no way back to eighteen 2 | lee anton
⟶ summary: in freshman year anton wrote you a letter he hoped would come true someday. two years after losing you, he returns to new york only to realize love doesn’t disappear just because people do.
˗ˏˋpairing: musician!anton x f!reader
❀ genre: slow burn, second chance (?), friends to lovers to enemies to…?
❀ word count: 23.4k
❀ staring: manon (24)- katseye, anton(23) + sohee (24)- riize, jake (25)- enhypen.
⟶ warnings: swearing, miscommunication, emotional immaturity, consumption of alcohol, toxic relationship dynamic, angst, unresolved tension, “right person, wrong time,” jealousy, please let me know if i’ve missed anything!
✎ ୭: after months of working on part two, she’s finally here! in all honesty, i wasn’t really planning on writing a second installment but there was a comment left on the first half that meant a lot to me, it’s been deleted but it stuck with me because the whole reason i wrote this was to deal with my own grief surrounding a relationship/what it did to me (this is way more romanticized than what i went though but it was healing nonetheless) seeing my words help someone else going through what i did meant a lot and pushed me to write the other half, so wherever you are, thank you!
♪: chasing shadows by alex warren, heal by monsta x, burning down by alex warren ft joe jonas, yard sale by alex warren, before you leave me by alex warren, fever dream by alex warren, lying by prettymuch ft lil tjay, phases by prettymuch, love me twice by kerr mercer, reading into it by aidan bissett, gone 2 long by prettymuch choir version, everything by alex warren, two years by rosé, losing you by wonho, once in a lifetime by john michael howell, strong by one direction, this town by niall horan, in other words by ed sheeran and heaven by ed sheeran.
NYU senior year; denial and bargaining
“I love you,” Anton hears you whisper, so quietly it drifts into the night.
His body feels heavy beneath yours, pleasantly warm from where you’re tucked against his chest, your bare leg thrown over his while the city glows faintly through the dorm window beside his bed. Somewhere outside, people are still celebrating graduation. New York continues moving around the two of you like tonight is ordinary, as though the world hasn’t just shifted between you both.
After years of dancing around it, you’re finally saying what you’ve both known to be true. Anton keeps his eyes closed anyway, relief washing through him so suddenly it almost makes him dizzy. The tension that’s lived in his chest for four years finally begins to loosen. Every fight, every jealous silence, every cruel thing neither of you could take back, every moment spent wanting each other so badly it became unbearable to stand in the same room without turning it into a war zone suddenly feels fixable.
Even now, after everything, Anton can still picture two of you actually trying this time instead of hiding behind rules and half-truths. You had looked at him like you believed him when he talked about returning to New York. It was as if part of you already lived inside the life he was describing.
A brownstone somewhere in Brooklyn with old hardwood floors and shelves overflowing with the books you swore you’d write someday. Your manuscripts scattered across the dining table while he sat nearby pretending to work on lyrics only to keep getting distracted watching you pace around the room talking to yourself whenever you got stuck on a chapter.
Anton has spent so much time loving you in secret that the idea of finally being allowed to do it openly still feels unreal.
He hears your breathing hitch unevenly above him then slowly, your body shifts. At first he barely notices it, assuming you’re only trying to get comfortable but the second your warmth begins slipping from his arms entirely his chest tightens instinctively.
The mattress dips softly beneath your weight as you pull away from him and Anton nearly opens his eyes right then, confusion flickering through him. Instead, he stays still and tells himself not to overthink it. You’ve both had a long emotional day. Graduation, the walk through campus, the conversation in the dorm room, maybe you just need a minute to breathe.
You just told him you loved him, people don’t say things like that before leaving.
The room falls quiet except for the faint rustle of fabric and your uneven breathing as you move around in the dark. Anton listens, suddenly hyperaware of every tiny sound filling the stripped dorm room around him. The sound of your zipper being pulled back up. The quiet sniffle you try unsuccessfully to smother. His stomach sinks slowly.
Anton’s fingers curl tighter against this bare thigh as understanding begins creeping in. His throat burns suddenly. You let him talk about the future, that thought hurts more than anything else. You let him sit there beside you on this bare mattress and talk about coming back to New York, about long distance, about trying for real this time while nodding softly like you believed in it too. You curled against his chest while he painted entire years in front of you so easily that he couldn’t fathom that there could ever be a version in time where the two of you didn’t end up together. Yet the whole time, you already knew you were leaving.
Still, some pathetic hopeful part of him refuses to accept it completely. Maybe you’re only overwhelmed? Maybe you just need space to think? Maybe in five minutes you’ll crawl back into bed beside him and laugh shakily about nearly leaving. Maybe tomorrow morning the two of you will wake up tangled together in this nearly empty dorm and start figuring it out one difficult step at a time like actual adults instead of scared college kids.
Anton wants that version of reality badly enough it physically hurts but the sound of the door unlocking shatters any hope immediately.
His heart seizes so suddenly he almost reacts, almost sits up and calls your name before stopping himself at the last second. Instead, he stays frozen in disbelief while light from the hallway spills across the room through his closed eyelids.
Anton hears you pause at the door, for one horrible second, hope surges through him all over again. Maybe you changed your mind? Maybe you’re looking back at him right now realizing this is insane, realizing you can’t spend four years loving someone only to disappear the second they finally ask you to stay.
Before Anton can even relish in this hope, he hears the door click shut. He peels his eyes open, expecting to find you standing by the door, looking apologetic for even considering it but you’re nowhere to be seen.
The dorm feels different intsantly. Your dress is gone from the floor beside the bed. His suit jacket no longer hangs loosely around your shoulders where it belongs. The room still smells like you, skin and perfume and the faint trace of champagne from earlier tonight but your absence settles over everything immediately, hollowing the space out so quickly it almost makes him nauseous.
He stares blankly at the ceiling for several long seconds before the first muffled sob reaches him through the door. Anton squeezes his eyes shut again.
You’re crying outside in the hallway.
The realization tears through him slowly because he doesn’t understand. He genuinely fucking doesn’t. You cried while kissing him tonight too. You cried when he talked about staying. You cried when he held you afterward like he never wanted to let go. Every part of you seemed to ache toward him just as desperately as he’s always ached toward you so why are you leaving?
His body shifts before he can think better of it, shoulders lifting slightly from the mattress, about to go after you but the movement dies halfway through because what would be even say? Stay? Choose me?
Haven’t I been asking you to do that for years already?
Anton drags a shaking hand over his face before finally sitting up, the bare mattress creaking softly beneath him. His eyes land on the suitcases by the wall waiting to be packed into cars tomorrow morning, he takes in the dorm that once held memories he never wanted to forget but now holds a memory he wishes he could scrub from his mind.
The future he spent the last hour imagining suddenly feels humiliating.
Outside in the hallway, your crying grows quieter then eventually your footsteps disappear entirely.
Anton doesn’t move for a long time after that. He stares blankly at the closed door for hours on end. Any second now, he thinks. Any second now you’ll come back. You’ll open the door crying harder this time, maybe angry at yourself, maybe embarrassed but you’ll come back. You’ll crawl into bed beside him again and admit you panicked. Tell him you got scared.
Anton would forgive you immediately. That’s the worst part, he knows he would.
His eyes flick toward his phone laying abandoned near the edge of the mattress. He reaches for it only to find nothing. No messages, no phone calls. Nothing. His thumb hovers uselessly over your contact for several long seconds before he locks the screen again and tosses it back onto the bed. Calling you now feels pathetic somehow, too desperate.
Still, he barely sleeps that night.
Every tiny sound from the hallway makes his heart skip a beat. Every burst of laughter drifting up from the street below tricks him into thinking maybe you came back with Manon or changed your mind after all. By four in the morning, Anton is still sitting awake against the headboard, fully dressed now, staring at his phone screen. You never call.
By the time sunlight starts creeping weakly through the dorm windows, something inside him feels broken beyond repair.
He finally gets out of his bed at 6:00 AM. He folds the last of his clothes in silence and shoves loose papers and notebooks into boxes until the room no longer resembles the place he spent the last four years of his life. Every now and then his eyes drift back toward the door without meaning to, some stupid hopeful part of him still expecting it to open.
Around noon, he texts his mom to come get him. His flight to Korea isn’t for another three days but Anton suddenly can’t stand the thought of remaining in New York any longer than necessary. The city feels wrong now, haunted by your memory.
By the time his mom pulls up outside Palladium Hall later that afternoon, Anton already has his suitcases stacked neatly beside the curb waiting for her. She takes one look at him through the rolled-down passenger window and immediately frowns. “Honey, did you sleep at all?” She asks softly.
Anton forces a small smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “A little.”
The drive back to Jersey passes mostly in silence. His mom talks occasionally about graduation, about how proud she is of him and how exciting Korea will be but Anton barely absorbs any of it. His forehead stays pressed against the cool window the entire ride while New York slowly disappears behind them.
The only thing he can think about is you.
Whether you made it home safely, whether you cried the entire car ride back home with your parents. Whether you regret leaving yet. Whether you’re staring at your phone right now debating calling him the same way he keeps debating calling you. You never do.
The first week after graduation passes strangely. Anton waits for you in humiliating ways. Every time his phone buzzes, his heart jumps before crashing again seconds later. He checks your socials more than he should, rereads old messages, scrolls through photos from sophomore year at three in the morning while sleep continues avoiding him completely.
Still, he rationalizes your actions. You’re overwhelmed, he initially thinks. Post-grad life is terrifying. Maybe you needed space to process everything first. Maybe the idea of long distance scares you. Maybe you regret leaving but don’t know how to come back after making such a dramatic exit.
Anton builds entire narratives around those possibilities because the alternative hurts too much to consider.
When he and Sohee finally leave for Korea, Anton almost breaks down in the middle of Newark airport after spotting a copy of Fourth Wing sitting in one of the bookstore displays near their gate. Your favorite series. The sight of it hits him so suddenly he has to stop walking.
Sohee notices immediately. “Anton?”
Anton shakes his head once, pressing the back of his hand hard against his mouth while tears burn violently behind his eyes. He feels ridiculous crying in the middle of an airport bookstore over a novel but suddenly all he can picture is you freshman year curled up in his dorm bed reading passages out loud while he pretended to be annoyed about it.
Anton looks away quickly, wiping at his face before the tears can fully fall. “Sorry. I’m fine.” he mutters hoarsely.
He isn’t but Sohee gives him a pass, he knows how deeply Anton loves you and how hard this week has been. When they finally arrive in Korea, Anton feels stagnant. The apartment he and Sohee move into is nice enough, modern and clean with huge windows overlooking the city skyline but Anton drifts through it.
Weeks pass in a blur of studio sessions, meetings, vocal training and late nights wandering convenience stores with Sohee after practice because neither of them knows how to cook yet. They make memories there despite everything…dumb ones. Sohee nearly setting the kitchen on fire trying to fry eggs at two in the morning, falling asleep on the studio couch during recording sessions, drinking cheap beer on the apartment balcony while the city shines beneath them.
Anton laughs sometimes, he even smiles but underneath all of it, something still feels off. Almost as if a part of him got left behind in New York, sitting on a bare mattress listening to you cry outside his door.
Two months after graduation, Anton still hasn’t deleted your contact. He still checks his phone before bed every night and still half expects to hear from you eventually. He decides to channel that grief into a song, forever immortalized.
Anton sits cross-legged on the floor of the apartment living room with his guitar resting across his lap while it rains outside. The entire apartment is dark except for the dim light glowing from his laptop. Sohee fell asleep hours ago but Anton hasn’t managed more than thirty minutes of rest at a time in weeks.
His mind keeps replaying the sound of the dorm door closing over and over and over again. It’s a torment he can’t escape, from the click of the lock to the sound of your tears. On nights when his mind decides to really mess with him all he can hear is your wshispered I love you.
Anton’s fingers brush absentmindedly against the guitar strings before a melody finally slips out. “Darling, handle me with care…”
The words leave him before he can think too hard about them. “Cover me in bubble wrap…”
Anton closes his eyes, letting the memory pull him under completely this time instead of fighting it. “I’m scared you really mean it…that you’re never coming back.”
He takes a minute to process and then suddenly the rest of the lyrics spill out almost violently, every thought he’s spent two months trying to rationalize clawing its way free all at once. By sunrise, the rough draft of Before You Leave Me sits unfinished in the notes app on his phone.
For the first time in weeks, Anton feels slightly lighter. Not at all healed but a tad bit lighter.
Unfortunately for him, the feeling doesn’t last long.
Seven months after graduation, your absence still lingers in every corner of Anton’s life like something stubbornly unfinished. Enough time has passed that the grief should’ve dulled by now, at least according to everyone around him.
He and Sohee’s schedules have become busier over the last five months, days bleeding into nights inside recording studios and rehearsal rooms while producers toss around words like potential and breakthrough. Sometimes Anton catches glimpses of himself in the booth glass during sessions and barely recognizes the person staring back. He’s thinner now, quieter too.
Not in an obvious enough way for people to worry long term but enough that Sohee notices every time Anton zones out halfway through conversations or instinctively checks his phone after long recording days despite there never being anything waiting for him there, you still haven’t called.
At first Anton convinced himself you only needed time. Then he convinced himself you were scared. Then he convinced himself maybe you thought reaching out would only make things harder for both of you. Now? Now he doesn’t know what to think anymore.
