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Everything was fine—at least as fine as everything could be—but then Lia had walked into Hailey’s life, strolling across the stars in Hailey’s world and painting the skies in roses and reds and mauve—and Hailey had seen all the beautiful colors and chased right after her.
God fucking dammit.
Hailey wanted to make herself think that getting so close to Lia had been a complete and utter mistake. After all, if Hailey ever hated anything, it was things that didn’t make sense, and the aching and breaking around the Lia-shaped hole in her heart made anything but sense if the truth was any different than that.
You should be angry, Hailey had tried to think to herself earlier. That was all she wanted; she wanted to be angry, God, if only she could actually make herself be angry.
She turned her back on you, Hailey, she heard herself yelling in her head, scolding herself like she were speaking to a child. She knew how hurt you were. She knew exactly why. And she couldn’t have cared any less about fucking over that trust you had in her, because now you’ve seen how much she’s changed, heard the things she’s started saying about you, seen her laughing at your expense all the time like it’s nothing, seen how she’s done everything except be fucking honest with you, seen how after all that, she still has the nerve to act like she’s in the right for all of it and that you’re just “not understanding” even though it’s not like she ever explained anything to you in the first place even after you tried and tried so hard to get it even with how distant she always was and—
You would’ve never done any of that to her. Never. But she didn’t care about you like that, no matter how much you thought she ever did just because you cared so much about her. And you need to stop being so fucking torn up over the truth.
In a way, Hailey really was angry. But only because she was having so much trouble being angry for what she felt like were the right reasons.
Because something about the look in Lia’s eyes when Hailey had finally lost composure those few hours ago on her porch—when she finally let every emotion fly from her heart and out of her mouth—when she finally spoke every thought that had grown into searing pain over the last few weeks, when she finally got to say that final “I don’t want to hear it” before she went storming back inside and slammed the front door behind her—that look haunted Hailey like a ghost, and it haunted her to tears. But nothing could fix it now.
And what made it worse was that no matter how hard she tried, whatever anger she could manage just wouldn’t last enough for her to let it out. Because maybe there was a sour truth to it all, a pill she couldn’t swallow, a reason why she couldn't bring herself to throw away Lia's friendship bracelet in the end and ultimately retired it to the corner of her desk: that maybe she’d never been enough for Lia in the first place, that it had been a complete and utter impossibility from the start.
That while Lia had taken over Hailey’s whole sky, Hailey had never taken up so much as even the thinnest wisp of a cloud.