CHAPTER FIVE
743 Words
Maya
Maya is awake when the text comes through at 2:26 a.m.
Group chat.
Lena: home safe, don’t wait up ❤️
Sent from her apartment Wi-Fi, not from Marcus’s place.
Maya stares at the little red heart like it’s personally insulted her bloodline.
She knows what “home safe” means tonight.
She knows who Lena called.
She saw Eli tear out of the parking lot barefoot ten minutes ago like the building was on fire and Lena was the only water left in the city.
Maya was already there, leaning against his car with the spare key he gave her two years ago “just in case.”
She’d come to say the thing she’s been swallowing since college.
She’d rehearsed it in the elevator:
She doesn’t get to keep doing this to you, Eli.
Let me be the one who stays.
Then she watched him run straight past her without seeing her at all.
She stayed in the parking lot another five minutes, key cutting into her palm, before she walked home.
Now she’s on her own couch, wineglass empty, TV muted on some late-night infomercial she isn’t watching.
Her phone is a minefield of evidence.
The i********: story she posted at 8:12 p.m. (Lena laughing, Marcus’s hand on her back) has 127 likes.
Maya took the photo herself.
She remembers the exact second she pressed the shutter: the way Lena’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, the way Maya’s own chest caved in when she realized she was helping stage the exact moment that would gut Eli later.
She hates herself for posting it.
She hates herself more for being glad it hurt him.
She opens her private album (the one no one knows exists).
There are 412 photos of Eli in it.
Some he knows about (group shots, birthdays).
Most he doesn’t: him asleep on her shoulder during a movie night when Lena was in the bathroom; him laughing at something on his phone in the kitchen light; him looking at Lena like she invented gravity.
She scrolls to the oldest one (freshman year, both of them drunk on cheap vodka, arms slung around each other, grinning like the world was brand new).
She remembers that night perfectly.
Lena had disappeared with some guy from the lacrosse team.
Eli had stayed with Maya until sunrise, talking about everything and nothing, and for one night Maya let herself believe maybe the story wasn’t already written.
She closes the album.
Opens her unsent drafts to Eli.
There are seventeen messages she’s never had the courage to send.
The most recent one, written tonight at 1:58 a.m., just says:
I would never make you run barefoot across the city at 2 a.m.
I would just ask you to stay.
She deletes it letter by letter.
She pours another glass of wine she doesn’t taste.
She thinks about the way Eli looked when he sprinted past her (wild, terrified, beautiful).
She thinks about the way Lena’s voice sounded on the phone last week when she said, “I can’t lose him, Maya. He’s my person.”
She thinks about the fact that Lena says it like it’s a law of physics, not a choice.
Maya has spent eight years being the safe friend, the one who listens, the one who laughs, the one who watches the person she loves love someone else with religious devotion.
Tonight something in her cracked open and started bleeding.
She opens her messages again.
Types a new one (this time to Lena).
You can’t keep doing this to him.
Her thumb hovers.
She deletes it.
Types:
He deserves more than being your 2 a.m. emergency contact.
Deletes it.
Types:
I’m in love with him too.
She stares at the sentence until the screen dims.
Then she locks the phone, presses it face-down on the table, and cries the way people cry when they realize they’ve been a supporting character in someone else’s story for so long they forgot they were allowed to want things.
When the sun comes up she’ll put on her normal face.
She’ll like Lena’s posts.
She’ll tease Eli about his heroic midnight rescue missions.
She’ll keep the secret that’s been eating her alive since she was nineteen.
But tonight, for the first time, Maya lets herself admit the truth out loud to an empty room:
“I could love him better.”
The words hang in the dark like smoke.
She doesn’t sleep.
- Writer