The song helps a little, Before You Leave Me ends up becoming the first thing Anton writes after graduation that actually feels honest instead of performative. Raw enough that even Sohee goes quiet the first time he hears it played back through the studio speakers. Their producers think it’s too honest so they shut down releasing it as his debut song.
Still, honesty doesn’t equal closure. If anything it just leaves Anton with more room to think. Which is exactly how he finds himself sitting across from Sohee seven months after graduation in some tiny restaurant in Seoul, half drunk off cheap beer after a brutal twelve hour studio session. The place is mostly empty save for a couple arguing near the back and an exhausted waitress wiping menus down behind the counter.
His phone rests face down beside his drink, untouched for once. Sohee eyes it anyway before taking another sip of beer. “You know…most people would’ve moved on by now.” He says carefully.
Anton looks up slowly from where he’d been absentmindedly picking at the label of his bottle. “What?”
Sohee shrugs one shoulder. “It’s been seven months.”
The number lands unpleasantly between them, seven months. Seven entire months since you slipped out of his arms in that dorm room and disappeared from his life. Anton hates hearing the time quantified out loud because it makes the situation sound pathetic in a way he’s been trying hard not to acknowledge.
“She made her choice when she walked away. At some point you have to stop waiting for her to change her mind.”
Anton’s jaw tightens immediately. “I’m not waiting.”
Sohee just looks at him flatly. The expression alone is enough to make irritation spark beneath Anton’s skin because they both know it’s a lie. He might not still be sitting around expecting your call every night the way he used to but some part of him is still caught between the version of you that loved him and the version that left.
“You don’t know her the way I do.” Anton mutters finally, looking away again.
Something flashes across Sohee’s face. Frustration? Anger? Exhaustion? Anton can’t quite place it. “Are you being deadass right now?” he asks with a short disbelieving laugh. “You think I didn’t know her too?”
“She was my friend too, Anton. Just because I didn’t fuck her like you did doesn’t suddenly negate four years of friendship.”
Anton’s head snaps up instantly. “It was more than sex and you know it.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” The words hit harder than Sohee probably intends.
Anton stares at him in disbelief for half a second before anger finally cracks through the exhaustion. “Fuck you.”
“Truth hurts.” Sohee fires back immediately. “You built this entire fantasy around someone who didn’t pick you and you still act like she’s some tragic victim in all of this.”
“She loves me.” Anton fires back because if he can’t argue anything else, at least he knows without a doubt you love him.
For a moment, Sohee just stares at him across the table then his expression softens into something almost pitying. “Then why did she leave?”
Anton opens his mouth immediately, instinctively ready with another excuse. Another explanation. She panicked, she was overwhelmed, long distance scared her, post-grad life hit too fast. The words rise automatically after months of repetition but for the first time since graduation, they stop before fully leaving his mouth.
Suddenly, sitting there across from hius best friend who is staring at him with such strong pity, Anton realizes something that makes his stomach twist violently. Every explanation he’s ever made for you still ends the same way: with you leaving.
No matter how many times he rewrites the story in his head, no matter how gently he frames your fear or how desperately he tries to rationalize your choices into something less painful, the truth remains ugly and unavoidable: you knew he loved you, you knew he wanted you. You knew he was willing to stay, to try, to build an entire future around the two of you if you’d only met him halfway and you still walked away.
Anton suddenly thinks back to that night, to the way he laid there afterwards imagining you’d come back through the door at any second while you cried somewhere out in the hallway. Even then, even at his absolute lowest, he spent more time trying to understand your pain than acknowledging his own.
Something bitter curls low in his chest. When had you ever done the same for him?
Sohee watches the shift happen in real time, watches something inside Anton finally begin to crack. Anton looks away first, jaw tightening faintly as he stares down at gis beer bottle in front of him.
For the first time in seven months, he lets himself consider the possibility that loving someone might not actually make the way they hurt you acceptable.
Year 1 postgrad; anger and avoidance:
Heartbreak sells surprisingly well.
Anton learns that somewhere between the fifth meeting with his producers and the hundredth comment under the teaser clip for his song Yard Sale. Apparently there’s something commercially irresistible about a twenty-three year old singing about destroying the remnants of a relationship he still clearly hasn’t recovered from.
His label calls it authenticity while online edits of Anton leaving bars at 1AM and staring moodily through car windows circulate alongside the same fifteen second snippet from the bridge.
I thought about just striking a match but it’s hard to burn a memory.
That line quite literally changed his life. Overnight, Anton Lee went from some random trainee posting song covers online to a name people suddenly know. His monthly listeners climb obscenely fast and strangers online begin dissecting his lyrics trying to figure out who they’re about.
The funniest part is, none of it feels artistic to Anton.
The song wasn’t written because he wanted to create something meaningful. It was written because he woke up one morning in the apartment he and Sohee shared and realized you were still everywhere despite being gone nearly a year. Your books remained stacked beside his desk and your birthday cards still sat tucked away inside drawers. He found one of the swim meet posters you’d made him shoved carelessly behind the couch one afternoon and nearly lost his mind over the fact that you somehow still occupied physical space in a life you no longer belonged to.
Anton briefly considered burning all of it. That was the thought that eventually led to Yard Sale. The problem wasn’t the objects themselves, it was what they carry. Every hoodie, every photograph, every annotated novel still holds traces of you and Anton has grown tired of living inside a mausoleum dedicated to someone who chose to leave him behind. Anger settles easier in his chest these days than sadness ever did. Anger lets him function. Anger lets him sleep. Anger lets him stop checking his phone every twenty minutes like some pathetic dog waiting by the door.
So when his management jokingly suggested holding an actual yard sale as promotion for the EP release, Anton eagerly nodded and said sure. That’s how he ends up hungover on the curb outside a rented Seoul bnb while strangers sift through the remains of your relationship.
The afternoon sun sits unpleasantly bright overhead, reflecting harshly against the lenses of his sunglasses while fans drift in and out of the house carrying armfuls of things that once belonged to some version of the two of you and promotional merch. Folding tables line the front yard cluttered with books, old clothes, random dorm decorations, vinyls, polaroids of New York, concert tickets and pieces of a life Anton spent four years building beside you.
Somewhere behind him, Yard Sale plays faintly through outdoor speakers while fans laugh excitedly amongst themselves. His management team had nearly combusted from excitement when clips from the event started circulating online earlier that morning.
Apparently people found the entire thing iconic, raw. A genius marketing move.
Anton finds it mildly horrifying but not enough to stop.
If anything, part of him almost enjoys the performance of it all. There’s something strangely cathartic about watching strangers carry pieces of you away in paper shopping bags like they’re purchasing clearance items instead of evidence that he once loved someone enough for them to have such a large impact on his life. Every sale feels oddly vindicating. Like proof he can let go too. Proof he’s finally doing what everyone spent the last year begging him to do: move on.
Still, every now and then the absurdity of the situation hits him hard enough to leave him briefly disoriented. It’s a strange thing, these people don’t actually know what they’re touching.
The oversized gray hoodie some girl happily ties around her waist used to smell like your perfume for months because you constantly stole it during late-night study sessions. The scratched vinyl somebody buys for one hundred thousand won once played in the background while the two of you danced drunkenly around his dorm sophomore year after Manon snuck alcohol into the building.
One guy walks off with a chipped ceramic mug you bought from some tiny bookstore café in Brooklyn and Anton has to physically stop himself from saying be careful with that.
None of it should matter anymore, that’s the entire point. His fans laugh excitedly while digging through boxes labeled with sharpie slogans from his song: ALL THE LOVE IS GONE. NAME YOUR PRICE. YOU CAN HAVE MY PAIN.
Anton glances up to find a girl around his age holding one of the physical EP copies against her chest while nervously extending a pen toward him. “Yeah, sure.”
“You saved my life with this song by the way,” she blurts quickly while he signs his name across the cover.
Anton’s hand pauses briefly against the glossy paper before continuing the signature anyway. “Oh…thank you.”
The girl’s shoulders relax almost instantly. “I’m serious, my boyfriend and I broke up a few months ago and I swear I had your song on repeat every night.” She laughs faintly, embarrassed. “It just made me feel less alone, I guess.”
Something in Anton’s chest twists unpleasantly at that. Despite everything, despite the bitterness that’s settled into him over the last year and the resentment he still carries around like a second skin some days, comments like these still affect him more than he expects. Maybe they always will.
He knows exactly what it feels like to become unnoticeable to yourself after heartbreak. To replay the same conversations over and over until your own thoughts begin sounding hostile, until the memories rot inside your head. To feel humiliated by how much you miss someone who couldn’t be bothered to consider your emotions when theu left.
If his music softens that loneliness for someone else, even briefly, he’s grateful for it. He just hates that he had to endure it deeply enough to write the songs in the first place.
The girl smiles as he hands the EP back to her. “Please never stop sharing your words.”
Something unexpectedly warm settles in Anton’s chest at that. Not enough to erase everything else but enough that he finds himself nodding genuinely instead of offering the practiced half-smile he’s spent most of the afternoon hiding behind. “I’ll try,” he says quietly.
The girl beams one final time before disappearing back into the crowd clutching the signed EP against her chest. Anton watches her go briefly before another album gets slid toward him, then another. The line continues moving steadily while sunlight crawls lower across the street.
A few fans drift out of the house laughing amongst themselves carrying old hoodies and records beneath their arms. One guy excitedly shows his friend a polaroid he’d managed to snag from one of the tables and Anton immediately looks away before he can accidentally recognize which memory it came from. That’s become another skill lately, looking away.
Anton looks up distractedly before his gaze lands on the object in her hands and immediately stills.
A worn copy of 1984 stares back at him. The edges of the pages are bent from overuse, colorful tabs sticking out messily along the sides while familiar handwriting litters the margins in faded pen. Anton recognizes it instantly because he used to watch you annotate books for hours sprawled across his bed, muttering complaints whenever authors disappointed you.
For one brief horrible second, the noise around him fades completely and suddenly he’s nineteen again watching you sit cross-legged beside his dorm window arguing passionately about symbolism while sunlight spills across your face. He remembers teasing you for taking fiction too seriously only for you to snatch the book away from him looking scandalized.
“Literature matters, Anton.”
The memory hits so vividly it almost knocks the breath from his lungs. These were real memories once. Not lyrics, not branding, not fan theories or spotify streams. Just two stupid college kids building a life around each other so naturally Anton genuinely believed there would come a day where the timing was finally right.
Now strangers rummage through those remnants like they’re vintage thrift finds.
Anton stares at the novel a second too long and something uncomfortable twists low in his chest because unlike the hoodies and polaroids and random dorm decorations scattered across the tables, this was never supposed to end up out here.
He doesn’t even remember packing it into the boxes management hauled over this morning. Somewhere between the hangover and the cameras and the endless stream of people picking apart the remains of his relationship, it must’ve slipped through unnoticed. His first instinct is immediate and visceral: take it back.
The thought slams into him so quickly it nearly startles him. He wants to snatch the book from the girl’s hands and shove it somewhere nobody else can touch it, somewhere hidden and safe. The novel holds too much of you inside it to belong to strangers. Your thoughts fill nearly every margin, your tiny sarcastic comments squeezed between paragraphs, entire pages dedicated to debates you went on and on about at two in the morning while he fought sleep beside you.
There’s probably an old receipt tucked between chapters because you constantly used random things as bookmarks instead of actual bookmarks like a psychopath. The realization makes his heart tighten painfully beneath his ribs. This feels different than selling clothes or records or posters. This feels like giving away pieces of your mind.
The thought unsettles him enough that for half a second he almost reaches for the book. Too cruel, something inside him whispers. Anton nearly laughs at himself.
Wasn’t you telling him you loved him before leaving anyway cruel? Wasn’t spending the better part of a year pretending he could somehow rationalize your absence into something less painful cruel? Wasn’t your silence that followed cruel too? The fact that while Anton sat awake writing songs about you, you somehow managed to continue existing beyond him?
Anton suddenly feels exhausted by his own inability to let you become the villain in peace.
The girl shifts awkwardly in front of him, clearly oblivious to the war unraveling silently behind his sunglasses. “Uh…if that’s okay?” she asks hesitantly, holding the book out toward him again.
Anton blinks once before forcing a smile back onto his face, something carefully practiced and detached.
He uncaps the marker slowly, leaning forward against the table as he finally takes the novel from her hands. “Where do you want me to sign?”
The girl points vaguely toward the inside cover and Anton nods once before lowering his gaze back to the page. The girl thanks him profusely afterward, clutching the novel against her chest before disappearing back toward the house looking thrilled by her purchase. Anton watches her go longer than necessary.
The voice pulls him out of it. Anton looks up just as his manager David steps onto the curb beside him with a grin stretched broadly across his face, phone in hand displaying what looks like social media metrics. Sohee trails behind him more slowly carrying another box of EPs beneath one arm.
“People are eating this up,” David says, almost laughing as he turns the screen toward Anton. “The clips already passed a million views.”
Anton glances briefly at the screen, edits stitched together of the yard sale and of him signing memorabilia.
These are literally the artifacts of my failed relationship.
The thought settles unpleasantly in his stomach but Anton only leans back slightly against his seat and gives an easy shrug instead. “Guess public humiliation’s good promo.”
David barks out a laugh immediately. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
He slaps Anton hard on the shoulder before disappearing back toward the house again, already answering another phone call halfway through the yard. Anton watches him go for a second before exhaling quietly through his nose.
