being part two of three in the story: feeling this.

Smoke curls disjointedly in the air, coalescing in a low-hanging cloud below the ceiling light. Wilbur watches Comet as she exhales, her lips parting, practiced, as they release more fog into the already hazy bedroom. She hands him back the blunt and leans back, curled like a fawn against his cushions, doe-eyes rimmed with red.

He finds his eyes wandering more and more recently, never finding anything, anyone, he deems worth his time. Harsh, perhaps: but he can't afford less. Not when every second has in its undertones a heavy ache, not when he needs good people to live. Wilbur drags from the blunt, where she was a second earlier, tastes her lipgloss faintly under that of marijuana. Back to her; and she drops it into a crystalline ashtray by his bedside, a gift from his father he found a thousand years ago in a desk drawer, still with the card addressed to Genevieve, his mother.

"Et nous attendons maintenant," he announces; and now, we wait.

So they wait.

Wilbur shifts far more than Comet does, legs crossing and uncrossing, straightening and clicking his back from the lack of support from the bedframe at his back until finally he just lies down, legs pointed towards the pillows, next to her. The tension is already slipping from her, and she makes herself cosy in a nest of cushions, pulling at loose threads in his duvet.

It's the first time he can really look at her after she saved his life. Through a haze of weed and the scotch she doesn't know he snuck earlier—that's the only reason he invited her to his. They didn't use to need invitations.

Ridges around Comet's eyes are heavier now, ex-laugh lines. She doesn't wear her usual thick eyeliner, stars drawn on in graphic shadow; she wears darker clothes, like she's in mourning. She looks empty without brightly coloured belt chains, homemade tank tops, ripped and stitched up skirts. She's still beautiful.

He's fully, totally embarrassed she saw him the way she did. But Comet smiles like she knows nothing.

...

He feels Comet watching him almost constantly; insistently attentive, not liking him to be alone for too long lest anything happen. She was a little like this before—as one is with a best friend—but now its hurting her. As if Wilbur isn't guilty enough.

On a quiet night that feels the same, except they're sober; it's maybe half a week later: "Je veux t'aider à te sentir mieux." The offer, finally vocalised, falls from his lips when he sees her staring, again, at the shadowy bags hanging under his eyes; sorrowful as though she does not carry the same weight. Comet starts, finally looks at him proper.

"I feel fine," she smiles. Clutched in her fingers is a plush bunny, ears flopping over her whitening knuckles. He recalls she bought it for him, for his fourteenth birthday, when he was far too old for that kind of thing. But it had round glasses, just like him, wiry frames stitched to its face; they hang off at an angle now.

She does not feel fine. Does she think he's stupid?—and Wilbur shakes his head.

The words escape him in French, so he strings them together in English (nothing sounds half as romantic when he has to switch tongues): "You're hurting yourself for my sake. I don't like you watching over me like this."

"Wilbur..." She swallows, touched by his worry even though care should be even on both sides, even though she thinks he cares less than she does and yet doesn't mind. "I don't need anything from you, love. I'm just glad you're alive. Je serais morte sans vous." I would have died without you.

A huge pit opens up in Wilbur's stomach; he's scared he might be swallowed whole. Guilt rips him to shreds—he bites the inside of his lip, draws blood—Comet looks at him again with sickening sweet sympathy—she thinks she's helped, a little, it's all she fucking wants.

There it is. There isn't much else left to say.