𝐀 𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐘𝐎𝐔 • Robin Buckley

Chapter 4

"Why didn't you go with Billy?" Robin asks.

Monica's eyebrows furrowed, turning to face the girl next to her. "Because I'm with you."

"But you're still with him technically if you're hanging out." Robin didn't mean to sound so bitter, but she couldn't take it back, especially considering she didn't really want to.

"We have sex," Monica says plainly. "That's all that it is. He just..."

"Inevitably saw how amazing you are and decided he wanted more."

"He'll never be satisfied and I'm under no obligation to satisfy him," Monica shrugs, pursing her lips. "That's all."

"So, hypothetically he went home with someone else tonight..."

"It's his business," Monica says with all certainty and ease. She tilts her head. "He's cute but he's not that cute."

Robin knew she was only joking, she could tell by her smile, but she thought it all over. "I don't get how people do it."

Monica was concentrating on Robin just as hard as she concentrated on listening. Her eyes flickered between Robin's eyes and every other part of her face. The heart outline of it, her abundance of freckles, her straight nose, her rose-painted lips that she remembered more than she could see them in the darkness of Tina's bedroom. They looked soft.

"Do what?" Monica asks, finding Robin's eyes.

"Casual. Is that what you call it? Just no emotional tether."

"Coming from the girl that doesn't want a guy." Robin rolls her eyes. "Her words." Then she threw herself down on Tina's bed, extending her arms out flat beside her. She looked ultimately frozen as she stared up at the ceiling and nothing else.

Monica expected Robin to say something or move a muscle, but she barely even blinked. So, she laid back, too, her hands resting on top of one another on her abdomen, and for a long quiet moment that was all there was. Just two girls dressed up as people they weren't, staring at the ceiling of someone else's bedroom.

But suddenly Monica missed Robin's voice. She missed her nervous rambling and even her cackling laughter. No, she missed her cackling laughter especially because of the smile that came with it.

She rolled her head onto her right cheek, looking over at wide-eyed and silent Robin. "Why are we laying?" Monica whispers, smiling slightly.

Robin didn't move an inch but still answered. "My body feels too heavy."

"I hear gravity can do that sometimes," Monica quips, checking to see if she succeeded in making Robin smile, but she was unmoving. "We don't do it."

"What?" Robin asks.

"No emotional tether. I do like Billy." She looked up at the ceiling, too, embarrassed to admit what she was admitting out loud let alone to someone else's face. "A lot actually, it's repulsive. I think I could see myself falling in love with him if he wasn't such a piece of work."

Robin rolled her head onto her left cheek, her eyebrows drawing together. "How? What do you see in him?"

"We have real conversations. You know behind all of it there's an actual human being and he lets me see that. So, I care about him deeply but not in the kind of way that would ever amount to love."

"But you could fall in love, right?" Robin asks. "Under different circumstances with someone else?"

Monica smiles, turning her head to face Robin. She searched her eyes as best as she could in the dark, the breath of space between them making it easier, and nodded. "Yeah I could."