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Angela thinks falling in love should be easy. Not easy in the sense that it never hurts. God knew she’d had enough relationships over the years to understand that love and pain had always existed hand in hand. Every person she’d ever dated had left something behind. A habit she’d picked up. A song she couldn’t listen to anymore. A restaurant she’d avoid for six months because she’d shared too many dinners there with someone who eventually became a stranger. Love had never promised permanence. It had certainly never promised comfort.
But falling?
Falling had always been the simplest part.
She was bisexual. She had known that for years now. Long enough that it no longer felt like a revelation, just another ordinary fact about herself. Loving women had never scared her. Loving men had never scared her. Love was love. She believed that with every stubborn, immovable piece of herself. She believed everyone deserved the chance to find the person who made the world feel a little softer around the edges.
If anything, she’d always secretly hoped she’d fall in love with someone who was also her best friend.
Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? Someone who made her laugh first. Someone whose number she reached for without thinking. Someone who knew how she took her coffee and what stupid movie she always put on when she was sick and that she cried every single time she watched Cars even though she knew exactly how it ended.
That part had always made perfect sense to Angela.
This, however, felt almost cruel.
Because somehow, against every conceivable odd, she’d managed to do exactly that. She’d fallen in love with her best friend. Her straight, married best friend.
Amanda.
The feelings hadn’t arrived all at once. They hadn’t struck like lightning or announced themselves with fireworks or some dramatic, cinematic moment where everything suddenly clicked into place. It all had happened quietly. So quietly Angela almost missed it.
It started with looking for Amanda in every room before she even realized she was looking. With automatically saving videos because Amanda would think this was funny. With hearing good news and instinctively reaching for her phone before remembering Amanda was sitting ten feet away. With bad days somehow becoming survivable the second Amanda had walked through a door.
It happened in a thousand tiny moments that individually meant nothing. Until together they had meant everything. And by the time Angela finally looked at the whole picture, there wasn’t another explanation left.
God.
Out of every person.
Why Amanda? Why her best friend? Why the woman who called her Honey without thinking? Why the woman who reached for her hand in parking lots? Why the woman who leaned against her shoulder during long filming days because she was tired? Why the woman who looked at her with so much uncomplicated affection that sometimes Angela forgot, just for half a second, that Amanda looked at everyone she loved that way?
Except that she didn’t. Not exactly, anyway.
Amanda remembered things about Angela that she didn’t remember about anyone else.
She’d order Angela’s coffee before she even walked into the café. She’d quietly grab the green M&M’s out of a shared bowl because she knew they were Angela’s favorite. She’d save the seat beside her in every meeting without ever consciously deciding to.
Just little things. Tiny, harmless things. Best friend things. Things that made Angela’s heart feel too large for her chest. Things she had absolutely no business in noticing, but things she had still noticed anyway.
She’d tried to stop. God, she’d tried. She’d gone on dates. With men and women who were actually available to love her back. And every single one of them eventually asked some version of the same question.
“Where’d you go just now?”
Because Angela would smile at a joke…and immediately think about telling Amanda.
That was when she’d known it was over for her. Not because she’d fallen in love. She could survive falling in love. But because of the fact that she’d fallen in love with the one person she could never ask to catch her when she fell.
Across the studio floor, she watches as Amanda laughed at something Courtney said. She’s standing at a table near craft services, absentmindedly peeling the label from her water bottle with meticulous little strips of paper collecting into a pile next to the bottle. She throws her head back when she laughs, sunlight from the open warehouse door catching the gold band on her left hand.
Angela’s eyes find it automatically. She hates that they do. She hates that she knows exactly when Amanda started twisting it absentmindedly while she was thinking. She hates that she notices when Amanda takes it off to wash her hands and slips it back on without looking. She hates that she’s memorized a piece of jewelry that doesn’t belong to her.
Because it means something. It means someone already chose Amanda. And Amanda chose them back.
Her chest aches with a slow, relentless sort of pain. Like something pressing steadily against her ribs from the inside. She wonders, not for the first time, if this is what heartbreak feels like before anyone has actually had their heart broken.
“Hey.” Angela jumps lightly. She hadn’t even heard Chanse walk over. He balances a coffee in one hand, eyebrows pinched together in quiet concern. “You good?”
Yeah. The answer comes to her mind automatically. Except, when her mouth opens, nothing comes out. She closes it again after a beat and lets her eyes drift back to where they were, settling on Amanda. Still laughing. Still peeling that stupid water bottle label. Still completely unaware that even simply existing has become the hardest part of Angela’s day.
Chanse follows her gaze, letting his eyes fall onto Amanda before he looks back towards his best friend, and then something in his face shifts.
“Ang…” He says quietly.
She swallows hard. Her throat suddenly feels impossibly tight.
“No.” She says with a slight shake of her head. It’s barely audible. A single syllable. She’s almost convinced he didn’t even hear it.
But Chanse quietly sets his coffee down on the nearest table and steps closer to her. He doesn’t ask her what’s wrong or accuse her of acting weird like normal. Instead, he simply reaches over and lays his hand gently over hers.
It's warm, and steady, and safe.
And that tiny act of kindness is somehow what finally undoes her.
Because she’d been holding onto this alone for far too long.
“I’m…” Her voice breaks. She laughs once through it, embarrassed, scrubbing furiously with her free hand at the tears already gathering before they can fall. “God.”
She hates crying. She especially hates crying at work. She takes one shaky breath.
“I think…” The words scrape their way out. “I’m in love with Amanda.”
The confession hangs there in between them. Absolutely impossible to take back now.
“And I think—” she whispers, eyes fixed on where Chanse’s hand still covers hers, “—I think I have been for longer than I’d like to admit.”
For a long moment, Chanse doesn’t say anything at all. Instead, he just steps forwards and wraps his arms around her, pulling her in tightly.
Angela folds into the hug almost immediately, like she’d been waiting for someone to catch her all along.
The first tear lands against his shoulder. Then another and another.
She just lets them.
Amanda smiles slightly as she shuts the door to her home behind her, finding her husband making dinner when she gets home. She can hear him before she even sees him.
Cabinet doors opening and closing. Water running in the sink. A wooden spoon tapping softly against the rim of a pot while something simmers on the stove. The television is on somewhere in the living room, turned low enough to become nothing more than background noise, the familiar cadence of a sitcom she’d watched a hundred times before without ever really paying attention.
She hangs her keys on the little hook beside the front door, toeing off her shoes with practiced ease before setting her bag down in exactly the same place she always does. It’s muscle memory now. The sort of routine built over years of living beside another person.
“Hey.”
She looks up. Her husband glances over his shoulder from the stove, smiling the second he sees her.
“Hi.” She replies back, warmly.
“Perfect timing.” He gestures vaguely with the wooden spoon. “Dinner’s almost done.”
Amanda smiles back automatically.
“Smells good.”
“It should. It’s one of your favorites.” He grins at her.
She hadn’t even noticed. He laughs quietly, shaking his head. Amanda blinks.
“What?” She asks him, her head tilting slightly.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head, handing her a glass of her favorite red.
Something in her chest twists, because he’d remembered. He always remembered. Every little thing. Like how she liked her coffee, or she couldn’t sleep without the fan on, even in winter, or that she preferred the grey throw blanket on their couch over the blue one because it was softer.
He remembered all of it, because he loved her.
Dinner passes mostly in comfortable silence. They had long ago reached the point where silence didn’t need to be filled. He tells her about something that happened at work, something about his coworker accidentally sending an email to the entire company.
Amanda laughs where she’s supposed to. Nodded where she’s supposed to. Adding in the occasional no way or seriously? at exactly the right moments.
She’s good at this. She’s always been good at this. That’s what marriage is about, knowing your spouse. She knows him. Just like he knows her.
“You seem tired.”
Amanda looks up at him with a blank expression. “Hm?”
“You okay?”
“Mhm.”
“You’ve barely said three words since you got home.”
She twirls pasta around her fork mindlessly, not eating it, just picking at it, playing around with it like a child. “I’m just exhausted, I think.”
He studies her for a second, thinking, because unfortunately, he knows her, he always has.
“Anything happen at work?”
