The golden boy’s Bluetooth speaker accidentally disconnected, broadcasting his phone’s audio to the entire room. A familiar, cool, and tender female voice drifted through the air: “Baby.” I froze. Declan Vaughn’s face flushed as he scrambled to lock his screen. “The rest is R-rated,” he teased, waving his phone. “Not for your innocent ears.” When the guys in the room pressed him for details, Declan just tilted his head back, shooting a brief, sidelong glance in my direction. “It’s just some untouchable ice queen who finally melted for me,” he said with a lazy shrug. “It’s really no big deal.” I knew that voice. It belonged to Eden Monroe—the girl I had grown up with, the girl I had loved for years, and the girl I was just about ready to give up on. 1 Right at the height of the locker-room banter, Eden walked into the classroom. Declan immediately closed the distance between them, dropping his voice to a theatrical whisper. “That audio recording from last Friday night… I accidentally just played it—” He cut himself off abruptly. What followed was a pair of bright red ears and a look of practiced, deliberate timidity aimed directly at me. Declan tugged gently at the cuff of Eden’s sleeve. “Eden, maybe you should explain things to Jude? Tell him nothing actually happened between us last Friday.” He sighed, playing the victim. “Otherwise, he’s just going to throw another tantrum at you.” Last Friday was my birthday. No wonder Eden hadn’t shown up. She was too busy losing herself in someone else. Eden’s brows drew together. When her eyes met mine, they were brimming with raw impatience. “Jude, you know what kind of person I am. I’m not cheap,” she said. “That night—” “You don’t have to explain,” I interrupted, my voice surprisingly steady. “You said it yourself. We’re just friends. You have no obligation to answer questions that cross a boundary.” The air in the room went dead. Declan stepped squarely in front of Eden, blocking my view of her. “Jude, you’re a guy. Can’t you be a little more mature about this? Why are you always picking fights with her?” He lowered his voice, coated in false sympathy. “Eden told me your constant paranoia is exhausting. You’re draining her.” My chest tightened on instinct. A Pavlovian response to the heartbreak. Clutching my books to my chest, I turned toward the door, desperate to escape the amused, predatory stares of our classmates. As I passed Eden, I looked at her properly for what felt like the last time. “Declan is right,” I said quietly. “Eden, I won’t bother you anymore.” She just turned her head to look at me. Her beautiful eyes were entirely devoid of emotion. “Suit yourself.” The familiar, suffocating weight of drowning finally pulled me completely under. The first time I confessed my feelings to Eden was in high school. Back then, she told me that as long as we got into the same university, we would be together. But once we actually enrolled at the same college, she threw herself entirely into launching her tech startup. I still remember the day of my second confession. Eden couldn’t even be bothered to look up from her laptop. “Jude, don’t you have your own life to live? Do we absolutely have to date “right now”?” She told me to keep being friends. As for a relationship, we would talk about it later. So, I waited. And I waited. I waited until Eden and Declan started spending all their time together. I waited until I was practically forced to abandon the idea of her entirely. The childhood promise I’d clung to had completely expired. 2 Because Eden never bothered to clear the air, rumors about her and Declan began to spread like wildfire across campus. In every version of the story, I was naturally cast as the pathetic collateral damage—the desperate orbiter who couldn’t take a hint and wouldn’t leave Eden alone. While walking across the quad later that week, I predictably bumped into the two of them. Declan was the first to speak, practically dripping with forced innocence. “Jude, please don’t misunderstand Eden. I lost my ID and needed to go to the DMV to get a new one. She was heading that way, so she just gave me a ride.” I gave a vague, noncommittal hum, wanting nothing more than to put as much physical distance between us as possible. But Eden suddenly grabbed my arm. “You blocked my number?” she demanded softly. I had blocked her the night of my birthday, almost a full week ago. It had taken her this long to even notice. I gave her a lazy excuse. “My account got hacked.” She exhaled a breath of relief, but her expression quickly shifted to worry. “Do you have enough money then?” Without waiting for an answer, she shoved a sleek black credit card into my palm. “The pin is your birthday.” At the word “birthday”, the color completely drained from Eden’s face. I watched her lips part as realization hit her, but I just pressed my mouth into a thin line. I really didn’t want to ask. Looking intensely frustrated with herself, Eden pulled out her phone and started canceling all her afternoon meetings. Declan panicked. “Aren’t you supposed to be pitching to investors today? How can you throw away an opportunity like that over something so trivial?” Eden ignored him, keeping her eyes fixed quietly on me. My heart did that pathetic, habitual stutter. Even though every shred of logic in my brain was screaming, “Jude, you cannot keep loving her”, the moment she opened her mouth, my rationality began to disintegrate. “It was never trivial,” she said. “Making up for Jude’s birthday is the most important thing right now.” We went to the Italian place we used to practically live at. When the slice