Cameron didn't go straight home.
She drove aimlessly for almost an hour—half-hoping she'd get lost, half-hoping the gas would run out. The city blurred past her windows, familiar streets cast in that lonely, sodium-orange glow. Jazz hummed faintly from the car stereo, a playlist she didn't remember making, every track blending into the next without a name.
Cameron had always thought heartbreak would be a more dramatic ordeal. She expected violent sobs, cinematic fits of rage, the kind of heartbreak that leaves walls punched through and mirrors shattered. But in the days following the party, she didn't cry, she didn't scream—she simply existed.
It was different from the panic she felt in the bathroom, different from the suffocating spiral of the moment. That had been fire, sharp and urgent. This was water, slow and inescapable, eroding her in increments she couldn't fight against. She woke up the next morning feeling the same as she always had, but the world had changed in a way she couldn't explain. Jasmine wasn't hers. Jasmine never could have been hers. That truth settled in like an iron weight in her stomach, pressing down but never quite crushing her.
When she finally pulled into her driveway, the clock on the dashboard read 11:48 p.m. The party hadn't even hit its peak when she left.
She turned off the engine. The silence hit like a weight.
Her hands stayed on the steering wheel for a full minute before she moved.
In the apartment, the air was still. She didn't bother turning on the lights—just kicked off her boots and dropped her bag near the door. The carpet felt cold under her feet.
She didn't bother drinking that night, or the night after. Alcohol wouldn't make this feeling go away—it wasn't a matter of numbing, but of elimination. Her feelings had nowhere to go. No outlet, no possibility, no daydream to keep them alive. So they started to dissolve.
It should have been a relief.
Instead, it was a funeral.
She kept replaying that moment in her head—the moment she saw Andrew standing beside Jasmine, the ease of their body language, the unconscious way Jasmine had glanced at him between words. Cameron had been so deluded, so stupidly convinced that fate had thrown them back together for a reason. But Jasmine had already been found, already been claimed. There had never been room for Cameron in that picture.
She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, staring at the floor.
The room felt smaller than usual. Like it had caved in around her while she was out pretending to be a person.
The shame arrived slowly—quiet but undeniable.
She thought back to all of it. The first time she saw Jasmine, the electricity of those weeks working together, the obsession that bloomed and twisted inside her, strangling everything else. She had convinced herself, somehow, that love was supposed to feel like that—frantic, all-consuming, painful. But what was it, really? Love, or just fixation? She could barely remember what had made Jasmine so special in the first place. It had all blurred into something intangible, a warped image she had projected onto someone who had only ever been kind.
And now, she was expected to let it go. To move forward, to continue breathing and functioning as if the past two years hadn't been a slow, festering wound. As if her mind hadn't constructed an entire life in which Jasmine was the answer to a question Cameron had never been able to articulate.
She wondered what Jasmine saw when she looked at her. Just an old coworker? A friend? Did she ever sense the weight of Cameron's thoughts pressing into the space between them, or had it all been completely one-sided? It didn't matter now.
She laid down on her side, clothes still on, her hair still twisted and pinned. She stared at the far wall where a small patch of paint had peeled in the shape of a crescent. She always meant to fix it.
Never did.
Outside, the hum of traffic dulled into nothing. The room grew quieter.
She deleted Jasmine's number that night. It didn't mean anything, not really—Jasmine could text her, could still reach her if she wanted to. But it was the principle of it. A pathetic attempt at severing the last thread. A step towards the nothingness Cameron knew was coming.
And for once, she didn't fight it.