Amanda shakes her head. “No.” She dismisses quietly.
He pauses for a beat before taking another bite, asking almost absentmindedly, “…Is Angela okay?”
Everything inside Amanda stops, her fork halfway to her mouth as her entire body just stills, breath caught inside her throat. “What?”
He notices the hesitance immediately. “What?” He echoes back, not sure if he should have even brought the other woman up.
“You asked about Angela.” She says carefully, a slight tilt in her head.
He frowns, confused. “Yeah?”
“You specifically asked about Angela.” She clarifies, once again.
He lets out a quiet little laugh, reaching for his water. “Babe…You always get like this when you’re worried about somebody.” Amanda just stares blankly at him, unsure of where this conversation is about to head. He lifts one hand to the back of his neck, scratching lightly. “I just figured maybe something happened.”
“Why her?”
“You’ve known her forever.” He shrugs, once, before continuing. “You love her. I was just worried, maybe something happened?”
The words land inside Amanda with frightening ease. Because of course she loves Angela, everyone knows that. Her friends know that. Their fans know that. Her husband knows that. Hell, he’s met Angela dozens of times. She’s been over for dinner, been to parties together, and celebrated birthdays. They’ve helped each other move furniture. Angela had even come over one time around Christmas with cookies she’d burned because she’d been too busy talking to Amanda on the phone to notice the timer.
Her husband had laughed, Angela had laughed harder, and Amanda had laughed so hard she’d cried. Of course he knew she loved Angela. There had never been anything strange about that, right?
“I—” Amanda clears her throat. “She’s fine.”
“You sure?”
“Mhm.”
“You seem somewhere else.”
“I’m just tired.”
He nods slowly, letting the conversation drop. He knows her. He knows when it’s time to end things or switch topics. He’ll never push her to talk about something she doesn’t want to or isn’t ready to discuss yet. It’s one of the many things Amanda has always loved about him. “Okay.” He says softly, focussing back on the food in front of them.
He appears in the doorway of the bathroom a while later, leaning against the frame, arms crossed casually across his chest as she rinses her brush under the faucet.
“You wanna watch another episode of Breaking Bad?”
She spits into the sink, wiping her mouth before replacing her toothbrush in the holder right next to his. “I think I’m just gonna go to bed.” She replies softly.
“So early?”
“I’m wiped.”
He nods, letting her go. “Okay.”
She walks past him towards their bedroom, trying to slip by but he catches her hand gently within his, just for a second, just long enough to stop her and make her catch his eyes.
“I love you.” He smiles at her, eyes softening at the creases, his hand giving her a tiny squeeze before letting go.
She smiles back automatically, words leaving her mouth before she can even think about them. “I love you too.”
He leans in, pressing a kiss to her forehead before pulling back just enough. “Get some sleep.” He whispers before turning and heading back to the living room.
She lies awake for almost three hours. He’d come into bed around an hour ago, and she’d feigned sleep, feeling him press another kiss to her forehead before slipping beneath the comforter beside her and resting an arm across her body, pulling her in. His breathing had evened out, slow and steady, peaceful even as Amanda stared blankly up at the ceiling.
The blades of the fan circle and blur in the sliver of moonlight slipping through the cracks of the curtain. She should be asleep, she was fucking exhausted. Instead, her mind keeps looping, replaying dinner, replaying his words on repeat inside her brain.
You love her.
Yeah, of fucking course she loves Angela. God, everyone loved Angela. What’s not to love about her? She was easy to love. She made strangers laugh in grocery store checkout lines. She remembered birthdays without Facebook reminders. She called just because. She showed up. She stayed.
Loving Angela wasn’t the problem. It never had been.
Amanda rolls onto her side, careful not to wake her husband as she turns to face him.
He is good. He is so, so, impossibly good.
He deserves certainty. He deserves someone who never hesitates before saying I love you. He deserves someone whose first thought after a funny day at work is to tell him. He deserves someone who pictures him in every future.
Amanda closes her eyes tightly, trying to conjure up the images, the future they’ve talked about planning. The future that is not so far distant anymore since time keeps creeping up on them, looming over them like a cloak in the night.
Christmas morning, their house, a child running through the hallway, laughter spilling from every corner.
She tries. She really, truly tries to picture it, the future she’d always imagined, the one they’d started trying to build together. The one she’d spent decades building and invited him into when she’d promised him forever.
And then, without permission, without any invitation or warning, she hears it. Angela’s laugh. Ringing in her ears, circling her thoughts, invading her imaginative future.
Her initial future fades into the background, hazy and blurred around everything, muted. But Angela’s laugh echoes once more inside her head and suddenly the future she’s picturing now settles into focus, and there she is. Standing barefooted in the kitchen, stealing cookie dough from a mixing bowl and making a mess. She’s looking over her shoulder with that stupid grin that always makes Amanda laugh before she’d even known why.
Amanda’s eyes fly open, a last stitch attempt on freeing herself from whatever her mind was conjuring up. “No.” the word is barely a breath, a whisper ghosting from her lips. “No.” She repeats to herself again as she shakes her head, sitting upright so fast to try and shake the thoughts from herself that the mattress beneath her shifts.
Her husband murmurs something unintelligible in his sleep before settling again. Amanda presses both hands over her face as her pulse pounds beneath her chest.
No. This isn’t… she isn’t…she’s straight, she’s married. She grew up in the church, her mom taught Sunday school, she dreamed about weddings and babies and houses with wraparound porches when she was a little girl.
She did everything right.
She’d followed the roadmap of life she’d been handed and never took a wrong turn. Never veered off course or taken a different exit, why did it suddenly feel like she was being rerouted?
School. Career. Marriage. House. A family was next on the list. That’s just how this went.
She isn’t unhappy. She’s not trapped. She doesn’t feel unloved. So why did it suddenly feel like she’d spent her whole life following the directions of this map without ever stopping to ask herself where she actually wanted to go? Why didn’t she ever ask if she was the one who chose the destination in the first place? Did she even know where she was supposed to be going?
Her hands began to shake, and she laughs once. It’s a little broken and disbelieving, wet and lodged inside her throat as she tries to be as quiet as possible.
“God.” She whispers quietly to herself. Because loving Angela? Of course that was easy, she’d already established that.
But falling in love with a woman? Falling in love with Angela, specifically?
Amanda squeezes her eyes shut as the fight with her lashes fail and the tears finally spill freely down her face, slipping softly down the curve of her cheeks and landing in droplets against the comforter tucked along her lap.
She isn’t crying because she thinks loving women is wrong. She doesn’t think that, not for a single second. She’s spent years celebrating people she loves for living honestly. It's just, why does the honesty feel so impossible when it belongs to her? Why does admitting this feel like it's unraveling every certainty she’s ever built her life on?
She sighs softly, wiping at her face to rid herself of the tears before settling back down into the bed and curling onto her side, facing away from the man sleeping peacefully beside her.
And for the first time in her life, Amanda allows herself to wonder whether it is possible to build a beautiful life and yet, still somehow end up living the wrong one.
Angela doesn’t disappear, she just moves. Slightly different, half a step, maybe. So small that if Amanda hadn’t spent years unconsciously orienting herself around Angela, she probably never would’ve noticed. Except she does, immediately, because she has always orbited Angela, and that means she notices everything.
It started with a hug. One of those absentminded hugs they’ve shared a thousand times before. Amanda says something stupid. Angela laughs, steps in automatically, wraps her arms around her for the briefest second before letting go again.
Usually, their hugs linger, for seconds too long neither of them wants to unpack. But this time, Amanda barely has time to hug her back before Angela’s already stepping away.
Angela isn’t cold about it, or awkward. It’s nothing strange, just short. But it feels heavier in a way. Amanda tries to tell herself she’s imagining it. People don’t hug each other for the exact same amount every single time. That would be ridiculous. So, inevitably, she lets it go.
Then, a few days later, they’re filming as usual. Amanda reaches out automatically for the chair next to her as Angela strides into the room, a silent invitation for her to sit. Except Spencer sits down first. It’s not a big deal. Angela just slips into the seat on the other side of him instead. She’s still within distance to joke, still close enough that no one would notice. Except Amanda does, because Angela would usually shove anyone aside and squeeze in between. She would've made room. She always made room.
