45. Lance
Lance
George shows up with the third coffee of the week.
He’s standing outside the main entrance like always, one hand shoved into his jacket pocket, the other holding out the cup toward me. No big speech or any hopeful expression, just that same stubborn persistence, wrapped in cold morning air and the faint steam of his coffee.
I take it mid-step and keep walking.
Some days, I take the coffee. Others I walk right past him like he’s part of the building. Background scenery. A sad little feature installed outside the hospital doors. There are times I leave through the side exit just to avoid the whole routine entirely.
Somehow, that feels even worse because avoiding him still means I thought about him first. I tell myself there’s no pattern here or any conscious choice. I’m just reacting to the moment, doing whatever pisses me off least that day.
The lie is starting to taste stale.
He shows up four days a week, almost always during the same narrow stretch before my shift starts or ends. I noticed that sometime during the second week.
On the days he doesn’t show, the rhythm of the morning or evening feels slightly off, like a familiar background hum that’s suddenly gone. My body just picks up on it instantly.
My coworkers have started noticing. Turns out a six-foot-something guy with big hands and a permanent scowl carved into his face tends to stand out when he parks himself outside a hospital at dawn or dusk four times a week waiting for the same person.
One of the residents outright asked if I had a stalker problem.
I should shut this down before someone decides to get invested. It’s only a matter of time before someone’s going to make it their business.
But every time I decide I’m going to tell him to stop, I walk outside and he’s just…there. Waiting silently in the cold like he’s already accepted whatever version of me walks through those doors.
Angry. Tired. Ignoring him. Taking the coffee. Looking everywhere except directly at him.
He never gets mad about it. Never guilt-trips me or asks for more than I’m willing to give.
George acts like even being near me again is something he has to earn.
He just stands there with that infuriating patience that used to feel like home but now seems like ripping the scab off every time I start to forget.
Almost two months have passed since that night in the parking lot—the only time we’ve actually spoken since shit hit the fan. Somehow we’ve drifted into this miserable, fragile little routine that lives somewhere between friendship and grief.
I hate how comforting the routine feels, how easily we fell back into orbit around each other, even without words. Our bodies still seem to remember each other even when our pride doesn’t want to, like some default system setting neither of us knows how to shut off.
We’re just two stubborn idiots circling the wreckage because neither of us knows how to fully walk away from it yet. I convince myself I’m not making decisions so much as responding to timing, that there’s no real pattern here.
The lie is getting harder to swallow every single day.
In the last few days though, now stretching into a full week, he isn’t there.
Not in any of the days that somehow become part of my fucking rhythm without my permission. It’s just nothing where there should have been something.
At first, I tell myself I don’t notice. That’s become my setting with George. Pretend first. Deal with the consequences later.
By midweek, it stops feeling subtle. The absence sits under my skin like low-level interference I can’t tune out. Every morning my eyes flick toward the entrance automatically before my brain catches up and tells me to knock that shit off.
Pathetic.
He disappeared before. He can do it again.
I keep my head down harder than usual that week. Drink way too much of the shitty coffee from work just to have something to hold onto that wasn’t this gnawing, restless feeling. I don’t ask Valerie if she’d seen him. I don’t check my phone. I don’t go looking.
Because that’s what this had become—small, controlled pieces of comfort I should’ve shut down months ago, like some invasive species settling into the ecosystem before you realize it’s choking everything else out. And now the space where he used to be feels wrong.
What did I expect? That he’d just keep showing up forever?
I tell myself this is probably a good thing. Maybe he finally got bored, or that he realized I’m not interested in whatever the hell this was supposed to be.
Maybe he finally came to his senses and thinks I’m never worth it.
The thought should make me feel better. Two months of him slowly dismantling the version of moving on I’d spent so long forcing myself into. It’s not with grand gestures or promises, more like just showing up often enough that my life adjusted around him again before I could stop it.
Now, he’s gone. Again.
I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m just stupid enough to still be disappointed by it anyway. I keep waiting for the irritation to turn into relief.
