"How can we go back to being friends after we just shared a bed? How can you look at me and pretend I’m someone you never met?" Or in which a lifelong friendship ends the night they sleep together.
masterlist.
You’d known Sid Jenkins your entire life. Same street. Same school. Same friend group. He was always just Sid. Your Sid. The boy who panicked before every exam. The boy who showed up at your window when his dad yelled too much.
You meet him when you’re six years old, and he’s holding a soggy plastic bucket full of worms.
The backyard is muddy, and you’re in shoes your mum told you not to ruin. But here you are—half-curious, half-bored—staring at a pale boy with crooked glasses and the biggest gap-toothed smile you’ve ever seen.
He holds the bucket out to you."Wanna see the king worm? He’s huge."
You scrunch up your face. "Ew. Worms are gross."
He frowns, looking into the bucket like maybe he’s hurt their feelings. Then he shrugs.
"That’s fine. I’ll be the worm king then."
You pause. "Can I be the worm queen?"
He lights up like it’s the best idea he’s ever heard. "Yeah! But you have to help dig more."
You kneel beside him, ruining your jeans, not caring. The two of you dig in silence, dirt under your fingernails and a strange sense of peace between you. It feels like the beginning of something, even if neither of you knows what that is yet.
By the time you're eight, Sid is your favorite person who isn't technically related to you.
You walk to school together, swap crisps, share secrets you pinky-promise to keep.
He cries when his pet hamster dies. You give him your favorite sticker. He doesn’t say thank you, but he doesn’t have to.
You start noticing that he knows how to make people laugh—even when he doesn’t feel like laughing. You start writing stories about characters like him. He reads them and says they’re brilliant. You believe him.
At nine, you tell him your parents are fighting a lot, and he doesn’t say anything dumb like "It’ll be okay." He just sits with you on the swing set after school until the sun starts to go down.
He tells you about his mum sleeping on the couch. You don’t know what to say, so you share your last fruit snack. That’s how it works between you—not a lot of big words. Just soft silence and tiny, loyal actions.
By ten, the two of you have a rhythm. You’re the first to hear about his nightmares. He’s the only one who sees the comics you draw. You steal biscuits from each other’s kitchens. You pass notes in class—stick figures, fart jokes, secret codes.
One day, he trips and skins his knee on the playground. You kneel next to him, gently brushing off the gravel.
"You okay?" you whisper.
He nods.
You offer your sleeve to wipe his tears, and he uses it without asking.
"Thanks," he mumbles.
You don’t say you’re welcome. You just stand up and hold out your hand.
He takes it.
And you walk home like that—his scraped knee, your muddy sleeve, your hands together.
Twelve sneaks up on you.
You both still trade gum wrappers and doodle in notebooks, but things are changing. Slowly. Quietly. You still watch cartoons together. But sometimes, you catch him looking at the popular girls and then quickly looking away.
Sid’s taller now. His voice cracks sometimes. He hates it, and you pretend not to notice.
You spend afternoons flopped on the floor doing homework, watching cartoons. You’ve seen each other cry. Seen each other laugh so hard you nearly threw up.
But one afternoon, your parents are yelling upstairs. Sid is sitting next to you at the kitchen table, working on math.
He doesn’t say anything.
Under the table, his hand finds yours.
Not like he’s holding it. Just... putting it there. A quiet gesture.
You pause. Then, slowly, you close your fingers around his.
He doesn’t look up.
You don’t let go.
You’re thirteen when things get... complicated.
Sid is still Sid. But now, he’s got longer legs and hair that falls into his eyes. You notice. He starts swearing more. You start wearing eyeliner. You both pretend you’re more confident than you really are.
You’re watching a movie one night, sprawled across your bed. He leans against you, half-asleep, mumbling something about popcorn.
His head falls on your shoulder.
You go completely still.
Not because it’s uncomfortable Because your heart’s doing something it didn’t used to do. He snores once. You almost laugh. He wakes up a minute later and stretches.
"Sorry," he says. "Didn’t mean to crush you."
"It’s fine," you say, voice too light.
But something in you changed, and you can’t un-feel it.
Suddenly you're fifteen and you start going to parties together. Still attached at the hip. You play the game. You pretend to be his girlfriend when other girls flirt with him. He plays along.
But one night, someone asks: "Are you two, like... a couple?"
Sid laughs. Too fast. Too loud.
"Nah. She’s basically my sister. That’d be messed up." You smile. And something inside you cracks. Not loudly. Just enough that it won’t go back.
Everything changed at seventeen. Everything changed when ge me Cassie. She shows up like a painting that moves. Glitter lids. Floaty skirts. Sugar in her voice. Sid is hooked. She’s everything you’re not. Dreamy. Delicate.