Beside him, Sohee lowers himself onto the empty seat beside him with considerably less enthusiasm than the rest of the team surrounding them. He sets the box of EPs down between them and begins organizing copies into smaller piles while Anton recaps the marker in his hands. For a minute neither of them says anything.
The speakers continue playing songs from his EP somewhere behind them while people drift in and out of the house. “We should do something tonight. Celebrate your first EP release properly.” Sohee says eventually.
Anton pushes his sunglasses higher up the bridge of his nose before glancing sideways at him. “Sure. Let’s go clubbing.”
Sohee snorts immediately. “I was thinking more like kbbq and shots at home.”
Anton laughs quietly under his breath. “That sounds boring.”
“You say that now but by midnight you’ll be drunk out of your mind and nauseated.”
Anton reaches for another EP and flips it open lazily. “Please, I’ve got the tolerance of a man made of steel.”
Sohee shakes his head though there’s a faint smile tugging briefly at the corner of his mouth. It fades just as quickly though, his expression settling into something more hesitant afterward. “Are you okay?” he asks finally.
Anton looks over at him properly this time, confused enough that his brows pull together slightly above the rim of his sunglasses. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Sohee hesitates. “You’re selling your stuff, Anton…I get it if this is…a lot.”
Anton stares at him for a second before scoffing quietly and looking away again. “When I’m depressed over her everyone tells me I need to move on.” He uncaps the marker again with more force than necessary. “Now I’m finally doing it and suddenly that’s a problem too?”
Sohee opens his mouth slightly before stopping himself because no, this doesn’t actually look like moving on. It looks like hiding.
It looks like Anton taking every ugly emotion he still carries around and drowning it beneath loud music and alcohol and productivity until he no longer has to sit alone with himself long enough to admit he’s still hurting. Sohee knows that. He’s known it for months now every time Anton stumbles home at four in the morning smelling like vodka. Still, selfishly, Sohee prefers this version of him anyway.
He prefers the Anton who laughs again. The one who jokes with producers and drags Sohee out drinking until sunrise and actually leaves the apartment instead of sitting silently in dark rooms replaying your memories like a punishment. Angry Anton might be reckless but at least he feels alive again. That version from a few months ago scared him more.
Sohee exhales quietly instead of pushing the argument further. “Sorry,” he mutters, nudging the box of EPs toward him slightly. “Forget I said anything.”
Anton doesn’t respond right away. He just lowers his head again and signs another album.
A few months after the EP release, Anton’s life settles into something strangely hollow. Not bad, necessarily just busy enough that he rarely has to sit still with himself long enough to notice how numb he’s become.
The success of his EP snowballs faster than anyone anticipated and suddenly Anton’s days are swallowed by recording sessions, interviews and endless meetings with people who speak about his heartbreak like it’s a lucky career breakthrough instead of the thing that cracked his life clean down the middle.
His anger fades eventually, eroded down into something more…paralyzing. That version of Anton who spent nearly a year furious at you for leaving becomes harder to maintain over time. Anger requires energy, it requires commitment. Eventually even resentment grows tired of itself. By the time summer bleeds into fall, Anton mostly just feels detached from everything around him.
The partying slows down around then too. One day Anton just realizes he’s exhausted by the performance of it all. Pretending requires too much energy these days. Anton still laughs though. Still works, still spends long nights producing music because it’s the only thing that consistently quiets his thoughts long enough for him to breathe properly. From the outside, he probably looks better now than he did during the anger phase of everything. Less volatile. The truth is he mostly just feels empty.
It’s close to midnight when Anton makes it home, exhaustion plaguing him after spending nearly ten straight hours at the studio working on tracks that probably won’t even make the album. He barely gets halfway through kicking his shoes off before his phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He pulls it out to look at the caller ID, Manon. A small smile pulls briefly at the corner of his mouth before he answers.
Anton snorts quietly, tossing his keys onto the kitchen counter before putting the phone on speaker. “Big shot? That’s a new one.”
He hears her hum in response. “Gotta keep you on your toes.”
Anton laughs softly under his breath as he grabs a water bottle from the fridge. He and Manon never really stopped talking after graduation. Maybe there were periods where life got busy or time zones made things difficult but somehow they always found their way back into conversation eventually.
Sometimes she calls him while rushing through airports on the way to another fashion event halfway across the world. Other times Anton calls her from studio couches at three in the morning while producers argue in the background over tracklists. Their friendship survives mostly because neither of them asks too many dangerous questions.
“How’s the celebrity life treating you?” Manon asks while Anton leans back against the kitchen counter.
Anton twists the cap off his water bottle slowly. “It’s…overwehlming but good, I think.” He pauses briefly before letting out a quiet laugh. “Still weird hearing people recognize me in public.”
Manon hums quietly, not saying much in response. The conversation settles easily after that, slipping into a rhythm only old friendships really manage. Manon tells him about a brand sponsored after party and the celebrities she met while Anton absentmindedly peels at his water bottle label.
For a little while, things feel normal but then somewhere through the phone, a male voice drifts faintly into the background. “Hey, dinner’s here.”
Anton barely reacts at first. He assumes she has company over, Manon is constantly surrounded by people these days anyway. Still, something about hearing an unfamiliar man’s voice in her apartment…that she shares with you catches his attention just enough that he glances down at his phone briefly.
“Oh my Gosh, finally,” Manon says away from the speaker before returning. “Sorry, continue.”
Anton snorts quietly. “Meret Manon, do you have a boy in your room? Am I interrupting something?”
Manon lets out a loud incredulous laugh immediately. “Puh-lease. I like my men older and slightly mean, you know that.”
Anton smiles faintly to himself, twisting the cap of the water bottle between his fingers. “So you do have somebody over.”
“I have food over,” she corrects.
In the background, the same male voice speaks again, quieter this time. “Do you mind if I throw this in the wash?”
“Sure, I have some stuff in the dryer though,” Manon mutters away from the speaker.
Anton huffs out another quiet laugh. “Wowww, he’s even doing his own laundry load? What, is he sleeping over too?”
“Well not in my bed at least.”
Silence floods the line quickly. Anton stills against the kitchen counter while realization washes over him. On the other end of the phone, Manon seems to process what she just implied at exactly the same time he does because her breathing catches sharply. “Oh fuck,” she mutters.
Manon exhales quietly through the speaker, the sound heavy with regret. “Anton–”
“Is she seeing someone?” The question leaves him before he can stop it.
His voice sounds calmer than he feels. Anton stares blankly out at the reflection of himself in the dark apartment window while his grip tightens unconsciously around the water bottle in his hand.
On the other end of the line, Manon says nothing. That silence tells him everything before she even answers. Anton closes his eyes briefly because somehow this hurts more than he imagined it would. Not because you’re dating someone else per se. Logically, he understands this was always going to happen eventually. A year has passed since graduation, the two of you live on opposite sides of the world now. He knows life keeps moving whether people are emotionally prepared for it or not.
Still, some pathetic part of him secretly believed you’d stay suspended in the same grief he’s spent the last year trapped inside.
“Manon,” he says quietly after the silence stretches too long.
“You weren’t supposed to find out like this.”
The confirmation knocks the air out of his lungs. Anton lets out a slow breath through his nose before leaning further back against the kitchen counter, his eyes drifting shut again. For one humiliating second, his mind immediately betrays him with images he never asked for. You curled beside somebody else in bed. Another man existing comfortably inside spaces Anton once imagined himself growing old inside. Somebody else hearing your laugh at midnight. Somebody else learning all the little things Anton used to think belonged only to him.
Suddenly every fear he spent months outrunning comes clawing violently back to the surface all at once. Maybe loving somebody else is easier for you than loving Anton ever was. Maybe you don’t panic and pull away every time things become too real with this guy. Maybe you finally became the calmer, softer version of yourself Anton spent four years fighting for. Maybe the problem was never timing…maybe it was just him.
“What’s his name?” Anton hears himself ask eventually.
Jake. The name feels painfully ordinary. Not some larger-than-life replacement worthy of stealing you away. Not someone impossible to compete against. Just some random man, it almost makes him nauseous.
“He’s nice,” Manon adds carefully after another long stretch of silence. “He treats her really well.”
The statement almost feels insulting in ways Manon clearly doesn’t intend. Anton treated you well too.
He loved you for years in every exhausting way a person possibly could. He waited for you, defended you, rearranged entire pieces of himself trying to become someone easier for you to choose. He sat there on that bare dorm mattress and offered you every vulnerable piece of him and you still left him anyway.
Anton laughs quietly under his breath, the sound hollow enough that Manon immediately goes silent again.
“Well,” he says eventually, voice flatter than intended. “Good for her.”
He means for the sentence to sound indifferent, instead it comes out exhausted.
Manon hears it too. Anton can tell by the way she goes quiet afterward, as if she’s suddenly become hyperaware of every word leaving her mouth. Guilt settles awkwardly between them after that. The conversation limps forward for another ten minutes anyway, both of them pretending things haven't shifted.
By the time they hang up, Anton feels even more numb. Somewhere in another country, you’re eating takeout with another man while Anton stands here trying not to imagine what your life looks like now that it no longer includes him.
The thought settles unpleasantly beneath his ribs because this is the first real proof he’s gotten that your world continued forward without him. The realization haunts him more than he expects it to.
After that, distancing himself from Manon happens slowly enough that Anton almost convinces himself it isn’t intentional at first. He takes longer replying to messages, misses calls occasionally because he’s “busy” at the studio. Sometimes he even types responses out only to leave them unsent because suddenly talking to her feels dangerous in ways it never used to. Manon becomes accidental collateral damage.
Every conversation now carries the possibility of hearing your name beside someone else’s. Jake said this. Jake liked that restaurant. Jake came over again. Anton realizes quickly that he genuinely cannot survive listening to you build a life with another person before he’s emotionally ready for it so he avoids the possibility entirely.
At first Manon tries to push through it anyway. She sends him random videos from work trips and stupid memes at three in the morning like nothing’s changed. Anton responds less and less each time. Eventually weeks start passing between conversations instead of days.
She stops calling as often after a while too.
One night Sohee casually asks why he and Manon never talk anymore and Anton immediately changes the subject so abruptly it leaves an uncomfortable silence hanging over the apartment afterward. Sohee doesn’t press but Anton catches him watching him strangely for the rest of the night anyway.
The truth is Anton misses her terribly. He misses it all. Not just you either but the version of his life attached to New York. The version where his phone buzzed constantly with messages from Manon and Sohee and you arguing about dinner plans or edits on your manuscripts or whose turn it was to buy snacks from the campus convenience store for movie nights.
Avoidance becomes easier than confronting that grief directly.
Months pass like that. Winter settles over Seoul by the time Anton fully realizes how isolated he’s allowed himself to become. His career continues climbing regardless. More songs, more interviews, more fans.
One night after coming home from another schedule he barely remembers participating in, Anton finds himself sitting alone at his desk while the apartment remains dark around him. His eyes drift absentmindedly toward the bottom drawer and before he can stop himself, he pulls it open.
Your handwriting greets him immediately: birthday cards, folded sticky notes, random scraps of paper covered in rushed penmanship he would recognize anywhere. Slowly, Anton picks one of the notes up between his fingers: don’t forget to eat before practice idiot ! ♡
Another one reads: you’re going to make something incredible one day. i know it.
There are years worth of these tucked inside the drawer. Encouragement written during finals weeks, tiny affirmations slipped into his backpack before meets, birthday cards filled with rambling emotional paragraphs only you would write.
Anton sold almost everything else, the hoodies, the records, the physical evidence of your relationship he convinced himself he no longer needed but somehow he kept the words.
The realization settles heavily over him because somewhere across the world you’ve moved on with your life while Anton still sits here in the middle of the night rereading proof that once upon a time, you loved him enough to remind him to eat before swim meets.
A hollow laugh slips quietly out of him before he can stop it. “Guess I’ll sell these when you win a Pulitzer, make a fortune off that too.”
The joke lands weakly in the silence. Anton sighs before carefully placing every note back inside the drawer instead of throwing them away.
Year 2 postgrad; acceptance and relapse:
Eventually, with lots of time, touring and therapy Anton Lee has finally decided to leave you as a ghost in his past.
Not forgotten exactly, Anton doesn’t think he’ll ever fully forget you. You were too woven into the fabric of his life to pretend you became meaningless after enough time passed. Four years worth of memories don’t simply dissolve because a relationship failed before it ever had the chance to properly exist. Rather, he now knows there’s a difference between carrying someone with you and allowing them to consume you whole.
Healing happens rather mundanely for him, ghere’s no dramatic breakthrough moment where he wakes up one morning suddenly free of you, it’s less cinematic. One day he realizes he’s gone nearly an entire afternoon without thinking about you. Another day he hears somebody mention New York and his chest doesn’t tighten painfully on instinct anymore. Slowly, life stops revolving around your absence.
Therapy helps more than Anton initially expects it to. He hates it at first, hates sitting in a cold office while a stranger dissects emotions he spent years trying to outrun through music and alcohol and work. For the longest time he kept trying to frame the breakup like some tragic impossible love story ruined by bad timing and fear but eventually even Anton grew tired of romanticizing his own pain.
The truth was much uglier and simpler than that: you hurt him.
Not accidentally, not in some beautiful poetic way destined to inspire albums and interviews and think pieces online about heartbreak. You hurt him genuinely and deeply and for a long time Anton kept refusing to let himself acknowledge the full extent of it because loving you still felt tied to protecting you somehow.