She catches herself a moment later watching as Angela laughs at something Shayne says from two chairs away. The distance between them is just one body, just Spencer between them, but somehow, it feels like an ocean stretching miles across.
The texting between them doesn't stop, either, which almost makes it feel worse. Because if it had, Amanda would be able to point to something obvious. Instead, they just slow. They come quieter now.
Angela will still send her TikToks, just not six in a row. Amanda will still wake up to memes from her, except they're no longer sent while Angela was doomscrolling at two in the morning. She gets them while she’s getting ready for work, when she knows Angela’s been awake for at least ten minutes now.
Their conversations still happen, they still feel the same in the beginning. They just seem to end earlier now. No nonsensical texts added on or jumps in conversations to continue on talking endlessly, no beginning, no end, no hi, hello, good morning or goodnights.
Amanda finds herself staring at the little Seen 8:42 PM beneath her last message one evening. Angela always answered her. Maybe not immediately. Angela was known for her terrible texting habits,but she’d always made time to reply to Amanda, no matter what. Even if it didn’t always make complete sense.
Except tonight, Amanda stares at her phone. Nothing. No notifications. No replies. Not even a Read notification under her message.
She locks her phone. And then unlocks it five minutes later. Still nothing. She was a grown, married adult, why the hell was she staring at texts waiting for a read receipt like she was sixteen?
She hates that she keeps noticing things now. Every little, miniscule thing she notices now. So tiny that she feels ridiculous every time she does notice one.
Angela doesn’t lean her head on her shoulder while they’re waiting between setups anymore. She’ll stand beside her instead, and not against her like usual, with their hips and shoulders knocking into one another.
When they walk across the parking lot together after work, Angela keeps both hands shoved into her jacket pockets instead of reaching absentmindedly for Amanda’s hand or arm while they weave through cars.
Amanda almost reaches first once, her hand lifting ever so slightly before pausing mid-air because she’d noticed that Angela’s hands were already tucked safely away into her pockets.
She let her hand fall back to her side instead, fingernails digging tiny crescents into her palm.
Nobody says anything, either, because why would they? From the outside, nothing has changed. The office collectively still jokes to them as ‘work wives’. Shayne still teases them about sharing a singular brain cell. Fans still make edits upon edits and the comment section is full of Just kiss already and They’re literally married and The chemistry is insaneeeee.
Amanda reads one by accident one night, and usually she’d laugh and screenshot it and send it to Angela so they could share together. Instead, she freezes, just for a second, before locking her phone so quickly it almost slips from her hands.
It gets to the point where Amanda starts anticipating the distance now even before it happens. Angela walks into a room and Amanda instinctively shifts over on the couch, leaving the space open beside her. But Angela just smiles and takes the chair instead. Not far away, just not beside her anymore.
Amanda’s smile doesn’t fade on the outside. But internally? Something quietly folds in on itself, trying to consume her whole.
Subconsciously, she begins keeping score without meaning to. Collecting an on-running tab in her mind of all the little moments they used to share that no longer exist or have shifted just enough to alert Amanda in the rift of their erosion.
Angela used to call her on the drive home. Now she texts when she gets home instead. Angela used to steal fries off Amanda’s plate. Now she asks first. Angela used to bump their shoulders together when they laughed. Now she catches herself before she does.
Every single change is microscopic, so tiny they’re barely even noticeable. Every single one still cuts deep, leaving invisible scars in their wake.
Amanda tells herself she’s imagining it. She has to be. Because what other explanation would there be? Life gets busy. It changes. People change. Angela is just changing. She’s dating, and writing, and building her career. And Amanda is married. They aren’t twenty-five anymore. They’re adults. This is what adulthood looks like, right? Friendships evolve and people become slightly less intertwined. It’s normal. It’s healthy, even.
So why does it feel like she’s beginning to grieve someone who’s still standing five feet away from her?
One afternoon they’re all gathered around the monitors watching playback. Amanda laughs and without thinking, she reaches for Angela’s hand. The movement is so automatic she doesn’t even realize she’s done it until her fingers close around nothing but air.
Angela had stepped away a second earlier to grab her water bottle.
Amanda’s hand hangs awkwardly in the air for half a heartbeat before she curls it into a loose fist and drops it back to her side.
Nobody even notices, except Angela herself, across the room when their eyes meet. Just for a moment, before Angela looks away first and Amanda’s stomach sinks.
She can’t stop thinking about it, letting every instance replay on repeat in her mind. She tells herself to stop, that she’s overanalyzing and assigning meaning where there is none. But every time Angela leaves a conversation a little earlier than she used to. Every time Amanda catches herself looking for Angela before walking into a room. Every time she instinctively saves a story to tell Angela later, the same thought comes back, echoing violently inside her head.
You’re supposed to notice things about the people you love.
Amanda stops walking. The thought bounces across every surface in the silence of her own mind.
People you love. People you love. People you love.
Not your husband. Not your family. Not everyone. Just who she loved. Just her. Just Angela. Just Angela. Just Angela.
Amanda squeezes her eyes shut. “No.”
The denial comes too instantly. Too quickly. Too desperately. Too overwhelmingly. She loves Angela. Of course she loves Angela, Angela is her best friend. That’s normal, isn’t it?
The question lingers in the forefront of her mind long after she’s stopped asking it. And no matter how many times she tells herself she’s imagining things, she cannot seem to shake the unbearable certainty that Angela has been pulling away.
The certainty that follows behind that might be worse, and she can’t decide which possibility hurts more. Was that Angela really pulling away, or that Amanda was finally understanding why.
Angela isn’t being obvious, in fact she’s doing the exact opposite of that, if anything. She’s trying so hard to make sure nothing changes between them, that somehow everything has changed. And Amanda has noticed. And can no longer ignore it.
She notices that Angela laughs just a little farther away now. That when everyone crowds around the monitors after filming, Angela somehow always ends up on the opposite side of Shayne or Courtney instead of unconsciously drifting towards Amanda the way she always used to.
She notices that Angela still texts her, still calls sometimes, still asks if she’d remembered to eat lunch and remembers her exact coffee order.
She even still sends her Instagram reels in the middle of the night, too.
Everything is still just Angela.
Except every single interaction feels like it’s happening through a pane of fogged glass Amanda can’t quite see clearly through.
Nothing is different, yet everything is different. And it makes her feel like she’s losing her mind.
She lasts almost three weeks before she finally caves and asks.
Not Angela, of course. She couldn’t ask her. If she did, whatever this was between them could suddenly become real, and Amanda isn’t sure if—well, Amanda’s not really sure of anything right now.
Instead she decides to find Chanse. He’s Angela’s other best friend. He’s her friend too. He’s for sure the correct choice, here, right?
He’s alone in the kitchen at the Smosh office one afternoon, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing while absentmindedly scrolling through his phone. Amanda almost chickens out and walks past, but she inhales deeply, mustering up any semblance of courage she has left and speaks.
“Hey.”
He looks up immediately. “Hey.”
She smiles the practiced smile she’s been donning a lot lately. “You busy?”
“Nah.”
“Can I ask you something?” She asks, suddenly more so interested in her hands rather than maintaining eye contact.
He locks his phone without hesitation. “Always.”
Amanda leans against the opposite counter and folds her arms across her chest. And then she unfolds them. And then folds them once again, desperately trying to figure out how to ask the question that’s been sitting beneath her ribs for weeks now.
“Is Angela mad at me?”
Chanse blinks, cocking his head to the side. “What?”
Amanda laughs awkwardly. “I know…” She says, drawing it out.
“What?”
“I know how that sounds.” She tries to clarify.
“No, I just…” He frowns, hesitant and unsure of how to continue just yet. “Where did that come from?”
Amanda shrugs, half unsure, but it’s definitely too quick and too casual. “I don’t know.” She lies. She does. She does know where it came from. She knows exactly where. “I just—” She pauses, searching for the words that seemingly are failing to exist. “She feels—” Different, she thinks to herself, the word lodging inside her throat.