It doesn’t.
I drive back to Marcus’s apartment from work with the radio on low. The city slides past the windows, indifferent, packed with people who aren’t dealing with any of this shit.
When I walk in, my brother is in the kitchen. Something’s simmering on the stove, and he’s moving around it with that coiled tension when he’s been chewing on something all day and has finally decided tonight is the night.
I drop my keys on the counter and go to the fridge.
“Was he there again?” Marcus asks, still facing the stove.
I pause with my hand on the handle. “Nope.”
Neither of us says anything yet. I grab a water bottle and drink half of it standing there.
“You haven’t seen him?”
I close the fridge. “All week.”
Marcus nods once, his back still to me. It should end there, and for a beat I think it will, but it doesn’t.
“You’ve been picking up extra shifts.” He keeps his tone even, like this isn’t going to turn into anything. “You worked six days straight,” Marcus says.
“We’re short.” That much is true. Staffing issues never go away.
“You do it on top of mom and Hearthside work.”
I lean back against the counter and take another sip. “So?”
Marcus rests his hip against the counter across from me with his arms folded. “I’m just worried about you. You didn’t come out on Saturday. Eugene asked where you were.”
“I was tired,” I say, looking past him.
“I get that,” he says. “I do. I just—” He pauses, runs a hand over his face. “You’ve been keeping to yourself more than usual.”
I shrug and take another sip.
“Friday night the other week, you left the bar early. You didn’t say goodbye to anyone, you just disappeared before the second round. It’s not a lecture. I just don’t want you alone too much.”
The irritation climbs before I decide to let it. “Why are we doing this right now?”
“Because it’s been getting worse, Lance.” Marcus turns fully from the stove after turning down the heat. “And you keep acting like nothing’s wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong, Marcus. Sorry that you’re worried, but I’m totally fine.” I set the bottle down harder than I need to. “I’m working more. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”
“You’re not sleeping much.” He lists it plainly, one item after another. “You crash for a few hours and call it a night. You barely eat. You come home, you sit in the dark. Do you really hate being back here that much?”
“No, I don’t hate being back here. I’m managing.”
“No, you’re not.” He pushes off the counter and takes a step toward me, not threatening, just closing the distance so I can’t look past him. “You’re running yourself into the ground.”
I let out a short, half-hearted laugh. “Is this a fucking welfare check?”
“It’s me telling you what I can see.” He doesn’t flinch at the laugh, doesn’t retreat from it. “You’re not acting like yourself.”
That one triggers me the most, and whatever patience I have left is running thin. I straighten up.
“Acting like myself. No one really gets to define what that looks like for me. Maybe this is just the new me.”
“Maybe,” he says, unflinching.
I hold his gaze. He’s been ready for this conversation longer than I have.
“You’re not okay, Lance.”
Something slips before I can catch it. The feeling rises and then it’s already there.
“Maybe I don’t want to be okay, Marcus. Did you ever think of that?”
Since he doesn’t answer, I keep going.
“Maybe I’m tired of being the one who has it together all the time.” The words come faster than I can sort them. “The one who keeps everything light, making sure nobody else has to sit in anything uncomfortable for too long.”
“Lance.” He takes a breath, and I can see him trying to find a way in.
“No, seriously.” I cut him off. “What if I don’t feel like being the Lance everyone knows? What if I’m having a genuinely shit time? Is it okay if I’m not being the loud, funny one for once, or does that make everyone uncomfortable?”
The kitchen light is too bright. The stove hisses low. My eyes sting, and I try not to let him see it.
Marcus steps closer. Before I can think about it, he pulls me into a hug, one arm across my back, the other gripping my shoulder. I try to keep talking, the words spilling out too fast.
“I had it handled. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked.
Work, sleep, repeat. I got through the day without too much bleeding through.
And then he shows up, just stands there with a fucking cup of coffee like nothing ever happened.
As if he can step back into my life whenever the fuck he feels like it.