Eventually though, he finally comes to terms with the fact that what happened between the two of you wasn’t fair. Yes, he became toxic during senior year, Anton can admit that now with enough time between himself and the version of him who spent months angry and reactive. There were moments near the end where he became manipulative in ways he isn’t proud of, where resentment started bleeding into every interaction between the both of you, until loving each other became exhausting but even then Anton still chose vulnerability.
That’s the part he keeps circling back to in therapy sessions and sleepless hotel nights staring at unfamiliar ceilings. At the very end of everything, when it would’ve been easier to shut down completely or laugh in your face, Anton still sat there on that bare dorm mattress and offered you every honest piece of himself. He asked you to stay. He told you he loved you then you left anyway.
For a long time Anton desperately needed there to be a reason large enough to justify that kind of heartbreak. Something catastrophic or impossible to overcome; distance, timing, fear. Anything. Ultimately though, he had to accept the possibility that maybe there never was some grand explanation waiting to be uncovered. Maybe you were simply two young people who loved each other deeply and still couldn’t make it work. Oddly enough, that realization frees him more than it destroys him.
By year two, Anton’s life finally starts resembling something stable again. His career explodes in ways he and Sohee nevr fully anticipated during those early studio sessions in Seoul. The success from Yard Sale snowballs into bigger opportunities, bigger crowds, bigger expectations. Before You Leave Me eventually gets released too after years of label hesitation and somehow that song climbs even faster than the others. People cling to it viciously online, turning lyrics Anton once wrote half-delirious at four in the morning into captions and comments beneath videos of their own heartbreak.
Sometimes it still unsettles him a little, the way strangers consume pieces of his grief like entertainment but he’s learned not to resent it anymore. If anything, Anton feels strangely grateful these days knowing something that once nearly destroyed him managed to become comfort for somebody else.
The strangest part is that success no longer feels tied entirely to pain anymore either. For the first time since graduation, Anton starts writing songs that aren’t solely about surviving you. Some are still about love, of course. He doesn’t think he’ll ever stop writing about love in some capacity but the desperation slowly fades from his work. His upcoming album becomes less about heartbreak and more about what comes after it. What remains once the grief settles enough for you to finally examine the shape it left behind.
Anton himself feels softer too. The partying and late nights have stopped completley. He just grows tired of waking up hungover in unfamiliar apartments beside people he doesn’t remember speaking to. These days he prefers quieter things. Studio nights with Sohee, solo walks through cities during tour stops, reading in hotel rooms while fans scream his name somewhere beneath balcony windows outside.
For the first time in years, Anton finally feels like a person again instead of an open wound. That doesn’t mean you disappear completely though. Sometimes, usually late at night after interviews or long rehearsals, Anton still catches himself wondering whether you’ve ever heard his music. He knows you avoid searching his name online. Manon let that slip months ago during one of their carefully navigated conversations before immediately changing the subject afterward.
Other times, Anton finds himself searching your name instead. Not obsessively the way he used to. Every few months he checks the New York Times best sellers list almost absentmindedly, eyes scanning for your name among authors and essayists and novelists. He never finds it but he keeps looking anyway because even after everything, Anton still believes you’ll get there eventually.
You always said you would.
Despite how badly the two of you failed each other romantically, despite the resentment and grief and silence that followed graduation, Anton never stops rooting for you. You were friends once and friends never stop rooting for their friends.
Somewhere along the way, he and Manon eventually find their way back to each other too. Neither of them ever properly addresses the distance that formed between them after Jake. They don’t really need to, both of them understand what happened without forcing each other to relive it aloud.
Manon becomes cautious with your name after that, Anton notices immediately. She stops casually bringing you up in conversation, sometimes he even catches her hesitating slightly before mentioning New York altogether. Eventually Anton tells her she doesn’t have to do that. “I’m okay, Manon…seriously” he says softly one night while she calls him from the backseat of some car in Switzerland.
He truly does mean it. Not in the sense that seeing you again wouldn’t still affect him, Anton isn’t naive enough to believe six years worth of love and grief could evaporate completely but you no longer feel like something actively destroying him either.
Which is probably why Anton agrees to the New York interview in the first place. His publicist pitches it casually during a meeting about the rollout for his first studio album. A weekend some change in the city, a few interviews, some promotional shoots and a live acoustic performance tied to the release. Should be wasy enough.
Part of him always knew returning would feel strange but another part genuinely believed he’d have more time before confronting it.
“You don’t have to decide now. We can always move the press run somewhere else.” David tells him, glancing up from his tablet.
Anton stays quiet for a second longer than necessary before exhaling softly through his nose and nods once. “No, it’s fine. I’ll do it.”
Truthfully, Anton thinks maybe it’ll be good for him. Therapy has taught him enough to recognize avoidance when he sees it and whether he likes admitting it or not, New York has remained the final untouched piece of his grief. Maybe going back is the last step.
Once it’s agreed upon, his team starts making the necessary phone calls and arraignments. Flights are booked and hotels are confirmed. Unfortunately for him however, he has to go alone. Sohee is somewhere in Australia finishing the international leg of his own tour following the release of his sophomore album. It had dropped a few months prior and unexpectedly performed even better than Anton’s first EP.
The flight to New York is oddly reflective. Somewhere over the Atlantic while most of the cabin sleeps around him, Anton sits awake with noise-cancelling headphones hanging loosely around his neck, staring absently out the window at nothing but dark sky.
Two years ago, the idea of returning to New York felt impossible. Back then he genuinely believed the city itself had become uninhabitable for him. Therapy gradually forced him to confront how much power he’d handed grief over his life after graduation.
Now though, sitting thirty thousand feet above the ocean with his first album on the verge of release and a life that finally feels stable beneath him, Anton mostly just feels thoughtful.
There’s nervousness, of course. He doesn’t think anyone could return to the place they experienced their first real heartbreak completely unaffected but it no longer feels like fear. That distinction matters more to him than he expects. Fear would imply the city still owns some part of him. It does not.
By the time the plane finally lands the following evening, exhaustion clings heavily to him but the moment Manhattan begins materializing outside the tinted car windows on the drive from JFK, his spirit lifts a bit.
His manager talks occasionally from the passenger seat about tomorrow’s schedule but Anton barely absorbs any of it. Every few blocks, another memory rises instinctively before fading again just as quickly. A ramen spot he and Sohee used to frequent after music theory. A convenience store where Manon once forced Anton to buy her food at 2AM because she had run out of dining dollars and he was the “rich” one of the friendgroup. The downtown bar where the two of you spent the entirety of sophomore-year pretending not to flirt while Manon watched in open disbelief from across the table.
It’s strange how memory works. Anton spent years convinced returning here would feel catastrophic only to realize grief can coexist with nostalgia.
When he and his team finally arrive at the hotel, restlessness settles into him almost immediately. They breeze through check-in and while Anton is examining his maps app trying to figure out what food places are nearby, he realizes alarmingly how close by they are to NYU.
He tries his best to ignore it. He showers, unpacks, flips mindlessly through television channels while messages from management continue flooding his phone regarding tomorrow’s interviews but none of it helps. Anton realizes quickly he cannot return after all this time only to lock himself inside some luxury suite pretending he doesn’t care.
Around 8PM against everyone’s better judgment, Anton grabs his leather jacket from the chair near the bed and heads downstairs. His bodyguard looks deeply unimpressed the second Anton appears in the lobby pulling his watch onto his wrist. “Absolutely not.”
Anton snorts softly while fastening the Lange & Söhne Odysseus into place. “I’m just gonna walk around Manhattan, no biggie.”
“It’s New York. That’s basically morning here.” He counters.
His manager pinches the bridge of his nose immediately. “Anton–”
“I’ll text.” Anton interrupts before either of them can fully start. “Promise.”
Neither looks convinced but reluctantly let him go mostly because Anton has become annoyingly good at slipping away whenever he wants space badly enough.
When he finally makes it outside, he just stands there beneath the hotel awning watching the city move around him. He takes in the place he once called home with a faint smile gracing his lips before setting off.
He walks without much direction at first, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets while familiar streets slowly unfold around him piece by piece. Some storefronts changed entirely over the years while others remain painfully identical.
A tiny pizza place downtown reminds him of drunkenly splitting slices with you on the curb at one in the morning after a party neither of you actually wanted to attend. Everywhere he turns, another version of himself surfaces briefly then disappears again.
In time, sadness settles over him. He recalls what his therapist told him during one particularly difficult session after he admitted feeling guilty whenever he missed you.
“You’re allowed to mourn things that were real to you. Healing doesn’t require pretending you never loved them.” She had said gently.
He takes a deep breath and lets himself feel the entirety of his emotions. He lets himself miss the version of his life that existed here before everything unraveled. The friendships, the tiny apartment parties, the stupid late-night walks back from campus. The years where loving you still felt hopeful instead of exhausting.
By the time 10PM rolls around, Anton feels consumed by his emotions. He walks aimlessly until he finds himself standing in front of phebes. He smiles faintly at the neon sign, another relic from his past.
Suddenly, a drink sounds lovely. Whether in memory of you or simply to drown you out, he’s not sure. After another moment passes, he pushes the door open.
For a second, you just stare at him.
Anton is physically here, seated beside you at a sticky downtown bar like the last two years never happened. “A-Anton?” you manage finally, your voice embarrassingly thinner than intended.
His mouth curves slightly at the way you call out to him. “The one and only,” he says, the response corny enough that under different circumstances you probably would’ve rolled your eyes. Instead your stomach drops so violently you almost feel nauseous.
Two years. Two years of forcing his memory into smaller and smaller corners of your mind, convincing yourself that choosing a life without him had been the right thing to do and somehow seeing him for the first time in years feels worse than every version you refused to imagine because Anton isn’t standing in front of you angry or devastated the way some selfish part of you always pictured him.
You suddenly become horribly aware of yourself. The empty shot glasses beside your elbow. Your still-damp cheeks. The fact that less than an hour ago you were crying hard enough to choke over a letter he wrote at eighteen.
Humiliation crawls hot beneath your skin.
Even worse, he notices it. Anton’s gaze flickers briefly toward the cluster of empty shot glasses near your hand before returning to your face again. Not judgmental exactly, which somehow makes it even more unbearable. Back in college, Anton had always possessed this irritating ability to look through you and know exactly what you’re saying without having to open your mouth.
You suddenly wonder how much he can still read now. The thought makes you straighten instinctively against the barstool, fingers curling tighter around the edge of the counter as if better posture might somehow disguise the fact that your entire life imploded less than two hours ago.
You steal a glance at him and slowly realize with a strange wave of panic that you can’t read him anymore. It’s an almost sobering thought.
“You look surprised,” Anton says after the silence stretches a little too long.
You let out a small disbelieving laugh. “You think?”
His smile pulls slightly wider at that. “Fair.”
The bartender appears again, glancing between the both of you before nodding toward Anton. “What can I get you?”
Anton’s eyes flick briefly toward your drinks again before he answers. “Whatever she’s having.”
Heat immediately floods your face but you say nothing. The bartender slides two fresh shots onto the counter between you both before disappearing again and suddenly you become hyperaware of how close Anton is sitting beside you. Close enough that you can smell his cologne faintly, you realize it hasn’t changed.
“How’ve you been?” Anton asks quietly.
The question should be simple but hearing it from him feels impossible to answer. You open your mouth once before shutting it again because what are you supposed to say? Bad? I blew up my relationship an hour ago because I accidentally admitted I never stopped loving you? I cried over a letter you wrote me at eighteen then somehow manifested you into existence?
Instead, you force out the first lie that comes to mind. “Good.” You clear your throat slightly. “Busy.”
Anton nods once like he knows you’re lying but has decided not to embarrass you by pointing it out. His restraint unsettles you almost as much as seeing him here in the first place. Your old Anton would’ve pushed immediately. You can practically hear it in your head: What happened? Talk to me.
The silence that follows is heavily awkward and unfamiliar. You used to know how to exist around Anton so naturally that conversations never required effort. Now you can practically feel yourself thinking before every sentence. You clear your throat softly, fingers tightening around the edge of the bartop. “So…what are you doing in New York?”
Anton leans back slightly against the stool beside you. “Press stuff mostly. My publicist booked interviews for the album rollout. I’ve got a whole press week thing happening.” He says casually.
Publicist? The word catches you embarrassingly off guard. For some reason, despite everything Manon mentioned earlier, some part of you still imagined Anton’s music career as smaller than this. Booked and busy, she’d said earlier tonight with a shrug like Anton was just picking up a few gigs instead of apparently having entire press schedules arranged for him in New York.
Another reminder of how you don’t know the man sat beside you. You genuinely know more about random coworkers from your publishing house than you do about the person you once thought you might spend the rest of your life with.
“Right…your album.” You murmur.
His gaze flickers toward you briefly at the tone in your voice but he doesn’t comment on it. “Manon played me one of your songs tonight actually,” you admit before you can overthink it.
Anton’s expression shifts almost imperceptibly then. “Yeah?” he asks quietly.
You nod once expecting him to ask which song, ask what you thought about it but he doesn’t. For some reason, that hurts too.
Instead he glances down briefly at the shot glass sitting untouched between his fingers before saying, “That tracks, Manon’s been a pretty big supporter of my music.”
The statement is casual yet guilt still curls hot and ugly beneath your ribs because that used to be you. You used to be the person shoving headphones over your ears while Anton played you his unfinished demos at three in the morning. The person sitting cross-legged on his dorm floor listening to half-written lyrics while he rambled about melodies and production. You used to be the first person he looked for whenever he created something new. Now apparently that role belongs to Manon.
