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1. let's draw the line here
Kohane’s ex-girlfriend is an asshole.
She lives by those words like the bible– Azusawa 16:8, thou shalt not text her back. Or is that more Shakespearean? Jesus surely wouldn’t have lived through a month-long mess of a breakup, unless his girly little tussle with Judas counted. Then again, Shakespeare is survived primarily by tenth grade drama classes, so he probably wouldn’t have either.
So Kohane lives by those words like a lifeline, instead. She wakes up and makes microwave oatmeal and loathes the fact that eventually, she’ll have to turn her phone on and be privy to the overnight flurry of texts from DO NOT REPLY. Minori tells her she should block her number and move on, but if Kohane knows anything about her ex, it’s that blocking wouldn’t stop her. She’s tried.
She lets the messages pile up, leaves them on read once every morning and spares a cold response a few times a week. Her hands itch against her spoon as she shovels diced apples into her mouth. Minori will be stumbling out of her bedroom in half an hour, blankets still draped over her shoulders as she complains about her back problems and morning breath and lack of time. Thirty minutes until Minori will glare at her phone and stash it in her backpack and drag them to campus, talking her ear off about idol games or club activities or the squirrel she saved from being run over.
It’s a minute past ten. Do Not Disturb disables itself and her screen lights up with yet another text from DO NOT REPLY.
Kohane bites the tip of her tongue and bristles. There are very few things she hates more than her ex– proving her right is one of them.
She takes another bite of oatmeal and tastes lukewarm metal. Looking down at her bowl, she finds it’s already finished.
2. nothing is in a name
“Don’t turn around,” Kohane whispers harshly. She drags her poor classmate into the shadows of a bush, and this is a pretty horrible first meeting for someone she’ll be sharing 50% of her final course grade with, but she’s preoccupied with more imminent dangers.
To her credit, Tenma Saki listens well and ducks into hiding, although the confusion in her furrowed eyebrows is apparent. “Are you alright?” she asks quietly, one hand cupping the side of her mouth. “What was it? Sworn enemy? Stray raccoon?”
“No,” Kohane murmurs bitterly, ignoring the stares she gets from both sides of the building’s front garden. She wishes their school would invest more into landscaping and less into extortionate overhead fees. “Just my ex. I haven’t talked to her since–” Yesterday, actually, “ – we broke up and I’d like to keep it that way.”
Saki’s eyes widen into belated understanding. “Ohh,” she says, nodding along slowly before following with another, “Ohhhh. Okay. I got it.” Her eyes glimmer with determination. “Want me to keep an eye out? Let you know when she’s gone?”
“Yes please. Blue hair, gold eyes. Always smiling. One of those girls that makes over-ear headphones her personality.”
“Sounds like someone I know,” Saki giggles. She stands up, pats her skirt, and narrows her eyes in search of DO NOT REPLY. If not landscaping, Kohane thinks free visioncare would be a great investment too. “Really sounds like someone I know, actually. And she’s right there. That’s funny.” Saki stills, and with a jerk of her head, looks down at Kohane’s crouching figure. “That’s real funny. Hey, Kohane. Were you dating–”
“No,” Kohane blurts out. She coughs her attempt of dishonesty away half a second later. “Yes. Maybe. Oh my god, I want to die.”
“I didn’t– oh my god,” Saki repeats after her. She sits back down, equally surprised, though her lips twitch up into a half-hearted smile. Kohane knows it isn’t meant to be mocking, but she feels that way anyway– leave it up to her ex-girlfriend to be so well-liked by everyone but her. “I had no idea! She’s a friend of a friend, and I’ve heard rumours about some breakup, but I didn’t know that they were about you. ”
It hurts to know that even with their mutual attempts to keep their personal matters private, things leaked out anyway, no doubt because of her ex-girlfriend’s perpetually growing social circle. Her identity’s been kept anonymous, at the very least, but Kohane’s still exhausted. By the conversation, by the assumptions, by everything. “It would be great if you could forget they were about me,” she mumbles.
“Oh– yeah, I’m sorry.” Saki’s expression falls, mildly guilty as she fidgets with her fingers. “I’m just curious. But it’s not my– you don’t have to tell me anything.”
It’s fine. Not the breakup, not the fact that her ex-girlfriend is still as friendly and bright and puppy-like as she’s always been. Saki’s obvious attempt to get Kohane to talk– that’s fine, she doesn’t care. She’s experienced the same thing from almost all her friends (a what happened? if they’re nice and a but why? if they aren’t). She has a list of explanations in her head that she cycles through, ranging from painstakingly ambiguous to uncomfortably hyperspecific. None of them are the truth.
Saki won’t get the truth, either. “We weren’t good for each other,” she tells her, slowly pulling herself up onto her feet. Eager to hear more, Saki stands too, eyes fixed on her lips. “We wanted different things in life.”
