Chapter 1
Sadie
I get back to the dorm. It’s late—2? 3 a.m.? I don’t know. I don’t care. What I do know is Gracie’s sitting up in bed like she’s been waiting all night to interrogate me. Lamp on, arms crossed, face twisted into that smug, disappointed-older-sister look, like she’s dying to say something righteous.
“You look like shit,” she says.
“Night to you too,” I deadpan, letting the door click shut behind me.
She doesn’t drop it. “You were with Cole again?”
“Yeah,” I say, not even pretending to lie. What’s the point?
She scoffs. “You two are so weird.”
Yeah. We are. Weird, fucked up, codependent—pick your word.
I met Cole at a frat party, one of those sweat-and-cheap-liquor disasters where everyone’s either trying to forget something or prove something. He was off in a corner, leaning against the wall like it personally offended him. Cup in hand, eyes locked on a blonde girl laughing with some other guy. She looked happy—carefree kind of happy. That was Michelle. His ex. The one who ripped his heart out and drop-kicked it on her way out. He was staring at her like she was a ghost who wouldn’t stay dead.
I didn’t know all that then. All I saw was a guy brooding like his life depended on it. I think I made some dumb joke. Something about how he looked like a sad indie band in human form. He smirked. We started talking.
He told me she dumped him. Just like that. No warning. Said he was still in love with her and yeah, it showed. His voice cracked every time her name came up.
I didn’t pretend to be better. My long-distance boyfriend had been ghosting my FaceTime calls while apparently screwing half his dorm. Found out when his roommate accidentally added me to a Snapchat story. There were three girls in the video. None of them were me.
So yeah. Cole and I got drunk. Laughed. Got really drunk. Ended up fucking in his car behind the 7-Eleven while a raccoon watched us like we were the worst people alive.
After that, it kind of made sense. Be each other’s rebound. Use the pain like duct tape. Muffle it. Drown it. Whatever.
No feelings. No strings. Just two sad assholes trying to forget the people who gutted us.
It wasn’t supposed to last. But here we are.
And yeah—Gracie’s right. It is fucking weird. Me and Cole, the whole thing. Like some sad, slow car crash we both keep pretending isn’t happening.
“And that’s none of your fucking business,” I mutter, not even looking at her. I’m too tired to fight, but too wound up to let it go.
She grunts, like she’s got more to say but decides it’s not worth the energy. “Fine. Just stop coming in at whatever-o’clock and slamming the door like you live alone.”
I roll my eyes, kick off my sneakers hard enough that one of them bounces off the wall. “Yeah, yeah.”
I peel my jeans off, not caring that they half-turn inside out, then drop them on the floor. Gracie makes a little disgusted sound but doesn’t comment—she knows better than to start that argument again.
I collapse onto the mattress like my bones gave out, face-first into the pillow, still wearing my hoodie, still half-drunk, still smelling like smoke and someone else’s cologne.
I hear her click off the lamp.
Silence.
Just the hum of the radiator and the occasional pop of some asshole laughing outside.
Maybe I should feel bad. About Cole. About dragging my shit into this room every night like it doesn’t stink.
But I don’t.
Or I do.
I don’t know.
Either way, I’m too fucking tired to figure it out.
Doesn’t take long for sleep to claim me. My body gives up before my brain does. One second I’m staring at the ceiling, hearing the faint tick of Gracie scrolling through her phone under the covers. The next, everything’s black.
Cole and I—we’re not some big tragic romance. We’re not even trying to be. We’re just numbing each other. Filling the silence, killing the ache. A pit stop. A fucked-up layover between disasters. A messy, hot, confusing thing that probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place but keeps happening anyway.
It’s not love. It’s not healing.
It’s a bad idea we keep choosing like it might fix us.
But in the dark—in the backseat of his car, wrapped in the smell of cheap detergent and weed—it almost passes for something real.
We both know how this ends.
We just don’t know when.
Every time he touches me, it’s not tender—it’s desperate. Same with me. We kiss like we’re trying to drown, fuck like we’re chasing a blackout, drink like the silence can’t follow us if we’re loud enough.
But it always does.
The quiet waits for us after. Heavy. Suffocating. We lie there side by side, pretending not to feel it pressing down on us.
We’re not lovers—we’re addicts. Hooked on the hit, on the distraction, on the sweet, stupid lie that this might be enough to forget the people who broke us.
It’s fucked up. Hollow. All wrong.
But goddamn, it feels good.
For a little while.
Cole
Third row. Second chair.
Michelle.
She’s tapping her pen against her airpad—rhythmic, soft, like she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. I do. I know what it means. She’s distracted. Trying to focus but can’t. That little tic used to drive her nuts when she was cramming. Used to make me smile.