How do you explain that someone hugs you for one second less than they used to? How do you explain that they still smile exactly the same way but somehow it doesn’t quite reach you anymore? How do you explain missing someone who’s standing in the same room you’ve always shared?
“Different.” She finally admits, saying it out loud. “So… I figured maybe I did something?” She asks, forcing out a small laugh.
Chanse doesn’t answer, and instead Amanda watches as the recognition flickers across his face, and then something more she can’t quite decipher, but it seems heavier, something more like grief maybe.
“No.” He says simply.
Amanda searches his face. “No?”
“No.” He repeats.
The relief inside her lasts for exactly half a heartbeat before she speaks again, unsure of her words. “Then—” She swallows, thinking of how to continue on. “What is it?”
Silence. Long enough for the coffee machine behind Chanse to finish dripping. Long enough for someone down the hallway to laugh. Long enough for Amanda to realize he isn’t trying to come up with an answer. He’s deciding whether he should give her one.
And then, he finally speaks up. “I can’t tell you.” He admits softly.
Amanda stares at him in confusion. “What?”
“I can’t.” He reiterates.
“Why?”
He closes his eyes briefly and when he opens them again, they’re gentler than she’s ever seen them. “Because if I tell you—” He pauses, his jaw tightening. “It changes everything.” He admits carefully.
Amanda’s heart begins pounding inside her chest so loudly she’s certain he can hear it. “What does?” She presses.
He doesn’t answer her, and drops his eyes from hers avoiding eye contact completely.
“Chanse.”
Nothing, still. She laughs once, only it doesn’t sound like laughter. It sounds frightened.
“You’re starting to scare me.” She says, a twinge of laughter lacing her voice in trying to shift the tone.
“I know.” He states, his tone unwavering.
Amanda straightens her posture, realizing that the tonal shift wasn’t landing and she adjusts once more. “Then tell me.” She insists.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
She watches as his shoulders rise with a slow, steady breath. Because he’s not sure if there is a kind way to say this. He isn’t sure there is a version of this conversation where everyone walks away okay. He knows some truths don’t just answer questions, they rearrange lives.
He finally looks back up at her, before opening his mouth to speak, cautiously, meticulously, his lips forming around every word with the utmost care.
“I’m not sure either of you would survive that.”
Amanda can feel the blood and color draining from her face as the words settle between them, heavily. He’d said them, spoken them out in the open, unable to take them back and her heartbeat stuttered painfully against her ribs.
Both.
He’d said both. Not just her. Not just Angela. Both.
Every single moment crashes before her eyes, violently whirring around inside her mind.
The shorter hugs. The empty chairs next to her. The unread texts. Hands shoved inside pockets instead of reaching out across parking lots to hold hers. The almost imperceptible distance she’d been trying so hard to convince herself wasn’t there.
Amanda’s mouth goes dry, but she opens it, asking the question before she can stop herself. “Does she know?”
The words are barely audible, a ghost of a whisper leaving her lips and she’s unsure if Chanse had even heard them.
He doesn’t respond immediately. He just stands there, watching her instead. Watching the way her breathing has changed, the way she grips the edge of the counter so tightly her knuckles have gone white, the way her eyes already look like she’s mourning something that hasn’t officially ended yet, hasn’t even started really.
He realizes in that moment of watching her, that Amanda isn’t asking whether Angela knows…she’s asking if Angela knows about her. About what Amanda herself has been too terrified to even name.
He thinks for a moment, debating on what he should do, what he could do. He could answer her. He could tell her everything. He could tell her about the afternoon Angela cried in his arms because she’d fallen in love with someone she could never have. He could tell her Angela has spent months pulling away because staying close was becoming unbearable.
He could do that, and potentially detonate everything and everyone around them, but that might not be the smartest of moves. So, instead, very quietly, he asks. “You tell me?”
Amanda freezes like someone had just dumped a bucket of ice cold water over her head because the question lands differently than any answer ever could. Because suddenly this wasn’t about Angela anymore. It’s about her.
Does Angela know?
The question ricochets around inside her, making her feel uncentered, ungrounded, unstable.
Does Angela know that she reaches for her first whenever something funny happens? Does Angela know she unconsciously leaves the seat beside her empty every single meeting? Does Angela know she’s started picturing futures she has no business picturing? Does Angela know Amanda has spent weeks lying awake beside her sleeping husband wondering why the person in every tomorrow somehow keeps becoming Angela?
Does Angela know? Does Angela know? Does Angela know?
Does Angela know that Amanda loves her too?
Amanda feels tears prick unexpectedly behind her eyes and she squeezes them shut tightly, trying to fight to hold them back. She’s not going to cry because Chanse confirmed it. He didn’t, he didn’t have to. She’d finally let the realization settle around her, every puzzle piece locking into place and the answer was there, present and clear as day. He did not need to confirm out loud what she had already known deep down.
So, she just nods once. A tiny, almost imperceptible movement because she no longer trusts herself to speak. If she opens her mouth, she thinks the truth might finally spill out, too raw and too real.
Instead, she just turns on her heel and walks towards the door. Her hand finds the handle, fingers wrapping around the metal, ready to twist but she hesitates. Just for a second. She thinks about turning back, thinks about telling him to tell her she’s wrong. To tell her she’d imagined all of it and that Angela wasn’t in love with her. That she wasn't in love with Angela. That they’re exactly who they were a month ago. A year. A few.
But she doesn’t. Because somewhere deep down, beneath all the fear and the denial and the life she’d built so delicately around herself, she thinks she’s known the answer for a very long time. She just hadn’t been brave enough to ask the question. And now, somehow knowing that Angela might have been carrying that same impossible love this entire time too, hurts far more than knowing ever could.
She twists the handle and pushes it open, stepping through before letting it close behind her, trying to leave behind every part of the conversation they’d just had behind that door.
When Amanda texts asking if she can come over for wine and whatever true crime documentary Angela inevitably falls asleep halfway through, Angela stares at her phone for a very long time before answering.
Her thumb hovers over the keyboard. She could say she’s busy or that she has plans. Or she could lie. She almost does. Because the distance had been helping. Not that much. Not enough to make a significant difference, but enough that she’d stopped waking up every morning with Amanda already occupying her first thought. Enough that she’d convinced herself she could survive this if she just kept putting one careful foot in front of the other. One shorter hug. One extra chair between them. One fewer late-night text. Tiny things. Things nobody else noticed.
Things she’d really hoped Amanda hadn’t either.
Her phone buzzes again.
you don’t have to if you’re busy 🤍
Angela laughs despite herself.
Amanda.
Always making it easy for everyone else to tell her no.
She sighs and types before she can overthink too much about it.
always.
Amanda knocks exactly twenty-three minutes later, standing on the other side of the door balancing a bottle of red wine beneath one arm and a paper bag of takeout in the other.
“You brought food.”
Amanda lifts the bag a little, with a smile. “I know you have half a lemon in your fridge and that’s probably about it.”
“You know I have other groceries.” She defends herself.
“I also know they’ll still be there tomorrow.” Amanda quips back and it makes Angela smile.
God. That smile. The one Amanda always manages to pull out of her without even trying.
Angela steps aside and Amanda brushes past her into the apartment. The familiar vanilla perfume with notes of floral she wears follows a second later, hitting her senses.
It smells like home.
That realization alone almost sends Angela back to the front door to ask her to leave before either of them gets hurt. Instead she just locks the door, follows Amanda into the kitchen and tries to pretend everything is normal.
It is normal.
Painfully so.
Amanda plates their food without asking where anything is because she’s been in this kitchen enough times to know. Forks are in the second drawer. Wine glasses are in the cabinet over the sink. Angela still complains every time Amanda folds her dish towel wrong. Amanda still laughs and folds it exactly the same incorrect way anyway.
They eat cross-legged on the couch. Talking over one another. Arguing about which documentary to put on. Angela loses as usual.
“I swear to God,” she mutters as Amanda presses play, “if this one ends with another husband doing it—”
“It was probably the husband.” Amanda tells her, taking another bite of her food.
“They’re making us profile people now.” Angela whines.
“They’re making you profile people.”
