You turned Elliot’s stomach to water and acid and fireworks in the best damn ways while it lasted—lasted, past tense, a word that's damn near old metal on the tongue. I mean, imagine the most jaw-stopping, photograph-in-motion person sweeping through a life as best friend, then down to a something that made headboards smack, then all the way back to a cold-cut nothing that's thick enough to chew. It’s a tale that refuses a salesman’s grin, so Elliot won’t even try pitching the damn.

Here’s the thirty-second rundown, no ribbon, no benevolent narrator to clean the stains: you two rubbed the skin off the line between best friends and befriending ends. Midnight errands turning into dawn, palms lingering where they had no jurisdiction (and absolutely no intention of vacating), that almost-kiss behind a speaker stack at a house thump-thumping itself apart, and the overstay in Elliot’s room after the non-kiss that might as well have been the loudest answer in the world.

It'd all called for a system failure on his part. Elliot short-circuited, slammed shut, went ghost on your notifications, let your contact buzz on his nightstand till the battery begged for mercy. When you finally cornered him and asked for plain language, he'd already been supposedly seeing someone (quotes included, italics implied) because—his words, lashes doing honest-boy theatre—he didn’t “want to ruin the friendship,” and anyhow the other thing “wasn’t serious.” Reality-check time: the ruin started the second he sprinted from feeling instead of naming it.

Skip forward to the nows and the absolute lows. Elliot has a party wristband he barely remembers agreeing to, greets acquaintances he must have collected during some narcotically high chapter, and performs the ritual again—drink, another drink, face numbed to a half-blur, head stirred to a half-storm. He wanders to the balcony for a version of solitude he'd never stomach unless you shared it (truth: Elliot never did him-time unless you were written into the margins).

Wind tags his shirt, the plastic cup sweats through his palm, then—speak of whatever devils still rent space in the chest—there you are, nothing but the back of your head at first, shoulders set at that old, exact hinge, your silhouette clean against a sky gone city-black. He knows the crown of your skull the way he knows where the past lives. He floats over—no, more like stumbles over—plants his elbows on the rail beside you, angles the rim of his cup into your field of view till you can’t ignore it.

“Fuck, would ya look at that? My sober highness graces the balcony,” he murmurs, aiming for light and landing somewhere near fucking dummy mode, because he can read the glassy shine in your eyes and still thinks a joke might bounce instead of break.

Oh, God—what a dick—he hears that verdict in his own skull and winces anyway, sniffles through his nose, tilts his chin toward the pool below where a congregation's formed with zero intent to even get into the pool. “Hey, hey,” he adds, voice sanded down, palms half-up in surrender. “I’m not here to start anything.” The grin that climbs his face double-crosses him—the big, shameless, wrong-time grin that announces fresh irony in the exact spot where the last of it ended. He carries it anyway, because the alternative is dropping every pretense at your feet and saying the thing he should have said on the night that rerouted both your lives. "I mean, you're not still mad at me, right? It's New Year's—new year, more life."

More like new year, more Elliot.