Page 87 of Just Friends

“It’s Movie Monday,” she says, and I chuff a laugh.

“I know,” I say and flip the camera around so she can see the messy spread of takeout containers on my coffee table. I ordered enough Chinese food to feed a small village, or in my case, enough for two meals.

The TV is on but muted in the background, playing some action movie that Adam wanted me to see with him in theaters last year. I blew him off that night to go to a concert with Hazel. It’s the kind of movie we would never watch on Mondays, so I figured now was the perfect time, but I haven’t been able to focus. I don’t know when my preferences changed from wars and aliens and well-dressed spies to cozy nineties rom-coms, but I don’t even think I’m mad about it.

“Are you watching a movie without me?” Hazel asks, sounding indignant, and I have to force back a smile when I turn the camera around.

I press a hand to my chest. “I would never.”

“I just watched someone be beheaded.”

My eyes flick back up to the TV screen, and sure enough, a severed, bloody head is rolling around on the white marble floors. “Gross,” I mutter, my face scrunching in disgust as I search for the remote.

“You deserved that,” Hazel says.

I nod gravely, pressing the power button. The glow of the TV disappears, leaving me only in the warm light of the table lamp. “I really did. It’s what I get for trying to watch a movie without you.”

“And on aMonday, Alex. Our sacred day.”

I laugh, sliding down into the couch cushions once more. “It was despicable of me, I know.”

“I’ll forgive it this one time,” Hazel says, tugging the blankets more securely around her shoulders, effectively hiding the thin strap of her tank top.

That thin, flimsy strap will haunt my dreams tonight.

“How was your day?” I ask. This has become our routine since she’s been too busy at the shop and helping with her mom to text much most days. But at night, when the sun is gone and the moon and stars wink alive for the night, it’s our time. After her parents go to bed, we talk on the phone for hours, like we’re teenagers, too obsessed with each other to hang up even for sleep.

It’s been the only thing keeping me sane over the past two weeks. I can’t deny that I’m ready for it to be over. I’d rather have her voice in my ear, her body pressed up against mine on my couch than hundreds of miles away, one Wi-Fi glitch away from disappearing.

“It was good,” she says. “The shop has been crazy busy the past few weeks. It’s a really good thing I came. There’s no way Mom would have been able to handle it on her own, even now that she’s up and moving more. She actually worked the entire morning with me and then spent the afternoon resting.”

“And by resting, you mean heckling your dad about how his butt looks in his jeans while he tries to get work done?”

“Exactly.” She pauses for a moment before saying, “Sebastian called again today.”

I sit up straighter on the couch, my shoulders squaring on instinct. “Did you…answer this time?”

When Sebastian called Hazel last week, I didn’twanther to talk to him. In fact, if he suddenly lost the ability to speak, I’d be pretty happy. Everything that came out of his mouth was a lie or a manipulation—something I’d always thought but didn’t mention in case it was my feelings for Hazel talking.

But I wanted her to answer if that’s what she needed to do. I think she thinks I haven’t noticed the way he still haunts her, a ghost she can’t shake, but Ihavenoticed. I’ve noticed every single day. In the way she distrusts herself. In the seemingly light-hearted digs she makes at herself about her poor choices in men. In the way she questions whether she will ever be lovable enough for someone to stick around for.

I’ve done my best to show her howIfeel about her, but most of those things are how Hazel feels aboutherself. And Sebastian is a big majority of the reason she feels that way. So if she needed to answer that call to chew him out or hear whatever lame excuse he tried to come up with, I’d back her up.

“I let it go to voice mail again,” she says, and her voice splinters. “I just froze again. It makes me so…angry that he still has this effect on me. He shouldn’t still be able to hold this much power over me.”

My heart breaks, shattering into a thousand tiny pieces, when I see the tears lining her eyes, when I hear the ragged tone of her voice, usually so smooth and bright.

“You could always block his number,” I say, tilting the camera toward the ceiling so she won’t see me trying to rub away the ache forming beneath my sternum.

She sighs. “But then he wins. Then it feels like he’s so dangerous to me that I have to block his calls.”

It takes everything inside me not to hang up and call Sebastian myself. I don’t remember how I got his number so long ago, but like her, I’ve never been able to delete it. I saved his name in my phone asPiece of Trash, and whenever I got tipsy, I’d compose long-winded, angry text messages to him that I always deleted before sending them. It was therapeutic, to tell him the things Hazel never would, even if I also never hit Send.

“I’m sorry, Haze. I wish I could do something to help you,” I say, and it’s true. That frazzled tension is building beneath my skin, the one I always feel when Hazel is in pain and I can’t fix it. “If Sebastian lived closer, I’d break into his house and put glitter on his ceiling fans and put green hair dye in his shampoo.”

Hazel spurts a laugh that brings a smile to my face. “He’d never fall for that. He only uses dye-free products.”

“Of course he does,” I say with an eye roll.

---