Poison

Her name does something to your heart before you even let yourself think it all the way through. Winter. Cold sliding down your back on a hot night — you’d call it relief except relief rarely comes with a warning label.

1:47 AM. The phone’s lighting up the nightstand like it’s got something to confess. You’ve been lying there twenty minutes already, doing the thing where you stare at the ceiling and pretend you’re not going to check it. You already know who it is, probably. Or at least you hope it’s her.

you up?

Two words. Three years of telling yourself you’re done, gone, fine without her — and two words wipe all of it out like it never happened.

You pick up the phone anyway. Just to look, you tell yourself. Just to see.

You never just look.

You met her at your cousin’s birthday party, the summer you turned twenty-three. You had a decent job, an apartment… kinda. It was barely an apartment with how small it was, but whatever. At least you’re not homeless. Things were fine.

Then she walked in — late, laughing at something somebody said near the drinks table, hair still damp from outside rain, wearing green that caught the kitchen light every time she moved. You noticed her before you’d decided to look, the way you notice a phone buzzing in another room. Just impossible to ignore once it starts.

“You’re staring,” your cousin said, elbowing you hard enough to spill your drink.

“I’m not staring.”

“You’ve been staring for ten minutes straight. Go say something before I announce it to the room.”

You went and talked to her. Best decision you ever made, worst decision you ever made — depends which year you ask. She had this way of looking at you, dead in the eyes, like you were the only person worth talking to in a room full of forty people. You thought you were special. Much later you found out that you were just a delusional shmuck. She looked at everybody that way. Some discoveries take longer than others.

“You looked nervous walking over here,” she said.

“Wasn’t nervous.”

“Liar.” She grinned, caught you red-handed and didn’t seem to mind. “I like that about you, though. Honesty’s rare.”

Honesty’s rare. You’d turn that phrase over in your head for years afterward — turn it, flip it, hold it up to the light — and wonder if she ever once measured herself against it. You don’t think she did. Doesn’t seem like the thought crossed her mind even once.

Here’s the thing about Winter — she doesn’t lie. Not technically. She just leaves gaps. She’ll say she’s at her sister’s and skip the part about who else showed up. She’ll say she misses you and not mention she said the same exact sentence to somebody else three days earlier. It’s not deception, really, more like editing. Curating which version of the story you get to see. And you fall for the edited cut every time, because you’re a fucking moron.

You used to think you were the exception. Everyone thinks that at first. Whatever drove off her exes, whatever made them get that look in their eye when somebody mentioned her name at parties — you figured none of it applied to you. You were different. What you two had was different. She’d lie next to you at 3 AM, hand pressed over your chest, telling you nobody had ever understood her the way you did, and you’d believe every word of it, because 3 AM and alcohol makes liars sound like prophets.

You don’t believe it like that anymore. You believe it differently now — eyes open instead of shut, which somehow makes the whole thing worse, not better. There’s no excuse of innocence left to hide behind. Just want, plain, with all the meat picked off the bone.

You’ve tried explaining this to people who’ve never met her, and it never lands right. They hear “toxic” and picture something obvious — yelling, name-calling, the kind of thing you could point a friend toward and say see, this is bad, leave. It’s never been that with Winter. It’s quieter than that. It’s the disappearing without explanation and the way she can make a six-week silence feel, somehow, like it’s a little bit your fault for minding. It’s the way she’ll say something devastating in the gentlest voice you’ve ever heard, so gentle you don’t register the damage until hours later, lying awake, replaying it, finally hearing what she actually said underneath how she said it. Nobody believes you when you try to describe that. You’ve mostly stopped trying.

There was a year — the second one, maybe, though nothing about you and Winter ever lined up neat enough to be sure — where you actually thought you’d built something real. Not the 2 AM version. Not the disappearing-for-weeks version. A real one, daylight hours included, with a key to her place and a toothbrush sitting in her bathroom cup and her contact saved under a little heart instead of just her name.

For a stretch, she actually stayed. Showed up when she said she would. Took you to meet her mother, who held onto your hand a beat too long and said, “She doesn’t usually bring people home”. It was probably a warning dressed up as a compliment. You spent Christmas at that table, watching Winter crack up at her brother’s terrible jokes, thinking: this is it, this is the thing everyone’s always talking about.

It ended on a Tuesday. Nothing dramatic — that was never her style, you’d come to learn. She didn’t do blowups. (She did do blowjobs tho, hehe. Shit joke. You deserve hell.) She did silences that slowly calcified into something permanent. You sent good morning the way you always did. Nothing back. Texted again that night. Still nothing. You told yourself her phone died, she was swamped, she got crushed under a piano, a dozen boring explanations that didn’t require you to feel the cold drop in your gut anyway.

