Chapter Text
CHAPTER 1 — Two Seconds
Mel didn’t remember climbing the stairs.
One second she was in her room, ignoring the buzzing of her phone.
The next, she was standing on the edge of the residence rooftop, bottle in hand and fingers numb from the wind, wondering when everything had gone so terribly wrong.
Her breath shook. The city below blurred into streaks of orange and rain-wet pavement.
*We were hugging this morning,* she thought. *Just this morning.*
And memory—cruel, soft, syrup-sweet—pulled her backward.
—
Sofi had been curled against her in bed, hair smelling faintly like coconut conditioner and the coffee she’d insisted on grabbing before their 9am seminar.
“You’re warm,” Sofi murmured, face pressed into Mel’s collarbone as if burrowing for safety. “Don’t go to class. Stay here and be my heater.”
Mel laughed, soft and stupidly in love. “Babes, you’re the one who made us sign up for Philosophy of Emotion at nine in the bloody morning.”
Sofi huffed dramatically, tightening her arms around Mel’s waist. “I regret everything except you.”
The line should’ve made Mel melt—and it did, a little—but something about the way Sofi said it was too sharp at the edges. Like a joke that didn’t want to be one.
Mel brushed it off. She always did. Sofi’s moods swung like that; she knew it. Loved her anyway. Tried to keep the moments light.
“Alright,” Mel said, pinching Sofi’s cheek. “Five more minutes. Then philosophy.”
Sofi beamed—god, she was beautiful when she smiled—and buried her face in Mel’s chest again. And for a moment, everything felt okay. Whole. Right.
—
A honk of a car snapped Mel back into the present.
Five more minutes. That’s all she’d given Sofi this morning.
Five minutes of warmth before the unraveling started again.
Before the texts. Before the panic. Before the guilt that gnawed her from the inside out.
Mel took a big swig from the half-finished bottle in her hand, a small sigh escaping her lips.
“What went wrong?” she whispered into the night.
But the city didn’t answer.
And Sofi’s name kept lighting up her phone. Intense, direct, immediate danger vibes.
Mel’s phone buzzed again. Then again. Then again.
She didn’t check it.
But she didn’t turn it off either.
The vibration was a heartbeat against her thigh—too fast, too desperate. Sofi’s heartbeat. Wind slapped strands of her hair across her face. She didn’t bother pushing them away.
Another buzz. Then a pause. Then the longer vibration of a voice message. Mel swallowed, throat tight. Sofi never sent voice messages unless she was spiraling, because even if she was mad, she cared too much.
Against her own better judgment—against the numbness she’d climbed up here to find—Mel slid her thumb across the screen.
Sofi (1:14 AM):
“Mel? Mel, please pick up. I know you’re mad. I know I messed up. Just—please. Fuck. I can’t—please.”
God, her voice was shaking. That brittle, cracking sound Mel had heard too many times.
Part of her wanted to throw the phone off the roof just so she wouldn’t have to hear it. Another part wanted to run all the way back to her dorm and hold Sofi until she stopped panicking.
Both parts hurt like hell. Mel closed her eyes. Took a breath that didn’t make it all the way down.
She hit play again.
And again.
And again.
When the next message came through, it wasn’t Sofi crying. It was worse.
“Mel? …I think something’s wrong with me. I’m sorry. I just—just tell me you’re there. Please. I don’t want to exist if you’re not there.”
That did it.
That snapped something in Mel.
Maybe it was the alcohol, or the stress—hell, maybe it was the fact she hadn’t slept in almost thirty hours—but the world tilted. The messages blurred. Her breath came shallow and thin.
Then another memory surfaced. Uninvited.
“You didn’t answer me for two hours, Mel.”
“It was a group project meeting—”
“You could’ve told me!”
“I did tell you!”
Sofi’s eyes had gone distant. Storm-warning distant.
“No,” she had whispered. “No you didn’t. You didn’t care. You never—”
“Sofi, stop. I do care.”
“You left me,” Sofi murmured—small, broken—and Mel had felt something ugly rise in her chest. Something like exhaustion.
“I didn’t leave you,” Mel muttered back. “I just lived my life for two hours.”
Silence.
The dangerous kind.
Then:
“You’re going to leave me.”
Matter-of-fact. Like gravity.
The memory fractured. The rooftop rushed back. The wind hit her like a shove.
Her ears rang. Her knees buckled. The bottle slipped from her hand and shattered somewhere far, far below. People shouted—maybe at her, maybe at each other—but the words came through water.
Mel’s vision narrowed. Black at the edges.
She wasn’t falling.
Not yet.
But she wasn’t standing, either.
The world went soft. Mercifully soft.
Her last thought, as everything tilted, wasn’t about the ground.
It was Sofi’s voice—thin, terrified—saying her name.
The rooftop spun.
And Mel went under.