The Way We Learned to Love ✓

35 - lily

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-"