was going to do something. Talk to him, tell him something, I don’t know—act in some way that wasn’t continuing to watch from the most comfortable seat on the couch with the blanket over my legs.
And there really is a difference between knowing something and understanding it.
I knew, for example, that what we had was nothing. I knew it the same way you know the hallway coffee machine coffee is a crime against humanity but you still buy it because it’s eight in the morning and the January cold in Briar doesn’t give you alternatives.
The deal was simple. So simple we had never needed to say it out loud, which was already a sign of something, although at the time I had cataloged that sign as efficiency and not cowardice—which is basically the story of my adult life summarized in one sentence.
No feelings. No exclusivity. No conversations that complicate things. We saw each other when we saw each other, which was almost always when he texted and I replied, and in between we existed in parallel universes that crossed just long enough to remember why we crossed again.
On Monday, which in my schedule meant Comparative Literature at ten, then research seminar at noon, followed by the four hours of slow death that was Monday afternoon at Briar when everyone was still in weekend mode but you couldn’t afford to be because you had two papers due the next week and an existential crisis pending.
I was in the library at three in the afternoon, laptop open to a document that had been blank for forty minutes and a coffee that had gone cold half an hour ago, when my phone vibrated.
I looked at it without moving.
The first thing I thought when I saw his name was: shit. Fuck.
I breathed through my nose, the way I do when I need two seconds before doing something that scares me. I stared at the phone for the time it took to convince myself there was no reason John Logan’s words should have the effect of someone opening a window in winter from the inside. Sudden cold. Involuntary. Then I picked it up.
I typed: sure and deleted it because it sounded too casual and I wasn’t casual, I was the opposite of casual. I typed yes and deleted that too because it was too short and would seem like I was annoyed. I typed hi, yeah, what’s up? and stared at it for five seconds before sending it before I could change my mind.
He replied in thirty seconds.
I looked around as if I needed to confirm it.
And that was exactly the verbal economy of someone who had never needed to use more words than necessary to get what he wanted—something I had observed over nine months of whatever-this-was with that specific mix of admiration and exasperation that almost everything he did produced in me. I turned the phone face down on the table. Then face up because I needed to be able to see it. Then I put it in my bag because if I kept looking I was going to do something stupid like reread the message another forty times looking for subtext.
There’s no subtext, I told myself. It’s Logan. Logan says things directly or doesn’t say them.
Functional, I thought. You are a functional person.
It took him eight minutes. I saw him before he saw me—he was coming from the main entrance with his backpack on one shoulder, hands in the pockets of his Briar jacket.
He saw me. Gave that minimal chin lift he sometimes did. Sat across from me.
“Hi.” He set his backpack on the floor. “Been here long?”
Silence. Brief. The kind of silence that exists between people who know each other well enough that silence isn’t awkward—except today it was. Today the silence had that specific weight of conversations that haven’t started yet.
Logan ran a hand through his hair. That gesture. The one he made when he was figuring out how to say something that wasn’t easy. It was so rare to see it in him that the two previous times I’d noticed it, I’d just stared without knowing what to do with the information.
“I need to tell you something,” he said, resting his elbows on the table. He clasped his hands. Looked at his clasped hands for a second like he was deciding the order of the words.
“Okay,” I said. My voice came out perfectly normal.
“This.” He made a vague gesture that encompassed the space between us, and there was nothing in that space except air and half a meter of distance and nine months of whatever-this-was that suddenly felt like so much more. “Us. It has to end.”
The room didn’t move. I didn’t move. Outside, someone walked down the hallway, quick steps on the cold linoleum, and the sound faded. Farther away, the subtle buzz of the library continued, reminding me the world kept turning with total normality. Except for me, the silence now had a different weight. All that bravery I had built up was cracking, making a deafening noise in my head as it shattered completely.
It has to end, as if there had been a “us” real enough…
I felt something move in my chest, something that wasn’t exactly fear but wasn’t exactly bravery either—it was that in-between space where you live when you’re about to do or hear something irreversible.
Logan blinked. He hadn’t expected that. Good. If I was going to sit there feeling like the floor had dropped three inches without warning, at least I could have the dignity of not letting him see the blow.
“Yes.” I shrugged with the indifference of someone who has perfected the art of looking unaffected. “That’s what we agreed. No complications. If it gets complicated, it ends.”
“It didn’t get complicated,” he said, too quickly.
Another pause. Longer. He was looking at me with that attentive gaze of his that I hated—the one that saw too much, the one completely incompatible with the nature of what we supposedly were. He exhaled and said:
I stayed perfectly still. Ah. Ah, no.
The brain sometimes shorts out at the exact moment you need it. Mine did—a second of absolute internal silence, clean, a white void before everything started working again and the sentence landed with its full weight, crushing my ribs.
There’s a girl. There’s a girl.
“Yeah?” I said. My voice came out fine. That was the good thing about years of being the spectator: I knew how to sound calm when I wasn’t. I’d practiced it since I was seven, watching happy endings from the most comfortable couch in the world and clapping at the good parts with completely still hands while inside I turned to ash.
“Her name’s Grace.” Pause. “Grace Ivers.” His voice was calm, direct. He had decided the only way to say this was without beating around the bush and he was executing it with the same determination he went after the puck on the ice. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s different.”
“Good.” I said it with the conviction of someone pretending they mean it, because that’s what I did: I said “good” and “how nice” and “I’m happy for you” with sincere admiration. That’s what I knew how to do. It was the only thing I knew how to do so no one would discover I was bleeding out in silence. “What about her?”