The realization leaves you feeling strangely displaced from your own life. Worse still, it forces you to confront how disconnected you’ve willingly made yourself these past two years. Anton and Manon stayed close enough for her to know his music intimately while you’ve spent all this time deliberately pretending that entire side of him didn’t exist at all.
“Oh…that’s good.” You say softly before looking down at your hands.
Anton studies you quietly for a second after that, fingers turning the shot glass slowly against the bartop. It hits you yet again yhat you can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“How long are you staying?” you ask finally, mostly because you can’t tolerate the quiet stretching any further.
You nod. A week, a lot can change in a week your subconscious tells you. You open your mouth to ask what he’s up to but he beats you to it.
“I’ve got a pretty packed schedule though. Interviews, performances, meetings. A bunch of stuff.”
You nod again even as disappointment settles quietly inside your chest. Of course he’s busy. Of course he has a life now that exists completely outside of you. Anton finally reaches for the shot glass then, lifting it between his fingers and for one panicked second you realize if you don’t say something now, this interaction is going to end. He’ll finish his drink, leave this bar and disappear back into the version of his life you no longer belong to.
“Could I maybe see you again before you leave?” The question comes out rushed and you immediately regret it. You sound desperate.
Anton visibly chokes slightly on the shot halfway through swallowing it, coughing once into his fist before setting the glass back down harder than intended.
Your eyes widen instantly. “Oh my Gosh! Sorry,” you rush out, mortified.
Anton shakes his head quickly, still clearing his throat slightly. “No, it’s fine.”
You immediately reach for your glass and throw back the shot, needing something to quiet your growing embarrassment. Finally, he says carefully, “My manager is pretty strict about staying on schedule.”
Anton watches you quietly for a second longer before exhaling softly through his nose. “I’ll…let you know if anything opens up.”
You nod immediately even though embarrassment is already crawling violently up your spine. “Right. Yeah, of course.”
You can’t meet his eyes anymore. You focus intensely on your second shot glass before grabbing it and throwing the tequila back in one smooth motion. The burn barely registers this time. You actually asked him to see you again and he practically turned you down. You can’t be upset with him because it wasn’t like he was rude either. He isn’t cold with the way he answers, punishing you or even trying to make you feel small. If anything, his tone is painfully considerate.
Anton taps twice against the bartop with the tips of his fingers before glancing toward the bartender. “Can I close out?”
The bartender nods immediately, reaching for the little receipt book. Anton gestures briefly toward you as well. “Can you close hers too?”
Your head snaps toward him instantly. “Oh! You don’t have to do that.”
Anton barely even looks up while reaching into his wallet. “It’s fine.”
“Just let me pay the tab.”
You go quiet after that. The bartender returns with the receipt machine a second later and Anton hands over a black card effortlessly before signing the slip. You watch the movement of his hand stupidly, your thoughts drifting somewhere dangerous again because you remember those fingers ink-stained from songwriting and tangled in your bedsheets and brushing hair behind your ear during quiet nights in the library.
Now they’re signing bar receipts for you like you’re strangers reconnecting politely after college. Once everything’s settled, Anton slides off the stool beside you and reaches for the leather jacket hanging loosely across his seat. The movement feels oddly final. He shrugs the jacket on before looking back at you again. “Don’t drink yourself sick, alright?”
You nod obediently and open your mouth to extend the conversation, to say anything to get him to stay even if it's just for a second longer. “Anton–”
He pauses and looks at you patiently. For one hopeful second, you think maybe he’ll stay. Maybe this is the part where everything spills out messily between you both and everything gets fixed. To your dismay, Anton cuts you off gently before you can say whatever disastrous thing had started climbing up your throat.
“Be safe getting home, okay?”
It shuts you up instantly because never in the four years you knew Anton Lee had he ever been the one to leave first. He used to linger in doorways just to keep talking to you another minute longer. Used to walk you home even when it inconvenienced him. Used to stand outside your dorm after arguments waiting for you to come back because the idea of ending the night at odds with you physically bothered him.
You were always the one doing the leaving. That is…until now. You watch him turn toward the exit a second later and disappear out into the New York night without looking back once.
You don’t stay much longer after that. The bartender gives you a sympathetic look while clearing the empty glasses scattered around your section of the bar and the pity of it alone is enough to make you want to crawl out of your own skin. You grab your phone quickly, shove it back into your bag and leave before you can humiliate yourself any further.
The subway ride home passes in a blur. You barely register the people packed into the train around you or the screeching sound of metal against tracks. Your mind loops relentlessly instead, replaying every second of the interaction over and over until you feel nauseous from it.
Anton looked good…he looked healed. Anton left.
You unlock the front door mechanically when you make it home and step inside only to immediately find Manon’s suitcases sitting packed neatly beside the entryway ready for her early morning flight to Miami.
The sight of them makes something twist strangely in your chest too. Everything feels like it’s moving forward without you lately. You stand there for a second too long staring at the luggage before quietly heading toward your room almost entirely on autopilot. You barely bother changing clothes before collapsing onto your bed emotionally spent and half-drunk.
To your misfortune, sleep never comes.
Rather, you spend the entire night staring blankly up at the ceiling replaying the image of Anton walking away from you over and over again until the memory starts feeling almost cruel in its repetition.
It’s around 8AM when you start to hear shuffling outside your door.
At some point after three in the morning you gave up pretending sleep was coming and opened your laptop instead, convincing yourself maybe if you wrote something you could outrun the constant replay of Anton walking away from you.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work. The blinking cursor mocks you from the center of the screen while your unfinished manuscript sits open beneath it. Six years ago, you genuinely believed this book would become your entire future. During undergrad, the story lived inside you so vividly it practically begged to be written…now every sentence feels strained and unnatural almost as if you’re trying to speak a language you’ve slowly forgotten over time.
You stare blankly at the same paragraph for nearly twenty minutes before eventually backspacing the entire thing with a frustrated exhale and harsh clacking of your keys.
You close your eyes in acceptance when a knock comes on your bedroom door. You glance up just as Manon leans lightly against the frame already dressed for her flight, her airport outfit somehow still looking expensive and effortless despite the fact that it’s nine in the morning. Sunglasses rest on top of her head while her carry-on suitcase waits behind her in the hallway.
Her gaze flickers immediately toward your laptop screen. “Well look at you.” She says slowly, brows lifting slightly.
Instinctively, your eyes drop back toward the manuscript still open on the screen. Embarrassment twists in your chest because you suddenly become hyperaware of how pathetic this probably looks. You haven’t meaningfully touched this novel in months and now suddenly after one emotionally taxing night you’re sitting at your desk pretending you’re going to become a writer again.
“It’s not really going well,” you admit quietly.
Manon hums softly before stepping further into the room. “Still, it’s open.”
You let out a weak breath at that and glance back toward the blinking cursor. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Figured when I heard you pacing around the apartment at four in the morning.”
Heat crawls into your face. You reach over and close the laptop gently, unable to look at the unfinished draft any longer. Manon watches you carefully for a second. “Any progress?”
You shake your head almost immediately. “Nothing’s coming out right.”
Something softens briefly in her expression then. “It will.”
The certainty in her voice almost hurts.
“Anyway…I came to say bye before I head to the airport.
Usually you’d tease her about abandoning you for the grandeur of her job but exhaustion has scraped you too raw for humor this morning “Right. Miami.” You say before standing from the desk chair.
Manon nods once. “With the hoochie daddies.”
Despite everything, a small smile pulls at your mouth. You walk her toward the doorway quietly before stopping there awkwardly, suddenly overwhelmed. Manon notices immediately. “What?”
You hesitate long enough that she straightens slightly then finally say, “I’m sorry.”
Confusion flickers across her face. “For what?"
You look down at your hands because suddenly maintaining eye contact feels impossible. “For…all of it, I guess. For putting you in the middle of everything with me and Anton all these years. For making you walk on eggshells around both of us.” You exhale shakily through your nose. “And Jake too.”
You clear your throat and continue. “None of it was your responsibility but somehow I kept making it yours anyway.”
You slowly look up to meet her eyes and find her looking at you with pity and understanding. “I appreciate you saying that.”
Relief and shame twist together painfully inside your chest. You hadn’t fully realized until yesterday just how much emotional weight you’d placed onto everyone around you these past two years. Manon spent so long carefully filtering conversations and balancing loyalties between two people she loved because you couldn’t bring yourself to confront your own feelings directly.
Manon takes a deep breath before gripping the handle of her carry on tighter. “I think there are some other people who could use an apology too.”
Your lips press together immediately because you already know who she means. For the last twelve hours your mind has revolved so violently around Anton that you almost allowed yourself to forget there’s another person bleeding from the aftermath of your choices too.
“Yeah…I know.” You admit after a moment.
Manon gives you a smile before bringing you in for a hug. “Good. I love you.”
You wrap your arms around her instinctively, eyes squeezing shut. Through every terrible decision and every selfish avoidance tactic you’ve made these past two years, Manon still stayed.
She squeezes you one more time before finally pulling away. You stand there watching while she slips her shoes on and adjusts her sunglasses back over her eyes. A second later the apartment door clicks shut behind her.
For a while, you just stand there motionless in the middle of the hallway. You retreat back to your bedroom on unsteady legs and sit down at the edge of your bed. You blindly reach for yout phone that’s sat underneath your pillow. Your thumb hovers uncertainly over Jake’s contact for nearly a full minute.
Part of you still wants to avoid this. To delay it another day, another week. To keep pretending maybe if you ignore everything long enough the consequences will somehow soften. That’s always been your problem though, avoidance. You’ve always loved romance in theory more than practice.
You knew how to exist inside almosts and maybes and how to romanticize stolen glances and unresolved tension. What you didn’t know how to survive was reality.
Reality meant Anton sitting on that bare mattress senior year asking you to choose him outright. Reality meant his voice shaking while he admitted he loved you and realizing suddenly that your answer possessed the power to devastate another human being permanently.
Reality meant understanding that if you let yourself fully love him back, if you allowed the relationship to become tangible and public and real, then one day he could leave too or worse, he could stay long enough to realize you weren’t worth all the devotion. Back then you convinced yourself you were protecting both of you somehow. In reality, you were mostly protecting yourself.
As long as things remained undefined, you never had to fully risk rejection. You never had to hand somebody the ability to break your heart. You got to exist inside his devotion without surrendering your comfort.
Anton saw you too clearly, he loved you too directly. There was nothing curated or fictional about the way he cared for you.
Your throat tightens painfully as another realization settles over you slowly. Jake was easier because he represented the kind of adulthood you thought you were supposed to want while Anton represented the terrifying possibility of actually being seen completely.
In trying to avoid hurting yourself, you ended up hurting both of them instead. The thought fills you with deep regret. You take a deep breath and unlock your phone again.
8:48 am | you: can we talk?
The typing bubble appears almost immediately.
8:48 am | jake: yeah.
8:49 am | jake: my place in an hour?
The conversation ends there because what else could possibly be discussed over text after last night? There are no words capable of softening what you admitted outside your apartment building. You force yourself off your bed and make work of getting ready for the day. You shower mechanically then brush your teeth, pull on jeans and a sweater without really registering any of it.
When you’re finished you grab your bag from the hallway and catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror hung above the shoe rack. You look awful.
For a second you consider fixing your makeup properly before realizing how absurd that thought is. You’re not going to see Jake to salvage anything, you’re going to end it.
The reminder makes your heart clench in sadness and guilt. You steel your shoulders and exit your building to get this over with. Your subway ride downtown passes mostly in silence. You sit near the back corner of the train clutching your phone tightly while you go over what you could possibly say in your head.
By the time you finally reach his building, your heart is beating so violently you feel slightly nauseous again.
You stand outside the entrance for a second longer than necessary staring blankly at the familiar glass doors. The elevator ride up feels suffocatingly quiet. When you finally reach his apartment door, your palms are damp with anxiety.
You knock twice and wait a few seconds before the door swings open. Jake stands there already dressed for the day in a dark sweater and slacks. You note the bags underneath his eyes and the slight puffiness, you notice he also didn’t sleep last night either. Neither of you speak, you just take each other in before Jake steps aside from the doorway silently. You take a deep breath as you walk in.
The apartment feels colder than usual.
The heat is still running through the vents and the same instrumental playlist Jake always keeps on during the mornings plays from a speaker near the kitchen but something about the space feels unfamiliar now. Maybe because for the first time since you met him, there’s no warmth left between the two of you.
Jake closes the front door behind you then walks further into the apartment without saying anything. You stand awkwardly near the entryway for a second before following after him. Usually when you came over, Jake would kiss your forehead immediately or ask if you wanted anything to drink before you even sat down. Sometimes he’d tug you toward the couch before you could fully take your shoes off because he claimed you never greeted him properly after long days apart.
Today he just gestures faintly toward the living room. You sit carefully at the edge of the couch while Jake remains standing for a moment longer, dragging a hand slowly over his face before finally lowering himself into the armchair across from you.
It stays silent for a long while. Your hands twist restlessly together in your lap while Jake watches you with an expression you can’t fully read anymore. You realize suddenly that you don’t actually know how to begin this conversation. There’s no graceful opening for something like this; there is nothing capable of making the damage smaller.
“I’m sorry,” you say finally, Jake just stares at you.
