CHAPTER THREE
737 Words
The Night She’s With Someone Else
Eli doesn’t leave the apartment all day.
He tells himself it’s because he has work to catch up on.
He opens his laptop, stares at the same email for forty-three minutes, closes it again.
The light changes outside.
Morning becomes afternoon becomes the bruised purple of early evening.
He watches it happen through the window without moving from the couch.
His phone sits on the coffee table like a landmine.
He has showered again (third time since Friday), because if he smells like anything other than soap he’s afraid he’ll smell like heartbreak and she might notice tomorrow.
He cooks nothing.
He drinks water straight from the tap because glasses feel like effort.
At 6:12 p.m. her status changes to a single emoji on the group chat: 🍷
He knows what it means.
She’s out.
She’s wearing the black dress with the tiny straps that she bought last month and pretended was “just a random purchase.”
She’s laughing at someone else’s jokes.
At 6:44 p.m. their friend Maya posts an i********: story: Lena mid-laugh, head thrown back, Marcus’s hand on the small of her back like it belongs there.
The caption: “third-wheeling these two cuties 😍”
Eli watches the fifteen-second clip on loop until the sound of her laugh becomes a foreign language.
He mutes the story.
He doesn’t unfollow Maya.
He’s not that far gone.
(He is exactly that far gone.)
7:28 p.m.
He opens their private chat.
The last message is still his from this morning:
Have fun tonight. You look beautiful.
She never replied.
Of course she didn’t.
He types:
Hope he’s treating you right.
Deletes it.
Types:
I miss you.
Deletes it faster.
Types:
If you need me, I’m here.
Stares at it until the letters blur.
Locks the phone. Throws it across the couch like it’s radioactive.
8:09 p.m.
He puts on music (their playlist).
The first song is the one they slow-danced to in her kitchen that one time at 3 a.m. when neither of them admitted what it meant.
He lasts eleven seconds before he rips his headphones off like they’re burning him.
He stands in the middle of the living room and screams.
No sound comes out.
Just the shape of it in his throat, raw and useless.
9:17 p.m.
He drinks two beers in eight minutes.
They do nothing except make him need to pee.
10:51 p.m.
He lies on the floor because the couch feels too much like the scene of the crime.
He stares at the ceiling and counts the cracks he’s never noticed before.
There are seven.
One for every year he waited, plus one extra for the night he finally spoke.
11:43 p.m.
He opens the unsent voice note folder.
There are now forty-three drafts addressed to her.
He plays the one from last night (“I will always answer at 2:14 a.m. even when it kills me”) and cries without sound, shoulders shaking hard enough to bruise.
12:06 a.m.
He thinks: Maybe the date went well.
Maybe she’s kissing Marcus right now.
Maybe she’s in his bed.
Maybe she’s finally found someone who doesn’t make her flinch when they say forever.
The thought is so physically painful he curls into a ball on the hardwood like a child waiting for the nausea to pass.
1:27 a.m.
He hasn’t moved.
His phone is still across the room.
He hasn’t checked it in eighty-four minutes.
That feels like victory and defeat in the same breath.
2:13 a.m.
He counts the seconds like a man counting down to an execution.
2:14 a.m. arrives with religious precision.
The screen lights up.
Lena.
One line.
No punctuation.
can you pick up
He is off the floor and grabbing his keys before the sentence even finishes registering.
He doesn’t ask why.
He doesn’t care that it’s been almost twenty-four hours since she drew the new boundary.
He doesn’t care that she was just on a date with another man.
He is already in the hallway, barefoot, heartbeat roaring in his ears like a subway train.
He calls her while he’s running down the stairs.
She answers on the first ring, voice thick with tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says before he can speak. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know who else—”
“I’m coming,” he says. “I’m already coming.”
- Writer