Angela lets out a quiet little laugh, and for a little while, everything feels okay. Which feels dangerous. They laugh. They refill their wine glasses. Amanda throws popcorn at her after Angela correctly predicts the killer fifteen minutes into the episode. Angela throws it back. Amanda yelps when one kernel lands in her wine. They both laugh so hard Amanda nearly spills the whole glass.
Normal.
It is so achingly, beautifully normal that Angela almost lets herself believe she’d imagined the last few months. Maybe she’d been dramatic. Maybe she’d been reading into things. Maybe she could still have this, whatever this was.
Then, Amanda shifts closer without thinking. The movement is so instinctive neither of them even notices it, consciously. Just an inch at first, and then another, and then their shoulders are touching, and Angela’s heart immediately betrays her.
Be steady. Be calm. Slow down. Breathe. Don’t forget to breathe. Not too fast, though.
She keeps her eyes on the television as the narrator is explaining blood spatter, but neither of them hears a word. Amanda reaches for the bowl of popcorn and her fingers brush Angela’s and she doesn’t pull away. Instead, she simply laces their fingers together, like she usually does, like she’s done a hundred times before, like this wasn't the most dangerous thing either of them has ever done.
Angela freezes, internally. Amanda’s hand is warm. Their palms fit together with the effortless familiarity of people who’ve held hands in a hundred parking lots, movie theaters, convention halls, and backstage hallways without ever attaching any meaning to it.
Best friends do this. Best friends can do this.
Angela repeats the thought like a prayer.
Best friends can do this.
Then why does it suddenly feel impossible for her to breathe?
The documentary keeps playing. Someone on the television cries. A detective explains timelines. Wine sloshes softly against the side of Amanda’s wine glass as she absentmindedly turns it between her fingers.
Life keeps happening. Outside, a car passes beneath Angela’s apartment window. Inside, time has quietly stopped.
Amanda leans her head sideways, her temple brushing Angela’s in the process and she makes no move to back away. It’s such a familiar gesture that Angela almost doesn’t react, but instead she turns, just enough that her forehead comes to rest against Amanda’s.
She hears Amanda exhale, long and shaky and weak. Angela shuts her eyes. She shouldn’t know what Amanda’s breathing sounds like. She shouldn’t know the exact rhythm of her heartbeat when she’s anxious. She shouldn’t know that Amanda worries her bottom lip between her teeth whenever she’s trying not to cry.
But she does. She does know that, all of that. Because she’s loved her for too long. Because she has memorized her without permission.
A drop of warmth lands against the back of their joined hands. Angela opens her eyes. Amanda. A single tear slipped silently down her cheek before falling onto their intertwined fingers.
Angela doesn’t move, and neither does Amanda. And in that tiny, fragile moment, everything becomes horribly, painfully, beautifully clear.
Amanda knows.
Not just about Angela. About herself too. Angela can see it all written on her face, stitched inside her chest. All the grief and the fear and the guilt and the impossible relief of finally having a name for something she’d spent so long trying to outrun. It was all right there, sitting inches away from her, crying quietly onto their intertwined hands.
Angela’s heart shatters inside her chest all over again.
Not because Amanda doesn’t love her. Because she does, she knows Amanda does, now, painfully. And yet, it still changes nothing.
“If I kissed you right now—” Angela barely breathes, surprising herself even with the words that had just left her mouth. Her own voice sounds unfamiliar, like she’s afraid that speaking any louder would shatter whatever fragile thing existing between them.
Angela feels Amanda go completely still. The way her fingers tighten instinctively around Angela’s hand. The way her breathing hitches in her throat.
“—you wouldn’t stop me.” Angela finishes.
Silence settles between them, thick and heavy. The atmosphere around them swirling with so much tension ready to snap at any given moment. Amanda closes her eyes and the silence stretches for one second. Two. Five. Long enough that Angela almost wishes she could take back the words and never have spoken.
Finally, barely audible, Angela’s unsure if she actually heard or had imagined it, Amanda whispers.
“No.” The word is barely there. A breath. A confession. A detonation.
Angela’s eyes close. Because some small, selfish part of her has wanted to hear exactly that for years. Amanda’s forehead stays pressed against hers, unwavering.
“So don’t.” Amanda continues as the words crack in the middle. It’s not because she doesn’t want Angela to kiss her. She does, God she goes, more than she’s ever wanted anything. “But if you kiss me—” She swallows, voice shaking. “—I don’t know if I'll ever stop wanting another one.”
A tear slips between them, falling.
“And I have a husband who loves me.” She states, like it’s a fact. Like it’s a reminder not just for Angela but for herself. “And you’re my best friend.” She inhales a shaking breath. “And if we do this—if we cross that line—” She finally opens her eyes, tears spilling freely from them now as her voice continues breaking. “I lose both.”
Angela’s own eyes fill as she nods once, understanding.
“Okay.”
And that’s it.
They don’t move. They don’t pull away. They don’t kiss. Instead, they stay exactly where they are, forehead against forehead with their hands intertwined and tears stain their cheeks. Close enough to feel every shaking breath. Close enough to know exactly what it would be like. And choosing, together, to never find out.
They never talked about that night, after that. Not once. Not the next morning. Not the next week. Not when Amanda drops off the Tupperware she’d accidentally taken home after wine night. Not when Angela sends her a TikTok three days later that she’d normally have texted you in all caps underneath. She just sends it and Amanda reacts with three crying laughing emojis.
Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing else, whatsoever.
As though nothing had even happened.
As though they hadn’t sat forehead to forehead in Angela’s apartment and admitted, without ever actually saying the words, that they both wanted something they could never have.
And life had simply continued on.
The next Monday, Amanda walks into Smosh carrying two coffees, without thinking, the way she always has. One iced lavender latte, one iced vanilla oatmilk latte.
She freezes halfway across the parking lot and stares down at the second cup. For a second she considers throwing it away. Instead, she walks inside and hands it to Angela just like always.
“Delivery, Madame.” She says in an overly dramatic posh accent.
Angela smiles. “Thanks.”
Their fingers brush as they exchange the cup, but neither of them linger.
“How was your weekend?”
“Good. You?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
“Cool.”
And that’s it. A conversation that, six months ago, would’ve somehow become forty-five minutes of laughter over absolutely nothing, dies after four sentences. And neither of them knows how to resurrect it.
Angela starts dating someone, eventually. Not seriously. Not at first. Just someone to pass the time. Just someone to scratch the itch. Just a bandaid she’s trying to place over a bullet wound.
Coffee at first, then dinner. And then another.
The girl is kind. She’s beautiful and patient and funny and she deserves someone who’s heart doesn’t permanently lie in the palm of someone else’s hands.
Angela tries anyway. Because life keeps asking her to.
Amanda hears about the date from Courtney.
“I hope she’s happy.” She says honestly. She means it too, God she means it.
And then she excuses herself to the crying bathroom, locking the door behind her before sliding down with her back against the wall. She cries for exactly ninety seconds before getting back up, checking her makeup and walking back out. Nobody even notices.
Time continues to still pass. Weeks turn into months turn into years and nothing dramatic happens. No explosive fights, no drunken confessions, no accidental kisses, no affair. Just absence. Tiny, miniscule, persistent things that Amanda still noticed.
Angela no longer reaching for her hand crossing parking lots. So she learned to shove her own hands into her jacket pockets too, it's easier that way, she tells herself. Amanda still saves memes, even pressing the share button, but when Angela’s name always appears first she locks her phone and puts it away. Angela still buys her birthday gifts, they're just slightly less personal now. Gift cards or a candle, not the book she’d mentioned months ago wanting to read and Angela having remembered and gotten it for her or a random shirt Angela had seen while traveling because “I saw this and immediately thought of you.”
Because she always thought of Amanda. That was exactly the problem.
People continued calling them work wives. Angela would laugh. Amanda would laugh. Chanse would fake gag. Court would roll their eyes. And everyone would move on.
Nobody noticed that Amanda no longer throws her legs across Angela’s lap while they wait between setups. Nobody noticed Angela unconsciously choosing the chair instead of squeezing beside Amanda on the couch. Nobody noticed anything because from the outside, nothing had changed.
