october 2018 : 1 year and 11 months ago

Lily watched as Henry's eyebrows furrowed, his eyes sparked with concern, and his teeth nipped at the corner of his lip. His classic I'm worried about you look. It was the last thing she wanted to see right now.

Her vision was so crimson red that she couldn't speak for a moment, her body nearly shaking from the sheer volume of emotion hammering her like a hurricane. A wave of sorrow followed by a wave of turmoil followed by a wave of shock followed by wave after wave after wave of fury.

Livid that he didn't have this conversation with her before he left, that he was now two-thousand miles across the country and they had to do it over the phone. Ashamed that she made herself so vulnerable to him each and every time he prodded to know how she was feeling. She felt exposed, used. Resentful that she spent the years putting her emotions on display more for his satisfaction than for her own.

It didn't matter that she wasn't collected enough to placate him with niceties first. He didn't deserve them anymore.

Her voice was hollow as her demand came out of her in a desperate rush of air. "Why didn't you tell me?"

A second of silence while it registered with him. Then, even through the phone screen, she could see a switch go off in him. The frown dissipated and his facial features relaxed into a neutral expression of nothingness, so uncharacteristically detached that it teetered on the brink of cold.

His eyebrows raised in feigned intrigue and he very calmly stated, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

She couldn't quite believe what she was hearing. "You're not serious."

"I'm being completely serious," he attempted to assuage her, his voice sounding smooth and buttery and nothing like him. It sent uncomfortable goosebumps rippling across the surface of her flesh.

"You're clearly a great liar, Henry," she bristled, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. "But this isn't working."

She caught the almost imperceptible tightening of his jaw and the way his eyes grew more frigid the longer they watched her. "Who have you been talking to?" he asked tightly.

Lily's words were laced with irritation as she retorted, "I haven't been talking to anyone."

She was so conditioned to expect warmth from him that the apathetic, almost sterile way he studied her made her recoil despite knowing that he couldn't do anything to her through the screen. His face contorted with an abrupt spasm of indignation as he realized what she'd done, but it lasted for only a second before he swallowed it and resumed his clinical demeanor.

"You've been digging around where you weren't supposed to."

"I wasn't digging around anywhere! Your dad asked me to grab something-"

"So you read it," he nodded. She could do nothing but stare in alarm as he did the last thing she expected him to: laugh, the sound so quiet and so scathing at the same time because he had never laughed at her mockingly before. "I hope it was as entertaining as you wanted it to be. You pop some popcorn?"

"Why are you being like t-"

"Would you be particularly pleased if you were me right now?" he snapped, forcefully cutting her off.

Lily mustered everything she had to stop her voice from quivering and her eyes from bleeding any more tears. "I never would be," she stated sharply. "Because I would have told you. How could you-"

She shook her head in disbelief and disgust, momentarily at a loss for words. "We've been friends for five years and I told you every single tiny little thing and you thought it was okay to hide everything? You said you were okay and I believed you. I always believed you. I thought we always told each other the truth. I would have done something-"

"There was nothing to do."

While possibly true, that response was nowhere near sufficient to put out these flames of betrayal that blazed their path through her veins and left her heart in ashes.

"Was all of it a lie?" she pressed, smoldering with rage and beginning to tear up from how suffocating it was. It smothered every inch of her spirit, every cell of her body. "All the time we spent together, were you miserable for all of it?"

"No." He let out an exasperated huff as if it was such a ridiculous question to ask. "That was two years before we even started talking, Lily. I got better."

"But how did you take me to the freaking hospital and still not tell me?!" The volume of her voice inched further beyond the metal walls of her car and up towards the sky with each word. "And lie to my face saying you missed school because you had freaking pneumonia?"

Spiteful tears that she couldn't stop rushed down her blotchy face. He had no visible reaction to them. "I've never stopped feeling like I'm insane," she seethed, her voice wobbling. "And you never once considered that maybe it would have helped me to know that I wasn't so alone here?"

"I was there with you the whole time. Stop acting like I wasn't," he insisted, his expression suddenly pained. "I never left you alone. I was doing okay and you had so much to deal with already. I wasn't gonna go make it worse-"

"Since when do you get to decide what's good for me?!"