His reaction immediately makes your stomach twist because you suddenly hear how insufficient it sounds out loud. Almost two years together reduced down to I’m sorry. “That’s it?” he asks.
Heat crawls violently into your face. “Jake–”
“No seriously,” he cuts in, leaning back against the chair slightly like he physically needs distance from you right now. “That’s all you have to say to me?”
You open your mouth then close it again because you genuinely don’t know what else you can say. Jake laughs softly under his breath but it’s clear there’s no humor in the sound. “We were together for almost two years. Every day you told me you loved me…was that all bullshit?”
“No. No, Jake, it wasn’t like that.” You defend automatically.
“Then what was it like? Because from where I’m sitting, it kinda feels like I spent two years dating somebody who was in love with someone else the entire time.”
“I did love you,” you insist weakly. “I tried, I really did.”
Jake’s jaw tightens faintly at that. “Did you?”
You look at him hurt and offended, you open your mouth to respond but he cuts you off before you even get the chance. “Did you actually try? You still keep another guy’s things hidden away in a box you won’t let anybody touch, You refused to move in with me every single time I brought it up and let’s not forget how fucking horrified you looked when my mum mentioned marriage.”
Your breath catches because you honestly didn’t realize he noticed that. You look away instinctively because suddenly maintaining eye contact feels unbearable. Every ugly truth you’ve spent years carefully avoiding now sits exposed between the two of you anyway.
Jake exhales sharply through his nose before leaning back against the chair again. “If nobody else in your life is willing to tell you this, I will. You’re selfish.”
You flinch almost imperceptibly.
“Being in this relationship with me while you were still in love with somebody else was selfish.” Jake continues. “Dragging me along while you figured your shit out was selfish.”
Tears slip quietly down your cheeks now but you don’t interrupt him because deep down you know he’s right.
Leaving Anton behind had been selfish, trying to force yourself into a relationship with Jake because it felt safer had been selfish too. Even the way you handled the aftermath afterward: shutting people out, forcing Manon to tiptoe between you and Anton, letting Sohee disappear from your life because facing him meant confronting your own guilt…all of it had revolved around protecting yourself from discomfort first.
Not once did you stop long enough to fully consider how your actions hurt others, the implications of your choices and the hurt it left in its wake. Jake watches your tears fall silently and something in his expression softens into pity.
“I really loved you…I need you to know that.”
Your chest caves inward painfully. “I know.” Your voice cracks around the words.
He shakes his head slowly while looking at you. “I hope all of this was worth it.”
You sniffle and wipe away your tears that can’t seem to stop. Jake drags a tired hand down his face before finally looking back toward you again. “You should go.”
You look up at him hesitantly, you don’t want it to end like this. “ Jake–”
“We’re done.” He says softly but firmly. “Please just…go.”
You stare at him for another second longer before finally nodding. Slowly, you stand from the couch and reach for your bag again. Jake doesn’t look at you while you walk toward the door. Your hand wraps around the handle before you stop suddenly. You turn slightly toward him, your voice quieter now. “I really am sorry.”
Jake finally looks up again.
“You were amazing to me and I hope someday you find somebody better than me. Somebody who can love you the way you deserve.” You pull the door open and leave before either of you can say anything else capable of hurting more.
The subway ride back home feels longer than the ride you took to his penthouse somehow. Your chest still aches from the look on Jake’s face when you left. You squeeze your eyes shut briefly and lean your head back against the train wall.
The word continues echoing around your head. You hate how quickly your instincts still try to defend yourself against it. You make it back home a little after twelve. You kick off your shoes and head straight to your bedroom before collapsing face-first onto the mattress without bothering to change clothes first.
You scream into your pillow out of pure frustration and sadness. It does little to ease your emotions. You huff before rolling over to face the ceiling, Mid roll, your eyes catch your laptop. Before you can stop yourself, you sit up and grab the laptop quickly and pull it into your lap before flipping it open. Your fingers hesitate for a second before they go flying across the keys: Anton Lee.
You let out a small gasp at all the results that populate. Interviews, magazine covers, performances, endless fan edits plastered across your screen. Photos of Anton leaving airports in oversized hoodies while flashes from paparazzi cameras illuminate his face, videos with millions of views. Articles dissecting lyrics you once heard half-finished at two in the morning from the edge of his dorm bed while he strummed absentmindedly against his guitar.
You stare blankly at the screen while your chest tightens painfully. The realization leaves you strangely hollow. You spent two years freezing Anton in place inside your mind meanwhile he kept growing beyond it…beyond you.
Now, millions of strangers know his voice more intimately than you do.
Your fingers move automatically after that, clicking through clips and interviews trying to reconstruct the last two years of his life from fragments. It’s bittersweet, seeing how he’s grown while you’ve stayed stagnant.
After hours of watching his interviews and reading articles, you find the courage to listen to his music. The first song you brave is titled Yard Sale.
At first you just sit there listening numbly, your fingers curling tighter around the edge of the laptop. Every lyric drips with resentment and grief…he hates you.
By the time the song ends, tears are already slipping silently down your face again. Your eyes drift downward toward the comment section beneath the video.
this man went THROUGH it 😭
the fact that he literally sold his ex’s stuff for promo is insane
an actual yard sale was genius marketing idc
i still can’t believe the actual artifacts from their relationship were there
Confusion flickers through you immediately. Your brows pull together slightly before your fingers begin moving again almost on instinct, clicking through linked videos and reposted clips until eventually you find it.
At first your brain almost refuses to process what you’re looking at. Anton sits outside some house in Seoul wearing sunglasses and dark clothes while fans swarm folding tables littered with objects from your relationship like they’re browsing a flea market: your books, his dorm decorations, hoodies you used to steal constantly during college.
You let out a disbelieving breath, those things meant something to you. They weren’t props or clever marketing concepts, they were pieces of your life. Pieces of him…pieces of the two of you.
Yet he sold them. All you can think is: I meant so little to him he could give us away to strangers.
You stare at the screen for another few agonizing seconds before abruptly snapping the laptop shut in hurt and undeservingly, anger. You shove the laptop away from yourself almost instinctively before curling tightly onto your side beneath the blankets.
You don’t leave your bed for the rest of the day.
Anton’s text comes four days later.
Long enough that you had stopped checking your phone every five minutes like a loser. Long enough that after your midnight deep dive through articles and interviews and fan edits and the Godforsaken Yard Sale clips, you had finally managed to tell yourself the truth as you understood it, Anton did not want you back in his life.
The bar had not been softness, it had been mercy. You’d mistaken his kindness for openness because that was easier than admitting the alternative: Anton Lee hates you.
You watched strangers pick through the remains of your history like it was clever promo instead of proof you once loved him. You watched as pieces of a relationship you never even had the courage to name properly was laid out on folding tables for people to carry home in shopping bags. The copy of 1984 hit hardest. Not because it was rare or expensive or even the most sentimental thing there but because it was your mind flattened into paper. Your thoughts lived in the margins, your underlines, your outrage, your rambling annotations about the world and what it was becoming.
You gave it to Anton because you thought he’d understand why it mattered. Back then, he was one of the only people you knew who would stay up with you talking about the meaning of life and whether people were doomed to repeat the same mistakes forever. You thought he would want to see the way you saw things. You thought he would treasure it because it would mean treasuring you.
Then there it was in a stranger’s hands, reduced to a clip online and a comment section full of people calling the whole thing iconic. You told yourself that if Anton had been willing to give away your copy of 1984, then whatever tenderness once existed between the two of you had burned out completely and been replaced with a deep hatred.
You stare at the message anyway.
4:13 pm | anton: got time to meet?
For a second, you genuinely wonder if you’re misreading it. Your eyes move over the sentence twice, then a third time, then a fourth as if the words might rearrange themselves but they don’t. Anton asked. After four days of silence, after gently shutting you down at the bar, he reached out.
The typing bubble appears immediately.
4:16 pm | anton: i’m at dale’s
Somehow that feels worse than if he’d picked a random coffee shop downtown. Dale’s is not neutral ground. It seems the universe apparently still isn’t done humiliating you.
4:17 pm | you: i can be there in ten
It takes you closer to fifteen.
The entire subway ride there feels like one long self-inflicted bout of nausea. You sit rigidly in your seat, phone clutched too tightly in one hand. Somewhere between stops, you catch sight of your own expression and look away almost immediately. There’s something deeply undignified about still being this affected by him. More undignified still is the fact that despite everything, despite Jake, despite the yard sale, despite the songs, despite the bar, some shameless part of you is still relieved he texted at all.
By the time you push open the door to Dale’s, your pulse is pounding hard enough to feel audible.
Nothing about the place has changed, the bell above the entrance still gives that same annoying jingle. The shelves still feel slightly too narrow for how much stock they try to fit into the store. It even smells the same; old paper and coffee. The familiarity hits fast and unpleasantly, another reminder of how much of your life still lives in this part of the city no matter how hard you’ve tried pretending otherwise.
You find him exactly where you knew you would: the back corner near the beanbags. The spot by the window where the two of you used to sit shoulder to shoulder with cheap wired headphones split between you, Anton reading whatever music biography or pretentious think-piece he’d picked up while you pretended not to be annoyed by the way he kept pausing your playlist to tell you random facts. The same corner where you’d spend hours reading to the point where the owner had to remind you the store was closing.
Anton is already seated when you get there, half-sunken into one of the beanbags with a copy of 1984 open in his hands.
He looks up at the sound of your footsteps. Something shifts across his face when he sees you, it’s gone before you can name it. His mouth curves a little, softening into a smile that only seems to make the awkwardness worse.
You stop a few feet away, suddenly unsure what your hands are supposed to do, if you’re supposed to smile, whether you’re meant to sit down immediately or stand there like an idiot. “Hi.” You reply timidly.
Anton closes the book over one finger to keep his place and gestures vaguely toward the empty beanbag across from him. You lower yourself into it, acutely aware of how ridiculous this probably looks from the outside.
For a second neither of you says anything. Anton finally sets the book aside on the floor beside him. “I’ve been doing a lot of press, sorry it took me a while to get back to you.” He says.
You shake your head too quickly. “No, it’s fine.”
Understatement of the year. The letter has been needling at you for days now, taking over every corner of your mind. You’ve spent four days replaying sentences he wrote at eighteen, four days trying not to think too hard about the fact that the boy who wrote I would’ve chosen you is now a man you can barely read across a bookstore.
Maybe that’s why the words leave you before you can stop them. “I got your letter.”
The sentence lands clumsily between you. Anton blinks once. “Umm…what letter?”
For a second, all you can do is stare at him. Eventually you say, “The English 102 project...the letters to the future?”
You see the recognition light up his face before he lets out a small breath through his nose, a laugh following that. “Wow, I forgot about that.”
The casualness of it stings more than it should. “You forgot?”
Anton shrugs one shoulder, his hand lifting to rub at the back of his neck. “I wrote that when I was eighteen.”
The words hang there between you, simple and factual and somehow still capable of breaking you. Four days. You’ve spent four days carrying that letter around, rereading lines he apparently hasn’t thought about in years. You don’t know why that hurts exactly.
“Right,” you say quietly.
Anton studies you for half a second too long before clearing his throat and shifting the conversation elsewhere. “I’ve got a live taping later tonight, press stuff. I wanted to at least see you before that since I don’t have much time left here.”
You nod slowly, trying not to linger too hard on that. See you before that. Like this is a stop on his schedule, as though you can be folded neatly between interviews and whatever version of his life exists now that has nothing to do with you.
“What are you performing?” you ask.
Anton leans back slightly in the beanbag. “My latest song Before You Leave Me and a cover of This City.”
You hum and look down at your hands. “I’ve been listening to some of your stuff.”
That seems to catch his attention more than the letter did. “Oh yeah?”
You nod. “Yeah.” You could stop there, you probably should but for whatever reason you don’t. “I came across Yard Sale. I saw the promotion.” You say instead.
Anton’s mouth flattens. He doesn’t look surprised or even shocked, moreso…resigned? You keep going anyway because now that it’s out there you can’t seem to stop yourself. “I just…” You swallow hard. “Did I really mean that little?”
Across from you, Anton scoffs softly under his breath before turning his gaze fully toward you. “You think that’s why I did it?”
You hate how quickly your face heats. “What else was I supposed to think? You sold everything.”
Anton lets out a slow breath through his nose, one hand dragging over his jaw before dropping back into his lap. “I sold it because I couldn’t keep looking at it.”
He looks down at the floor for a second before saying flatly, his voice devoid of any warmth. “You left but your stuff was still everywhere. Every drawer I opened, every shelf, every corner of my apartment had some piece of you in it. I couldn’t look for my own charger without finding traces of you.”
Anton huffs before continuing, “I’d be having a normal day and then suddenly there’s one of your stupid sticky notes, a hoodie, little things you left in our dorm that you never came back for and that was it, I'd be paralyzed for the whole day.”
The shame that follows his words leave you shifting uncomfortably. You had come into this conversation so sure yard sale meant hatred or indifference or some clean, final severing of whatever had once existed between you.
“So no,” Anton says finally, turning back toward you. “It wasn’t because you meant too little. It’s because you meant too much.”
The sentence knocks whatever air you had left clean out of your lungs. You look down at your hands because meeting his eyes feels impossible now. “I wish I’d stayed,” you say before you can stop yourself. The words come out smaller than you intended. Barely more than breath. They sound humiliating the second they leave you, too naked and two years too late but you can’t take them back.