Please don’t say it. Don’t. Say. It.
“I really like her. For real. It’s not like… it’s not the usual thing.”
I knew exactly what the usual thing was. The usual thing was the Puck bunnies, Friday parties, and the long history of girls who never went anywhere because Logan didn’t want them to. The usual thing was our silent pact not to touch each other’s hearts, the unbreakable rule of that first kiss I had run from terrified. The usual thing was the system. The system he knew perfectly and was now throwing away for someone else.
I was thinking about movies again, how they prepare you for hard moments with music and light and the right camera angle so the pain looks aesthetic. In real life there was none of that. In real life there was a cold library, coffee gone cold forty minutes ago, and John Logan looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read because it was new. Something between nervous and hopeful, a light in his eyes completely alien to the darkness I had in my chest right then.
Until the name Grace sounded briefly familiar.
Piper, one of those girls who existed in the hockey game ecosystem with the specific energy of someone who knows exactly what she wants and has no shame getting it, had been telling half of Briar that a girl was spending too much time around Logan. I’d heard it in passing, without meaning to, in the hallway after class—Piper’s shrill voice floating like a warning I had decided to ignore. To the poor girl’s misfortune and misery, Piper had been right. Logan’s world had already shifted while I remained frozen in the same place.
“Ah,” I said, tasting the bitter flavor of humiliation in my mouth.
“How did you meet her?” I asked, because if I was going to be an adult about it, I was going to be one completely, all the way, with all the consequences. Even if every question felt like sticking a pin in an open wound.
“At a party.” He paused. “Before the break.”
While all that was happening, there had been a freshman girl named Grace who already existed.
That was good, I told myself. It simplified everything. Lie. It didn’t simplify anything. It complicated everything in a different way, but sometimes you need a narrative, even a partially false one, to keep functioning, and this was the one I had available.
Logan hesitated. I saw his shoulders tense before he ran his hand through his hair, a worn-out gesture I already knew by heart. He did it whenever nerves got the better of him and he desperately searched for how to say something without it sounding like what it really was.
“Can you do something for me?” he said. The firmness in his voice didn’t quite cover the doubt.
I blinked, swallowing the knot rising in my throat. “What do you need from me?”
He sighed, a broken sound that seemed to cost him effort. He shrugged, shedding that confidence that always surrounded him, and looked at me with an intensity that hurt in my chest.
“I want you to help me do things right. With Grace.” His voice sounded lower, almost a plea. “Please.”
I stared at him, feeling the weight of his words floating in the dense library air. I let out a small, bitter laugh, a dry sound that drowned between the wooden shelves.
“Sure,” I said, resting my elbows on the table. “Though you can do it on your own. Even if you’re a pain in the ass, Logan, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.”
“Good,” he said, and a spark of relief crossed his eyes. Then he added, “Thanks.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
“Yeah, but…” He shrugged. “Thanks anyway.”
He grabbed his keys and backpack from the table. The unmistakable gesture of detachment. I stayed exactly where I was, anchored to that rigid chair, and mentally counted to three because I needed to convince my body not to fall apart on the floor. My mind wanted to beg him to stay, but my legs only wanted to run, to run as fast as the first time.
Then Logan extended his hand toward me. A formal, neat movement.
I extended mine mechanically and he gave me a handshake. His palm against mine, warm and firm. What irony. The last time our skin had recognized each other, our mouths had been touching, the world had been burning, and panic had made me run from his side. We had agreed on distance. We had sworn the “no kissing” line was the only border keeping us safe. And now he was sealing the end with the greeting of two strangers who share a business. The contact burned my skin like a punishment.
He walked toward the exit of the stacks aisle. Reached the threshold.
And then he turned, right before stepping into the main hallway, and looked at me with that smile of his—the easy one, the usual one, the killer grin I’d seen him use in awkward situations and that now bloomed here, in the middle of my ruin—and said in a whisper, careful not to disturb the peace of the place:
“Now that we’re done… the rules don’t matter anymore, right?”
I looked at him, feeling the air turn to glass in my lungs. “What rules?”
“Ours.” A pause. “What we agreed on.” Another, shorter pause. “That means we can be friends now, right?” And he had the tone of someone explaining the obvious, of someone cleaning up a mess with a dirty rag and smiling because the stain is no longer visible. “Help me out for old times’ sake.”
Nine months reduced to ashes in the time it took him to say three words, with that damn smile, from the doorway.
My thoughts crowded together in a violent mess, a silent scream clawing at my ribs. Friends? Is it really that easy for you? I ran from you because one single kiss from you felt like the end of the world, because breaking that rule meant accepting that I liked you enough to destroy me. I built a stone system to protect us from ourselves, and you reduce it to an expiring contract? How can you ask me for friendship from the very edge of the abyss you pushed me into? I don’t want your damn old times. I don’t want to be the spectator clapping while you walk over the rubble of what we forbade ourselves to be.
But the subtle buzz of the library was still there, floating like dust in the afternoon light, reminding me that my catastrophe was irrelevant to the rest of the world.
I looked at him for a second that lasted an entire eternity. A second where my dignity hung by a bleeding thread.
“Sure,” I said, and my voice sounded so alien, so cold, that I barely recognized it. “Friends.”
The smile widened a little. He nodded, turned around, and left. His silhouette dissolved behind the heavy shelves. It was like when you finally decide to pick up your pieces and stand up, someone else had already taken your spot, and the floor was flat again, as if you had never fallen.
There was an afternoon when he arrived with his hair still damp from practice.