"Maybe since it's about me?!"

"If you weren't going to tell me, then why did you have to know every last thing about me?!" Lily snapped. "Why did you have to take so much if you weren't willing to give anything back?"

"I never forced you to tell me anything-"

"You just moped around and treated me like I was fragile until I divulged everything to give you peace of mind," she countered. "Sometimes all I wanted was to be alone, but I talked to you to keep you comfortable."

"And how exactly was I supposed to know you didn't want to tell me?" he pushed back.

She had never known the full extent of this grudge towards him—although it had reared its head when he told her he was moving away, she had shoved it down and buried it six feet deep in her heart because it made her too uncomfortable. She didn't want to believe she could truly resent him. But now that it was all erupting out, Lily realized just how bitter she was that he practically forced her to lean on him instead of helping her find other ways to cope, that he let her become dependent on him like he was a drug.

"Hmm, well, seeing that you clearly spend all your time not wanting to tell people things, it shouldn't have been too hard to guess that the same might be true to me if you ever sat down and thought about it. You could have – oh, I dunno – asked me. Were you just having so much fun trying to be my savior you convinced yourself no one needed to think about you?"

Henry wasn't so cold anymore—he was searing with palpable enmity. His gaze was burning, aching. She sensed that there were a million cruel words at the tip of his tongue that he wanted to use on her. And he was getting heated enough that he just might.

"I thought about myself nonstop for years," he told her, his voice somehow bitterly stiff and raw at the same time. "Until I finally didn't have to be scared that I was gonna do something else if I let my guard down. Not telling you doesn't mean I didn't do anything."

Lily wiped at her cheeks with the hand that wasn't holding her phone. "Maybe I was too naive to see this," she sniffled, unsure which one of them her heart was breaking for but still too devastated to see beyond immediately tangible emotion. "But I know you, Henry. You're-" she fumbled for words. "You're emotional. You're empathetic. You like to talk. You need to talk and instead you hide."

"Why do you hide so much?" she begged him. "I want to understand. You left telling me you had nothing else to give me-"

Henry's eyebrows shot up again, his lips contorting into a sick smile of incredulity. "You really want to call this a gift?" he scoffed before his expression hardened once more. So hard she didn't know if it would crack ever again.

"Perhaps you need a life lesson," he acerbically proposed, his eyes darkening as he spelled it all out for her like she was a child. "Sharing something doesn't make it good. Giving you the chance to pat yourself on the back because at least you're not as screwed up as me isn't going to do anything to fix what I did. You don't want to understand. You don't."

She held her ground despite nearly wincing at his words. "I don't want to be protected from you."

He was watching her callously. He hadn't shed a single tear. "Then I imagine you must feel really great right now having gotten what you wanted."

The fissure between them was now so wide, so deep, a canyon of distance and broken trust with no end in sight. Far too vast for her to cross. Talking to him was supposed to help, but she only despised him more. And the sole way Lily's brain knew how to respond to this state was to grab all her remaining verbal ammunition and hurl it across the abyss at him.

Henry never lifted a finger to stop her from making him her God. So if he was casting her out of heaven after all this time, she was latching on and fighting tooth and nail to make sure he went down with her.

Her thoughts jumped back to those days when they were first becoming friends. How simple she was. How easily fooled.

"Katie always warned me not to trust you," she remembered.

His tone was dry, unaffected. "Maybe you should have listened."

"Rookie mistake," she curtly agreed.

The sun finished its flight past the horizon, successfully breaking free from the entrapments of day. Lily looked him in the eyes, didn't find any regret in them, and felt the last of the threads that bound them to each other slip off their wrists.

"Were you ever going to tell me?"

He didn't even pretend to hesitate. "No."

She hung up. 

____________________

*SCREAMS*

THOUGHTS? REACTIONS? Is that how you expected that to go? Are you sympathizing more with one of them over the other?

Sorry that this one was so short! I was originally gonna combine it with the next chapter because I thought that one would also be short but then it got too long.