Ariel broke up with Mick three months after they got engaged.

Again, Ryan didn’t understand. He watched it all happen from the outside—because, that’s right, he was an outsider now, too. Ariel barely even talked to him anymore.

I should just shut up and move on with my life, and build something of my own, instead of being so pre-occupied with my ex-best friend, he thought.

Except that, try as he might, Ryan simply couldn’t do that.

There was fire in his gut. Tears in his eyes. Ariel had obviously been pushing everyone away, ever since she’d moved into that studio apartment, that was an hour away from where most of their circle of friends lived, alone.

Ryan took a bus. And then a tram. And then another bus. Even the road to get to Ariel was fucking complicated. He decided he hated everything. But, he still stopped by a bakery, to get a few sweets for Ariel. Because, well, maybe that would be enough for her to open her apartment’s door, which had seemingly turned into an insurmountable wall, over the past few days. The professors at Ryan’s University had said Ariel wasn’t sick. Yet, she’d still taken two weeks off. Why was that?

Is it the break-up? Ryan wondered. Yet, then again, she’d been the one who'd called it off. It made no sense.

“Ariel makes no fucking sense.” Fuck.

Ryan rang her doorbell. Plastic bags crinkled between his palm. Ryan suddenly thought, that he should be more stoic. He was an adult now. He had twenty-two years of experience behind him. Ariel being a little off should not have put his mind in such a state of dishevel.

“No,” Ryan immediately heard the word from behind Ariel’s door. The declaration was slightly muffled, but it was Ariel’s voice, all right. “Go away.”

“So that you can sulk for another twenty whole days?”

“What I do is my business.”

Ryan laughed. He couldn’t help it. “S-sorry.” He was quick to apologize, however. Really, he shouldn’t have been laughing in the first place.

Nothing was funny about this.

“I’ll sleep here,” he then warned Ariel, in a rather serious tone, filled with determination. “I brought my sleeping bag.”

He heard Ariel sigh.

She was probably aware that Ryan was capable of doing it. He’d done worse before. Stealing bikes to save kittens; beating up kids because they’d beaten up other, smaller classmates and taken their lunch money; an entire year’s worth of suspension leaflets…the day Ryan walked across an entire city, just to give Ariel the notes she’d forgotten for a job interview.

Yeah, Ryan had a screw lose. And it was probably worse, because he knew it. He was aware, and yet, he didn’t fix it. He liked it, being this way. Feeling twice as much as most people tend to. The anger. The pain.

Love.

“Okay!” Ryan shouted, in an overexaggerated, dramatic manner, as he began to rummage through his back pack. “I’m setting up camp, Ariel! I hope you’re—”

Ariel immediately opened her door.

Her face was red. Dried tears gave the edges of her eyes a mournful shine. She cursed. “Fuck you, Ryan.”

And that, perhaps, was when it all truly began.

When Ryan entered Ariel’s apartment with a chuckle, and asked her, “Tell me, what’s been going on with you. I promise I won’t judge.”