I don’t know why I noticed that. I noticed it with the same idiotic precision with which I noticed the way he rested his weight on his left elbow when reading something, or how his hands occupied the space on the table as if it belonged to them by right. My brain had been cataloging John Logan for months with a thoroughness that would have been useful if I had applied it to my Comparative Literature exams.
He sat down, opened his backpack, looked at me.
Friends see each other. Friends talk. Friends text at eleven thirty at night saying things like hey, do you think it’s weird that I like movies more than parties? and you have to reply no, Logan, it’s not weird, most people prefer movies to parties and he answers but you preferred parties and you stay staring at your phone screen in the darkness of your room longer than you should before typing I preferred going where you went and then deleting it and writing depends on the night and sending it before you regret it.
“Hey. There’s a party at Fitzy’s on Friday. Do you think I should invite her?”
I set my pen down on the notebook. Carefully.
“Have you hung out alone yet?”
“Good.” A pause. That pause of his, the one he used when there was more he didn’t know how to say. “Really good. Too good, if you know what I mean.”
A sharp cold ran down my spine, leaving me breathless. Too good. I knew exactly what he meant. You didn’t have to be a genius to decode the subtext in Logan’s voice, that almost floating lightness of someone who had just crossed a sacred border with someone.
Really good. Two words. A new territory to which I had no map, no compass, no right of entry. And in the middle of that territory, the weight of my own reality crushed my chest with overwhelming force. Nine months. Months in which my body had only known his. Months in which my skin had remained suspended in the memory of his hands, unable even to conceive of looking at anyone else. I was still trapped in his orbit, intact and exclusive in my own misery, while he was already undressing in other rooms, erasing my traces with the haste of someone starting a clean life. The asymmetry of our pain stung in my throat like a physical humiliation, pure and alive.
“Then no,” I said, surprised my voice didn’t break into pieces on the table. “Don’t take her with the team yet. Fitzy and the rest are noise and alcohol, and you can’t build anything real in that context. You need her to see you in places where you can be yourself without the version of Logan everyone expects you to be.”
He looked at me with that new intensity that still didn’t resemble anything I knew from before.
“How do you know these things?”
“Because I read a lot of books,” I said. “And I observe. And I have the luxury of not being in love with anyone, so I think clearly.”
I said it with perfect naturalness. With the same naturalness with which you say that tree leaves eventually rot on the ground. Mechanical, gray truths spoken out loud only to fill the void.
“The luxury of not being in love with anyone,” he repeated, testing the weight of the phrase, letting the words float between us like smoke.
I picked up the pen. I kept writing, pressing the tip against the paper with ridiculous force, trying to anchor my entire existence to that stroke of ink. I never looked up, but I didn’t need to. I felt his gaze. I felt the weight of his eyes fixed on me, tracing the line of my jaw, my forehead, my hands. A dense, suffocating attention that burned my skin and forced me to hold my breath so I wouldn’t give myself away. I knew he was searching for the trace of a lie, but I stayed rigid, carved in stone, holding the mask while my mind sabotaged the silence by unearthing the beginning of everything.
I remembered the night it all started. Fran had dragged me to a faculty party just to officially introduce me to Tucker and the rest of the hockey guys. At first, Logan and I clashed immediately. He looked at me with that unbearable smugness and started hitting on me with poorly delivered lines. I gave him such a cold, completely indifferent look that I could see the exact moment his pride faltered. He realized I wasn’t just another girl, and from then on he only tried to irritate me, poke me, break my facade. And for strange reasons born from that violent friction, we ended up tangled against the bathroom tiles of that house. A chaotic impulse that became the first piece of our system. Nine months of bodies fitted together, of shared breaths in the dark, only to end up here: holding a pen like it was a shield.
The following Tuesday he arrived with the face of someone who had slept little and a story he told me in the wrong chronological order, as he always did when he was nervous and didn’t want it to show.
The short version was that they had talked on the phone for two hours. The long version was the same but with the details he released one by one, like someone handing over someone else’s treasures, which I received with the trained expression of someone listening without bleeding.
He had told her about the workshop. About his dad. About his brother and the deal.
A sudden cold froze my fingers. The words got stuck in my throat.
“You told her about your dad’s workshop?” I said, and for the first time my voice faltered, betraying the distance I had worked so hard to fake.
“Yeah.” He looked at me, surprised by my reaction. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I breathed, but the air felt like ground glass. “It’s just… that’s something of yours, Logan. Something important.”
“I know.” He shrugged, but the movement was too stiff to be casual. “That’s why I’m saying it.”
I looked at him while the world reconfigured around me in a painful blink. I felt a pang of disbelief and helplessness that emptied my stomach. I hadn’t known. Months of whatever-this-was, months of entire nights where our skin knew each other by the millimeter, and I had never known about the workshop. I knew nothing about his father, or the promises, or the weights that sank his shoulders when he stayed quiet staring at the ceiling after we’d been together.
He was telling me now, in the library, weeks after destroying everything, like mentioning a trivial fact on any afternoon. But the real blow wasn’t that. The real blow was understanding the terrible irony of our intimacy: we had hooked up for almost a year under the premise that we were an exclusive secret, but the reality was that I was the only one living in ignorance. Most people at Briar, his teammates, the people floating in his periphery, knew more about his life than I did. My exclusivity was a deception. I only had rights to his surface, while to her—to Grace—he had handed over the keys to his basement over the phone, in the middle of the night.
It’s different, he had said that day. It’s not like the usual thing.
