25 Zara
Functioning Is Hard
The door clicks shut behind him, and for a second my brain does this stupid, hopeful thing where it decides that wasn’t the real ending.
He’s coming back.
That’s all.
He just needs a minute. He’s in the hallway pacing or rubbing the back of his neck or standing there regretting every single word that just came out of his mouth, and in ten seconds he’s going to open the door again and say something in that rough, annoyed voice of his about how I look at him when I’m crying and how he hates it and how he’s sorry and how he didn’t mean it that way and how we’re both idiots.
Any second now.
I stand there waiting for the knob to turn with only the sound of my breathing to fill the silence. Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
Nothing.
I blink once, then again, but the door stays shut.
He meant it.
That hits me in waves instead of all at once, which somehow makes it worse. If it had just knocked me flat immediately, maybe that would’ve been better. Instead, it works its way through slowly, a blade getting pushed through layers.
My knees go weak so suddenly I don’t really decide to sit down, my body just gives up before my brain catches up. I end up on the floor beside my bed with my shoulder bumping the mattress and one hand still half-lifted from where I think maybe I was going to reach for the door.
My throat tightens, then nothing happens right away. That’s the weirdest part. I thought I’d be sobbing immediately. Throwing up. Screaming. Something dramatic and cinematic and at least worth all this pain.
Instead, I’m just sitting on the floor in his hoodie, staring at a bad patch of carpet and feeling my pulse in my wrists while my brain replays the same two sentences over and over until they don’t sound real anymore.
You have to let me go.
I love you.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes hard enough to see stars and it still doesn’t make any of it feel less real.
This is so stupid.
I drop my hands and look at the door again. Still shut, no footsteps coming, and no Cass in sight. My chest caves in on itself a little.
Okay. Okay.
So this is real.
I should get up.
I should take off his hoodie.
But I can’t, because taking it off means giving up the weight of it around my shoulders.
It means giving up the smell of him that always sticks to the collar no matter how many times he claims he doesn’t care what body wash he uses.
So I curl the sleeves into my fists instead and drop my forehead to my knees.
This is fine.
My throat works once around nothing, and that’s when the sobs finally start.
One slips out and then another, and then suddenly my whole face hurts and my chest is jerking in these ugly little broken breaths I can’t get under control.
I press my mouth against the sleeve of his hoodie because the idea of anybody hearing me right now feels unbearable, even though nobody’s in the room yet.
The crying gets worse anyway. Quiet and then not quiet, making my stomach cramp and my nose run and my head pound. It keeps going until something ugly and hot starts slipping in. I lift my head and scrub both sleeves over my face, breathing hard.
I’m not safe.
His voice drops right into the middle of my skull, calm and shattered and so convinced it makes me want to punch something.
“Yeah,” I whisper to the empty room, then louder because why not at this point, “and I’m not either.”
I push myself up too fast and have to catch the bed to steady myself.
“I can handle you,” I mutter, then say it again because it feels better out loud. “I was handling you.”
I pace to the desk and back again, the room too small for the amount of restless energy suddenly in me.
He doesn’t get to do that.
He doesn’t get to call it love and expect me to nod along. He doesn’t get to act like protecting me means taking my choice away and then leaving me here to deal with the aftermath by myself.
My hand wraps around the doorknob before I realize I crossed the room.
I stop there, fingers tight, pulse pounding.
I could go after him. I could open the door, find him in his dorm, and tell him exactly what I think of his noble, self-sacrificing bullshit.
I could tell him he’s wrong. I could tell him he’s stubborn and unfair and absolutely out of his mind if he thinks I’d rather lose him than deal with him.
The urge is so strong my hand actually turns the knob a fraction before I catch myself.
Then I picture it. I picture finding him and saying all of it, every furious, devastated thing in my chest, and I picture him standing there with that wrecked look he gets when he’s already decided he deserves to hurt.
He’d listen. That’s the worst part. He’d listen to every word and still tell me to leave.
I don’t think I could survive that twice in one night. So I let go of the doorknob and step back.
Coward.
Before I know it, I’m back on the floor by my bed, but I don’t remember moving over here. The hour moves again, but I’m not sure how long it’s been when I hear a knock at the door.