They still orbited each other. They still finished each other’s sentences. They still knew exactly what the other person was thinking half the time. They were still best friends.
They were just careful now. Painfully, meticulously careful.
At night Amanda lies awake, like most nights, beside her husband again. He rolls over in his sleep and wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her closer without waking.
Amanda cries quietly, silently into the darkness. It’s not because she doesn’t love him. It’s not because she wants to leave. It’s not because she wants to stay, either. It’s because she wants a version of the world where neither choice hurts.
Though it never comes.
Life just continues on instead, doing what it always does. Birthdays. Christmases. Wrap parties. Coffee runs. Movie nights with the whole cast. Photos. Instagram comments. Inside jokes. Late-night shoots. Everything.
Everything is still there.
Except for the ease.
Now every interaction is measured. Every hug is shorter. Every goodbye is a little quicker. Every love you before hanging up on the phone becomes see you tomorrow instead. It was safer. Less dangerous, less true.
Because she wants to move past this. She wants to forget the pain she feels whenever she notices each of those tiny moments shifting into something else because she will forever remember the evening those shifts had begun.
That one impossible evening where she rested her forehead against Angela’s and they both chose not to kiss not because they didn’t want to but because they wanted to enough that they both knew one kiss would never be just one kiss.
And that is the cruelest part of remembering.
Nothing ever happened.
The tragedy isn’t that they lost each other.
It’s that they spent months proving, over and over again, that they loved each other enough to keep choosing the lives they had already built—even when those choices quietly broke both of their hearts in the process.
The front office door flies open hard enough to bounce off the stopper behind it.
“I BOOKED!” Angela’s voice cracks halfway through the sentence.
Nobody processes the words at first. They just hear Angela, loud and breathless and laughing like usual.
Shayne is the first one to look up. “What?”
Angela is standing in the doorway with both hands clamped over her mouth, eyes impossibly wide, tears already spilling over before she’s even stopped smiling.
“I—” She laughs. The kind that steals the rest of the sentence away with disbelief. “I booked!”
“A commercial?”
“No—”
“A movie?”
Angela shakes her head so hard her curls bounce. “Nope.”
Courtney’s eyes go impossibly wide before the realization dawns on them. “No…” They say hesitantly.
Angela nods. She’s still crying, still laughing, still trying to remember how to breathe. “SNL baby!”
For one heartbeat the room forgets how to breathe. And then it erupts. With cheers, and congratulations, and noise, and so, so much love. Voices overlapping one another, hugs and high-fives exchanged, pictures and videos taken and sent between everyone.
Every person in the room is suddenly moving. Chanse reaches her first, practically tackling her into a hug. Courtney is next. Then Shayne. Then Spencer.
People are still shouting over one another. Thousands of questions were hurled at her all at once. Someone already asking when she starts. Someone else demanding to know whether she’s allowed to tell them who she auditioned with.
Angela can’t answer. She can’t stop crying long enough to answer. She keeps laughing instead, burying her face in Chanse’s shoulder for a second before looking back up at everyone.
“I booked SNL.” It’s the only thing she’s able to say. And saying it out loud somehow makes it real.
Amanda doesn’t remember standing up. One second she was sitting and the next she’s already across the room, wrapping her arms around Angela almost on instinct. Harder than she’s hugged her in months.
She feels Angela let out one surprised little sound before immediately melting against her. For just a moment, everything else disappears. The cameras, the office, the noise around them of people cheering. It’s just Amanda holding Angela.
“I’m so proud of you.” Amanda’s voice breaks as her head tilts low enough to reach Angela’s ear. She hadn’t expected that to happen.
Angela pulls back just enough to look at her and Amanda has tears in her own eyes too.
“Hey.” Angela laughs softly. “Why are you crying?”
Amanda lets out a watery laugh. “Because you did it.” She states proudly.
God. She did it. She actually fucking did it.
Years of improv shows. Open mics. Writing packets. Last-minute auditions. Flights to New York. Rejections. Waiting. Trying again. Watching people less funny get opportunities before her and somehow never becoming bitter enough to quit.
Amanda had watched all of it. Every single step. She’d watched Angela doubt herself and still get back up anyway.
“You did it.” Amanda says it again, quieter this time, almost to herself. “You actually did it.”
Angela smiles through fresh tears. “I know.”
Neither of them notices they’ve forgotten to let each other go, and it takes Courtney loudly clearing their throat with a dramatically exaggerated grin before they separate, both laughing sheepishly as the room immediately descends into teasing.
“Jesus, save some emotion for your acceptance speech.”
“Oh shut up.”
It isn’t until much later that the room finally begins to settle. People slowly drifting back towards work, still buzzing with excitement.
Amanda finds Angela standing by the window, looking out, quiet for the first time all day.
She walks over slowly, and neither of them says anything immediately. The silence between them today feels different. Lighter, almost peaceful. Nice.
“So.” Angela says, breaking the silence. Amanda just smiles back at her.
“So.” She echoes back.
Angela lets out a long breath. “I guess—” She laughs once in disbelief. “I guess I’m moving to New York.”
There it is. The statement everyone knew was coming. The one nobody had wanted to say out loud because it meant that Angela was really going to be leaving, LA, her job, all of them.
Amanda’s smile stays exactly where it is. “When are we thinking?”
“A month?” Angela asks, almost to herself. “Probably, yeah, a month.”
Amanda nods. “That’s—”
“Soon.” Angela nods too.
“Yeah.” Amanda replies, a little breathlessly.
Neither of them says what they actually really mean.
A month. A month until no more coffee runs. No more dropping by each other’s offices. No more “come sit with me.” No more instinctively looking for each other across the set because the other person will always be somewhere nearby.
Amanda’s throat tightens and she swallows it down. “You’ve always wanted this.” She says, trying to keep her words steady and even.
“I have.”
“And you deserve it.”
Angela’s eyes flicker towards her. “I know, but—” she hesitates.
“But?” Amanda turns fully toward her.
“I didn’t think—” She trails off, looking back out the window. “I don’t know.”
Amanda waits and watches as she sees Angela warring within herself over deciding what words should come next.
“I guess I forgot that getting the thing you’ve dreamed about your whole life,” She smiles sadly. “…usually means leaving something else behind.”
Amanda’s chest aches so suddenly she almost has to look away.
Before she can reply, Ian appears in the doorway.
“Ang, there you are.”
Angela turns. “Hey.”
He walks over with that familiar, easy smile he’s worn for years. “You know—” He gestures around the office. “…this place is always going to be yours.” Angela blinks. “You’ll always have a home here.”
The room feels strangely quiet as Angela looks around at the office, the sets, the hallway she’d walked through thousands of times. At the people who had become family without her realizing exactly when it happened.
Her eyes shine again. “I know.” She says, and she means it. Amanda knows she does. This place will always belong to Angela, just not in the everyday way anymore.
And as everyone starts talking again—already discussing apartments in New York, flights, schedules, guest appearances—Amanda smiles and joins the conversation. She asks practical questions and laughs at jokes and means every word when she says how excited she is.
But somewhere beneath all of it, tucked carefully behind a smile she’s become very good at wearing, one quiet thought settles into place.
For months, she’d been mourning a version of Angela she thought she was slowly losing. Now she realizes she is about to lose her in a way neither of them can pretend isn’t real anymore. Not forever, of course. But no longer down the hall. No longer one text away from, Come to my place. No longer the easiest person in the world to find.
And somehow, watching Angela stand there glowing with the life she’d worked so hard to build, Amanda has never felt more proud of her.
Or more heartbroken.
Angela had expected to cry. She had expected Chanse to cry. She had expected Courtney to cry. She had expected Ian’s hug to linger a little longer than usual. She had expected hugs and photos and promises and group texts already planning trips to New York.
She had expected all of that.
She had not expected…this.
LAX is busy in the particular way airports always are. Chaotic and purposeful because everyone has somewhere to be. Business travelers rolling suitcases without looking up from emails. Parents trying to convince exhausted toddlers that yes, they absolutely have to wear their shoes. College students sleeping on backpacks beneath charging stations. Couples kissing hello. Families crying goodbye. Entire lives crossing paths for seconds before disappearing forever.
