She calls and you come. That's what you do. That's what you always do.
She's locked the door, but she's given you a copy of the key. You find her on the floor, hugging her knees, face smeared with mascara, and her hand clutching her phone. It's not hard to imagine that she hasn't moved since you hung up.
You learned that, when she's like this, it doesn't do to fluster around her, to run to her, to hold her shoulders, to will her to look at you, and ask if she's okay. She lies when you do that. She smiles and tries to wipe her face (but she only ends up getting mascara on her hands and smudging the rest of her pale face with it), then she'll tell you she's fine "now that you're here." But she's never fine. And not ever with you.
Also, you learned that you don't tell her you love her. Because she'll cry more, and she'll apologize. And you don't really want to hear someone respond to "I've always loved you" with "I'm so sorry," because you came to be there for her, but instead you end up dying inside yourself.
What you do is you sit beside her and you wait.
If you're lucky, she'll lean on you and you can put your arms around her. Maybe you can whisper a few "It's okays" and "I'm heres." But she doesn't really hear you. And you kind of just convince yourself that she at least knows those are your arms are holding her.
Other times, she just hugs herself and cries into her knees. And you, you just sit there and listen because you're supposed to know that, even though she called you, if she wanted to be touched, she'd tell you.
But, either way, she says nothing. So you say nothing.
Tonight, it looks like you're lucky.
Luckier, it seems, than usual. Because after you whisper promises that she forgets in the morning, she starts to talk. So you listen.
She asks, in a voice that barely manages to break through the lump in her throat, "Why can't I just stop wanting him?"
You might want to tell her that, if it were that simple, you would've made yourself stop wanting her a long time ago. But you can't. Because that's not what you do.
Instead, you say nothing, like you always do.
A/N: completely impulsive, random story that begged to be written after watching Reality Bites (1994) and listening to Stay (I Missed You) by Lisa Loeb.
As such, it's heavily OOC and really just self-serving.