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You see her before the cold reaches you, before the screech of the incoming train, before you even register that you’re standing on the wrong side of the yellow line again.
She’s there, across the platform, tall and composed in that impossible way she has. Her coat is draped over her arm like the winter wind never dares to touch her. People swarm and move around her, brushing past without noticing the gravity she pulls around herself. But you do. Of course you do. Your body tenses like it was wired to respond to her silhouette alone.
It feels like being struck.
Like grief with a pulse.
You swallow, but the air in your throat wavers. Your fingers curl uselessly inside your gloves, nails biting your palms through the wool. You told yourself you were done reacting like this. Told yourself last night. The night before. Every night stretching back since the last time she said your name with more restraint than warmth.
But she’s here. And your stupid traitorous heart is still attached to hers like no one bothered to cut the cord.
She shifts her weight on the platform. The lights overhead flicker, washing her in a sickly yellow that makes the sharp line of her nose even more severe. Her eyes lift—slow, idle, disinterested in the world orbiting beneath her.
Then they pass over you.
The moment is microscopic.
Smaller than breath, smaller than the beat your heart forgets to take.
Her gaze flicks across you like a beam of light crossing dark water. Brief, cold, impersonal. A glance fit for strangers. The kind of look she gives to book club newcomers who mispronounce Brontë.
But you see the recognition. Or maybe you invent it. It doesn’t matter. Your chest tightens all the same, a sharp internal twist that makes you sway a little on your feet.
She looks away.
Not startled.
Not tense.
Not even avoiding.
Just… indifferent.
You feel something in you recoil violently, some wounded part pulling back like you’ve been slapped. Anger spikes under your ribs, small, trembling, pathetic. A defensiveness you don’t want, a bitterness you don’t mean. You hate it. You hate that you feel it at all. You hate that she’s made you capable of pettiness, of spite, of rewriting memories to give them edges they never had.
Because you remember her differently. And memory is the cruelest kind of traitor.
A wind gusts through the station. It isn’t her perfume—you know that—but the scent hits you anyway, manufactured by your own pathetic longing: vanilla, sandalwood, warmth. You close your eyes against the sting. You don’t need to look to know she’s still there. You can feel her like phantom pain.
The train screeches into her platform. People jostle, push past her, board. Larissa steps forward with her usual measured precision, movements so controlled it borders on robotic. She doesn’t glance back, doesn’t search the crowd, doesn’t hesitate.
As she disappears into the carriage, your knees nearly buckle.
Your throat tightens, a heat rising up from somewhere deep and ugly. Something furious. Something gutted. You don’t cry—your body has learned not to—but it feels like crying, like something acidic is pressing up behind your ribs.
Why does she get to walk away clean?
You look down at the floor, the cracks between tiles, the stains from too many winters. Anything but the train doors closing on her.
Your own train is late. Of course it is. The universe likes symmetry like that.
Your breathing comes unevenly. Too fast, then too slow, then catching on nothing at all. You press a hand to your sternum as if you can force your heart to behave. You can’t.
God, you hate this. You hate that she still has this power. You hate that you gave it to her willingly.
And beneath all that, you hate that you miss her. That missing her feels like addiction withdrawal. That wanting her feels embarrassing, humiliating, childlike.
Maybe that’s why your mind punishes you with memory.
Not gentle ones.
Not warm ones.
The heavy ones.
The ones with teeth.
You had met at the book club downtown. A quaint little thing housed in the renovated library of Jericho, eclectic and cozy, warmed by mismatched lamps and soft chairs that always seemed to sink too low.
The moment she walked in that first meeting—tall, immaculate, smelling lightly of vanilla and ambition—you were done for.
It was a slow burn from there. Agonizingly slow.
You’d catch her watching you from across the circle as someone droned on about narrative structure. She’d linger just a second too long when you passed her a copy of Jane Eyre. Her fingers brushing yours felt like a secret whispered against your palm.
Everyone else thought Larissa Weems was inscrutable, but you learned the truth: she was a storm held together by discipline and habit.
And then one night, the storm broke.
You’d stayed late, shelving books. She’d stayed late, pretending she’d misplaced her phone. The room was dim, lit only by a few scattered lamps.
Shadows pooled between shelves and, somehow, the two of you found yourselves inches apart, a silence stretching taut between your bodies.
“I shouldn’t,” she whispered.
Which would have been a warning—if she hadn’t been leaning in as she said it.
You kissed her first.
But she kissed you back harder.
The affair that followed was everything slow burns warned you about. Messy, breathless, addictive, reckless, hungry.
You were the wildfire she couldn’t contain, she was the match you kept striking anyway.
Sitting on her lap in her car. Your mouth against her throat in the elevator leading to your flat. Her hands sliding under your coat in bathroom of the library. Whispered confessions pressed into your skin like bruises:
“Just once more.”
“I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Stay.”
Nothing about her was cold then.
But Larissa loved with her whole body and none of her voice, and you needed more than stolen nights and pretended detachment.
When you asked for more, you watched the shutters slam down behind her eyes.
“This is becoming too complicated,” she said one night after the club meeting. Her voice was smooth. Unreadable. Practiced.
You didn’t believe it for a second.
“I asked you if we could talk,” you whispered.
“And we are talking,” she replied.
“Larissa—”
“This cannot continue.”
Her eyes never wavered. Her lips never trembled. There was only the faintest tremor in her fingers where she gripped her own forearms.
“You want more than I can give,” she said. “And I cannot be responsible for hurting you when I will inevitably fail at it.”
You took a step forward. She took a step back.
“Please don’t make this harder,” she murmured. “It’s already difficult enough.”
That was it.
That was the whole ending of something you were ready to fight for.
She dismissed you with a nod, and you walked out.
She didn’t come after you.
You stopped attending book club. Stopped buying the pastries she loved.
But grief doesn’t respect boundaries.
You dreamed about her.
The warmth of her hands.
The sound of her breath in the dark.
The way she looked at you like she was trying not to memorize your face.
You tried to distract yourself with someone else once—a date you didn’t want, a moment you weren’t ready for.
It was going fine until lips touched your neck and the wrong name, her name, rose unbidden to your tongue like a reflex, like muscle memory.
You pulled back fast.
Apologized.
Left.
You felt pathetic and hollow and embarrassingly human.
A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, dragging you sharply back into the present.
You stand at the platform, arms wrapped around yourself, staring at nothing.
No more tall blonde on the opposite side. No more perfume drifting on the cold air.
Just silence.
And the ache.
And the knowledge that you loved someone who couldn’t let herself love you back.
You close your eyes.
“Four months,” you whisper to the empty station, “if you still feel that way in four months, you’re getting out of here.”
The words feel heavy. A promise you might be able to keep if you gather the pieces of yourself one by one.
The arriving train rattles the rails.
You inhale.
It smells like metal and dust and the future you haven’t met yet.
Larissa Weems got away.
She got away, and she’s not coming back, and the wound she left behind still throbs like it’s fresh.
But you step onto the train anyway.
Because you have to.
Because she won’t save you.
Because you deserve something more than bleeding for a woman who walked away without looking back.
The doors hiss closed.
You don’t look across the platform, just in case.
You let the train take you forward.
And for the first time in weeks, you let yourself breathe.
Not easily.
Not fully.
Four months, you remind yourself.