Angela sits in the middle of all of it, feeling very, very invisible.
Spork sleeps inside the soft-sided carrier at her feet. His tiny chest rises and falls in slow, even breaths, his tongue hanging out awkwardly because he’d insisted on fighting the anxiety medication right up until it won.
For once, she isn’t running late. No sprint through Terminal 5 with coffee spilling down her sleeve. No apologizing to strangers because she clipped them with her carry-on. No boarding announcement echoing overhead with her name attached to it.
Just sitting and watching and waiting. She isn’t very good at waiting. Waiting leaves too much room for thinking. And thinking leads to spiraling.
So she watches people instead. A little girl proudly dragging a suitcase almost bigger than she is. An older couple quietly sharing fries. A man asleep with his mouth open. Someone crying into their phone near the windows.
Life continuing on for everyone, uninterrupted, as though today isn’t ending an entire chapter of hers.
A shadow falls across the seat beside her. She barely looks up before speaking.
“Sorry, someone’s actually—” The words die on her tongue as she stares at the person now sitting next to her.
Amanda.
Angela just stares at her for a long moment.
Amanda looks winded. Not in the physical way, but emotionally, like she’d run here without ever actually running. And now she’d just slid into the empty chair beside her while neither of them spoke.
“What—” Angela finally manages, breaking her reverie of staring at Amanda to look back out in front of her again through the floor to ceiling windows of the tarmac.
Amanda shrugs. The movement is almost embarrassed. “I bought the cheapest ticket I could.”
Angela blinks. “What?”
“So I could get through security.” Amanda tells her, as if she’s telling her she picked up an extra bag of chips with her lunch.
Silence.
“You bought a plane ticket.” Angela clarifies, repeating herself so Amanda can hear it too.
“Mhm.”
“To get through TSA.”
“Mhm.”
“You’re insane.”
“I know.” Amanda says softly, agreeing.
Angela lets out one startled laugh. “What the fuck, ‘Manda?”
Amanda smiles. God. It’s such an Amanda smile. The one she wears when she’s trying to make someone else comfortable instead of herself.
“I just wanted a little more time.” She says, finally looking away from Angela, instead mirroring her, and looking out in front of her through the giant glass window panes.
And just like that, the laughter disappears.
Neither of them reaches for the other, not yet anyway. They just simply sit, side by side, facing the enormous windows overlooking the runway.
Outside, planes land with practiced precision and others climb into impossibly blue skies. One leaves. Another arrives. Nothing feels permanent here. It feels like everything is designed to be temporary. Amanda watches as a baggage cart disappears behind another plane.
“I used to love airports.” She hums softly, still looking forward.
Angela glances over through the corner of her eye, ever so briefly. “Yeah?”
“They made everything feel possible.” She laughs softly. “Like every gate led to some completely different version of your life.”
Angela nods. “I get that.”
Amanda keeps watching the runway, letting the words almost die before they leave her tongue. But quietly, she frees them. “I hate them now.”
Minutes pass, but neither of them checks the time. Neither of them wants to know how little they have left together before—
A little boy runs past, between them and the giant panelled glass windows, chasing his older sister as they both squeal. Their dad apologizes to nobody in particular. A barista at the cafe within the gate calls out someone’s latte order. Someone nearby laughs so loudly half the terminal looks over.
The world refuses to pause for grief. Angela has always hated that about it. How, when something devastating happens, the Earth seems to stop rotating for someone, but for everyone else it still kept on spinning.
Amanda breaks the silence first. “You know—”
“Hm?”
“This is really romantic.”
Angela snorts. “What?”
Amanda gestures vaguely around them. “The airport. The tragic goodbye. The impossible circumstances.”
Angela starts laughing, looking over at her with a shake of her head. “Oh my God.”
Amanda nods seriously. “This is absolutely some rom-com bullshit.”
“It kind of is.” Angela agrees, disappointingly.
“This is usually the part where somebody realizes they’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Angela smiles. “Yeah.”
“They run through the airport—”
“Mhm.”
“They confess—”
“They kiss.” Angela adds in.
“They miss their flight.” Amanda’s smile wavers. “And then the credits roll.”
Angela looks back towards the runway, silence falling between them again.
“I think we missed our cue.” She says softly, her voice wavering and trying not to falter.
Amanda laughs, only it breaks halfway through. “I think so.”
The silence between them had long since felt uncomfortable. Sitting here, now, in the airport as the clock ticked down the time they were allotted to spend with each other, it felt sacred.
Their shoulders brushed, but neither of them moved away. Their knees knocked once together, and both of them left them resting against the other. Amanda’s hand rested between them on the armrest with her palm up. She wasn't offering it up or asking, she’d just simply left it there.
Angela just stares at it for one long heartbeat. And then, without thinking too hard about it, she places her own hand inside it. Because to her this—holding hands with Amanda—was muscle memory. Like breathing. Like coming home.
Their fingers lace together without either of them thinking about it. The cool metal of Amanda’s wedding band settles against the inside of Angela’s finger. It’s astonishing how something so small can seemingly weigh so, so much.
Angela runs her thumb over it once, absentmindedly. She’s not trying to, her body just automatically remembers Amanda before her mind can stop it.
The ring catches against her skin. A tiny interruption. A reminder. A boundary. A promise Amanda made long before either of them understood what they would eventually become to one another.
Neither of them says anything, because there is nothing to say.
The ring says enough.
Amanda is the one who begins to cry. Not suddenly or even dramatically, just a single tear, slipping from the curve of her jaw and disappearing into the collar of her sweater. Another follows. Then another.
Angela wants to wipe them away, but she doesn’t.
Instead, Amanda just leans slowly and carefully as if she’s asking for permission without using words. Her head comes to rest on Angela’s shoulder, and Angela lets out a contented sigh.
The weight is achingly familiar. Memories of movie nights, car rides, long filming days, crowded booths in bars. How many times had they sat exactly like this? How many times had it meant nothing? Or how many times had it meant everything before either of them knew how to name it?
Amanda’s voice is almost swallowed by the sounds of the terminal. “I keep thinking—” Angela waits, because she knows there’s more coming. “I keep thinking if I’d met you first—” She stops and shakes her head. “No.” She corrects herself with another shaky breath. “That’s not fair.” She chides herself.
“It isn’t.” Angela agrees softly.
“I don’t regret my life.” Amanda states clearly.
“I know.”
“I don’t regret him.”
“I know.”
“I don’t regret meeting you.”
Angela’s throat tightens at the admission. “I know.”
Amanda laughs through tears. “But somehow all of those things can be true—” She turns her face slightly into Angela’s shoulder. “—and it still fucking hurts.”
Angela squeezes her eyes shut, because yeah. That was the fucking tragedy, wasn’t it? No one had been wrong. No one had made a mistake. Neither of them had chosen badly. Sometimes life just simply asks impossible things of good people and every choice costs something.
Sometimes the only villains are time and circumstances and two hearts that finally learned the truth too late to build a life around.
Amanda whispers, so quietly Angela almost misses it, “I love you.”
The words don’t feel like a confession anymore. They feel like an acknowledgment. A statement. The sky is blue. The grass is green. The Earth is round. It was like naming something that had existed for so long pretending otherwise had become more painful that honesty.
Angela squeezes her hand, once. “I know.” She says softly, smiling through tears that refuse to stop falling. “I love you too.”
Amanda lets out one broken weak laugh before letting the silence settle for one impossible second and then she’s breaking it again. “How long?”
Angela doesn’t answer immediately. Instead she watches a plane lift from the runway, soaring higher and higher until it becomes another tiny silver shape against the morning sky.
“A couple years.” She admits.
Amanda nods as though she’d expected that answer. “I think—” Her voice catches in her throat. “I think I knew before I let myself know.”
Angela looks at her, ever so slightly confused.
Amanda just smiles sadly. “I think I noticed every time you hugged me a little less. Every time you left first. Every time you stopped reaching for my hand. Every time you looked away just a little too quickly. I kept telling myself I was imagining it—”
“You weren’t.” Angela is quick to interrupt and give her some sort of clarity.