Yes, I thought, feeling the dead weight of my own blindness. The usual thing had been using me as anesthesia so he didn’t have to talk to anyone.
“It’s good,” I said, and my voice sounded mechanical, like the echo of an empty body. “That you told her. It means you trust her.”
“Yeah,” he said, and that light in his eyes returned, the hungry one, the one that already had a destination. “I think so.”
I was happy for him with all the conviction I could scrape from my ruins, which that afternoon wasn’t much, but it was what was left.
And then, in a blind impulse my pride couldn’t defend against, my hand moved across the table. It was an unconscious act, an animal reflex for survival. My fingers sought his and I took his hand. The contact was a warm spark in the middle of my winter. Logan tensed barely a millimeter, but he didn’t pull away. On the contrary, he turned his palm a little, catching mine in a gentle grip, and we stayed looking. It was an eternal second, suspended in the cold library air, where time stretched until it became a taut rope between us. His eyes searched mine with desperate, almost painful intensity, as if trying to decipher the secret language we had spoken for nine months in the darkness of that bathroom. We were so close I could hear the broken rhythm of his breathing.
Until the table vibrated.
The dull buzz of his phone broke the spell like an ax blow. I looked away abruptly, feeling the pull of the cold air as I let go of his hand, and my eyes inevitably fell on the lit screen.
The name shone with insulting clarity, claiming what was already hers. I felt a pang of humiliation coloring my cheeks, a brutal reminder of my place in his new life. But Logan didn’t even look at the phone. His gaze stayed fixed on me, heavy, dense, fixed on my face as if the call was nothing more than irrelevant background noise. He was waiting. Waiting for me to say something, to break the system, to ask him not to do it.
I swallowed the knot of bile choking me and forced my lips into a cold, distant line.
“You should answer,” I said, and my voice sounded so empty and lifeless it seemed like a ghost’s.
The thing with Logan was that when he talked about Grace—when he really talked about her, without the armor of humor and sideways comments—his face did something I hadn’t seen before. It went still. Not with the stillness of someone hiding, but with the stillness of someone looking at something they still don’t quite know how to name.
Sometimes I wondered if his apparent clumsiness wasn’t just refined cruelty. If he was forcing me to guide him toward her as a form of conscious torture, releasing every private detail just to see which part of me broke first under his gaze. Or maybe it was worse. Maybe there was no malice in his eyes, just absolute ignorance of my pain, and it was only that small sick and hopeful part of my chest that invented the illusion that he was provoking me to see if, finally, I dared to claim him.
He told me everything. That they had gone out. That it had gone well. That then he had said something awkward—he didn’t specify what, just something awkward, you know how I am—and that she had pulled back in a way he didn’t know how to close the distance without making it worse.
“What exactly did you say to her?” I asked.
“Something about a girl at Garrett’s party.”
“Why the hell did you tell her that?”
“I don’t know! She asked if I’d been with anyone lately and I answered honestly and—”
“Honesty has its moment,” I said. “And that moment is not when someone you like asks if you’ve been with other people. That moment is never. Or much later. Much, much later.”
He looked at me. We stayed looking. It was an eternal second, suspended in the cold library air, where time stretched until it became a taut rope between us. His eyes searched mine with desperate, almost painful intensity, as if trying to decipher the secret language we had spoken for nine months in the darkness. We were so close I could hear the broken rhythm of his breathing.
Then a strand of my hair came loose and fell across my cheek, breaking the line of my face. Logan didn’t think. He slowly raised his hand, with a slowness that froze my blood, and his fingers brushed my skin as he tucked the strand behind my ear. His touch was a warm burn, a ghost of the nights when his hands didn’t ask permission. The brush lingered a millimeter too long, enough for the tension in the air to become dense, suffocating, a high-voltage cable about to snap.
Logan cleared his throat, pulling his fingers away abruptly as if he’d burned himself, and broke the spell.
“Okay,” he said when it passed. “What do I do?”
“Apologize. No excuses. No context. No explaining why you said it.” I leaned on the table, hardening my voice to cover the tremor his touch had left. “Just: I’m sorry, it was stupid, it won’t happen again.”
“And if she wants to know why I said it?”
That night Fran was on the couch with a cup of something hot and her laptop on her knees when I got home, and she looked at me exactly once before turning her eyes back to the screen.
That was the good thing about Fran. She knew when to ask and when not to, and that afternoon her social survival instinct told her, correctly, that it was a no-questions night. After all, she had been there the day of the party. She remembered perfectly how she had dragged me toward Tucker and how Logan had tried to corner me with his arrogance before we ended up in that bathroom.
“There’s pasta on the stove,” she said, without looking away from the screen.
I went into my room. Closed the door.
I stood in front of the whiteboard.
OPERATION LIVERS, it said at the top, in the big, slightly crooked letters from a January night that now felt like another century.
Grace Ivers, Logan. Livers. It was obvious.
Below the title was a list. Not very long. But not very short either. I had added to it with fleeting thoughts that crossed my mind when we saw each other.
Don’t lose composure in front of him.
Listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t make faces.
Don’t think about the kiss. (NEVER think about the kiss)
Be useful. Be reasonable. Be the person he needs right now.
Don’t be the person you want to be.
Don’t think about how he laughs.
Don’t think about how he laughs (with you)
Remember that spectators don’t lose anything. (Remember that you already lost something.)
Below the nine points, the blank space I had left because at some point I thought I would need more.
I had been right. I needed more.
I picked up the marker. Uncapped it. And then I stayed still, cap in hand and tip on the green surface of the whiteboard, without writing anything.
