Liminal Space | A Stardew Valley FanFiction

Chapter 17

I bolted through the front door, Robin not even bothering to ask what was going on as I sprinted towards the stairs, a knowing smile creeping onto her lips. A menacing thud followed each of my footsteps, Sebastian's door swinging open so quickly that he could've missed its movement had I not been gasping for air.

The look on his face said it all: furrowed eyebrows huddled over sparkling eyes, nimble fingers frozen in place over a now silent keyboard.

"I love you," I blurted out, grasping the door frame for leverage. "I've loved you since we were kids and I've never stopped, not once. I've lied so many times—trying to make it less real, trying to abolish it from my life like I did you. But that's the thing about love, Seb, it's a hell of a lot more resilient than we are. Every time I gave up, some terrible part of me held on, and I hated you for it—I hated me for it. I never told you the truth because I was scared; shit, I'm scared now. But I'm doing it scared—I'm saying it scared. I love you."

"What?" was all he managed to choke out, his chair scraping against the hardwood as he stood. "What is happening?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "After the tree fell, I realized how temporary shit really is. How the person who planted the tree is dead, how the tree itself is dead, but my love for you still won't fucking go away, no matter how hard I try. Then I thought about those years of living together, here, in high school—the way that silence followed us around, and the only thing that made it better was the fact that it was you. You may have hated me, and I may have hated you, but you can't escape someone who lives upstairs, you know? You were never fully removed from my life, and I think that that's the one thing that kept me going. I know how it feels to miss someone and never see their face again, to have all that love funnel into nothing. I'm used to that. To at least know you were alive, and healthy, and happy—with or without me—that's all I could've asked for. I never broke that quiet because—for once—everything was still. I didn't want to disturb the equilibrium, even if it killed me every. single. day."

He was walking towards me now, and the confusion was melting into something more complex—his face was practically unreadable. His scent enveloped me as he inched forward, seemingly scouring my features for the same reason I was his. To make something—anything—make sense.

"You couldn't say it six hours ago," he breathed out, a shaky hand landing on my shoulder. "Why now?"

"Because..." I gulped. "...I realized that even the most permanent things must come to an end, one way or another. It hit me today that silence wasn't an option anymore—I either had to face my feelings or let you go. I couldn't let you go."

He pulled me into a hug, resting his chin on top of my head. I could hear his heartbeat through his jacket; his thumb rubbed circles on my back.

"I'm not meant to love quietly, Cal," he whispered. "Shit, sometimes I feel like I'm not meant to love at all. But then you show up, and it all makes sense again. It kills me to keep it to myself."

His words danced on my heart, igniting it with a flame that felt inextinguishable. I wanted to tackle him and do everything I'd never been able to; I wanted to tell him I loved him a million times over; I wanted to live in this moment with him forever, shielded from the past and our own stupid decisions.

But it wasn't that easy.

"As much as I want this to be the magic fix, we...We need to talk about everything that happened and why it did, or it'll sneak up on us and ruin it all again."

He gulped, and it almost felt like I could hear his thoughts—probably because the same ones were dizzying me, as well. Talking about the fallout had always been the one thing we couldn't do, the one thing that damned us more than silence itself did. Two perspectives of the same trauma were like two identical sides of a magnet—always pushing away.

"Can you go first?" He croaked out. I nodded. If there is one thing he deserves, I decided, it's for me to do the talking.

We sat on his bed, both looking out into the room within which everything had changed. The tiled bathroom floor that we'd both found ourselves sprawled upon, the bed we'd both slept in, the stairs we'd both stormed down when the other went too far. All of the same things, at different times.

And then it hit me why we couldn't mend each other's wounds: we'd never truly been there to see them form. Instead, we'd let them fester, just to spare the other from the same trauma they'd already experienced. Anger tends to release itself on the people we are closest to, even if they are not the catalyst of it. Ms. Stevens's psychology lecture. It's a matter of safety—we project our deepest insecurities onto the person who is willing to see past them.

"Listen, I had it wrong," I started. My hands shook in my lap. "Just because my experience with grief felt monumental didn't mean that yours wasn't. I feel like I'm seeing this situation clearly for the first time ever, and it's bigger than both of us. We were wronged by the universe and wanted someone else to understand—to agree that it sucked—but instead, we made it a competition of who had it worse. But the truth is neither—we had it different; different in the details but same at the core. We both lost our parents, through death or proximity or unwanted new beginnings; we both lost my grandfather, who was the only person who cared about us more than we cared about each other; we both felt the effects of grief, and it tore us apart instead of bringing us together. I didn't want to burden you with the weight of all of this, but now—a little too late—I realize that it wasn't my place to make that decision for you. It wasn't the grief that drove you away, it was my inability to open up about it. I was so scared of losing you on someone else's terms that I self-sabotaged, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"I'm sorry, too...That night that I told you I loved you, it was because—" he stopped. " —I felt like life was too short to keep it in any longer. I know it's cliche, but I was scared, too. I never told you when we were younger because we're conditioned to believe love only exists in minds far older than ours, but that's the thing about it, don't you think? My mind wanted nothing to do with it—I wanted to not care about anything, like Sam, but instead, I was bonded to you by some mystery force; I knew when we were thirteen that I'd spend my life with you or no one at all. I want you to know that I've never given up on us—not even when we hadn't spoken in two years and you kissed Alex, in my room, after prom."

I burst into laughter, slapping his arm as though it were instinct. "You shouldn't have offered to host the after party, then!"

"Three of us already lived here," he scoffed. "Plus, if it were here, we could drink as much as we wanted to and not worry about tumbling down the mountain on the way home."

"I definitely had one too many that night," I said, a bitter-sweet nostalgia washing over me. "You did, too—I'm pretty sure you threw up in the front yard."

"I was sober," he said, his cheeks turning red. "I was so distraught that you kissed someone else that I felt sick."

"How do you think I felt when you fucked my best friend, two days ago, right where our asses are sitting right now? I'd say that was a bigger foul than drunk kissing Alex six years ago."

"No comment," he shrugged, looking away. "And stop fucking calling her your best friend, haven't we been over this? I'm your best friend."

"...Just my best friend?" I whispered, scraping patterns onto my thigh.

His eyes were wide as they met mine, as if we hadn't spent the last thirty minutes discussing our undying love for each other.

"I'll be anything you want me to be, Callie."