He told me he won’t stop, then he disappears for a whole week.
” My voice cracks with frustration. “What the fuck does he think he’s doing?
And more importantly, what in the name of the shittiest of fucks am I doing letting it get to me, again? ”
I draw in a shaky breath. “I was putting things back together, just enough to function.”
The steady pressure of Marcus’s arms around me gives me something to lean on, even if I hate needing it.
“And I don’t need anyone telling me how to handle it. I don’t need someone watching every time I sit in the dark, or skip a meal, or sleep like shit. I just need to get through this without becoming someone else’s problem.”
“Lance…”
A tremor runs through me, and then the tears erupt.
The cap finally pops off everything I’ve been bottling up.
My face slams into his shoulder and my hands grip his shirt so tight it hurts.
I can’t master the sound that comes out of me anymore.
They’re all breaks and stutters catching in my throat, intense enough that they’re not stopping anytime soon.
I can’t breathe properly around it. I just cry and shake against him.
Marcus holds me tighter, not saying a word. I keep talking, speaking in fragments and half sentences, some of them not even making sense. He doesn’t try to follow it. He just holds me.
When it eases, I feel embarrassed and tired. Marcus exhales and steps back.
He hesitates for a second, jaw working like he’s deciding how much to say.
“Lance, I’m sorry…for my part in how all this went down. I know I didn’t make it easier for you.”
He holds my face for a second firmly, grounding me—an older brother’s grip more than anything gentle. It’s like he’s making sure I stay in one piece while he says it.
“And I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to stand here pretending this doesn’t hurt you. It does. And it’s going to, for a while.”
He pauses, like he’s digging for deeper than advice.
“And don’t try to outrun it,” he says finally, sounding like it came from a place he doesn’t visit often.
“That’s the mistake people make. They think if they stay busy enough, tired enough, distracted enough, it’ll stop hurting.
Most of the time, it fucking doesn’t. It just follows you around, even after many years.
It waits until you finally stop moving.”
His lips press into a tight half-smile, eyes sympathetic but carrying their own pain.
“You get through it by letting it hurt. Even when it doesn’t feel like it’s getting any better. You just don’t let it decide who you become. And maybe one day, the pain will stop.”
He reaches behind him on the counter, picks up what looks like a cassette player with a tape inside, and sets it down within my reach.
“This arrived in my mail a week after you came home,” he says. “No return address, just your name on it. The note said I could give it to you in a year, or it’s probably better if I forgot I ever got it.”
I stay silent, my heart thudding hard against my ribs.
“You know where I am if anything changes,” he adds. “Whatever you need, even if it’s just me staying out of it, you say the word.”
I pick up the cassette tape player and just stand there for a while, frozen in place. My fingers grip around it. I look at Marcus, my eyes swollen, but somehow the tears stop coming. It’s like my body’s decided it’s done for now.
I manage to move and walk slowly down the hall and into my room, closing the door behind me. I lower myself onto the middle of the bed.
The tape inside is wound tight, old-school black plastic. My name is written across it in George’s blocky handwriting.
It’s an ordinary cassette player, one that probably belonged in any household from the late eighties through the early two thousands. Here, it feels completely out of place, like it shouldn’t exist in this version of my life at all, and somehow also exactly like it was always going to end up here.
I press play.
The tape clicks, the mechanism catching for a second before the first song comes through. It’s “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol—that fragile, breath-caught voice sliding into the room. It starts pulling everything in, knowing where it’s going to hurt.
I lie back on the bed without really meaning to. The ceiling blurs.
I end up mouthing along, then actually singing under my breath. Didn’t know this same song I heard for the first time during one of our road trips would end up on a playlist I wasn’t supposed to hear this way.
I smile a little as it drags me through memories of small moments I told myself I’d left behind but never really did.
The playlist keeps going after that, rolling into the next road trip songs I also know by heart because of him. It goes on until the last track fades out.
A rough, crackling sound cuts through.
Some static. A cough.
And then him.