Liminal Space | A Stardew Valley FanFiction

Chapter 19

"Callie," Abigail breathed out, springing into my grasp. Her warmth quickly dissolved the late-September goosebumps that enveloped my arms.

"How are you?" I asked gingerly as she pulled me into her room, patting her bed like she was summoning a dog. I obliged and took a seat beside her.

"A lot better now that you're here," she said quietly. "I've been worried sick about you...about us."

"We're okay," I reassured her, nodding intently as her eyebrows scrunched together. "I promise."

"You have every right to be mad at me," she blurted out. "I've been thinking about it all, and it just wasn't right."

We were locked in a moment of silent understanding, of mutual mistakes that hurt the other in ways we had never anticipated. I drank in the discomfort and swallowed it like a shot; leaving things unsaid was what landed us here to begin with. I couldn't live like that anymore

"I regret saying I was okay with it," I admitted quietly, staring at the carpet. My hands shook in my lap.

She digested my words for a minute, finally replying, "I regret believing that you meant it." Her cuticles filled with blood as she picked at them. There was a certain solace in the sight—a tale as old as time. "I should've known."

"Did it mean something to you?"

I almost didn't want to know as her eyes rose to meet mine, her irises clouded by shame and something much more cryptic.

"No," she sighed. "And it meant even less to him."

"I saw the way he looked at you," I prodded, practically begging her to say more. "That wasn't nothing."

At that moment, I wasn't sure who I was trying to convince: her, or me.

Part of me longed for it to have meant something, so I had a reason to run away. To stop the feeling, to build my walls back up.

"You know how when you stare at something in the dark for long enough, you start to convince yourself it's something completely different? Like, how a jacket hanging on the door can start to look like a person or something?" She asked gently. "He watched me in that basement until I became you, Cal."

"Abby—"

"And I wouldn't have it any other way," she reassured me, grabbing my hand. "It was sex, nothing more—I didn't care who he pretended I was if it meant I got laid."

She chuckled, and so did I; a strange sense of relief flooded over me.

"I still feel weird about it," I admitted.

"Me too," she replied, rubbing her temples. "Can we talk about it?"

I swallowed thick saliva in anticipation of my own confession, telling her somehow more scary than telling Seb. "Well, I told him I loved him last night."

"You—" confusion swept across her face. "You hadn't said that yet?"

"No, apparently I'd said it to everyone except him. Oh, and actively avoided it every time he tried to draw it out of me."

"I'm proud of you, babe," she beamed, laying her head on my shoulder. The tension dissolved at the touch. "Does that make you two—"

"I think so?" I replied, fiddling with a loose string on my pants. "We, uh—well, let's just say he got laid twice this week."

"No way," she covered her mouth, mischief twinkling in her eyes. "How was it?"

"I hate that I can tell you about it and you'll know exactly what I mean," I groaned, burying my head in my hands. I found a bizarre sense of comedy in it all—the way we all, one way or another, took it too far...A terrible trifecta of anger, detachment, and lust.

"Callie," she warned, a certain seriousness encased within her tone. "We were both wasted when it happened, and when I tried again the next day, he basically told me hell no. Which, as I know now, was because you finally told him the truth."

"Alright, alright," I giggled. "Make fun of me all you want, but it was scary. I genuinely thought I'd lost my chance, and that he didn't see me that way anymore."

"It's funny you say that...I was thinking about it, and there's something to be said about someone who only notices you after a long night and a bottle of liquor. I guess for Sebastian, it might be a little different, considering that's the life he lives." She laughed. "Cal, he sees you in the broad daylight and can't keep his eyes off of you—he respects you so much that he wouldn't even glance at you in the dark. The fact that he recognized that he was just horny and kept you out of it means something, even if it's in a weird, twisted way and he went about it all wrong. Does that make sense?"

And, as much as I hated to admit it, it did.

I hated to admit that the massacre of feeling flooding my veins was doing nothing but pulling me towards him; I hated that my outer shell had been shed and there was no getting it back. That I had nothing in my heart but love, and it was spilling from my pores for everyone to see. That the things death did to me had now died.

"Thank you for forgiving me," Abby whispered.

"Thank you for showing me I had something to fight for," I responded.

And then she smiled, and I smiled back.