Bambi's POV:
The apartment felt dead that night. Empty in a way that pressed in from every side, like the walls themselves were exhaling and forgetting to inhale again. Mateo had taken off hours ago—said he needed to "clear his head," which honestly always meant he'd end up at Lucas's place, venting about life and pretending he wasn't dragging the rest of us down with him. Without his constant noise—the phone notifications, the aimless commentary, the weight of his presence taking up space he hadn't earned—the silence got heavy. Almost suffocating.
I hated how predictable it was. Hated that I could map his evenings without trying. Hated that I'd stopped expecting anything else.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed, folding laundry. Mateo's crumpled shirts, the ones he left in balls on the bathroom floor. Jade's soft sweaters, the oatmeal-colored one with the hole in the sleeve I kept meaning to mend. My work apron, still smelling faintly of spilled vodka tonics and regret. The rhythm of folding was meditative, something my mother had taught me: corners aligned, sleeves tucked, creases pressed flat. Order from chaos. Pretend.
That's when I noticed Jade at the window.
The last of the evening light caught her hair, made it shine deep brown with hints of auburn I usually only saw in direct sun. She stood very still, phone in hand, barely breathing. Her reflection in the glass was ghostlike, translucent—like she was already halfway out of this life, this room, this body.
Lately, I'd been noticing all the things about her I shouldn't.
The way she smirks when she wants to make me laugh, one corner of her mouth lifting higher than the other. How she looks with her hair in a messy bun, those dark strands escaping to frame her face like she's always mid-unraveling. The dip of her waist. The sharp cut of her collarbones. Her in a sports bra and those gray sweatpants that barely hang on her hips, the drawstring loose, the fabric soft from years of washing.
The night she got drunk and leaned in so close my heart just stopped—not because I thought she'd kiss me, but because I realized in that moment that I desperately wanted her to.
"Jade?" I said, keeping my voice low.
She didn't even flinch at first. Just kept staring at that screen like it held her entire future, balanced on a knife's edge.
I set down the shirt I was folding and walked over, my bare feet cold on the worn floorboards. I touched her shoulder.
She jerked like I'd burned her, then locked her screen way too fast.
My stomach dropped, a familiar, sickening lurch. I knew that movement. I'd done it myself a hundred times—hiding bank notifications, hiding collection agency messages, hiding the evidence of how close we were to the edge.
"What's up?" I asked, keeping my voice even.
"Nothing." Too quick. Sharp. "Spam."
I just looked at her. "Spam doesn't make you look like that."
She let out this shaky breath, like I'd poked a hole in whatever wall she'd spent hours building. Her shoulders dropped. The fight drained out of her all at once, and she suddenly looked so tired—tired in a way that went deeper than missed sleep or long shifts.
Finally, she handed me the phone.
The screen glowed with one message: I'll pay you good for company. Some random number, no name attached. The timestamp showed she'd been staring at it for eleven minutes.
I swear, the whole room shrank all at once.
"Jade…" I whispered.
Her eyes were glassy. Worn out. She wouldn't look at me. "We're three months behind on rent, Bambi."
"I know. But this? No." I tried to sound sure, but my throat felt tight, like someone was pressing their thumb against my windpipe. "No, Jade. Absolutely not."
She just stared at the wall, at Bartholomew the water stain, at the crack spreading from the corner of the window frame. "You can't be serious," I said, pushing. "There's gotta be another way—"
"There isn't." Her voice cracked right down the middle. "I've tried everything. Everything. Nobody's calling me back. The landlord threatened eviction again. And Mateo—"
She stopped, but we both knew what she meant.
Mateo wasn't helping. Couldn't help. Wouldn't, even if he could. He was drowning too, but he'd decided the best way to survive was to float face-down and pretend the water wasn't filling his lungs.
My chest ached, a deep physical pain that had taken up residence months ago and refused to leave. "Jade… this could mess you up. This could—you don't come back from some things."
She finally looked at me, really looked. Her eyes were red-rimmed, exhausted, but there was something else there too—a hardness I'd never seen before, forged in the space between desperation and survival. She pushed the hair out of my face, her fingers grazing my cheek, and I saw everything she'd tried to hide. Guilt. Shame. Fear.
And underneath all of it, something stubborn. Something that refused to let us drown.
"He said he'd pay almost all the rent in one night." Her voice was barely there, barely audible over the hum of the ancient refrigerator. "One night, Bambi."
I sank onto the edge of the bed. My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, trying to steady myself, but the tremor ran all the way through me. "I can't let you do this alone."
She blinked, shocked. "Bambi, no. That's not why I showed you. I didn't—I just needed someone to know. In case—"
"But if you go," I said, my mouth dry, "it doesn't feel right letting you carry it by yourself."