What was I going to write? He told her about his dad? Nine months touching each other blindly? You’re not in love with anyone and you said it out loud and it sounded completely true and completely false at the same time?
I capped the marker again.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at point nine until the letters stopped making sense.
Was it ever real with me?
That was exactly the problem and I had written it with my own hand. It had seemed honest and brave to me, and a week later it just seemed like physical proof of my own humiliation. I had believed that keeping my distance kept me in control, when in reality it had only made me invisible to him.
From the other side of the door I heard Fran close her laptop. Her steps toward the kitchen, the sound of the microwave, the clink of a spoon.
“You sure you don’t want pasta?” she called out without approaching, with that tact of hers of offering without invading.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, swallowing the bitter knot clawing at my throat.
“Yeah,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”
I stayed sitting on the bed for another two minutes. Then I got up, went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face, and looked at myself in the mirror long enough to convince myself I looked moderately functional. It wasn’t entirely true, but it was convincing enough to hold the mask.
I went out to the hallway.
Fran was in the kitchen serving two bowls, without asking if I wanted any or how much, simply putting double as if she had already decided. That small, everyday, completely hers gesture squeezed my chest in a way that had nothing to do with Logan and everything to do with the specific relief of having someone who takes care of you without forcing you to bare your wounds.
Fran sat across from me with her bowl. The subtle buzz of the apartment was the only thing filling the space. She looked at me intently, with those eyes that saw too much through my cracks.
“You okay?” she asked simply.
The question floated between us, loaded with a silent suspicion she didn’t want to force. I felt the impulse to disarm myself right there, to remind her of that party where it all started in the bathroom, to confess that the system had collapsed and that what hurt me more was what I had never known about him than his departure. But the discipline of being a spectator was a muscle too well trained.
“Yeah,” I said, forcing a light smile as I picked up the spoon. “Fine.”
We ate in silence for a while. The kind of silence that exists between people who have been together long enough to know that some truths are better not touched when the wound is still open. Fran looked back at her bowl and didn’t say anything else, filing away my lie with delicacy.
Later, when she went to her room and the house sank into shadow, I went back to my room and stood in front of the whiteboard again. The walls seemed to close in on me, reminding me of the loneliness of my own script.
This time I did uncap the marker. I wrote in the space below the nine, in the irregular handwriting of someone writing while breaking inside:
Don’t confuse knowing what someone needs with being what someone needs. They are different things. You’ve spent months not understanding the difference.
I read it. Each word felt like a silk line cutting my throat.
I erased it with the green felt eraser hanging on the side of the whiteboard, leaving a smudged trace.
And then I wrote it again. Because erasing it didn’t make it any less true, and I, apparently, still had intact that masochistic instinct to look at things directly even if they took my breath away.
I got into bed with my clothes on, sinking into the mattress as if the floor kept giving way under my feet.
The party at the guys’ house was a swarm of music too loud, red plastic cups, and the sour smell of spilled beer on the wood. A subtle buzz of shrill laughter and shouts that I found unbearable. In the middle of the mass of bodies, I saw them.
I crossed the room dodging bodies until my eyes, with that masochistic aim that characterized me, found them.
There was Logan. And next to him, a blonde girl laughing at something he had just said. He looked at her with that hungry light, the one that already had a destination, and moved a cup away from her hand with a gesture so incredibly protective it turned my stomach. I let out a shaky sigh, a sound immediately drowned by the party music, and looked for the most distant corner. I dropped into a faded wingback chair, sinking into the worn fabric, wishing the earth would swallow me.
A few meters away, Fran was laughing with Tucker near the bar. Honoring our silent pact, my friend kept throwing glances at me every so often, making sure my facade was still intact, that I hadn’t left yet. I gave her a vague wave to let her continue with her thing.
The cushion of the chair sank beside me. Someone had sat down. I didn’t bother turning my head. I kept my eyes fixed on my own sneakers, tired of the world.
“You hiding too?” asked a female voice, soft, tinged with light amusement.
I let out a dry, bitter laugh without looking away from the floor.
“I’m just tired of thinking,” I answered, leaning my head back on the chair, closing my eyes.
“And why do you say that?” the stranger insisted, with a genuine curiosity that caught me with my defenses down, worn out by the noise and the cheap gin.
I opened my eyes halfway, fixing my gaze on the ceiling, on the shadows cast by the party lights. The knot I had been swallowing for weeks in the library, the poison of every piece of advice, overflowed all at once. I no longer had any dignity left to protect in front of a stranger. In that moment, the mask of the perfect spectator who claps at happy endings cracked completely. The pressure in my chest was so great that the words came out in a poetic, painful torrent, like a scream I had carried stuck in my throat for months.
“Because I do a lot of things for people I care about,” I blurted out, and my voice sounded strange, broken, suspended in the dim corner. “All the time. Thinking I’m going to fill this stupid void that only one person can fill. And when I knew it… God, when I realized what it meant, I literally ran. I ran like a coward. And now… now I’m helping him conquer someone else. I give him advice. And every time I wake up, I feel emptier. I feel like I have nothing. Like I’ve been left with nothing.”
The silence that fell between us was thick, almost sacred in the middle of the party’s roar. I expected the girl to get up uncomfortably, but she didn’t. She took her time, weighing my ruins with a maturity that froze my blood.
“Sometimes we run from things that scare us because we think that way we keep control,” the stranger said, and her words sounded like an ancient proverb, wise and sharp. “But distance doesn’t erase the fire, it just leaves you watching the smoke from afar. If you spend your life building bridges for others, you’ll end up forgetting what it feels like to be on the other side. You can’t save someone from their own blindness if you refuse to look yourself. You have to stop being the collateral damage of a story you’re writing yourself.”