Time is garbage now.
I hear something, then Riley’s voice, muffled and wrong through the wood. “Zae?”
I don’t answer. The door opens anyway because she lives here too, and then she steps inside with her backpack hanging off one shoulder and a drink in her hand, staring at me like she can’t quite peg what she needs to be concerned about first.
Her face changes fast. Confusion then concern. Then something more concrete once she sees the crying and notes I clearly have not moved in… a while.
“Oh my God,” she says, dropping her bag without looking where it lands. “What happened?”
I open my mouth, but nothing useful comes out. I’ve got a whole angry TED Talk in my head and apparently none of it translates into actual speech. She crosses the room fast and kneels in front of me, one hand reaching for my knee and then stopping, as if she isn’t sure where I’ll let her touch.
“Zae,” she says again, softer now. “Hey. Talk to me.”
I shake my head and Riley reads enough of that to adjust. She shifts closer and sits on the floor with me instead, legs folded awkwardly under her because dorm floors aren’t built for comfort or breakdowns.
“Okay,” she murmurs, voice low and careful. “No talking yet. That’s fine. You can just… blink twice if it was him.”
I don’t blink twice because I don’t have control over my face right now, but I must make some kind of expression because her own face tightens and she exhales hard through her nose.
“Oh, that motherf—”
I shake my head this time, immediately and hard enough that my hair sticks to my wet cheeks. That stops her from finishing.
Don’t. Not yet.
Riley presses her lips together and nods once. “Okay. Okay.”
At some point she hands me tissues. At another she gets me water.
And eventually, she asks if I want to sit on the bed, and apparently I do because one minute I’m on the floor and the next I’m against the wall with my knees pulled up, his hoodie still wrapped around me while Riley sits cross-legged at the foot of the mattress pretending to scroll on her phone so she’s giving me space without leaving me alone.
My phone buzzes on the desk, which I ignore at first, but a few seconds later it buzzes again, and this time I look.
Mama Lori
The sight of her name cracks something open in a completely different way. It isn’t bigger than the breakup. It just sits too close to it, another wound crowding the first.
Riley notices where I’m looking. “Do you want me to get it?”
I stare at the screen until it goes dark.
Then I whisper, because apparently my voice only works if I keep it barely above nothing, “No.”
She nods. “Okay.”
A minute later the phone lights again.
Mama Lori
The preview this time is enough to read without opening it.
Mama Lori:
Sweet girl, I’m checking on you. Cass—
That’s all I get before the screen dims again, and my stomach drops so hard it hurts.
Because apparently breaking my heart personally wasn’t enough for Cass.
He had to go and be thoughtful from a distance too.
He had to still care in this crooked, unbearable way that doesn’t fix anything and somehow hurts more than if he’d just vanished completely.
I pick up my phone with both hands. My thumb hovers over the screen. Then I open the message.
Mama Lori:
Sweet girl, I’m checking on you. Cass asked me to make sure you were okay. I know I’m probably the last person you want right now, but I’m here. Always. You don’t have to answer if you can’t. I just need to know you’re breathing.
That does me in, replacing the anger with depression again. The tears start over and I fold over my knees, pressing the heel of my hand against my mouth because I cannot physically survive Mama Lori being kind to me right now.
He left me, but he still asked his mother to check if I was breathing.
I don’t know whether I want to scream or thank her or throw my phone at the wall. Riley is by my side in a second, one hand rubbing between my shoulders.
“Hey, hey,” she murmurs. “What happened?”
I turn the phone toward her because that’s easier than speaking. She reads just enough to understand.
“Oh,” she whispers.
Yeah. Oh.
I lock the screen without replying. I can’t answer her. The thought of typing anything back feels impossible, my brain short-circuiting the second I imagine words.
Yes, I’m breathing, thanks for checking. Your son ripped my heart out but at least he outsourced the follow-up care.
Jesus.
That thought is so ugly and unfair that I almost feel guilty for having it.
Riley takes the phone gently out of my hand and sets it facedown on the nightstand. “Okay. No phones.”
I nod because I’d agree to almost anything if it means I don’t have to look at the screen again.
I don’t know what time I finally fall asleep. Sleep might be generous. It feels more like my body shuts down forcefully.