It felt like everything was sorted. Finished. Wrapped up. 

But it wasn’t.

Jacob may have found what he wanted, but I sure hadn’t. Though I wasn’t jealous of Cailyn for having Jacob, I was jealous of their relationship. I envied them and their happiness, the way they were. I longed for it, the closeness. I’d had it, perhaps just once…

He realised my unhappiness. I guess it couldn’t have been very well hidden; I wasn’t making an effort. I was beginning to get sick of feeling upset all the time. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, as though I was crossing things of a list that just kept growing.

We were down at the beach, huddled together, his arm around my shoulders. Though I still loved him like I did before, and I think he felt the same way, we sat there as friends, comforting each other. He sighed, and I looked up at his face. He was staring out, into the sea-but his eyes were glazed, and he was obviously looking at something else, something from another time.

“We were so close, weren’t we?” I was startled by his tone, his words, and the sudden break of the silence. I met his eyes, confused.

“Without the…monsters. Without them, we’d have been fine. If there wasn’t all this other stuff, we’d have been normal, got along fine,” Worry shot through me. Was everything with Cailyn a lie? Did he resent the connection between them? Surely he couldn’t. “I mean, I have Cailyn. But you don’t have anyone. Always one of us, eh? Always one on their own, without anyone, just looking up from where they are, angry and envious,”

“I’m not-“

“Not angry, I know, I know. I can see that you’re happy for me. But you’re not happy for you, are you? You’re miserable. Something’s missing, and you know it, you feel it.” I didn’t give thought to how Jacob knew me so well that he was listing the exact points of what I had been feeling. I just stared at the waves as they grew larger, and then crashed as they neared us. We were sitting fairly close, and so I was often sprayed, though only slightly. I sighed, mimicking his earlier release of breath, laying my head on his shoulder. It was quite cold, especially here, at the coast, where the wind blew my hair into my face repeatedly, but his incredible heat kept me warm.