Her words hit me with the force of naked truth. I sat up slowly in the chair, shocked by the lucidity of her words, and finally looked at her directly. She had clear eyes with soft freckles adorning her gentle face, fixed on me with a strange compassion.
“What’s your name?” I asked, my heart beating in my throat.
The girl held my gaze for a second that stretched like gum. I saw her eyes travel from my face to the notebook sticking out of my bag, and then, with startling slowness, toward Logan’s figure still on the other side of the room. Recognition crossed her features like lightning. Her expression changed—a spark, as if an equation that had been incomplete had just solved itself—and then, slowly, a small smile formed. Not mocking. Not triumphant. Just the smile of someone who has just understood something they should have seen before. The compassion transformed into monumental surprise, followed by absolute understanding. She lowered her gaze for a moment. Murmured something under her breath, so low I almost didn’t hear it.
Before I could process the insult or the strangeness of her reaction, the girl stood up. She gave me a firm, brief squeeze on the shoulder—a physical contact that felt like both a goodbye and a warning at the same time—and walked away, disappearing into the crowd toward where Logan was.
I stayed completely petrified in the chair, the cold of her hand still marked on my clothes. The realization hit me like a bucket of ice water, paralyzing my lungs. It was her. It was Grace. I had fucked up. God, I had told everything to the only person who shouldn’t know.
I desperately searched for Fran with my eyes, eyes wide with panic, feeling like the floor of the party had dropped three inches without warning and that this time everyone was going to notice the blow.
I found him in the kitchen.
I didn’t look for him on purpose, or at least that’s what I told myself in the three seconds it took me to cross the entire party dodging people with my eyes fixed on the back of his neck. He was leaning on the counter with a beer in his hand and Garrett beside him saying something that made him laugh—that laugh of his I knew by heart even though I had spent months trying to forget it. I saw him and thought no and then yes and then I simply acted before either part of my brain could reach an agreement.
I didn’t say anything. I just grabbed his hand and pulled.
He cut off mid-laugh, surprised, and looked at me with that what the hell is happening expression I had never seen because I never did this kind of thing. I was the one who stayed still, the one who observed, the one who never pulled anyone anywhere.
“One moment,” I said without looking at him.
And Logan let me pull him. That was what surprised me later, thinking about it. That he let me pull him without asking where we were going.
The back porch was empty.
The music was muffled from inside like background noise that belonged to no one. I let go of his hand as soon as we stepped out. I turned around. He was looking at me with his hands now in his pockets, brow slightly furrowed, that posture of his of waiting without pressuring that I knew and that at this moment felt unbearable.
And everything I had kept in the place I didn’t allow myself to examine came out all at once, without order, without the rehearsed speech I hadn’t rehearsed, without anything except the raw truth that is the only thing left when you’ve carried it alone for too long.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Christmas. I’m sorry.”
“I was scared.” I cut him off, because if I didn’t say it now I never would. “I was scared of what you made me feel. Because what I felt for you was new, Logan. It was really new. I had never—” I stopped. Breathed. “I had never been in love. With anyone. In my whole life. And I know it sounds like a lie and I know you might not believe me and I know that after everything I did it doesn’t matter what I say now, but I wanted you to know. I needed you to know. That’s why.”
His voice sounded strange. Flat, controlled, the kind of voice people use when they’re holding on to something they don’t want to let go.
“I can’t keep being your friend,” I continued, because there was no turning back now and the precipice was there and I had already jumped. “I can’t. I can’t have another conversation with you and think I’ll never be yours. I can’t sit across from you in that library and listen to you talk about her and pretend that’s not killing me inside. I let you go and it was a mistake. The biggest mistake I’ve made in my life and I’m going to hate myself for what I’m about to say, I’m going to hate myself, but—”
“Stop,” he repeated, more tense. “Stop, you can’t do this.”
“I don’t want the Logan I could only sleep with,” the words came out on their own, one after another, without me being able to stop them. “I don’t want that. I want your fears. I want your achievements. I want all your phases, the ones I already know and the ones I don’t. I want to be with you. I want the real Logan, the whole one, not the one you gave me because that’s all we had agreed on. And I know it’s too late and I know you have Grace now and I know this is a disaster but I needed to tell you because I couldn’t anymore—” I broke there, just for a second, and pulled myself together. “I love you, Logan.”
The silence that followed lasted an eternity.
He had his jaw clenched, eyes fixed on me, and on his face there was something I couldn’t read, something that was too many things at once and none of them was what I needed it to be.
Then he shook his head. Slowly.
His voice came out different. Not flat. Broken at the edges, with something underneath that wasn’t cold but the complete opposite: an echo of old anger that scratched my ears.
“Why now?” he repeated, and this time there was something in his tone that closed my throat, a dull violence that made me take a step back. “Months. We’ve had months. I’ve had you in front of me every damn week, every afternoon in that library, and you said nothing. Nothing. You listened, you nodded, and you helped me to…” He cut himself off abruptly, running his hand through his hair with a frustration that seemed to hurt him physically. “And now. Now that there’s someone. Now that for the first time in a long time I have something that works, now you tell me this.”
“Don’t tell me you love me now.” He took a step toward me, cornering me against the cold wall. “Not after Christmas. Not after months of making me believe you were fine, that you were my friend, that everything was perfectly under control.”