Now it just pisses me off.
I know all her tells. The way she twirls her hair when she’s bored, the way her jaw clenches when she’s overthinking. I know how she sounds when she’s about to come—how she gasps and arches, how she shakes after, the quiet sobs she tries to hide during the second round.
And now I’m just a guy watching her from five rows back in Advanced Math like a goddamn stranger.
I don’t even like this class. I signed up because we were supposed to take it together. Then she drops me and keeps the class.
She said she wanted to “enjoy her campus life.” What the fuck does that even mean? What, like I was ruining her vibe? Like our relationship was some kind of leash?
Bullshit.
She wanted to party. Hook up. Do shots off a bar in someone’s basement and fuck some guy who barely knows her last name.
But sure. Call it “self-growth” or whatever fake-deep term makes it sound noble.
Meanwhile, I get to sit here watching her pretend she doesn’t see me. Like we didn’t spend years wrapped around each other every night. Like I don’t still have her toothbrush in my drawer.
She laughs at something the TA says. A soft chuckle. I used to be the one who made her laugh like that.
Now I’m just taking notes I won’t use, stuck in a class I don’t need, waiting for a girl who’s not coming back.
And it fucking sucks.
Now she’s “enjoying her campus life.”
Which apparently means getting wasted on shitty vodka and playing tonsil hockey with guys who couldn’t hold a real conversation if their lives depended on it. Last weekend, I saw her at that Phi Sig party, pressed up against some random dude, his hands all over her like he’d earned the right.
I stood there, frozen, just watching them like a fucking idiot. Her laughing, him grinning like he just won the goddamn lottery.
And I swear—for a second—I wanted to rip the ground open. Slam his head through a wall. Just drag him off her and make him feel how fucking replaceable he is.
Only thing that stopped me was Sadie.
She stepped in front of me, calm as hell, beer in one hand, eyes locked on mine. “You really wanna go there and be the fucking loser ex-boyfriend right now?”
And just like that, I snapped out of it.
Because she was right.
I would’ve looked pathetic. Unhinged. Like some jealous creep who couldn’t handle getting dumped.
Michelle would’ve looked at me like I was nothing. Less than nothing.
So I walked out. Hands clenched. Jaw tight. Rage burning through me like acid.
Didn’t even say goodbye to Sadie. Just got in my car, drove to nowhere, and screamed into the goddamn steering wheel.
I don’t miss Michelle, I tell myself.
But that’s a lie.
I miss the us we were before she decided I wasn’t fun enough. Before she wanted “space” to “find herself,” like she needed a solo trip to figure out how not to give a shit about me.
Sadie was right. Of course she was.
But fuck if I didn’t hate her for it in that moment.
Because all I wanted was to do something—swing, scream, break something—anything other than just stand there like a goddamn loser watching Michelle grind on some frat bro like I never existed. Like she hadn’t cried in my arms three weeks ago about how scared she was of losing herself out here. Like none of it ever meant a fucking thing.
And Sadie, cool as ever, just yanked me back to reality with one sentence. One cold, necessary sentence.
This thing with me and Sadie? It’s not love. It’s not even closeness. It’s a weird tangle of numb sex, rough conversations, and a shitload of her talking me down from doing something I’d regret.
She’s the fire alarm I keep pulling before I burn the whole place down.
We’re not friends. Not real ones. Not the kind who ask about birthdays or give a shit about how your day went. We don’t do brunch. We don’t tag each other in memes.
We’re something else. A nothing that somehow became a lifeline.
She gets it. That’s the fucked-up part. She gets it more than anyone. The bitterness. The petty anger. The obsession. The empty.
And she never tells me I’m being a little shit for it. Not like my guy friends, who act like I should just “hit the gym” or “fuck someone hotter” like that’s gonna stitch up what broke inside me.
Sadie doesn’t flinch when I say the ugly stuff. When I admit that yeah, I do still check Michelle’s socials. That yeah, I am spiraling. She just grabs a beer, shrugs, and says, “Same.”
We’re not building anything. We’re just surviving the fallout together. Clinging to the wreckage like it might keep us afloat, even if it’s dragging us under.
And maybe that’s why she keeps ending up in my bed. Or in the backseat of my car, thighs around my waist, nails digging into my arms like she’s trying to leave proof that she was there. That someone was.
Because for once, someone isn’t trying to fix me. Not trying to talk me into therapy, or tell me to “move on,” or slap a fucking inspirational quote on my pain.
Sadie just meets me where I’m at—broken, bitter, pissed off at everything—and matches me blow for blow in our fucked-up little war against being alone.
No illusions. No promises.
Just the raw, ugly comfort of someone else who’s bleeding in the same places.
