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You dream of dancing. Of hands on your body. Moving slow in dim light. Clumsy because this isn't what you do. But his hands keep you upright and when he shifts, you follow. And when he presses his mouth against yours you don't think about it. Don't worry that anyone could see you.
And then his eyes go dark and his hands pass through you. And your voice catches in your throat. And the words don't form anymore.
You wake up gasping for breath. Eyes wide and unseeing in the dark.
Your phone lights up and you go quiet. You've deleted the thread with him. So the empty text chain stares back at you and the new message glares at you from the bottom of the screen. No text. No caption. No "Heyyy" with an obnoxious amount of emojis. Just a capture of a PDF document.
"You are cordially invited to celebrate the union of Nicholas Hemmick and Erik Klose"
The spot where a name would be is blank. Clearly intended to be filled in by hand, careful and scripted. Instead it feels like a punch to the gut. It's nice. You can imagine the kind of card stock it would be printed on.
Your thumb hovers over the keypad. Hesitant. You itch to ask. Even get halfway through typing something out before you stop and delete it all.
How it hurts when it shouldn't at all. When you have no place here. But shoving it in your face feels uncharacteristically cruel. You knew it was coming up. Dan had text the group chat when they'd all been mailed the invites, your inbox unsurprisingly empty. You'd been the other woman. The next best thing. You were never getting invited.
No one has any idea what kind of hurt this brings. There's not even anyone you can talk to. You'd made a promise, years ago. That what happened in storage rooms, in magically empty dorm rooms, would stay a precious clandestine secret.
The chat still sits open, glaring up at you like a tender open wound, still soft and sticky, weeping with an infected ache you have no idea how to treat.
And then, salt in the wound, three shifting ellipses appear at the bottom of your screen.
Sorry.
I shouldn't have sent that.
How to even respond. Your thumb presses into the screen like you can will it away. The texts are too regular, especially for the sloppy kind of drunk you know he's capable of. You'd have thought he'd have to be wasted to send something so unnecessarily mean. Perhaps auto correct is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Still, you feel sick. Nausea bubbling up in the back of your throat. Your skin hot and heart racing in your chest.
You feel observed. Eyes on you, even in your dark apartment.
And then, your phone, which had been slowly dimming from inactivity, busts into life again, and a contact photo you hadn't bothered changing fills the screen.
You choke on air for a moment, so horrified by the incoming number that you don't even realise you've instinctively accepted the call. It's silent for a long moment on both ends, your harsh breath filling the air, and a crackling hiccupy gasp coming through the other end.
"Why did you pick up?"
Your heart sinks. You don't even have an answer. You offer as much honesty as you can allow. "I don't know, Nick."
"Don't call me that." His voice is hushed. But you can hear the gentle rumbling of a dance beat pulsing out in the background. Someone yelling, some girl shrieking something in a language you never bothered learning.
"What the fuck?" You say, too soft for the circumstances, too soft for what you are to one another. You can't help it.
"I don't know," It sounds like a sob, wobbly and drunk as you expected. "I don't know."
"Where are you?" You don't even know why you say it. You could blame it on the bowl you smoked before crashing early, you can certainly blame the dream on it. But you're too cogent to be this sensitive.
"Bachelorette party." He says.
His. He doesn't say. The date on the invite had said the event was scheduled for the next week.
"You shouldn't have called, Nicky." You almost call him that stupid nickname again, and catch yourself just in time. You're over this. You'd thought you were anyway. But secretly, what you won't even admit to yourself, is that every time you've caught eyes with a guy from across a bar you shouldn't be in, it's his face you see.
When you close your eyes, each caress, each tender touch, each fluttering press of lips against your jaw, feels just like him. Close enough that you can pretend.
"I know." He says, this one sounds watery, like he's actually crying.
"You should get back to the party." You've decided it's easier actually if you don't get an explanation. If you can end this call and go on like it had never happened. You'll have to smoke up again to go to sleep when you hang up, but it will be nothing more than a blip. Nothing more than a misdial.
"Sorry." He says, far too genuine, and you know suddenly it won't be that easy.
"That's not fair, Nick." This time you don't catch yourself in time, and you bite down hard enough on your lip around the sentence that you feel blood in your mouth.
"Seth…" He says, like there's something to say there, some argument he can make.
"You're getting married in a week." You say, around a swelling lip, fighting with everything you've got to remain composed. "I've held up my end. It's not fair to either of us, me or him."
It would be easier if the guilt hadn't been eating you alive for years, if Erik wasn't a genuine fucking guy.
"I know." He says, shaking, "I was just thinking about you."
"That's not how this works." You haven't felt this sick since the first time you fucked a guy. Hunched over the toilet bowl, with Boyd banging on the door, alarmed by the sound of your retching.
"I— Fuck, I don't know." There's a rustling then, and you can imagine that old habit, pushing his hair back from his forehead.
"Did you ever tell him?"
A pause then, a long heavy breath. "Yeah," another pause, "I told him. We went to counselling for a while. He knows."
"Then this shouldn't be happening."
"Yeah."
It's that quiet agreement that breaks you. You collapse onto yourself. Arm flung over your face as tears you never let spill prick at the corner of your eyes, the other hand keeps the phone pressed to your ear.
"I think you should go," You hope he's drunk enough to not notice the way your voice quavers around it, "They'll be looking for you."
"Yeah," Another long pause, a shaking breath and then, "Sorry, just missed you, is all."
You steel yourself against that for this next bit. "I'm happy for you, Nicky. Have a good life."
And then you hang up. And you open the contact page, even as the screen fills again with that dreaded ellipsis. It takes you a second too long to block his number. And it feels strangely anticlimactic, even though it's something you should have done years ago.
When you close out of the tab, there's one last message left at the bottom of your screen. One final stab to the chest.
I'm really sorry, Seth
You launch your phone across the room. And the hard thud of it hitting the wall feels like forcing a dislocated shoulder back into alignment. You crawl out of bed to your window and push it open, and inhale deep as the cool night air hits your lungs.
You think suddenly that this is a kind of grief. That you weren't ever allowed to feel.