I kept my face turned toward the wall for a long moment after her question.
“I did not plan to kiss you,” I said at last. My voice sounded rough even to me. “That is the truth. I did not stand there during the argument thinking that would be the ending. But you kept asking whether you mattered. You said it like the answer might already be no. Like years of standing beside you could be reduced to management and habit. I wanted you to stop talking. I wanted you to understand that you were wrong. The only way I knew how to make the point land was… that.”
The words came out uneven. I pressed my forehead against the pillow for a second and felt the heat in my face.
“I wanted to show you how much you mattered,” I said. “And it still was not enough to make the feeling stop being one-sided. That is why this has to end. I have a clean reason now. The friendship and the part of it you never asked for. Both. Ending it is better than sitting here waiting for the next time you look at me and do not see it.”
Tears had already started. I hated the feeling of them. I wiped at my face with the heel of my hand and kept my back to her.
Joselline was quiet for a few seconds.
“I have other people,” she said. “I know that. There are names I can go to if I need noise or company or someone to sit with at a table. But none of them have been what you have been. You were the one who stayed. Through the academy. Through the rumors. Through the funeral. Through me making a public mess of myself three days ago. When I thought about you shutting this door for good, it did not feel like losing one friend among others. It felt like the main one disappearing.”
“That is not a reason to keep something that only works in one direction.”
“It is a reason not to throw it away without looking at it properly.”
I shook my head against the pillow. “If you make a decision that favors me out of guilt or habit, I will only inconvenience you further. You do not owe me a place in your life because I could not keep my feelings where they belonged. We all have lives to attend to. We can go our own ways. It will be cleaner.”
I pushed myself up.
It was the first time in three days I had properly left the bed. My body felt stiff and vaguely unreal. I put my feet on the floor and reached for the robe at the end of the mattress, already calculating the shortest path to the door and the excuse I would give anyone who saw my face.
Joselline’s hand closed around my wrist.
“No.”
“Let go.” This story is hosted at g.com.
“No.” She pulled. The balance went out of the movement at once. I sat hard back onto the bed, and before I could recover she had shifted her weight and ended up over me, knees on either side of my hips, one hand still around my wrist as if she expected me to bolt the moment she loosened it.
“Get down,” I said.
“No.”
“Joselline.”
“I cannot reciprocate the way you want,” she said. The words came out fast, almost blurted. “I know that. I am not going to pretend I already feel the same thing you do. If that is the reason you want to end this, then say it plainly and I will still be sitting here telling you I do not accept it.”
“That is exactly the reason we cannot stay friends.”
“But.”
She stopped. Her face was close enough that I could see the strain around her eyes and the stubborn set of her mouth. For a moment she only breathed. Then she said, quieter,
“I also want to try.”
I stared up at her.
“Falling in love is new to me,” she continued. “I have never done it. I have admired people. I have wanted people near me. I have held onto Elira in a way I still do not have a clean name for. But I have not done this. I do not know the rules and I do not know what I am able to give. That is the truth. And even with that truth I am still here saying I want to try. With you.”
Something in my chest broke open in a way I could not control. The sound that left me was undignified. I turned my face to the side and cried properly, the kind of crying that made my shoulders shake and my breath stutter. At some point a humiliating “waaaah” escaped before I could stop it.
“Shut up,” Joselline muttered, flustered.
I dragged in a breath and looked back at her through the blur. “The last time one of us told the other to shut up, you already know what happened.”
Color rose hard across her face. “That is not- I did not mean it like that.”
“This is all new,” she said, still above me, still not moving off. “I cannot do anything dramatic right now. I do not even know what I am supposed to do with my hands. I only know I do not want you to walk out of this room and close the door on the years we already have.”
My hands had been lying uselessly at my sides. Slowly, carefully, I lifted them and settled them at her hips. The contact was light. She still jumped.
“Eek!”
I almost laughed through the remaining tears. “That is why we would need to train your body.”
Her eyes went wide. “Do not try anything weird.”
“I am not.” I left my hands where they were for one more second, then let them fall away again. The smile that pulled at my mouth felt strange after three days of nothing. “Not today.”
Joselline stayed where she was, hovering between retreat and stubbornness, face still red. The room felt smaller and less poisoned than it had when she first forced the door open.
“However long it takes,” I said quietly. “If you are serious about trying, I am willing to wait.”
She looked down at me for a long moment. Some of the panic in her expression had eased, replaced by something more complicated and less ready to run.
“I am serious,” she said. “I just do not know how to be good at this yet.”
“Then we do not need to be good at it today.”
She finally shifted her weight and moved off me, sitting on the edge of the bed instead. The absence of her warmth registered more clearly than I wanted it to. I pushed myself up to sit beside her, eyes still sore, face still damp, the decision to end everything lying in pieces between us on the blanket.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
Outside the room the house continued its ordinary sounds. Inside it, the line I had been prepared to cut had been pulled back into something unfinished and alive, and for the first time in three days the quiet did not feel like a conclusion.