Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Kelechi
“I’m feeling so nervous right now,” I said, my finger hovering over the send button.
“Jesus, baby, hit the damned button before the nerves start coming,” Marley replied from across the library table.
We were both seated in our usual section, surrounded by our open laptops, empty coffee cups and crumpled notes.
We’d finished compiling our project and were about to submit it, with the deadline just two days away.
“What if—”
“What if we did brilliantly? Come on, don’t infect both our brains with negativity.” She cut me off, running a hand through her hair with that infuriatingly cute smirk playing on her lips.
“Okay… okay, here we go.” I closed my eyes and hit the send button.
A second later, the confirmation message appeared on screen:
Submission successful.
“Easy, wasn’t it?” She grinned, leaning back in her chair with satisfaction.
“Speak for yourself. I think I aged five years in the last thirty seconds,” I said, slumping forward onto the table dramatically.
“You’re such a drama queen,” she laughed, reaching across to flick my forehead gently. “We killed that project, and you know it. Professor Chen is going to love our research.”
“I hope so, because we put our entire soul into it.”
“Our soul and your anxiety.”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “It’s called the art of overthinking. Every philosopher does it. Kierkegaard basically built a career out of it.”
She rolled her eyes, but her smile lingered. “You just compared your nervous breakdown to existential despair.”
“Exactly. Authenticity,” I replied gravely.
“You’re impossible.”
“And yet, deeply necessary,” I countered, lowering my voice as if I were delivering a lecture. “Where would reason be without passion? Plato said they’re both parts of the soul, remember?”
Her eyes sparkled at that. “You’re quoting Plato to justify your nerves?”
“Better than quoting Nietzsche to defend my chaos,” I said, grinning as she chuckled.
We packed up our things, bantering back and forth as we headed out of the library into the February air. The snow was lighter now, but everything was still covered in that pristine white blanket that made the campus look postcard-perfect...
“So,” I said as we approached her car, “I’ve been thinking about getting a job.”
She stopped walking. “A job? What for?”
“What do you mean, what for? Money, obviously. You can’t keep taking care of me.”
“Why not?” She said it in a tone, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “I’ve got plenty. You don’t need to stress.”
I stared at her. Sometimes I forgot how different our worlds were. “Marley, I can’t just live off you indefinitely. I need my own income.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” she said, waving a dismissive hand as she unlocked the car. “Right now, I’m more concerned with celebrating our project submission. And your hair looks amazing today, by the way.”
I touched my cornrows self-consciously. “Come on, it’s just cornrows. It’s nothing special.”
“Are you kidding? You look like a goddess, seriously.” She pulled out her iPhone. “Let me get a picture.”
“Marley, no—”
“C’mon, you look ethereal.”
“I don’t,” I protested.
But she was already snapping photos, moving around to get different angles while I protested and laughed. I rolled my eyes in mock exasperation, and she kept making little appreciative noises behind the camera.
“Okay, okay, let me see,” I said, reaching for the phone.
She handed it over, and I scrolled through the pictures. They were beautiful. I looked happy, radiant even, my smile genuine and bright.
“These are gorgeous,” I murmured. “Send them to me?”
“Of course.”
I handed her my phone so she could forward them to me, and that was when everything changed.
Her expression morphed from casual concentration to confusion, to recognition, then to something harder and colder.
It was like her face drained of colour.
“Marley?” I asked, my heart starting to race. “What’s wrong?”
She didn’t answer. She just kept staring at my phone screen, her jaw tightening in that way it did when she was trying to control her emotions.
“What did you see?” I reached for the phone, but she pulled it back, still staring.
I tried to snatch it away, but she dodged, taking a step back. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were different.
They seemed distant and closed. I had never seen them like that before.
“Let’s get into the car,” she said calmly. Too calmly, in a way that made my blood freeze and my heart thump loudly.
She got into her side of the car, my phone still clutched in her hand.
“Marley, wait—”
But she didn’t wait. Instead, she slammed the door and my breathing quickened, my heart hammering against my ribs.
What had she seen? What was on my phone that could make her face go so blank, so cold?