It’s such a fat lie that Kohane’s momentarily disgusted with herself. Discomfort settles at the bottom of her stomach, a threat bubbling up into her throat. But Saki nods like she understands and offers a hug so warm that Kohane almost feels better.
3. channel surfing
It’s Touya who helps her through her first day post-breakup. He’s incredibly empathetic, and honestly looks sadder than she does, trailing behind her with the demeanour of a small abandoned kitten. “Azusawa,” he says, offering a grocery bag in his hands, “I brought you ice cream.”
“That’s very nice of you,” she says through a sniffle, “but I’m lactose-intolerant.”
“I knew that,” he replies quickly. He digs through the bag and reveals a sliced quarter of watermelon, sealed in cling wrap and tagged with an unsettlingly high price sticker. “So I brought you this just in case.”
Only in Touya’s world would watermelon be the closest substitute to ice cream– but she’s known Touya all her life, and watermelon is very lactose free, so she accepts the quarter without a single complaint and saves it in the fridge. They end up on the couch later, with Kohane tucked into layers of blankets and Touya sitting blanketless in the opposite corner. Gingerly, Kohane offers him a corner. “You can have some, you know.”
“I’m not cold,” he says.
“It’s not about being cold.” She tilts her head. “I’m not cold either. Just sad.”
Touya is a very dear friend of hers. It’s why she chooses to accept that he’s still dating her ex-girlfriend’s best friend, and that this probably won’t change anytime soon unless he follows her footsteps and breaks up with him too. Well, if his boyfriend breaks up with him. The timeline is complicated, stretching from over a month ago to yesterday, full of who said what and what was this and why, why, why. Thinking about their last words to each other makes Kohane’s stomach hurt, and she considers binge eating the ice cream anyway, because the only way to coax herself out of misery is to dig deeper into it.
Touya won’t let her. “Did you end on good terms?” he asks, cautious.
Absent-mindedly, Kohane plays with the edges of the blanket, rolling a stray thread between her fingers. “What do you consider good terms?"
She didn’t look behind her when she left her ex-girlfriend in the car. She shut her curtains and refused to look outside because she knew her ex would still be there, loitering in the parking lot until someone from the lobby asked her to leave. She threw their photos into a box and shoved it under her bed, hoping the monster from her childhood would eat them up and leave her dreams alone.
Snaggletooth on the left side of her smile. Her left, Kohane’s right. Three moles below her jaw, and two more on the side of her cheek, a blind recreation of Cassiopeia. The strange way she’d type on her phone with one thumb and one index. Her refusal to let Kohane carry a single heavy bag. Her eventual defeat halfway up a flight of stairs. Her hands, her laugh, her name–
“I don’t know,” Touya finally says, appropriately reluctant for a concerned friend. “Was it mutual?”
“As mutual as it could be.”
“Was she upset?”
“Not as much as I was,” Kohane replies. She picks at her nails, a habit she thought she got rid of. “She was how she always is. She smiled, you know.”
He bristles. "Because she was happy to break up with you?”
Because she was happy to see me, Kohane thinks to herself.
But she doesn’t say that. She scratches against the sofa in an effort to fight her impulses, feeling like a cat with an urge to knead. She’s sad right now. She has tears beading between her lashes, more caught at the corner of her lips.
At her lack of a response, Touya turns and looks at her, jaw tight as he swallows. “Do you hate her?”
She wishes he’d stop asking questions. “If it looks like I do, then I do,” she says softly. His reaction is unreadable, hidden behind the knit of his eyebrows and the stoic pity on his face, and suddenly she wishes he’d ask something, anything else.
4. the truth
They were together for five years.
It started in their first year of high school and ended like they never met in the first place. Kohane remembers the moment she came to realise that– that her ex-girlfriend was realising too, that every promise they’d made would be broken, that neither of them could care anymore. Her ex had said something characteristically romantic, in a gentle, sweet way that made Kohane sick to her stomach. She didn’t slap her, but she hoped that slamming the car door behind her made her ex feel like she had.
In the time that they were a couple, they were picture perfect.
High school sweethearts. They counted the minutes until school would end to see each other. When that wasn’t enough, they skipped class to sneak into each other’s schools, though that was her ex nine times out of ten. They went on great dates and shitty ones, held hands in the winter to preserve heat and held hands in the summer because the “heat” was just an excuse anyway. The first time her ex said I love you, she was half-asleep on their picnic blanket as they looked up at a dotty sky and pretended to care about stargazing. They talked about living together. They talked about marriage. They talked about anything and everything, so long as the other would listen.
Obviously, something went wrong. They never ended up living together because their dorms were selected at random, and at the time it felt like– it felt alright, something they would get over and deal with. After, her ex promised. After we graduate and I can afford overpriced rent and lactose-free milk and everything you might ever want.
