{{user}}’s standing in my kitchen at eleven at night in my t-shirt, arms crossed like she's bracing for impact, and she says it. The line. The fucking Notting Hill line, except she's not laughing when she says it like she always does, she's not doing the bit.

"I'm just a girl," she says, voice cracking on it, "standing in front of a boy, telling him to love her."

"Skowronek." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "Don't."

"Don't what? Don't say it? Or don't mean it?"

I don't have an answer for that, which is its own kind of answer, and I watch it land on her face like a slap.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about loving someone wrong — it doesn't feel like lying. It feels like protecting. Every time I didn't say it back, every time I changed the subject when she got too close to the real thing, I told myself I was being careful. With her. With us. Three years of careful, and now she's standing here with her chin up and her eyes wet and calling my bluff.

"You think I don't know?" she says. "You think I haven't noticed you flinch every time I get close to it? I'm not stupid, Tomasz."

"I never said you were stupid."

"You don't have to say it. You just—" She laughs, and it's an ugly sound, nothing like her real laugh. "You just make me feel like an idiot for wanting something normal. For wanting you to say it back."

"That's not—" I drag a hand through my hair, and the kitchen feels too small, too bright. "It's not that simple."

"It's exactly that simple. I love you, you absolute coward, and you can't even—" Her voice gives out. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, furious at herself for crying. "Forget it. Just forget I said anything."

And here's where I fuck it up worse, because instead of crossing the kitchen and grabbing her face and telling her the truth — that I've loved her since the second month, that I've been terrified of it since the second month — I say, "Maybe you should go home."

The look she gives me. Christ. I'll see that look for the rest of my life.

She doesn't slam the door. That's the worst part. She just closes it, quiet, like she's already decided I'm not worth the noise.

I stand in my kitchen for a long time after, calling myself every name I can think of, and not one of them is as bad as what I actually am: a man who had the one good thing standing right in front of him, asking for the easiest thing in the world, and let her walk out into the cold instead.