You help him text her. You help him pick out a hoodie to wear around her. You help him fall in love with someone else. And he thanks you like you haven’t been loving him quietly for years.
You stop eating lunch sometimes. You stop drawing. He doesn’t notice.
You sit with him at lunch while he talks about Cassie. You eat quietly. You don’t tell him your parents are getting divorced. He talks about her voice. Her hair. How she kissed him and then disappeared for a week. You just nod. Because being near him is the closest you’ll get.
It's raining and he knocks.
He climbs in through the window. Hoodie soaked. Heart cracked.
"She left again," he says. "Didn’t say goodbye."
You sit beside him.
He says, "I keep getting it wrong."
You say, "You’re not what’s wrong."
He looks at you. Like maybe he’s seeing something new.
He kisses you. And you kiss him back. Not because it’s right. Because it’s him. Because it’s always been him.
And when it happens, it’s soft. Clumsy. Real. Your first time. You give him everything. And he lets you.
Later, you lie tangled in your sheets. His skin still warm against yours. The silence feels heavier now. He’s staring at the ceiling, and you’re watching the side of his face.
Say something, you think. Please.
He sits up slowly, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Fuck. I should probably get going…”
You don’t move.
“She might call.”
Cassie. Again. Like you were just a break in the middle of the Cassie spiral.
He bends down, grabbing his jeans, not looking at you. “You don’t mind, right? That I came by?”
You shake your head.
You want to scream.
You want to beg.
You want to rewind the night and stop yourself from ever opening the door.
Instead, you lie there and say, “No. ’Course not.”
He leaves ten minutes later.
Doesn’t kiss you goodbye. Doesn’t even meet your eyes.
The door closes behind him, and you’re alone.
The sheets smell like him. Your lips are still swollen. Your thighs ache in the way you’ve always imagined they would, after him. But it doesn’t feel good anymore.
It feels like a dream you woke up from too fast.
You bury your face into the pillow, and this time you do cry. Quietly. Carefully. Like maybe if you’re soft enough, you won’t feel it so deep in your chest.
Because now, you know the truth:
There’s no going back.
You can’t be just friends with someone who touched you like that.
And you don’t know how to look him in the eyes again
without begging him to see you.
You don’t talk the next day.
You see him in the hallway, standing by the vending machine with Tony and Chris, laughing at something stupid, and for a second you wonder how he does it.
How he looks so normal.
So unchanged.
He doesn’t see you. Or maybe he does and chooses not to.
You’re not sure which would hurt more.
You go to class. You sit beside him in Media, like always. But this time, there’s a full inch of space between your arms, and he doesn’t look your way once.
Neither do you.
You used to pass notes. Share snacks. Whisper jokes.
Now you just pretend the other isn’t breathing beside you. Like nothing happened.
Like you didn’t know how he tasted.
Days go by. Then a week. You don’t text. He doesn’t knock.
You almost message him one night — just a stupid meme he would’ve laughed at — but your thumb hovers over the send button and all you can think is:
He wouldn’t laugh like he used to.
He wouldn’t send one back.
You’re not that person to him anymore.
So you delete it.
And go to bed with your phone face-down.
The worst part isn’t that you lost him. It’s how easy it happened. There’s no fight. No screaming. No dramatic ending.
Just silence.
Just space widening between you like water between two ships drifting apart.
You see him around sometimes. Still surrounded by the same people. Still trailing behind Tony like a loyal shadow. Still lost in Cassie, who’s back and smiling again like she never shattered him.
You hear from Jal that he’s trying to make it work now. You nod and say “that’s good” and try not to throw up.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon when you finally speak. Not by choice.
You bump into each other outside school, both cutting through the alley behind the record shop. You’re both startled — like ghosts seeing their reflection for the first time.
You stop. He stops.
It’s quiet.
Sid runs a hand through his hair. You recognize the twitch in his fingers — nerves. You used to know what that meant.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
You both stand there like idiots. Strangers.
He opens his mouth, then closes it. Shuffles his feet. “I, uh… I meant to text. I just didn’t know what to say.”
You nod. “Yeah.”
He glances at you then. Really looks. “You alright?”
It’s such a normal question. So meaningless.
You should lie. You should say “I’m fine.” You should walk away.
But your voice breaks instead: “No. Not really.”
He freezes. The old Sid would know what to do.
“We shouldn’t have done that,” you say quietly. “I thought it meant something. But it didn’t. Not to you.”
He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t say yes it did. Just looks at the pavement. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know,” you whisper. “But you did. I don’t think we can go back,” you add.
You think he might argue. Say you’re wrong. Say you can.
But he just nods.
“I don’t think so either.”
