No Hard Feelings

eighteen

"Hello?"

Her voice makes Dexter deflate, but he tries not to show this. "Andy."

"What's up?"

"Are you busy?"

There's a rustle, then a muffled thump. "Just packing," she replies, voice somehow less diluted than before.

The guilt sits in Dexter's gut. He doesn't know what to feel apart from it. He hears her voice and tries to find a semblance of the giddiness that it never failed to make him feel before.
He doesn't.

He can't tell if it's because his sadness about Hadley's absence is too much for a simple phone call to fix or if it's because he has finally admitted what he has been denying all along: he isn't over Hadley.

And Andy doesn't deserve that.

"I was wondering if we could talk," he tells her and waits.

The silence that follows is punctuated, and Dexter wonders if Andy somehow knows already, even though he put extra care into sounding a little less wrong than he felt.

"I don't have a lot of stuff to pack," she finally replies. Something in her tone tells him she knows. How, exactly, he has no idea, but it doesn't matter, not really. "I'll be free around five. I'll call to let you know."

"Okay."

His own voice sounds distant to him, and it feels so off somehow.

When the call ends, he feels his heart constrict. He never means for it to happen, but he recognizes now that he has made this mistake, time and time and time again, and Andy's just another casualty in the tragedy he and Hadley have been writing these past two years, when he always chose Hadley over all the other girls who have come and gone, sometimes explicitly, like with Tara.
Tara was always jealous of his closeness with Hadley. They fought so much that it tired Dexter out and when she finally asked for him to choose between her and Hadley, it hadn't been a difficult decision.

Or maybe it wouldn't have been a difficult decision either way. Dexter always chose Hadley, even in the subtlest of ways. It's in the way he thinks of her, even when he's out with the other girls. Not in an I-wish-she-was-Hadley-instead way, of course not, but in a Hadley-would-definitely-love-this-cake-so-should-I-buy-her-a-slice? way. And it wasn't just cake. It was everything.

I should definitely rewatch this movie with Hadley.

Or

Hey, do you mind stopping by that book shop later? I think I saw a title my friend Hadley had been looking for in ages.

Or Oh, god, what's this song called? Hadley would absolutely just adore it.

It's like the image of her smile is always just lingering at the back of his head and her happiness always exists alongside his.

Some of the girls he went out with didn't mind. Or at least they claimed they didn't. Henry always told him they're just saying so, to spare themselves from having Dexter choose between their relationship and his friendship with Hadley.

"Hadley puts a strain on all your relationships, Dex," Henry told him once, but he just waved him off, insisting that if any of those girls really loved him, then his friendship with Hadley shouldn't even be an issue.

And Dexter really believed this.
Maybe it was true, to an extent, but there's no denying it now. Dexter is in love with Hadley.

He doesn't know if he ever actually stopped loving her, or if he really did get over her at some point, and just ended up falling in love with her again now.