Three days of dead air. You were convinced that she died, or you hoped that she did. Then a message that wasn’t even really a breakup — more like a memo. I think I need some time to figure some things out. This isn’t about you. As if a sentence like that could file away an entire year under “not about you.” As if you hadn’t rearranged half your life to make room for hers.

Four months of nothing after that. Not one word. You went through it — the disbelief, the anger, nights spent typing out texts you deleted before sending, the slow, ugly business of living in an apartment that didn’t have her toothbrush in it anymore, because you threw it out yourself, and then immediately wished you hadn’t. You liked brushing your teeth with it… yeah, there was something wrong with you.

By month three you’d started coming back to yourself. You’d catch yourself laughing at something without the laugh snagging on the way up, notice someone across a room without your chest doing that old complicated thing. You thought, almost proud of yourself: I did it. I got out.

Then, month four:

can we talk

You should’ve said no. For four solid months, you had proof that life without her wasn’t just survivable, it was good. You said yes anyway, because saying no to Winter had never once been a muscle you could build, no matter how strong you got everywhere else. Why did she have to be so pretty?

She showed up at a coffee shop looking smaller somehow, like the time apart had worn her down too, and told you she got scared. Said the closeness scared her. Said nobody had ever wanted to really know her before, and it made her feel like she was standing somewhere too high up with nothing to grab onto, so she did what she always did when that happened — ran, quiet, without telling anyone, including herself, that running was the thing she was doing.

Good explanation. Might even have been true. The problem with Winter’s reasons was never that they were fake. The problem was they never once changed what she did next. You let her back in anyway. Course you did. And for a while it was good again, better than good even, because absence has a way of dressing a return up like a gift instead of a risk — until it wasn’t good, until the next disappearing act, a little shorter this time, and the one after that shorter still, until what you had quietly stopped being a relationship with some gaps in it and became, instead, a long string of gaps with the occasional, blinding return wedged in between.

That’s the shape of it now. You stopped waiting for daylight-Winter to stick around. Stopped introducing her to people, stopped hoping for another Christmas, stopped believing the toothbrush would survive past a few months in that cup by the sink. You kept the 2 AM version instead — at least that one was honest about what it was, even when what it was wasn’t close to enough.

You answer her ‘you up’ text.

yeah

It’s not even a real question. It’s a door you’re already holding open before you’ve decided anything. She probably knows. The three dots show up instantly — she was waiting, you realize, sitting there with her thumb hovering, which tells you something about wherever she’s coming from and whoever she just left. You’re the landing pad. The place she comes to when the other places didn’t pan out.

You know this. Same way you know the sun comes up — a fact of life, not something that requires a fresh feeling every time it happens. And you still get out of bed. Still pull a shirt over your head and grab your keys, your hands moving faster than your brain can object, because some part of you stopped asking permission from yourself a long time back.

can i come over

You should say no. You did, once — almost two full months of it, the longest clean stretch since you met her. You remember those two months in detail: the strange weightlessness of them, like you’d set down something heavy you didn’t even know you’d been hauling. You slept through the night again. Texted your friends back within the hour instead of leaving them on read while you waited to see if she’d surface. For two months you genuinely thought you’d done it — gotten free, gotten clean, turned into someone who doesn’t answer a phone at 1:47 in the morning.

Then she showed up at your job with coffee and an apology that wasn’t quite an apology, more a performance of one, and you let her back in inside an hour. That’s the part that actually scares you, if you’re being honest, which you try to be, even though being honest with yourself has never once stopped you from doing the dumb thing regardless. One hour. Two months of work undone before lunch, because she gave you that particular soft look she saves for when she wants something, and you have never, not once in your life, managed to say no to that look.

yeah

come over

She turns up almost forty minutes later in a dress the same green as that first one — not the actual dress, just the color, the one you’ve never been able to look at since without your chest tightening before you’ve even clocked why. You wonder, sometimes, if she does that on purpose. You’ve stopped being able to tell where thoughtless ends and calculated begins with her — whether she even experiences those as two separate things. Maybe to her it’s all one impulse: say the thing that gets the reaction I’m after.

“Hey,” she says, and there’s the smile — used to feel like sun breaking through clouds, now feels like a hand reaching into your ribs and finding the exact one it’s looking for.

“Hey.” You step aside to let her in, even while some worn-down corner of you wants to ask where she’s coming from, whose night she just walked out on to land on your doorstep. You don’t ask. You’ve figured out by now that asking doesn’t get you a real answer — just a thinner version of the truth, slid under the door like a note. And somehow that’s worse than not knowing at all. Not knowing at least leaves room for a story you can stomach.