It feels like getting punched in the chest. But at least now it’s done. No pretending. No dragging it out. You step past him, slowly.
“Bye, Sid.”
He doesn’t say anything. You look back twice. He doesn't.
You don’t hate him. You just miss being fifteen. Miss when he fell asleep on your shoulder and nothing had been broken yet. Sometimes you dream about that version of him. Then you wake up.
You stood in front of your locker exchanging your books from within your bags before you heard a soft thud next to you. Tony was leaning against the locker, his eyes locked on his phone as he typed out a text.
“ Are you coming to Nips party tonight? ”
“ No, mm’ busy tonight. ”
Tony simply just rolled his eyes and walked off, but yet not even four hours later he was completely plastered, calling your phone.
“ Where are you, I thought you were coming, ” he was barely even legible, his words slurring into the phone as music blared in the background.
“ No, I told you I have a date. ”
The phone went silent, the only indicator he was still there being the loud music.
“ You what? With who? ”
You clicked your phone shut without an answer, your date standing in front of you.
“ Hey, you alright? ”
“ Yeah Sid, let's just go get food, ” you silenced your phone shoving it in your bag.
Your fingers were intertwined with Sid's, your faces illuminated by the movie theater screen. The reflection of the movie played in Sid’s glasses, his eyes remaining on the screen, but your eyes were locked on him. You knew he was a virgin, hadn’t even kissed a girl according to Tony, but you found it endearing. He wasn’t like the other boys you had been with, he wasn’t like Tony.
You had been staring too long and now you were being reflected back to yourself in Sid’s glasses, his eyes locked on yours. You leaned in, giving him a gentle peck on the lips, but when Sid tried to pull back his cheeks flushing red you held him there. Your fingers curled in his hair playing with the exposed hair on the nape of his neck, your tongue tangled with his. You could feel how inexperienced he was. Every movement of his lips or tongue met with a retraction unsure of how to proceed.
You were only pulled from each other when the lights of the theater came on. Lipstick was smudged across Sid’s lips making you laugh, but you didn’t tell him why.
Your hand remained in his as he walked you to your doorstep.
“ Do you want to come up, my parents aren’t home. ”
Sid could practically taste the sexual innuendo from the question as it fell from your lips. He stared at you like a deer in headlights, the simple affirmation of yes getting caught in his throat.
Your eyes were locked on him, watching as his cheeks grew red and he stood frozen, “ you don’t have to… ”
Words didn’t follow your sentence, they couldn’t, it was the only thing Sid could think of doing as his lips came down upon yours. His tongue pushing into your mouth the way yours had earlier in the night, it was as if he was trying to memorize the feeling.
Sid’s nails were clawing at your hips that were covered only by a denim mini skirt as you sat in his lap. Your hands were tangled in his messy brown hair, his beanie discarded on your bedroom floor along with your shirt. It was all almost overwhelming to Sid but so exciting.
Your hands moved to the zipper on his hoodie pulling it down with one tug before it joined his beanie on the floor. You stripped him of his clothing, one by one till he was laid out on your bed in just his boxers. His cock was straining against the fabric desperate to break free of its confines. You stripped down, carelessly tossing your clothes on the floor watching as Sid’s cheeks grew redder against his pale face.
You bent down, opening your purse, grabbing out the spare rubber you always kept in the side pocket before joining Sid on the bed. You tore open the plastic with your teeth before grabbing the rubber discarding the rest on the bed.
“ Can you take em’ off for me? ”
Sid hastily nodded, his fingers hooked under the elastic waistband pushing them down before kicking them. His cock was resting against his abdomen, the veins that lay visible through the skin pulsing. You slowly rolled the condom onto his cock already earning a groan from Sid. Your hands rested on his chest for support as you sunk down onto his shaft, his head was already thrown back pushing against your pillows as groans tumbled past his lips. His fingers gripped the sheets, his knuckles going white as he tried desperately not to finish too early, but his efforts were futile as you simply rolled your hips against his. A loud moan filled the room, his hips bucking into yours as he finished.
“ Shit- I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to- ”
I cut him off by pressing my lips to his, “ we’re not done. ”
Your hips rolled against his before you grabbed his hands moving them to grasp your breasts. Your soft moans were much quieter than all the sounds falling from Sid’s lips. His hips rutted into yours, nothing could pull you from one another till something did.
You could hear the loud pounding from downstairs as someone banged on the door. Your brow furrowed knowing you didn’t invite anyone over and your parents weren’t coming back till Monday. You slowly slid off Sid pulling his zip up over your unclothed body struggling with the zipper as you ran down the steps insisting to whoever was pounding on the door that you were coming.
You had just gotten the zipper up when you opened the door revealing Tony, partially standing and partially leaning on the railing that guarded the front of your porch.