“I know.” Amanda says sadly, knowing that it really had been the truth. “I just—” Her shoulders shake slightly. “I needed to believe I was.”
Angela’s own tears spill over onto her cheeks now. “I learned to live with it.”
Amanda laughs softly in disbelief. “Did you?”
Angela thinks about all the ways she’d tried. The shorter hugs. The chairs she deliberately chose. The unanswered late-night texts until morning. Dating people she could never quite give her whole heart to. Teaching herself to leave first because if Amanda left first it felt too much like being abandoned.
Finally, honestly, she whispers, “Mostly…”
And somehow that one word hurts more than every confession that came before it. Because it meant she never really did. It meant every careful inch of distance, every restrained touch, every smile that ended just a little too soon wasn’t proof that she loved Amanda less.
It was proof that she never figured out how to.
Amanda nods because the answer doesn’t surprise her. That is somehow the cruelest part. Nothing about any of this feels shocking anymore, just devastatingly inevitable.
“I think—” She whispers, watching their joined hands instead of Angela. “I think I started falling in love with you the day I realized every funny thing that happened, I wanted to tell you before anybody else.”
Angela just hums in acknowledgment, giving Amanda’s hand the tiniest of squeezes.
“I didn’t know what that meant.” Amanda continued. “I just—” She laughs quietly, wiping at her face with the free sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I thought you were my best friend. You were.” She answers herself before pausing and shaking her head. “No, you are.”
The correction lands between them. Not were. Are. Present tense. Angela swallows around the lump in her throat.
“I wish—” Amanda starts and then stops, smiling sadly.
“What?” Angela asks, curiosity piqued.
“I was going to say I wish we’d met sooner.”
Angela studies her. “Would it have mattered?”
Amanda thinks about it for a minute and the answer surprises even her.
“I don’t know.”
Because maybe she still would’ve met her husband. Maybe she still would’ve married him. Maybe she still would’ve built exactly the same life.
Or maybe…
Maybe she would’ve looked at Angela in her twenties instead of her thirties. Maybe she would’ve recognized herself before she’d built an entire future around someone else.
Maybe, but she’ll never know.
“I just—” Amanda says softly. “I wish I’d known myself sooner.”
Angela nods. “I know.”
“I spent so much time trying to become the person I thought I was supposed to be—” She laughs once, “—that I never stopped to ask who I already was.”
Angela’s heart cracks quietly inside her chest. Because Amanda isn’t saying she regrets her marriage. She’s mourning something much larger. The version of herself that never got the chance to choose.
The boarding announcement interrupts them.
“Flight 2478 with service to LaGuardia is now boarding Group A.”
Neither of them moves. Neither of them even looks towards the gate. The announcement might as well have been for another planet.
Amanda squeezes Angela’s hand. “So…”
“So.”
“I guess this is it.”
Angela smiles weakly. “No.” Amanda looks at her. “It isn’t.” She promises.
“You’ll call?” Amanda asks, a hopeful lilt in her voice.
“Every day.” Angela promises.
“You’ll send me TikToks?”
“Too many.”
“And you’ll visit?”
“I’ll come home and visit.”
Amanda’s face falters just a little as her voice wavers. “Good.”
Home.
Angela had called Los Angeles home. Not New York. Not because of the city itself but because of the people in it. Because Amanda was here. Because Chanse was here. Because this weird little office full of people who loved each other too loudly had become home without her realizing it.
Another announcement crackles through the speakers overhead. Group B this time. People begin standing, forming lines, rolling suitcases, scanning tickets. Life keeps moving forwards whether either of them is ready or not.
Angela looks down at Spork’s carrier. He is still asleep. Lucky little dog. She wishes grief came with medication prescription.
Final boarding calls. The words echo through the terminal. Angela knows she has to go. Its her time to leave.
She stands, and her legs feel glued to the floor. The movements feel all wrong, like standing at the end of a movie before the credits finish rolling.
Amanda stands too, automatically.
Neither of them seem to know what to do with their hands anymore. They’d always hugged before. For years. Do they still? Can they? Are they even allowed?
Angela doesn’t know, but Amanda solves it for her. She steps forwards and wrapped both arms around Angela, no longer the measured or restrained hugs they’d been giving each other for months. Amanda hugged her like she used to, as if she was trying to memorize her.
Angela makes a sound she doesn’t recognize as her own. Somewhere between a sob and an exhale as she buries her face against Amanda’s shoulder and breathes her in. Laundry detergent. Coffee. Home.
“I’m so proud of you.” Amanda whispers into her hair.
Angela closes her eyes, voice muffled by the press fabric over her mouth. “I know.”
“And I hope you get everything you’ve ever wanted.” Amanda adds on.
“I won’t.” Angela tells her, a little sorrowful.
Amanda pulls back, confusion etched across her face. “What?”
Angela smiles, but its small, and laced with heartbreak. “I already didn’t.”
Amanda’s breath catches as she realizes exactly what Angela is meaning. And then they separate, slowly, almost reluctantly. Neither of them wanting to let go first, hands sliding apart one finger at a time until only their pinkies are touching, and then, nothing.
Angela crouches down to lift Spork’s carrier and adjusts the strap on her shoulder. She scans her boarding pass with the agent ready to enter the jetbridge before she stops, turning back. Amanda is still standing exactly where she’d left her, just watching her like always.
Angela smiles through tears. “I think—” Amanda waits. “In another life—”
Amanda interrupts her immediately, almost desperately, before she can finish. “I don’t want another life.” Angela freezes. Amanda’s own tears spill freely again now. “I don’t want some imaginary universe where everything worked out.” Her voice trembles. “I wanted this one.”
The words hang in the air, raw and ugly and beautiful.
“I wanted this life.” She states, an edge to her voice, as if she’s yelling at the universe for having led her down this specific path. “I wanted you in this life.”
And with that, Angela’s entire face crumples.
Because there it is. The sentence neither of them can fix. The one no amount of love can change.
“I know.”
Amanda wipes roughly at her cheeks. “I just—” Another shaky breath. “I wish I’d figured it out while there was still time.”
Angela nods once. “So do I.”
“Miss Giarratana?” The gate agent calls her name, signalling a final call.
Angela doesn’t answer right away.nShe can’t stop looking at Amanda. Trying to memorize everything. The way her eyebrows arched. The way she slipped her tongue between her teeth and the corners of her lips curled into a smile. The way she always tucked loose hair behind her ear when she cried. The way her wedding band was still catching the airport lights.
God. The ring. Angela forces herself to look away from it.
She smiles at her one last time. “I love you.”
Amanda smiles back. “I know.”
Not because she can’t say it back. Because she already had, just, she was acknowledging the words for what they were in that moment. Angela loves her.
Angela turns and walks towards the jet bridge. She doesn’t look back, she can’t, because if she does, she isn't sure she’ll be able to keep walking.
Amanda stands there long after Angela disappears from sight. People brush past her. Families reunite. Some flights board. Other flights land. The world somehow keeps continuing.
She watches until the jet bridge door closes and there’s nothing left to see anymore. Then she walks back to the enormous windows overlooking the runway.
It takes a while, but eventually the plane begins to move. Reversing out of the gate slowly, pivoting, and heading for the runway. It turns, accelerating, and lifts. For one impossible second it’s suspended between the Earth and the sky. She watches it until she can’t anymore. Until it grows so small from distance that it is just entirely gone from sight.
Another plane takes off on its heels.
Amanda stands there until the sky is empty again, and then, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone.
She unlocks it, and Angela’s text thread is already open. Of course. She was checking her location one last time before showing up to the airport.
Her thumbs hover over the keyboard and she taps across the screen.
Come home.
She stares at the words for a long time before deleting them. She tries again, thumbs gliding across the tempered glass.
I wish I’d known sooner.
She huffs and deletes that too. One more try.
I love you.
She smiles sadly to herself.
“You already know.” She whispers to no one before just locking her phone entirely and sliding it back into her pocket.
She straightens her posture, inhaling a slow and shaky breath, giving one last glance out the window before walking away.
Because sometimes, the love of your life is not the person you built a future with, sometimes it’s the person who quietly changes every future you can imagine long after they’ve already left for their own.