“I know,” I said, and the frozen air tasted like bile. “I know and I’m sorry—”
“You’re sorry?” The laugh he let out had no humor in it. It was a dry, heartbreaking crack. “Do you have any idea what it is to carry you in your head for months without being able to get you out? Do you know what it is to try to build something with someone while there’s a part of you that keeps obstinately looking at the same place as always?” He stopped abruptly. As if he had just heard himself. As if he had just confessed a weakness he had sworn to bury. “No. I’m not doing this.”
“Always.” The word came out on its own, with the dead weight of something that had been without a place for too long. “Fucking always sabotaging yourself. And then you show up right when you feel like you’re losing my attention, right when there’s something to lose, and suddenly you can say everything.” A short pause. With the edge of a scalpel. “Where were you in January? Where was all this truth every afternoon you sat across from me and could have said something and said nothing?”
“Everyone’s scared.” He said it with an intensity that emptied my lungs. “I was scared too. You think I wasn’t? You think it was easy to come find you in that library and tell you it had to end while the only thing I wanted was for you to tell me no? You think it was easy to wait, week after week, for you to say something, anything, and hear nothing?”
I stayed completely still, feeling the floor giving way under my feet.
“I waited,” he said, and now his voice came out different, lower, more broken, with a helplessness that was almost unrecognizable coming from him. “I waited for you. And you said nothing. So I moved on. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Stay paralyzed in the cold waiting for you to decide if I mattered enough for you to risk it?”
“You know what’s the saddest part?” he said, and his voice came out so low I had to strain to hear it over the music filtering from inside. “That I don’t even know if this is real or if you just can’t stand that there’s something in my life that doesn’t revolve around you.”
The air disappeared. Not all at once. Little by little, like when something crushes your chest so slowly you don’t realize you’re suffocating until you can no longer breathe.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said, and he said it in a low voice, which was worse than if he had shouted it, much worse, because shouts dissolve but things said in a low voice stay engraved in your bones. “Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with you? You’ve spent months watching me build something with another person, sitting there, perfect, giving me advice, and at no point—not one—were you able to say anything. And now that it’s done, now that you can’t control it, you show up with this.”
I swallowed, feeling my throat bleeding inside.
“No?” His eyes on mine, direct, stripping me with no escape. “Then tell me how it is. Explain to me why now. Explain to me why not on Christmas, why not in January, why not any of the afternoons you sat across from me in that library and could have said it and didn’t.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had something broken inside that made it infinitely worse. “You can’t. Because the answer is that you waited until there was something to lose to decide that you cared.”
The words pierced me completely, leaving me in ruins. I said nothing. Not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I had too many and none were enough to save me. He kept looking at me with those eyes I knew by heart and that now held something I had never seen: pure pain, without any covering, an open and exposed wound that was unbearable to look at.
“And the worst part,” he continued, and now his voice came out completely broken, without edge, without anger, reduced to pure exhaustion and something that looked too much like surrender. “The worst part is that right now, listening to you, a part of me wishes all this were different. That I wish you had said this months ago. That I still…” He cut himself off. Shook his head, as if wanting to tear the thought out. “And that’s what I can’t forgive you for. That you come now and make me feel this now, when I can no longer do anything with it. When I no longer have the right. Tell me. What do you want from me?”
The silence that followed was the kind of silence that doesn’t resemble any other: an absolute void where you could hear the echo of our own disaster.
I saw on his face the exact moment his own words reached his chest. I saw him close his eyes for a second. I saw something cross his face that wasn’t anger, but its exact opposite: the pain of someone who has just hurt himself without meaning to in the act of destroying another person.
He extended his hand toward me. Slowly. Like someone who knows it’s already too late but can’t help the instinct to try to hold what is falling.
I stepped back one step. Just one. My body moving by pure survival reflex, because I no longer had anything left inside with which to decide anything.
He stayed with his hand halfway, suspended in the freezing air. Eyes fixed on me. And on his face there was something I couldn’t look at directly because if I looked I would understand things I couldn’t allow myself to understand here, on this porch, with everything too broken to touch without hurting us more.
“I’m sorry,” he said. In a low voice. And he meant it, that was the worst, he meant it completely. “I’m sorry.”
Without looking back. Without finishing the gesture. Without giving me anything to hold on to except that I’m sorry that was real and that changed absolutely nothing, and that somehow was the most devastating thing of everything he had said that night.
The door closed with a dull thud. The noise of the party returned from inside. The music. The voices. An insulting normality that kept turning while I stayed behind.
I stayed still for a moment I didn’t know how to measure. Then I sat on the porch step without deciding to, my knees giving way on their own under the weight of my own humiliation, hands tucked between my legs, feeling the cold of the wood seeping relentlessly through my clothes.
I don’t know how long I was on that step.
Long enough for the cold to stop biting me and start numbing me, which was worse, because numbness doesn’t hurt but it also doesn’t warn when it ends. Long enough for the music from inside to change twice and for someone to open the door at some point and close it again without saying anything.
Long enough for Fran to find me.
She didn’t announce her arrival. She didn’t say anything at first. She just came out, closed the door slowly behind her, and stood looking at me for a second before coming down the two steps and sitting beside me in the cold, without anyone asking her to.
She looked at me. I kept my eyes fixed on the emptiness of the yard.
“We’re leaving,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m fine,” I lied, and the word sounded like a glass breaking in the freezing air.
“Yeah.” She stood up and held out her hand with a firmness that didn’t admit reply. “We’re leaving.”
