Bestfriends, Broken Things

ber

the first crack in our care

ght streaming through the window caught the steam rising from his cup, gilding the swirling patterns in the foam, but my eyes remained fixed on those trembling fingers. They were the same fingers that h

had been raw, scraped from some deep inte

ue of her psychological warfare. I'd borne witness to it all: the late-night phone calls where he'd second-guessed every interaction ("Was I too needy today?"), the way he'd started keepin

clinging to his shoulders like a second skin as I peeled it off him. I'd wrapped him in the thick grey blanket that lived perpetually on my sofa, the one he'd stole

ition, staring into the steam rising from his mug as he recounted Rachel's parting shot i

like the height of selfishness in the face of his devastation. He needs a friend right now, I'd reminded myself sternly, a safe harbor, not your messy heart. So I became what he needed - his anchor in the storm, the keeper of his broken pieces. I listened without

autumn light catching the gold flecks in his brown eyes and gilding t

as barely above a whisper, but it might as well have been

t and espresso and something else I couldn't name. My own five years of carefully banked longing surged up like a tidal wave, swamping all caution and common

hat single moment, believing with the absolute certainty of the lovesick that I co

he delicate skin beneath my eye. The silver ring Rachel had given him, a serpent e

not to s

-

Weeks

skyline like a living painting. It was beautiful in the way that art galleries are beautiful, impressive but impersonal, lacking the lived-in warmth of a true home. The only

across the planes of his bare chest and shoulders. A comfortable silence stretched between us, broken only by the

r, a relic from a spectacularly failed skateboard trick a

hat didn't quite reach his eyes. His fingertip followed the old ridge of tissue

sudden, painful clarity another moment months earlier, wrapped in that same grey blanket on my sofa, when he'd lifted his

aid it made me look... damaged. Unlovable." The shame radiating off him that night had been a physi

e, detached curiosity. "Yours is different," he finally said, his gaze distant, fixed on

pped between the sheets with us, her invisible presence leaching the warmth from what should have been an intimate mo

throat, forcing a lightness into my voice I d

ntly. The serpent ring, which he still wore during the day, though he'd started taking it o

nt to the quiet unraveling happening thirty-two floors abov

articulated why, the victory of finally bei