Wait. Oh, no… no, no, no… God, please not that…
I said a silent prayer as I got into the passenger seat and shut the door.
Jesus… Why had I saved that to my photos?
“Marley, please, I can explain… it’s… it’s not what you think,” I said as I turned to face her.
Her mouth was set in a deep frown, one I’d never seen before, as she stared straight ahead through the windscreen. The silence stretched until I thought I might suffocate.
“A wedding invitation,” she said finally. “With your name on it. April thirteenth. How romantic.”
My chest hollowed out.
“How long?” She still wasn’t looking at me.
“Mar—”
“How. Long. Have. You. Known?”
Each word was clipped, like she was barely holding herself together.
“Since New Year’s Day.”
The confession sat between us while I watched her absorb it, watched her hands start to shake before she clenched them into fists.
“New Year’s Day.” She was nodding slowly now. “New Year’s Day. When you got that call from your folks, when you looked like someone had died.”
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her cigarettes and lighter with shaking hands. The lighter flicked once, twice, three times before it caught. She took a long, desperate drag.
“Over a month. Over a month you’ve known you were going to marry someone else in a few months, and you said nothing.” Her voice was getting tighter. “Do you have any fucking idea what this month has been for me?”
“I was trying to figure out how to tell you—”
“Figure out how to tell me?” She whirled to face me, and I could see the exact moment her composure cracked. “A month, Kelechi! A month of me falling deeper every single day while you sat there knowing exactly how this thing we have between us ends!”
“I didn’t know how to say it, Marley, please—”
“Please, what? Please understand? Please forgive you for lying to my face every day for a month?” She was crying now, angry tears that made her eyes even greener. “I told you things I’ve never told anyone. I let you see me in ways no one else ever has. I trusted you!”
“I know—”
“Do you? Do you know what you’ve done?” Her voice cracked. “I don’t let people in, ever. I keep things simple, keep people at arm’s length, keep my heart safe behind walls that took me years to build. But you…” She laughed bitterly. “You walked right through them as though they weren’t even there.”
“I never asked you to—”
“No, you didn’t ask. You just smiled at me with those big beautiful eyes and made me want things I swore I’d never want. You made me believe in something I thought was impossible.” Her eyes burned into mine.
“What?”
“That love could be worth the risk.”
The words came out raw and broken, and it broke me.
“That maybe, for once in my life, I could have something real and lasting and good.”
I was sobbing now, but she wasn’t finished.
“I’ve been planning a future with you in my head,” she continued, her voice shaking with the effort of getting the words out.
“Stupid, right? Planning trips, thinking about introducing you to my family, wondering if you’d want to move in together eventually.
All while you were planning your wedding to someone else. ”
“I never meant for this to happen—”
“What? You never meant for me to fall for you?”
“No… I…”
“Well, congratulations. It happened anyway.” She took another drag, her hands still trembling. “Tell me about him.”
“What?”
“The groom. Tell me about this man you’re going to promise to love, honour, and have a happy ever after with.”
“I don’t want to talk about—”
“I don’t give a fuck what you want right now.” Her voice was as hard as steel wrapped in velvet. “You owe me this much. Tell me about him.”
“His name is—”
“I don’t want to fucking know what his name is,” she snapped. “All I want to know is, do you love him?”
The question was so quiet I almost missed it.
“I don’t—”
“It’s a simple question, Princess. Do you love him?”
The endearment sliced through my skin.
“No.”
“Do you even know him?”
“We’ve met a few times—”
“Jesus Christ.” She laughed, but there was no humour in it. “You’re going to marry a stranger rather than choosing the person who’s been loving you with everything she has.”
“You love me?”
The words slipped out before I could stop them, and Marley went completely still.
“Don’t,” she said quietly. “Don’t make me say it just so you can carry it with you into your marriage like some tragic keepsake.”
“I need to hear it.”
“Why? What difference does it make now?”
“I don’t know.”
She stared at me for a long moment, and I could see her internal war playing out across her face. Finally, she stubbed out her cigarette and turned to face me fully.
“You want to know if I love you?” Her voice had gone soft now, and somehow, that was much worse than the yelling.