of cake was brought out, Eden finally started to apologize. She said she had been so swamped she forgot what day it was. But even as the apologies spilled from her mouth, her eyes never left her phone screen. From my angle, it looked exactly like a live location-sharing map. Even knowing her mind was miles away, I couldn’t stop myself from asking the one question that was killing me. “If you forgot…” I started. “Then why did you text me that night, telling me to wait for you in that dark alley off Fourth Street? You know I’m terrified of the dark.” But before I could finish the sentence, her phone buzzed. I caught a glimpse of the caller ID: “Declan”. All the words I had left choked in my throat like glass. Eden stepped outside to take the call. Just as I expected, she never came back. I sat there looking at the table full of cold food and the untouched slice of cake. I knew then that whatever existed between Eden and me was truly, irreparably dead. It didn’t matter how many years of memories we had shared. None of it mattered anymore. 3 That night, alone in my apartment, I drank a lot. Going cold turkey on an unrequited love you’ve harbored for nearly a decade is a vicious kind of withdrawal. I sat in the dark for a long time. Eventually, I couldn’t stop myself. I just wanted to hear her voice. When I realized my cell phone was dead, I forced my heavily intoxicated body up from the floor and stumbled into the living room to use the vintage landline answering machine we had bought at a flea market years ago. As it dialed her old home number, I heard the voicemail greeting I had recorded for her two years ago: “Hey, you’ve reached Eden’s place! This is Jude, the guy who follows her absolutely everywhere. If you can’t find her, you can always check with me first!” The sheer joy in that recorded voice now only made my chest ache with a violent, acidic regret. I clutched the heavy receiver, my consciousness slipping around the edges. Stripped of my inhibitions, I finally spilled all the questions I had buried deep in my chest. I figured Eden probably didn’t even use this landline anymore. I was just treating it like a hollow tree, whispering my most humiliating secrets into the void. I asked her so many things. I asked if she knew that while I was waiting in that alley for her, a mugger had cornered me. When he lunged at me with a switchblade, if I hadn’t dodged exactly when I did, I wouldn’t be here crying into a phone. I remembered running out of that alley to find the police, my legs shaking so violently they could barely hold my weight. I didn’t even realize until I got home that the blade had caught my arm. I had been bleeding through my shirt the entire time. That scar still crawled up my forearm like a pale centipede. I also asked her just how important Declan Vaughn was to her. Was he really more important than me? Though honestly, I already knew the answer. Loving Eden Monroe was an exhausting, agonizing existence. If I could rewind time, the very first thing I would do is figure out how to run as far away from her as humanly possible. I gripped the phone and breathed out my final truth into the receiver: “Eden, I never want to love you again.” 4 I didn’t know when I passed out, but I woke up slumped on the floor, my back pressed painfully against the sofa. My entire body ached. My cell phone was fully charged now. As soon as I turned it on, Eden called. “Declan called me last night in a panic,” she said quickly, her tone defensive. “He said his Uber driver was taking him down these super sketchy, deserted roads. Anyway, I didn’t mean to abandon you at the restaurant.” When I didn’t respond, she assumed I was giving her the silent treatment. Her tone sharpened into a reprimand. “Jude, there’s a hierarchy to emergencies. What do you think is more important? Your birthday cake, or his safety?” Right on cue, Declan’s delighted voice echoed from the background of her end of the line. “Eden! Your bathroom is massive. Where do you keep the towels?” Every muscle in my body tensed. My first instinct was to scream at her, to start a massive fight like we always used to. Instead, I forced my jaw shut, swallowed the bile in my throat, and hung up the phone. Once the adrenaline faded, I sat staring out the window, completely zoning out. At this point, I didn’t even know if what I felt for Eden was love, or just bitter resentment. Because I grew up with wealthy, doting parents, things had always come easily to me. Everything, except Eden. Because of that, I was fascinated by her. I felt possessive of her. I wanted to “win” her. But I never expected that this tangled, messy affection would slowly mutate me into an incredibly stupid, hysterical lunatic. The next day, I didn’t go to class. I spent the entire day cornering my parents, finally convincing them to let me transfer to a university in London. They were hesitant, worried I’d struggle so far from home. But to me, staying anywhere near Eden was the real struggle. It was rotting me from the inside out. During the days I skipped school to finalize my transfer papers, Eden never once texted to ask where I was. I was already used to it. When I finally returned to campus, Eden was sitting by the window. The sunlight caught the delicate bridge of her nose. