Breathe Again

25: Heartbreak Isn't A Competition

"Isaac," Liam says, "what are you doing here?"

It perhaps isn't the loving, happy welcome Isaac dreamed of but it is probably the welcome Isaac deserves, he has after all not reached out to Liam at all for the past several weeks and instead has been rather a horrible friend, and that's not even touching on the maybe more than friends stuff.

"I leave today."

That also isn't how Isaac had exactly planned this moment, he hadn't put words together on the way over here, hadn't had a chance to assemble his thoughts into something coherent, but he had definitely imaged it would be better than this. Better than stating facts and expecting Liam to read between the lines to decipher his feeling.

Isaac tries again, he takes a deep breath, tries to remind himself that not talking is what brought them this mess in the first place, now is his chance to make up for all the words that got lost in the silence.

"I'm leaving today," he says again, "and I couldn't bear the thought of leaving with everything how it is between us, I wanted to make things right before I left."

"You came here to tell me you wanted to be friends again?"

Isaac finds the word friend to be a little bit wounding - like it's a tiny dagger that Liam has plunged straight into his heart. But he reminds himself that they've danced around this for so long and that there's a hope in Liam's eyes that suggests he's hoping that Isaac isn't just here for a friendship. Isaac needs to get his shit together before it's too late, needs to finally take the leap of faith he's been resisting for so long.

"Not quite."

Liam's face seems to be caught between hope and disappointment and Isaac hopes that he's doing the right thing, that this isn't somehow going to all blow up in his face.

"What did you want then?"

There's impatient in Liam's tone and Isaac can't blame him for it but it doesn't make this situation any easy. But Isaac has taken the easy way out so many times now, sometimes the good things take a little more work, but they're worth it in the end.

"I wanted to tell you I like you. I like you as a friend, but I like you as more that a friend to. And I'm sorry I kept ignoring what was going on between us and refusing to talk about it, but I felt so confused and I was worried, am worried, that you didn't really feel the same, and so I ignored the situation, which was dumb." Liam is silent and so Isaac keeps on talking. "But yeah, I just wanted to tell you before I left, just in case you wanted to know."

"You was worried I didn't feel the same? Isaac, I kissed you."

Isaac shrugs, tries to figure out if this conversation is going well or not, all of a sudden Liam seems so hard to read.

"So? People kiss people all the time and often it doesn't really mean anything."

"Not me, not you, not me kissing you, that always meant something," Liam says, and it sounds like a promise.

It's music to Isaac's ears, exactly what he always dreamt he would hear and he curses himself for not believing in the possibility of them sooner, for leaving this until it was too late, until he was heading to the opposite end of the country in a couple of hours time.

"I'm sorry," Isaac says.

It's the closest he can come to summing up how he really feels. Because he is sorry, really sorry, sorry for doubting Liam, sorry for believing all of this could have meant nothing to Liam and that Liam was capable of breaking his heart. Isaac is sorry for being horrendous at communicating and for always being too late to the party and for taking so long to realise that best friends don't kiss like they do, that embracing a relationship doesn't mean saying goodbye to the friendship, that the two of them could be whatever they wanted to be, that they were writing their own story and the ending wasn't defined just yet.