The Revenge

Unwanted reunion

Jasmine

I didn't look for my friends on the way out.

I didn't want to explain, didn't want to be talked down from the ledge, didn't want Riley's arm around my shoulders and her careful voice telling me it was going to be fine. I just walked — out the front door, past the cars lining the driveway, onto the street where the music faded behind me into something bearable.

The night air was cold enough to think in. I needed that.

He was there. He actually came.

I turned it over in my mind as I walked, trying to make it fit into something I could manage. Alex, standing in that doorway. Alex, looking at me with eyes I didn't recognise. Two years of imagining that moment — what I'd say, how I'd explain, whether he'd let me — and when it finally arrived I hadn't said a single word. I'd just breathed his name like a question I already knew the answer to.

And he'd walked away.

Maybe that's all it will be, I thought. Maybe that's enough for tonight.

Then I heard it — slow, deliberate clapping. The kind that isn't applause.

I stopped walking.

I didn't turn around. I stood very still on the empty pavement and listened to my own heartbeat and told myself it could be anyone. A drunk guest. A stranger. Someone entirely unrelated to this night.

"Did you miss me, Jas?"

His voice.

Two years, and I would have known it anywhere. Lower than I remembered, something worn into it that hadn't been there before. But unmistakably his.

I turned around.

•

He looked like himself and nothing like himself. That was the only way to describe it. Same face, same dark eyes — but the openness was gone. The thing that used to live there, the thing that had made me trust him completely and without question since we were children, had been replaced by something sealed shut.

He stood a few metres away with his hands in his pockets, watching me with something that wasn't quite hatred. Hatred would have been easier. Hatred still cares.

This was something colder.

"Alex," I said.

He tilted his head slightly, as though my voice was a sound he was cataloging rather than responding to.

"You look the same," he said. "That's strange. I thought you'd look different."

"I—"

"I spent a long time thinking about this moment." He took one step forward, then stopped. Unhurried. "What I'd say. What you'd say. Whether you'd cry." His eyes moved over my face with a kind of clinical interest. "I think you want to cry right now."

I did. I held it.

"Alex, please let me explain—"

"No." The word was quiet and absolute. "I didn't come here for your explanation, Jasmine. I don't want it. I want you to understand something, and I want you to understand it clearly so we don't have to revisit it." He paused. "There is nothing you can say to me. Not tonight. Not ever. Whatever you've been rehearsing — whatever story you've been telling yourself so you could sleep at night — keep it. I genuinely don't care."

"That's not true," I said. My voice cracked slightly. "If you didn't care, you wouldn't be here."

Something moved across his face. Not softness. Something sharper.

"You're right," he said. "I'm here because I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to know that I'm out, and I'm fine, and whatever you were hoping — that prison broke me, or changed me enough that I'd come out wanting to understand — didn't happen." He looked at me steadily. "I came out wanting exactly what I promised you."

The air between us felt thin.

"You were my best friend," I whispered.

"I know." Not a flinch. Not even a flicker. "That's why."

He took another slow step forward, and I took one back — instinct, not decision. He noticed. Something in his expression acknowledged it without satisfaction, which was somehow worse than if he'd smiled.

"It's simple." He stopped a meter away. Close enough that I could see how he'd changed — the line of his jaw harder, a stillness in him that hadn't been there before, the kind that comes from learning to survive somewhere that punishes noise and movement. "You took two years from me. I'm going to take something back." A pause. "And there's nothing you can do about it, and no one you can tell, because everyone who knows us knows what you did."

"Alex—"

"I'm not finished." His voice didn't rise. It never rose. "I used to love you like a sister. I want you to know that I remember that — I remember exactly what it felt like, and I remember the day it died. And I need you to understand that it is completely, permanently gone. I'm not angry, Jasmine. Angry people still have hope. I don't have any left when it comes to you. What I have is time, and patience, and absolutely nothing to lose."

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my sides.

"So that's it?" I managed. "That's all you came to say?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached out and, with one finger, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear — slowly, deliberately, the way you'd touch something that no longer belongs to you, and you want it to know.

I went completely still.

"Welcome back, Jas," he said quietly.

He dropped his hand, turned, and walked away. Steady steps. No hesitation. He didn't look back.

I stood alone on the empty street, the distant music still pulsing from the Coleman house, and I understood — with a certainty that settled into my bones like cold water — that the Alex who had been my best friend, was gone.

What had come back in his place was something I had made.

And it knew exactly where it lived.