ollie_gopoly
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When Andy was nine, a boy named Tommy Reyes tripped her in the cafeteria line while she was holding an entire chocolate bar, and she hated him for the rest of that year, and then some after. In fact, if you were to utter his name now, in front of forty-two-year-old Andy, she would still, with active conviction, tell you that she wholeheartedly hates Tommy. It isn't something Andy does, as a rule: hate people. She runs out of anger fast, usually with relief.
Then Benji Barnes buys Runway, Miranda leaves for good, and Emily Charlton is sitting in that chair, behind that desk now, drinking water out of Miranda's old glass like she's always belonged there. Andy hates her more than she ever hated Tommy Reyes. And unlike Tommy Reyes, Emily is forty feet away, every single day, impossible to just wait out.
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It becomes a problem. Because like is a lot more manageable than love. Liking someone, if you are disciplined enough - and Emily clearly is - can be confined. You can take it off and shove it in a little box, then throw it at the very edge of the conscious mind and never once look at it again. From there, if you focus deep enough on not focusing on it at all, the box will itself move closer to the edge, and, eventually, completely fall into the profundity of the forgettable.
Love is different. Emily feels it right away. She reaches for the feeling, box already open. But while like would just be easy to pick off, love claws at the heart, tears the walls to stay lodged in. It doesn't fold up neatly the way like does. It doesn't wait politely at the edge of her mind to be forgotten. It digs in with both hands, finds the soft, unguarded tissue behind her ribs, and holds on there, and every attempt to pry it loose only tears something on the way out.Or: Emily reads a five-hundred-year-old debate about whether it's better to speak or to die, and spends the rest of her life proving both sides wrong.
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Later, lying in the dark, she thinks about the hug. About the whole night. About next Friday, and the one after that, if she's allowed to want one after that. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, her mind snags, unhelpfully, on the mug. On Andy, drinking her coffee out of a soup bowl, or one of those transparent plastic cups they hand out at festivals, like a woman in the middle of some minor personal collapse she's decided to find charming. Emily has never once in her life left a problem lying there unsolved. It isn't in her. It isn't who she is.
So Andy needs a mug.
She reaches for her phone on the nightstand, unlocks it, and adds it to her list for the week, right there between dry cleaning and call Patrick.Or: Andy loses two decades of mugs in a move. Emily Charlton spends the next year replacing them, one at a time, each with a story she never quite explains. It takes Andy considerably longer than it should to work out why.
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She breathes in before she can stop herself. Deep, unmistakable, the kind of inhale that has nothing to do with reading a paragraph.
Emily freezes.
She pulls back fast, turns, and stares at Andy with her eyes gone wide, something close to panic behind them, like she's just been caught at something far worse than sitting too close to a coworker.
"Em," Andy starts.
"No." Emily's already standing, already reaching for her bag, voice gone thin and fast. "Andrea. No."
And then she's gone, out the door and into the street like the building's on fire behind her, and Andy is left sitting alone at a table built for four, completely alone, with a half-finished paragraph, a caramel frappe gone warm, and the specific, useless realisation that she misses Emily. Badly. Actively. In a way she hasn't let herself feel in twenty years, and can't, apparently, stop feeling now that she's started.Or: Andy catalogues fifteen things that have changed in Emily's life, except that they haven't changed at all. Not really.
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“She’s mistaken, surely.”
Andrea's stomach tightened. “What?”
Emily looked almost annoyed by the question.
“Miranda.” Andrea waited. Emily swallowed. “You’re not going to tell me to stop the wedding, right?”
Andrea stared at her. The room seemed to reduce itself suddenly to Emily, the dress and the engagement ring visible against her left hand. Andrea laughed because she could not think of anything else to do.
“Obviously not. Why would I do that?”
OR
Okay, maybe it is weird that Emily Charlton invites her ex-girlfriend to her wedding, but it would be just as weird not inviting her, you know? Plus, what's the worst that could happen?
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Bookmarked by ollie_gopoly
07 Sep 2026