The next several days feels like 1 step back and 3 steps forward to total decimation. Everything I say, everything Simon says, pushes every wrong button at once, like an excited toddler smashing the keys of a piano. Small decisions spiral into soul-destroying arguments, growing more and more dire and heated and angry. We apologize. We always apologize, and it's always empty, but we don't know what else to do. The next day, the world seems okay (as okay as it can be), and then something normally so small tips it into ending all over again.

Ungratefulness seeps into my skin, cooling me from the outside in. Infected, deaths continue to rise, and the sun continues to shine, and I can't stand being in the same room with the one person I came with. If anything was world-ending, the circumstances has made it really perfect for it.

Rooms start being sectioned off mentally – I don't cross this line, he doesn't cross this one, and our dance of awkward hurt continues unimpeded. This room is his; that one is mine, and the house accommodates our isolation perfectly. We start withholding our words, tense and tinted in blues and blacks. We spend more and more time apart, and I am both relieved and ache to turn back time. To return to a time of breathless optimism and vibrancy and shoujo sparkles.

The world has never been so small before.

“God damn, Pansy, what did you do?” asks Finn one day. He presses both hands on Mr. Hopkins desk in the study as I thumb over the titles he has on the shelves.

“Micah,” I say absentmindedly, running my fingers along the grooves of the side table between the 2 armchairs, “and thank you for thinking about me, but it's between me and your brother.”

“Wasn't thinking of you. I'm just tired of hearing you guys fight.”

“We're not...” We are, and the thought pains me and irks me to no end. Ghosts of our words float through my head, each one an arrow-prick of hurt. They echo mercilessly. I have no energy to defend ourselves.

“But if you're going to break up with him, I get it. He's an asshole.”

My skin prickles, yet the thought of us ending things is...enticing. And I hate how enticing it is. I turn to him. “Please, Finn. I'm sorry, but I am so not in the mood right now.”

“I came to talk.”

“You came to bait me. For what, I don't know.”

“And if I came to do both? What then?”

“What is the beef you have with your brother?”

“Besides him basically abandoning me here to suffer alone?”

“You forget – if he did go to college like your dad wanted, he would've done that, anyways.”

Finn shrugs. “Inconsequential.”

I sigh.

Finn traces the inlaid wood on the desktop. “You should break up with him.”

“Why?”

“Because he's an asshole? Because he – ” And something catches in his throat, and Finn clears it. “Can I ask you a question?”

I stare. After a second, I nod. “Shoot.”

“Are you gay?”

Oh. “No.”

Finn blinks. “What.”

“What?”

“You're not gay?”

“No, I – well, I don't think I am.”

“But you're dating – ”

“Look, I've already had my friends and my foster parents grill me on this, so here's the abridged version: My girlfriend of 2 years had broken up with me a couple months before I met Simon. She didn't want to do long distance, and we're still friends. I don't, like, hate her for it. But when I met Simon, I...” I'm thrown back to the coffee shop, each smell visceral in my nose and every color in my memory is warm and glittering, my stomach fluttering at the thought of the first time he looked at me. After a moment, my stomach starts sinking, and I ground myself into the cold wooden floor. “I don't know. I fell in love with him right then and there.” I turn away. “I guess I was being a little stupid.”

Finn stares. “...you, just, fell in love with someone you just met?”

“Yeah.”

He waits. “Oh, I don't get some long-winded explanatory bullshit?”

“Look, I know it doesn't make sense. Trust me, I get it. But...I saw him, and he made sense in my head. I thought the universe had aligned for that specific moment. It was like...I was meeting someone I'd known in a past life. Or like I had always known him, and we were finally meeting again.”

“So he's a rebound?”

“That's – no.”

“But you don't like him right now?”

“Finn, I – ” I catch myself before I say anything else. That spark is back in my throat, and it burns. I put my hand on my throat and swallow it back until it's descending back into my stomach. I sigh, and deflate like after a fight with Simon. I frown. “...has he always been like that?”

“I told you. He's always been like that. A shitty – ”

“Finn.”

He scrunches his nose and grumbles. “I don't know why I'm helping you. I hate him.”

“So you don't hate me?”

“You're the least worst person in this house right now.”

I smirk. “I'll take that as a compliment.”

“It isn't.”

I flap my arms at my sides. “I don't know what to do with him. How to help him.”

“Just dump him.”

“He, just, shuts down and there's no way of getting through to him. I don't want to assume anything, but I also don't know what to do to make things easier.”

“Pansy, Simon's always been like that. There is no fixing him or whatever. You're stuck with that, or you ditch his ass.”

“But what does that mean, he's always been like that? That doesn't – ”

“That,” Finn stresses, pointing back up the stairs. “Working himself to death, and then suddenly unmotivated like a motherfucker. Avoiding everyone to avoid dealing with hard stuff. Withdrawing. I don't know if he's fucking depressed or if he hates himself or the world or whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that he's still a shitty brother who left me behind just like everyone else, and didn't fucking look back.” He sucks in air through his teeth and turns away.

My stomach flares in defense, an odd sensation for the circumstances between us, and my gaze drops.

“Sorry,” he forces out.

I drum my fingers along my legs before whispering, “...I don't think I've ever thanked you. For making this place more...tolerable.”

Finn hums his response.

“...when's your birthday?”

“What.”

“There's cake batter in the pantry that's going to go bad at the end of the month. Can I make it for you? As thanks?”

“No.” Finn purses his lips, frowning intensely. “June 15.”

“Good birthday.” I step forward. “I don't know if Simon and I will be here – ”

“ – if you're still together.”

I shiver at that. “ – but as payment, can I make it for you?”

“We're not turning it into a thing, are we?”

“No. But I might tell Simon about it.”

“No.”

“Please?”

He lingers. “No.”

I glance down and nod. “Okay.” I step out into the foyer, and my muscle memory almost takes me back upstairs, and my heart, for a second, yearns for Simon – his smell, his freckled face, his hands – before tumbling into my stomach. I stop on the first step and mentally map out the house, where I can go, and what I can do in it. I don't want to see him. I'm desperate for him.

“Want to hang out down here?” Finn asks. “I'm going to spike the vanilla frosting with peppermint because I think it's better that way.”

I stare, wide eyed, before grinning. “That sounds absolutely disgusting. I am also very curious.”

While he does that, his parents apparently vanished from existence, I tell him about Harley and his amazing obsession with the stars.