“I love the way you bite your lip when you’re concentrating.
I love how you organise your books by colour, like you’re creating rainbows on your shelves.
I love that you dance barefoot in the kitchen when you think no one’s watching, and how you laugh at your own jokes before you finish telling them. ”
My breath caught in my throat.
“I love how you scrunch your nose when you’re thinking hard about something. I love that you cry at commercials and try to hide it from me. I love how you feel so safe in my arms that you fall asleep with your face pressed into my neck.”
She reached up and touched my cheek, so gently it made me cry harder.
“I love how brave you are, even though you think you’re not. I love how you look at me and see magic instead of ruthlessness. I love that you see the best in everyone, even when they don’t deserve it.”
“Marley—”
“I love everything about you. Fuck, I love you so much it terrifies me,” she said, her voice breaking now as her thumb traced my cheekbone. “I love you in ways I didn’t know I was capable of. I love you enough that I’ve been ready to change everything about my life to make room for you in it.”
I leaned into her touch, memorising the feel of her hand against my skin.
“And that’s what makes this so fucking devastating,” she whispered. “Because I don’t even know if you feel the same way about me. But you’re going to choose duty over love anyway.”
“I don’t know how to choose you,” I admitted through my tears. “I don’t know how to be brave enough.”
“That’s the thing about bravery, Princess. You don’t know how until you just do it.” She pulled her hand away, and I immediately felt the loss. “But you can’t, can you? You can’t disappoint them, even if it means disappointing yourself for the rest of your life.”
“What if I choose you and we don’t work out? What if I lose everything for something that doesn’t last?”
“What if we do work out? What if ours is the kind of love that lasts for a lifetime, and you’re throwing it away because you’re too scared to find out?”
I had no answer for that.
She stared at me for a long moment, and I watched something die in her eyes.
“Let’s get you back to the dorm. It’s getting late.”
She started the engine. I wanted to reach for her hand on the gear shift, but I’d lost that right. The silence between us felt like a living thing, heavy and breathing in the small space of her car.
I cried and didn’t try to hide it. I cried ugly, messy tears that I wiped on my sleeve like a child. She didn’t look at me, not even a glance in my direction. Just kept her eyes straight ahead like I wasn’t even there.
Gosh. I’d really done it this time.
I’d hurt the one person who actually mattered, and now I was sitting here drowning in my own stupidity, trying to figure out how to fix something that might be completely broken.
When we pulled up to my dorm, I knew this might be it. The last time I’d sit in her car, breathing in her perfume mixed with the vanilla air freshener she kept clipped to her vent.
“I’ll make sure you have your stuff delivered to you over the weekend,” she said, still not looking at me. “And it would be much better if we pretend we don’t know each other. I’ll reach out to Dr. Chen and sort out whatever relates to our project so she contacts you directly.”
“Marley… try to understand me, please.”
She scoffed. “I understand you perfectly. You’ve made your choice. Now live with it.”
Dejectedly, I opened the door and stepped out into the cold, clutching my phone to my chest. Before I could say another word, she slammed her door and drove away.
I stood there like a ghost in front of my dorm, watching her car disappear around the corner.
Her taillights grew smaller and smaller until they were just pinpricks of red in the distance, and then nothing.
She was gone.
Just like that, everything that had ever made me feel human vanished around that corner. Every moment of joy, every burst of laughter, every time I’d looked in the mirror and actually liked what I saw—gone.
The silence that followed was deafening. I could hear my own heartbeat, could feel it breaking with each thud against my ribs.
This was what I’d chosen. This emptiness. This nothingness masquerading as safety.
I had just torched the only real thing in my entire existence.
The only person who had shown me what life without the whole act of performance truly felt like. The only soul who had ever made me feel like I wasn’t just taking up space in the world.
The only love that I had ever felt like coming home to myself.
And the cruellest irony of all was that she would go about her life never knowing that she had been my entire universe.
Never knowing that losing her felt like losing the ability to breathe.
Never knowing that I loved her with a desperation that terrified me, that I loved her more than I had ever loved my own life.
I had become my own destroyer, and she would never even know why.