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but Declan, who was half-sitting on her desk, was laughing, his eyes crinkling with pure adoration. I tried my best to act like they didn’t exist as I walked toward my seat. But Eden called out. “Jude.” She stood up. “We need to talk.” 5 We stood in the stairwell. As Eden stood next to me, I glanced down and noticed a silver star bracelet circling her wrist. It was a bracelet I had lost a few months ago. While I was staring at it, her cool voice floated down from above. “You’ve been distancing yourself from me.” “Ever since last Friday, you stopped texting me first. You used to at least say goodnight, even when you were throwing a tantrum.” My chest gave a hard thud, but I didn’t say a word. She reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and silently unblocked her own number. In a rare moment of compromise, Eden looked up at me. “If I agree to let us be official right now, will you stop pushing me away?” I looked down, a bitter, hollow laugh escaping my lips. It was funny. Hearing the exact words I had spent half my life bleeding for, only to realize how utterly cheap they sounded now. “Eden, dating is a waste of time,” I said. “You have an empire to build. Your time is money, and I really can’t afford to hold you back.” She didn’t even get the chance to process what I had said. The heavy stairwell door burst open, and one of Declan’s frat brothers rushed in, breathless. “Eden! It’s Declan! He collapsed on the field during practice!” The moment she heard the word “collapsed,” it was as if I ceased to exist. She shoved past me, racing down the stairs toward the athletic fields without a backward glance. Declan’s buddy lingered just long enough to shoot me a smug, victorious smirk. It was as if he was saying, “Look at you, Jude. You lost again.” I walked over to the stairwell window and looked out over the campus. I watched as Eden practically carried Declan toward the infirmary. And as I watched them disappear, I realized something deeply profound. I didn’t feel sad anymore. Every single thing she did—every movement, every betrayal—could no longer create even a ripple in the dead water of my heart. 6 Eden didn’t come to campus for the next couple of weeks. She told me she was in Silicon Valley closing a massive venture capital deal. Suddenly, she gave me permission to “bother” her again. “If you miss me, call me anytime,” she texted. I never called. Not once. Her behavior became entirely erratic. Every single night, she would flood my phone with photos of everything she ate and everything she saw. How many clouds were in the sky, the exact shade of the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge—she shared it all. Even though the meals in her photos were clearly portioned for two. Even though the beaches she visited were notoriously romantic date spots. Even though, in the corners of her photos, I could occasionally spot the hem of a men’s dress shirt. I knew perfectly well that Declan had flown out to California with her. As I sat there, Eden’s texts continued to ping in rapid succession. More unappetizing food, more boring skies. I didn’t want to reply to a single one. Just like how she never used to bother replying when I shared things with her. I opened Instagram. Declan had posted a relentless string of Stories: “Eating the couple’s tasting menu with someone special tonight! So insanely good!” … “She’s so sweet. She knew the food was too spicy for me so she ordered me a milkshake on the side~” “I told her I liked the stars, so someone took off her favorite star bracelet and gave it to me! I’m literally swooning rn!” “Someone spilled coffee on my designer shirt today. Blackmailed her for $5,000. Not too harsh, right?” … The rest was so obnoxiously cloying it made my stomach turn. I closed the app. Just then, another text from Eden came through. “Jude, I have a surprise for you when I get back.” After that, silence. My thumb hovered over the screen. A surprise. That was a first. In all the years I’d known her, Eden Monroe had never prepared a surprise for me. But the truth was, I really didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t reply. I just quietly went into my settings and blocked them both on every platform. I was moving to London anyway. There was absolutely no point in keeping the contact info of old college acquaintances. 7 I started going around and saying my goodbyes to my closest friends in the cohort, handing out the parting gifts I had bought for them. One of my friends tugged at my sleeve. “I heard Eden’s flight lands today. She’s only like two hours away. Jude, aren’t you going to wait for her?” I looked over at Eden and Declan’s empty desks. “No,” I said mildly. “I’m never waiting for her again.” Missing her entirely felt like the cleanest ending. After handing out all the gifts, I took the largest, heaviest shopping bag and set it squarely in the center of Eden’s desk. My friend looked confused. “Jude, why are you giving Eden so much stuff? Don’t tell me you’re still hung up on her.” I shook my head. Inside that bag was every single gift Eden had ever given me since we were kids. There weren’t many, but every single item was wildly expensive. “These are all the high-end things she’s bought me,” I explained smoothly. “Since we’re going our separate ways, it’s only right to return to sender.” But the moment the words left my mouth, everyone in the room suddenly turned to look at the doorway. Following their shocked stares, I saw Eden. She looked utterly exhausted, her hair windblown and her eyes completely bloodshot. It looked like she had changed her ticket and taken the earliest, most miserable red-eye flight just to get here. And tightly gripped in her hand was a small, velvet bag. The logo on the outside was unmistakable. It was from a luxury jeweler that exclusively sold custom engagement rings.
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