Across from you, Anton goes still. You hate yourself a little for saying it but you’ve always been selfish haven’t you? You were always selfish when it came to Anton.
When Anton finally speaks, his voice is quiet. “I think maybe you had it right.”
Your head lifts slowly. His expression hasn’t hardened, if anything, he just looks exhausted beyond belief. “I spent a long time hoping you’d choose me…I really did.”
Your throat tightens. “And now?” you ask, even though some part of you already knows the answer.
Anton glances toward the window briefly before looking back at you. “Now I think we would’ve destroyed each other.”
You don’t fight him on it. You can’t. Not because it doesn’t hurt, because it does.You say nothing because you know he isn’t wrong. You know exactly which versions of yourselves he means. The boy who kept handing you his whole heart like maybe one day you’d stop being afraid to hold it. The girl who kept mistaking avoidance for maturity and fear for wisdom. The two of you spent years loving each other in ways that felt huge enough to survive anything, all while quietly becoming worse for it.
Your vision blurs. You look away quickly, blinking hard. Anton looks away too. That small act of mercy almost undoes you more than anything else he’s said. Even now, even after all this, he still has enough tenderness left in him not to force you to be watched while you come apart.
After a second, he leans forward and reaches for the copy of 1984 resting beside him. He stands, brushing his hand once over the cover before tucking it beneath his arm.
You nod because what else can you do? Anton takes a step, then pauses. “For what it’s worth,” he starts, the steadiness of his voice makes you look up again, “I meant everything I said in that letter.”
You have to bite your bottom lip to keep it from wobbling. Even the part about choosing me? You think to yourself.
“You’re gonna write the book. I still believe that.” He says.
You just stare at him. He shifts the book slightly beneath his arm, his expression softer now than it has been this entire conversation. “You’re still in there, that version of you, the one who thought she was going to become something. I still think she was right.”
He gives you a small nod after that, like the conversation has reached whatever end he came here for then he leaves you sitting there in the back corner of Dale’s with your hands clenched in your lap and your throat thick with tears, carrying the unbearable weight of the one thing you somehow never expected Anton Lee to give you after all this time. Not another chance, not absolution but faith.
For a long time after Anton leaves, you don’t move. The bookstore carries on around you. Life carries on while you stay in the beanbag, your hands still clenched tightly in your lap and your throat aching. The tears fall silently, humiliatingly while you stare blankly at the empty space Anton occupied minutes ago.
After everything you did to him, after all the years you spent punishing him for loving you honestly, Anton still looked at you like there was something worth salvaging in the wreckage. Not the two of you but you.
Eventually when it becomes clear you can’t stay curled up in the back corner of Dale’s forever without drawing attention to yourself, you orce yourself to stand. You swipe angrily beneath your eyes, collect your bag and leave the store without buying anything.
The train ride does nothing to give you reprieve from your thoughts. Anton’s words replay relentlessly in your head. You’re gonna write the book. I still believe that. You’re still in there. You hate how badly those sentences get to you.
Maybe because they feel too close to the version of yourself you’ve spent years trying not to think about. The girl who wrote letters to the future and believed without irony that she would become something extraordinary one day. The girl who moved to New York convinced talent and ambition alone would be enough to build a life out of words. Somewhere along the way, you stopped being her.
Your head tips back against the train wall as Manhattan flickers past in fractured glimpses outside. Anton still believes in that version of you more than you do. It really would be easier if he hated you. Easier if he had given you something cruel and definitive to carry home instead. Something you could use to justify staying exactly as you are; small and frozen in the past.
By the time you make it home your head is throbbing. You unlock the apartment and step inside without bothering to turn on the main lights. The place still feels emptier with Manon gone. Your bag slips from your shoulder and lands softly near the couch while you stand there in the dimness.
Anton is on magazine covers, Manon gets flown across the world for work and fashion weeks and race weekends. Sohee is on a world tour of his own. Everyone kept going.
That’s what hits you hardest in the silence of your apartment. Not even just Anton, all of them. Manon built the life she used to joke about wanting, Anton took his grief and somehow turned it into art, even Sohee who once lived half in Anton’s shadow became someone with his own orbit, his own career, his own stages and schedules and cities waiting for him. Everyone kept becoming who they said they would be.
And you? You stayed here.
Not physically, not exactly. On paper your life moved too. You graduated, you got the job, you built the relationship, you learned how to answer emails and survive office politics and smile through meetings. Yet beneath all of that, in the place that mattered, you stayed suspended in the same grief and self-inflicted punishment. Standing here now in the half-dark with Anton’s voice still echoing through your mind, you finally understand what it really was: stagnation.
The realization is so sharp you have to grip the couch to stay standing. You don’t know what comes next yet. You don’t know how to undo years of shrinking yourself down into something easier to carry. You don’t know whether writing the book will save you or if it’s already too late to become the person eighteen-year-old you swore you would be.
But for the first time in a very long while, standing there in the dark with your heart still in shards from everything Anton did and didn’t say, you know one thing with painful certainty.
You cannot keep living like this.
“Are you sure about this?”
You glance up from the cardboard box in your arms to find Mia standing beside your desk, one hand curled around her coffee cup, her expression caught somewhere between concern and admiration. Around the two of you, the rest of the editorial floor hums on as usual. You set the box down on your desk and tuck a loose folder beneath your arm. “If I don’t do this now I don’t think I ever will.”
Three days have passed since Dale’s. Three days since you stood in your dark apartment and finally admitted what your life had become. The very next day you handed in your two week notice. Was it impulsive? Probably but maybe this is what you need.
The two weeks are mostly ceremonial anyway. Your boss made it abundantly clear after your resignation that she has no intention of assigning you anything substantial enough to justify keeping you beyond the bare minimum.
Next week you have a meeting with a mid-level publishing house in Brooklyn. Nothing guaranteed, nothing particularly glamorous either. They’re small enough to still take unsolicited fiction seriously and large enough that getting signed by them would mean your novel might actually have a future outside your laptop screen.
You spent the last three nights finishing the cleanest draft you could manage, editing until your eyes blurred, shaping it into something worthy of being read by someone who doesn’t already love you enough to lie.
If the meeting goes well, maybe they’ll sign you. If they sign you, maybe this whole reckless, humiliating leap of faith turns out to be the first decent thing you’ve done for yourself in years. If it doesn’t…well you’re trying very hard not to let yourself finish that thought.
Mia leans against the edge of your desk while you start sliding old marked-up manuscripts into the box. “Well,” she says after a beat, “we’re gonna miss you.”
You huff softly under your breath. “No, you’re gonna miss making me print your pages because you never remember your login.”
“That too. When you become famous, dedicate your first book to the entire floor.” She grins.
The laugh that escapes you is small but genuine. “I’ll think about it.”
Mia gives you one last smile before walking over to her desk. You settle into your chair again to finish the last real assignment your boss dumped onto your desk this morning with a clipped, irritated, “At least make yourself useful before you go.”
It’s an op-ed, one last editorial bone thrown your way because nobody else on staff wants to touch it. The brief sits open in front of you now. A culture essay about regret.
Your fingers rest lightly against the keyboard while the cursor blinks on your google drive. Outside your office window, the city continues moving, cabs inching through traffic, pedestrians shouldering past one another.
Regret and timing. How ironic. Your boss wants something short and detached yet all you can think about is Anton: Anton at eighteen writing letters to the future, Anton at twenty-two sleeping in a dorm bed while you slipped out of his arms, Anton at twenty-four in Dale’s telling you maybe you had it right because the two of you would’ve destroyed each other.
You crack your knuckles as you think about what to write. You open a fresh document and type the title before you can stop yourself. For a long second, you just stare at the screen then you begin.
There is a particular kind of lie people tell themselves after making a life-altering choice. It’s not usually phrased to sound like a direct lie. In fact, it often sounds rational. We tell ourselves we did what made the most sense with the information we had at the time. We call it practicality. We call it timing. We call it growing up. Sometimes, if we are especially committed to preserving our own self-image, we even call it kindness.
What we rarely call it is fear.
For a long time, I believed the most painful decisions of my life had been inevitable. If something was always going to happen, then no one is really to blame for it. There is comfort in that kind of thinking. There is also cowardice.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive our own choices. About how often fear disguises itself as wisdom and how easily self-protection can be mistaken for emotional inteligence.
I’m writing this now because I have spent years mistaking those things.
In college, I loved romance in theory more than I ever knew how to survive it in practice. I loved it in books, where longing was curated and miscommunication always arrived with the promise of eventual resolution. Fiction allowed me to admire vulnerability from a safe distance. Real love was different. Real love asked things of me I did not know how to give. It asked for honesty that I did not know how to tell and worst of all, it asked me to risk humiliation.
Years ago, there was a boy who loved me with a kind of intensity that should have felt like safety. Instead, it terrified me. He knew the version of me that still believed she was going to become something, the smart, sharp witted girl who could make people laugh without trying. He also knew the parts of me I tried to keep unlovable, the uglier truths I worked hardest to hide from everyone else and somehow he never looked away. He was never interested in the idea of almost, he wanted forever.
I loved him too. That is the least complicated part of this story and maybe the saddest. Love was never the absence, courage was.
When the time came to choose something real, I left.
For years, I told myself leaving had been the wiser choice, the kinder choice; the inevitable one. I turned my own fear into philosophy because the truth was harder to sit with: I was not protecting either of us. I was protecting myself. As long as our relationship remained undefined, I never had to risk being fully known and then rejected anyways. I got to remain loved without surrendering any real control.
In trying to protect myself from heartbreak, I became the source of it. There is no graceful way to write that sentence. There is certainly no graceful way to live it.
The internet, as it does, eventually found its own version of this story. Not the full one, just the public fragments. Songs people turned into captions, clips and theories and edits. I watched strangers build mythology out of what I had once experienced as private intimacy. I watched the person I love become known to the rest of the world in ways I had forfeited the right to. It’s a deeply disorienting thing to become the unnamed girl in someone else’s art, especially when you know you earned your place there.
So let me remove the ambiguity now, because ambiguity has been my disease for years. I am the girl in Anton Lee’s songs. I was the one who left.
I was the one who kept choosing the safer life and calling it the smarter one. I was the one who hurt people and then hid from the consequences.
What I understand now, far too late to be useful to the people I hurt, is that regret is not always proof that you did not know better then. Sometimes it’s that you knew exactly what was required of you and were not brave enough to meet it.
There is no way back to eighteen. No way back to dorm rooms and bookstore afternoons and the arrogant certainty that there will always be more time. There is no undoing what I did. No version of this essay where the right arrangement of sentences transforms damage into something beautiful.
But there is this: I loved you. I still left. For years, I called that decision inevitable because regret is easier to survive when you twist it into fate.
If I had been brave enough back then, I would’ve stayed. There are some losses you do not begin to understand until you realize you helped create them.
You read the final line once more and then before you can chicken out and delete the whole thing, you attach the file to the submission link and hit send. Once the file uploads you stand abruptly, smooth your palms down the front of your skirt and mutter something about needing more coffee to no one in particular before stepping away from your cubicle, desperate for any small errand that might keep your mind from what you’ve just set loose.
“I promise kid, the second promotions are done, you've got a long break waiting for you.” David promises Anton. The latter can only laugh in response. The same phrase has been said since the beginning of his career.
David keeps one hand on the SUV door while the other presses lightly against Anton’s back, ushering him forward while the driver finishes loading the last suitcase. “I’m serious this time! No promo, no appearances, nothing. You disappear for a week and enjoy the labor of your work.” David adds, already half-distracted by his phone pinned between his shoulder and ear.
Anton only rolls his eyes playfully before humming in response. The door shuts behind him with a heavy thud that muffles the sounds of outside. For the first time all day, he’s finally met with some peace and quiet. He slumps back against the leather seat and closes his eyes briefly.
His day had started before six with glam and one last filming session for Vogue's youtube where he filmed a what’s in my bag video. After that came tiktok promos in a cramped studio with ring lights, then a rushed lunch he barely touched, then more cameras, more smiling and photoshoots.
Now it’s a little after five pm and he’s on his way to JFK to catch a flight to Japan.
Sohee is there already, Anton is supposed to meet him for a few days before heading back to Seoul to his own schedule. He’d been looking forward to it all week, seeing Sohee and cheering him on.
He tilts his head to the side and opens his eyes as he watches Manhattan get drowned in rain, he briefly wonders if his flight will be grounded due to how hard it’s coming down. He only sighs before closing his eyes again to reflect on the week and three days that he’s had. From the press run, to the city and finally to the fact that he saw you twice in the span of a few days after two years of silence.
His mind drifts back to phoebe’s against his will.
He thinks of you sat at the bar, drunk and glassy-eyed. Anton still doesn’t know what he was supposed to do with that. How he was supposed to look at someone he once loved so deeply and pretend it didn’t matter that you looked so defeated.
He knows he didn't owe you anything but he also couldn’t stomach leaving you there to keep drinking so with embarrassingly shaky hands, hands he still wonders if you noticed trembling, Anton paid your tab and told you to be safe getting home because that was all he could do now. You no longer belonged to each other. Kindness was the only thing he had left to offer you.
The second he stepped back out onto the sidewalk, his stomach turned so violently he had to brace a hand against the brick wall beside the bar and breathe through the sudden sick rush of memories and grief. He stood out there for nearly five minutes trying not to throw up.
He truly had no intentions of reaching out after that. At least, that’s what he had told himself but as the days passed you were all he could think about.