It was fine. They were fine. Model couple, girlfriends, known to be everything they should be. Kohane used to hear a lot about that– that she was lucky to be in such a loving relationship, that they really, truly were each other’s other halves, that they were the closest thing to a soulmate anyone could ever be.
How was she supposed to reply?
The breakup came and went quietly. Kohane blocked and unblocked her ex over and over again, upset when she would text and upset when she wouldn’t. She erased her from the life she lived, tried to forget her face and her name and everything about her. She made new friends and told her old ones that it was over, it would always be over, that she was hurt and needed privacy and, more than anything, wanted to move on.
Even now, her friends don’t understand– not even Minori, or Touya, which she hopes is because her ex has been quiet about her side of the story too. They trust that she’ll tell them when the time is right.
She will, she thinks. She’ll tell them when she can close her eyes and hear plain, white noise instead of her ex calling her name. Or when she stops finding fragments of deep blue hair and golden eyes in her dreams.
Or when she stops lying to herself, too.
ㅤ5. i don't really wanna hate you
Kohane’s ex-girlfriend is in the parking lot again.
She’s loitering. She pretends not to be, but there’s very little else she can be doing with her windows rolled down and an obnoxious whistle on her lips, indicative of her intention to stay right where she is. Kohane has half a mind to report her to the front desk for taking up sweet, precious space on their property– a valued commodity, mind you– but there’s a voice in her head, ever the anti-capitalist, that keeps her from doing so.
The other voice, which is the one full of anger and hate, tells her to throw something right at her ex’s face. An egg, maybe, but they’re too expensive in this economy to waste. A ball of air vent dust, but her nose is sensitive and she’d sneeze before she gets the chance to do anything else. The box under her bed as an extra fuck you, leave me alone, and all the other words she didn’t get to say all those months ago.
Her phone is wedged into the pockets of her skirt, heavy with unread messages. She stands by the front door and grimaces at the sight of her ex’s clunky over-ear headphones. These days, she never listens to a word Kohane says. She doesn’t want to, probably. Kohane wouldn’t want to hear herself either.
The door opens behind her. Another tenant stumbles out, complaining under their breath about the leak in their kitchen sink or their estranged daughter that hates them or something else. Kohane doesn’t care because her ex-girlfriend is looking over, sneakers caught at the edge of her seat, headphones finally, finally off of her fucking ears. She’s smiling, corners of her eyes crinkled, horribly, unbearably pretty even from this far away. Kohane , she mouths, one hand urging her forward. Come here.
“You’re crazy,” Kohane says. To her ex, to herself, to the way her feet take her forward.
She stands right outside the passenger seat, bending over just enough that she can look her ex in the eye and maybe spit in her face before she’s kicked off of the property. Her ex, on the other hand, is still smiling wide despite Kohane’s obvious sneer. If the cat who ate the canary was a dog who ate shit. A shit-eating grin. A grin worth punching until her snaggletooth unsnaggles itself.
“I thought you’d ignore me today, too,” her ex-girlfriend says. She leans over and unlocks the passenger door. “Change of heart? What, are we getting back together today too?”
It’s a low jab. It isn’t worth the effort to reply, so Kohane opens the door and sits down and kisses her ex-girlfriend before it’s even closed.
Her lips are a little chapped, but they’re warm and taste like drug store lip balm and fit against Kohane’s so well that she hates it. She hates a lot of things about her ex– she hates how she threads her fingers into Kohane’s hair like they’ve never been apart, hates how she laughs against her kiss, hates how being with her feels like everything Kohane’s been missing.
Missing, not missing, you know. Kohane’s her own person, with or without her ex. She has her own dreams and hobbies and friends, even if they used to share those. She has her own room and clothes and promises to herself, even though they used to share those too. She’s not missing anything. She doesn’t feel any more complete being with her ex than away from her.
She misses her in a different way. She misses finding more ways to hate her.
Her ex-girlfriend finds her hand and tangles their fingers together in a knot of bony joints, with no concern for comfort. Kohane furrows her eyebrows and pulls her hand away, and her ex follows like a ghost. “We’re not getting back together,” she asserts. “Not now. Not ever.”
Maybe what she hates the most is how her ex doesn’t take her seriously. She laughs again, a sound that rings in her head the exact same way in all the years they’ve known each other. “Of course we aren’t,” she replies, eager to agree. Eager to make Kohane happy, and Kohane hates that too. “Or else you’d never let me kiss you like that again.”
Her ex-girlfriend was never her second half. They’re two different people living two different lives, with ten times the number of differences than similarities. Kohane hated the looks they got. The showers of praise. The compliments. The labels.
She exhales. Her ex-girlfriend leans in to kiss her again, and she lets her, feeling glowing orange and cold blue shadows. The bitterness in her heart slowly bubbles into something else, and maybe what Kohane hates the most is that she’s never hated An in the first place.