I didn’t have the energy to argue. I took her hand, let her pull me up, and followed her along the side of the house to the street, with the noise of the party fading like a distant echo behind us and closing around us like an ice coffin.
The car was parked halfway down the street. Fran opened the passenger door first, pushed me inside with that implacable efficiency of when she has made a decision and there’s no turning back, then walked around the hood and sat in the driver’s seat.
She didn’t start the engine. She turned toward me.
She looked at me with that expression I had only seen on her a few times in all the years we had been what we were. A look that contained no pity, but something much harder to bear: an absolute, clear presence that stripped me completely.
“Stop pretending to be strong,” she said softly. “You’re shaking.”
And something in those five words, in the absolute absence of judgment or drama, broke the last barrier I had left.
I cried. Not in the contained and strict way you allow yourself to cry when you want to save dignity. I cried for real, with that violent crying that is born in the pit of your stomach and, once it breaks open, has no off switch. I covered my face with my hands while my shoulders shook convulsively, letting out that horrible, sharp, undignified sound of someone who has spent months swallowing the rubble.
Fran didn’t pull away. She put a firm hand on my back and stayed there, still, letting me flounder.
And then I told her everything. Without order, without structure, without any of the neat, rehearsed versions with which I had tried to deceive myself in the library. I let it out in pieces, with loose threads, repetitions, and humiliating truths that made no sense outside my head. I told her about the STUPID months-long deal, about the rejection on the porch, and about the absolute certainty that he was right: he had waited for me and I had stayed sitting in my own script.
Fran listened to every word without interrupting me once. When I finished, the silence inside the car felt so heavy we could barely breathe.
“Just breathe,” she said. “In and out. I’m right here.”
I tried to imitate her, swallowing the cold air that burned my chest. After a long moment, Fran moved her hand from my back, looked me straight in the eyes, and asked me the question I feared most:
“Why didn’t you ever tell me you felt like this?” There was no reproach in her voice. It was the pure desolation of someone who would have walked into the fire for me if only I had told her I was burning. “You’ve spent months living in this official spectator car, breaking into pieces every night in our kitchen, and you made me believe everything was under control? I thought it was us against the world. I don’t understand at what point you decided you had to go through your worst winters alone.”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, and my voice hurt in my throat. “I don’t know, Fran. I was so scared that if I named it, it would become real…”
“I’m tired,” I added, and the words came out with the urgency of poison finding an exit. “I’m tired of feeling like this. Why do I feel so fucking sad? Why can’t I stop breaking? I prefer to be like before. I prefer to feel nothing. I prefer to go back to when all this didn’t matter to me, when I could watch other people’s love, clap from my corner, and stay in my place. I don’t want this. I don’t want this pain. Take my heart out, Fran, seriously, rip it out, because I can’t live like this.”
Fran looked at me, and her clear eyes filled with a sadness so deep it broke my soul. She leaned toward me, took my face between her hands with brutal tenderness, and forced me to hold her gaze.
“Listen to me carefully,” she said, and her voice trembled barely a millimeter. “I’m not going to take your heart out. And you’re not going back to being who you were before, because the one before was dead and was only pretending to breathe. It hurts like this because you’ve finally come to the surface, because risking loving someone cuts like fucking glass, but it’s the only way to know you’re alive.”
She paused, and her fingers wiped my tears with a softness that hurt more than the cold.
“Your mistake wasn’t falling in love with Logan, nor was it being afraid. Your mistake was believing that your only role in this world was to sit in the back row watching others be happy. You built yourself a whiteboard, a script, and stupid rules to protect yourself from life, and the only thing you achieved was becoming invisible in your own story. Logan didn’t see you because you decided not to let yourself be seen. You spent months giving him maps so he could find another person because you were too terrified to ask him to stay with you. You can’t spend your life being the architect of other people’s bridges and then cry because you stayed stranded on the shore. If you don’t dare to claim your space, the world is going to keep passing by, and you can’t get mad at it for giving you exactly the silence you yourself demanded.”
Each of her words entered clean, sharp, destroying the last vestiges of my lies. It was advice I didn’t want to hear, but it was the only truth that could save me from the bottom of the well.
“Logan is gone,” Fran continued, her voice now pure balm. “And it’s going to hurt. You’re going to wake up tomorrow and feel like your chest weighs a ton. But you’re not going to die of cold. Because love doesn’t end just because he didn’t want it. The love is still yours. Now put it somewhere else. Put it in yourself. Stop being the damn spectator of your own ruin.”
She looked at me for one more second and then, simply, opened her arms.
I went in without thinking, disarmed, stripped of all the defenses that had brought me here. I buried my face in her neck and she wrapped me with a force so solid that I felt, for the first time in nine months, that the ground beneath me stopped giving way. She pressed me against her chest, letting me cry out the last remains of my pride, and didn’t say anything else because she had already said everything. Because sometimes the only answer that exists is this: someone who stays with you in the middle of the rubble and doesn’t ask you to pull yourself together before it’s time.
Outside, the streetlights flickered in the gloom, oblivious to the collapse of my universe.
Inside, the sound of my crying slowly faded, transforming into a slow, heavy breathing, into a silence that finally brought some peace. Fran’s hand stroked my hair with a constant rhythm.
“I’m here,” she whispered against my forehead. “You’re not going to be left alone on the shore. I’m here.”
And I stayed like that, folded over myself in the passenger seat, with my heart completely shattered and, at the same time, in a small, imperceptible, and poetic way, a little less cold than ten minutes ago.
Which was, for that night, the only thing I needed to survive.
The Neighbourhood · I Love You. · Song · 2013
