Juney Bee had always loved too hard.

Not loudly. Not in the cinematic, screaming-in-the-rain kind of way people wrote songs about. Her love was quieter than that. Softer. It lived in the way she remembered little things—favorite candy, how someone took their coffee, the exact shape of their laugh when they were tired. She loved like someone carefully pressing flowers between pages, terrified they’d crumble if touched too roughly.

And when you left, it felt like someone had ripped every page out of the book at once.

Fort Myers kept moving anyway. The palms still swayed in the wet heat. The cicadas still screamed outside her bedroom window every evening. Tourists still crowded the beaches with sunburnt shoulders and disposable joy. The world refused to pause just because Juney Bee’s heart had split open.

That almost offended her.

Her room had become a museum of you.

Books you’d left behind stacked beside her bed. Receipts folded into her drawers from little convenience store runs together at midnight. A hoodie hanging off the back of her desk chair that barely smelled like you anymore, the scent washed down to something faint and ghostlike. Juney still pressed it against her chest sometimes anyway.

She hated herself for that.

The breakup hadn’t even been explosive. That was the worst part. No screaming. No betrayal dramatic enough to make her angry. Just exhaustion. Misunderstanding. Timing that slipped through their fingers like water. You both decided space would help. Time apart. Breathing room.

But Juney didn’t know how to breathe without you in the room anymore.

People still thought she was whimsical. Cute little Juney Bee with ribbons looped through her hair and paint stains on her fingertips. She still smiled in hallways. Still hummed to herself absentmindedly during class. Still wore oversized sweaters that slid off one shoulder and silver rings shaped like moons.

But underneath it all, she felt rotten.

Like something inside her had gone soft and spoiled.

At night, she lay awake tangled in blankets, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to her ceiling since middle school. Her thoughts spiraled until dawn. Every tiny memory replayed itself cruelly. The way your hand used to rest against the small of her back. The shape of your sleepy face lit by TV screens during late-night gaming sessions. The sound of you laughing quietly at one of her terrible jokes like it was the funniest thing in the world.

She missed being known.

That was the unbearable part.

Juney Bee spent so much of her life feeling difficult to love—too emotional, too sensitive, too messy underneath the ribbons and softness. But with you, she never felt like she had to shrink herself down into something easier. You held every strange little piece of her gently, like it was precious.

Nobody had ever done that before.

So now she wandered through Fort Myers like a ghost haunting her own life.

The town looked different after heartbreak. The beaches felt emptier. The fluorescent lights inside gas stations looked harsher at 2 a.m. Rainstorms rolled over the city in thick gray sheets, flooding roads and rattling windows, and Juney would sit on her porch watching it all collapse into water, wondering if this was what grief looked like in Florida—humid and endless.

Sometimes she almost texted you.

Her fingers would hover over your contact while her chest caved in around itself. She’d type paragraphs, erase them, type them again. Tiny desperate things. I saw your favorite drink today. This song sounds like you. Do you miss me too?

Nothing ever got sent.

Because what terrified her most wasn’t losing you.

It was the possibility that maybe you were finally learning how not to need her anymore.

Meanwhile, Juney still needed you in every moment.

Which is why she dialed your number. Why she was chewing anxiously on her thumbnail, hoping maybe... You would answer this time.