About how defeated you seemed. It bothered him in a way he couldn’t quite rationalize away so despite the pain and distance, Anton reached out because he needed to know if there was anything left of the girl he used to love.
Seeing you there in the bookstore nearly broke him all over again. Not because you looked beautiful, though you did. It was something worse than that. You looked like grief had reached into you and made itself comfortable. You almost looked like a mirror. Not of who Anton was now but of someone he had once been. The sight of it unsettled him because he knew that particular vacancy too well.
Anton had lost you once. He couldn’t bear the thought of grief finishing the job.
So he said what he could. He left you with the only thing that still felt clean enough to offer. Not another chance. Not love, though God knows that was still there. Just belief, the hope that maybe if it came from him, it might reach the part of you that had slowly started to evaporate.
He only hopes now that it was enough to wake you up.
Just as he starts drifting off, his phone starts vibrating in his lap. Anton opens his eyes slowly, expecting a final itinerary text from David or maybe Sohee telling him of what shenanigans they’re going to be up to in Tokyo instead his screen is full of notifications.
Messages from his PR manager, mentions across all his socials and a missed call from Sohee. His brows furrow as he tries to read the notifications as they come in but it’s far too much and far too fast. Just as he’s about to open Twitter to see what’s going on, another call from Sohee comes in. He frowns before answering.
Sohee is quiet for a second before asking, “are you alone?”
The question is strange enough to make Anton sit up properly. He glances toward the driver in the front seat, none the wiser, eyes fixed on the road while rain falls against the windshield. “I’m on my way to the airport, why?”
Another beat passes then Sohee asks carefully, “have you looked at your phone?”
Anton’s stomach tightens for reasons he doesn’t yet understand. He huffs softly through his nose and drags a hand over his face. “Dude, just say what you clearly want to say.”
Sohee exhales on the other end. “____ made a post.”
“A piece,” Sohee corrects quickly. “Like an article or an essay or something? I don’t know. She…she names you directly.”
For a second, Anton genuinely thinks he must have misheard him. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sending the link just…read it.” Sohee says. His voice is less cautious and more concerned. The line clicks dead before Anton can say anything else. A second later, the text comes through.
Anton immediately clicks on the link and is brought to an op-ed titled No Way Back to Eighteen. His chest tightens automatically.
He reads the piece and the more words he processes, the more anger starts to burn in his stomach. I loved you. I still left. Anton’s jaw tightens so hard it starts to ache.
His thumb scrolls back upward and then down again, rereading certain lines because his brain refuses to absorb them correctly the first time. Rage cuts through his grief, his vindication poisoned by the timing. After all these years, he finally managed to move forward. He managed to leave Dale’s with something close to peace. He had said what he needed to say and while it hurt, it had been clean.
This is not clean. This is you reaching into wounds he finally managed to scar over and prying them open in front of the entire world.
Anton feels suddenly, violently furious.
He lets out a short, disbelieving breath that sounds nothing like laughter. His voice when he speaks is low and unsteady. “Why would she do this?”
Anton swallows hard, staring at the line If I had been brave enough back then, I would’ve stayed until the words start to blur. “Why now? Why the fuck now?”
The only person in the world who can answer that unfortunately is not within his vicinity. Anton leans forward abruptly in his seat and orders his driver.
The driver glances back through the mirror, confused. “Excuse me?”
Anton grips the phone tighter in one hand, the article still open across the screen and looks out at the rain drowning the city he had been so ready to leave behind. His chest is rising too fast now, anger and grief and love and disbelief all fighting for dominance.
“Turn the car around. Take me back.”
Anton gives the driver your address that he got from Manon years ago to send her care packages. The rest of the drive passes in a blur of wet glass and red taillights. By the time the SUV pulls up outside your building, he is out of the car before the driver has fully shifted into park.
The rain hits him instantly, cold and relentless, soaking through his jacket within seconds. The car door slams behind him and then he’s taking the front steps two at a time, phone still clutched in one hand, his heart pounding violently.
He starts banging on the door without any real plan beyond needing it to open. “____!”
He bangs again harder, palm flat against the wood. “Open the door!”
Rain runs into his eyes, down the back of his neck, through his hair and over his mouth. He wipes at his face uselessly and pounds again. “____, come outside!”
He’s met with silence again. Anton hits the wood with the side of his fist again then braces one hand flat against it and drags in a breath that does nothing to calm him. He’s about to call our your name again when he hears you from behind him.
He turns around fast and squints. You’re standing a few feet away on the sidewalk beneath an umbrella, your work bag still hanging from your shoulder. All Anton can do for a moment is stare. He had spent the entire drive over imagining this moment, imagining you on the other side of the door, imagining what he would say first, how angry he would sound, whether he would still be angry once he actually saw you. Now faced with you, some of his anger gives way.
“What are you doing here?” you ask.
Anton’s anger almost fizzlies out but then his eyes catch the article on his screen and it’s like its been reignited all over again. “What the fuck was that?”
Your brows knit together immediately. “What?”
“The article.” He lifts the phone in one hand, rain dripping from his wrist down over the screen. “Why would you write that?”
Your eyes dart to his phone and you say nothing for a beat before softly calling his name. “...Anton–”
He immediately cuts you off. “No. I don’t want to hear anything but the truth. Why did you write this? Why now?”
You suck in a breath and try again. “I didn’t write it to hurt you.”
He laughs once. “Then what the fuck did you write it for?”
He continues because his anger is too volatile to let him stop and breathe. “I was leaving. Do you understand that? I said what I needed to say to you, I got in the car, I was on my way to the airport and then you decided to publish that!”
Your brows pull together. “Anton–”
He cuts you off again. “What was the reason? To embarrass me? To expose me? To punish me for loving you?”
Your mouth parts immediately. “No!”
“Then what!?” Anton demands. “Because I genuinely do not understand what that does for me. If you actually cared about me you wouldn’t have written this, put my full fucking name on it and thrown it out into the world like I’m supposed to what? Be grateful?”
You flinch at that. Good, some mean part of him thinks. Good because he is soaked standing outside your apartment like he has lost his mind and all because you decided that today, of all days, was the day to tell the truth.
You tighten your grip on the umbrella handle. “That’s not fair.”
Anton actually scoffs. “Fair?”
“You don’t get to act like I’m the only one who made this public!”
That stops him for half a second. “That’s not what I did.”
He sees your eyes widen in pure disbelief. “Are you being serious?”
“You wrote songs about me!” You yell at him.
“I wrote songs about what happened to me.” He argues.
“And I wrote about me! So what exactly is the difference, Anton? That your version got to hide behind metaphors and mine didn’t?” You shoot back.
Anton frowns, truly not grasping your point. “That is not the same thing.”
You laugh at him but there’s no humor in it. “No, you did worse.”
He goes still in disbelief. “Worse?”
Anton looks at you as if you’ve grown a second head. “What are you talking about?”
“Our things, Anton!” you snap, the umbrella jolting in your grip with the force of your voice. “The hoodies, the polaroids, my copy of 1984?”
So thar’s the hill you want to die on? Anton thinks to himself, this argument again. “The book? That’s what you’re mad about?” He asks, rainwater dripping down his face.
You look at him scandalized. “It wasn’t just a book and you know it.”
Before Anton can defend his actions again, you barrel on. “You sold pieces of me to strangers and now you want to be morally outraged because I named you in an article condemning my own actions?”
Anton takes one step toward you before he can stop himself. “I sold things you left behind.”
His correction clearly leaves you stunned. You blink at him, trying to come up with something in response but he continues on. “You left yet I was the one paying the price every fucking day! I couldn’t move around my own place without being reminded of someone who decided I wasn’t enough to stay for!”
Your face falls slightly at that but Anton is too far gone to soften any of his words now. “So no, don’t stand there and tell me I sold our love like I was trying to cheapen it. I was trying to survive it!”
You say nothing, just stare at him in pure anger and hurt. Anton thinks you might finally back down and offer to scrub the internet of your think piece but then your eyes flash in a way that tells him you’re not backing down either. “And what do you think I’ve been doing?” you ask.
Anton stares at you. “Is that a joke?”
“Because it fucking sounds like one.” He retorts.
You flinch at that. “You think I haven’t been miserable?”
He laughs again before shoving his phone away in his pocket and getting even closer to you. “Miserable? You created this! You know what real misery looks like? Misery looks like spending years turning someone into songs because that’s the only way you know how to carry what they did to you! Misery looks like finally getting to a place where you can breathe and then opening your phone to find out the person who left you loved you the whole time and just…did it anyway!”
You open your mouth to argue but he speaks over you, not even giving you the chance. “Do you understand how humiliating that is? Do you understand what you did to me with that piece?” He takes another step closer, close enough that the edge of your umbrella clips uselessly against his shoulder. “You didn’t just name me, you told the whole world I wasn’t enough. That our love wasn’t enough. So agin I ask you, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?”
All the fight seems to leave you at once as you tilt your head up to get a better view of him. “I wasn’t trying to humiliate you.”
“Then what were you trying to do? I can’t think of anything that doesn’t make me feel like some punchline.”
You take a deep breath. “I wrote it because I couldn’t let you leave again believing I didn’t love you enough.”
Anton goes still, the words knocking some air out of him. You swallow hard before continuing. “I know I’m years too late….I know that and I’m not asking for another chance.”
Anton says nothing. A part of him wants to stop you, keep you from ruining the last remaining bits of his well deserved anger but another part of him…the one that has loved you since he was eighteen needs to hear what comes next.
“I just…I couldn’t let you leave again thinking I didn’t love you enough to stay. Thinking you weren’t worth staying for.”
You slowly lower your umbrella, letting the rain beat down on you. “You were. You were always worth staying for.”
Anton can feel his chest rising and falling rapidly as he tries to fight off tears. “I wasn’t brave enough to try and I was too selfish to think about anyone but myself. I kept calling it timing and fate but really I just…didn’t want to risk getting my heart broken so instead I broke yours and then spent years acting like ignoring you would make it easier.”
There is something almost unbearable about hearing you say aloud the things he had once spent years searching for. You squint against the rain as it falls in your eyes. “I know I did this to us, I know what I ruined. I didn’t write it because I thought it would fix anything. I wrote it because I couldn’t let that be the story you carried out of New York. I couldn’t let you leave thinking I didn’t love you enough.”
Just like that, the last of Anton’s anger gives way. His face twists before he can stop it. He looks down briefly, rain mixing uselessly with the tears he can no longer hold back. He had imagined this conversation so many different ways over the years, imagined what it might feel like to finally hear you say it, to finally have proof that he hadn’t misunderstood the depth of what was between you, that he hadn’t spent all this time mourning something pathetic and one-sided. None of those imagined versions account for this, none of them prepared him for how much it would hurt to be right.
“I love you,” he says, the confession sounding a lot less romantic and more like defeat. “I love you and a part of me probably always will.”
Your face crumples completely. Anton sucks in a deep breath, choking slightly on his tears. “But I cannot do this again.”
You nod immediately, tears spilling from your eyes too and somehow that hurts him, the way you don’t fight him. “I won’t choose you unless you’re choosing me too.” His words seem to catch you off guard.
“No matter how hard I tried, no matter how far away I got, no matter how much therapy or music I threw at it, it was always you for me, ____.” He steps closer, close enough now that there is barely any space left between your bodies. “I cannot go through this again if you’re just going to hurt me again.”
Your head starts shaking before he’s even finished. “I won’t…I swear Anton. I won’t.”
Anton searches your face, rain and tears blurring his vision until all he can really make out is your mouth trembling. “I love you,” you say, more urgently now. “I love you, Anton. I always have.”
Anton steps even closer. Your umbrella is useless now, hanging slack at your side while both of you stand there getting soaked through. Anton trembles as he works up the courage to ask you the one question he’s never dared to ask out loud. “When you said it, that night…when you told me you loved me before you left…did you mean it?”
Your entire face changes. Your brows pull together in confusion and then realization flashes across your face. “You were awake?” you ask.
He nods once. You sob at the admission, completely letting go of the umbrella now, your hand flying to your chest. “I always meant it.”
The second the words leave your mouth Anton closes the distance and kisses you hard. His hands come up to cradle your face as his lips crash into yours. His fingers tremble as they press into your rain-cold skin. You meet him with equal urgency, your fingers twisting into the front of his soaked jacket hard enough to wrinkle the fabric beneath your fists. The rain keeps falling around you sliding down both your faces and gathering at the corners of your mouths but neither of you pulls away.
His thumbs drag shakily along your jaw, tipping your face up deeper into the kiss. You let him maneuver you in any way he pleases, willing to give him whatever he wants to take. When he pulls away, both of you are breathing hard with his forehead resting against yours, your hands still fisted in his jacket.
His eyes stay shut for a minute as he tries to collect himself before he opens them and looks at you. “I don’t want to go back…not to who we were.”
He watches as you nod, staring at him dazed. Anton swallows and wipes away the trail of spit he left behind on your lips. “If we do this I want it to be different, a fresh start. I want us to learn how to be in each other’s lives without destroying each other first.”
A small smile tugs at your mouth. “Friends first?”
A smile breaks out across his face too. “Friends who are very clearly in love with each other.”
You laugh at his words and Anton feels his heart soften at the sound. He leans in and kisses you once more, gentler this time.
You nod against his mouth. “Okay,” you whisper. “I’d love to start over.”
For the first time in years, Anton lets himself believe you.
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