Jade knelt down in front of me, grabbed my hands. Hers were cold. "I don't want you to. You're the one good thing left."
My stomach twisted. None of this was fair. Not what I felt. Not any of it. "Not if watching you break ruins me," I whispered.
Her breath caught.
We sat in that space for a long time, just breathing, not moving. The distance between us buzzed—terrifying and hot and real. I could count her eyelashes. Could see the tiny mole beneath her left ear. Could feel the shape of her fingers interlaced with mine.
Mateo never got this. Never saw what we had just under the surface, this constant low hum of something that had never found its name. He saw us as his—his girlfriend, his friend—without understanding that we existed in dimensions he'd never bothered to explore.
Then Jade let it fall: "I'm scared."
That was all it took. Not the bravado, not the stubbornness, not the fierce independence. Just those two words, spoken so quietly I almost missed them.
I pressed my forehead to hers. Her skin was warm. "Then we do it together."
Her breath shook on my cheek. "Bambi…"
"Together," I said again. "If that's what it takes to survive."
She squeezed her eyes shut. A tear escaped, streaked down her cheek. I caught it with my thumb, and she leaned into my palm like she was starving for touch, for kindness, for someone to just hold her without wanting anything else.
I wanted things. God, I wanted so many things. But in that moment, all I wanted was for her to be okay.
That night, she went first. Alone.
I waited, pacing the apartment, checking the clock every five minutes. 11:47. 12:13. 12:58. I prayed she'd come home safe. I prayed she'd just turn back, walk through the door and say she couldn't do it. I prayed and I didn't believe in anything, and the silence ate all my prayers anyway.
She came in at 2:41 AM. Makeup smeared. Eyes hollow. She didn't speak. Didn't have to.
She walked straight into my arms and I held her until she stopped shaking. I didn't even ask what happened. I couldn't. Some doors you don't open because you're afraid of what's waiting on the other side.
Two days later, I followed her.
That was it—our lives bent in a way we never saw coming, a fracture that would either heal wrong or never heal at all. I told myself it was survival. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself a lot of things, and none of them made the shame sit any lighter in my chest.
Mateo didn't notice at first.
He stayed out late, slept through mornings, kept asking the wrong questions—What's for dinner? Did anyone pick up my prescription? Why are we out of beer?—never the ones that mattered. He just thought we were stressed. Thought we were tired. Thought we were distant because of the money problems, the landlord, the usual grind of being young and broke and slowly realizing the world wasn't going to hand us anything.
But one night, he came home early.
Jade was in the bathroom, scrubbing off someone else's cologne—she always hated the smell, the way it clung to her skin like residue she couldn't wash away. I was at the table, counting cash. My hands were barely steady, the bills making soft whispering sounds as I stacked them. Twenties. Tens. Fives. Enough to cover rent. Enough to keep us here, in this crumbling apartment, in this life we'd built on sand.
Mateo stood in the doorway, just staring.
"What's all that money?" he asked.
My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. "Tips."
"From what?" His voice edged sharp. "You said the bar's been dead."
Jade came out of the bathroom, hair wet, eyes going wide when she saw him. Water dripped down her neck, disappearing into the collar of her shirt. And God help me, even now, even with everything—she looked stunning. The kind of beautiful that made you understand why people wrote poems about things they couldn't have.
Mateo's eyes moved from her damp neck to the bills in my hand. The calculation happening behind his face was visible, a slow horror dawning.
"Tell me," he said, quiet but hard. He never asked softly. Always a demand dressed up as a question.
Jade stepped in front of me, like a shield. "Mateo, just—"
"Are you sleeping with men for money?"
The words hit the room like a slap.
I felt sick. My vision tunneled. The cash in my hands suddenly felt obscene, evidence of something I couldn't take back.
Jade froze.
Mateo's expression twisted into something ugly, something wounded and furious. His face was reddening, the vein in his temple pulsing. I'd seen him angry before—at landlords, at bosses, at the world that kept saying no—but I'd never seen him look at us like this.
"You're both doing it?" he hissed.
Neither of us answered. Our silence was confession enough.
He laughed—a hollow, disgusted sound that bounced off the walls and came back sharper. "Unbelievable. You go behind my back? You—you spread your legs for random men instead of asking me for help?"
He started pacing, running his hands through his hair, pulling at the ends. "I almost killed Lucas when he said it. I told him to shut up, told him he didn't know what he was talking about. I defended you. Both of you. And you were actually—" He stopped, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob.
"You can't help!" Jade snapped, her voice breaking. "You haven't helped in months! You don't work, you don't contribute, you just exist here and take and take and we're drowning, Mateo. We're drowning and you're standing on the shore asking why the water is wet."
He flinched like she'd hit him.
I stepped forward, voice shaking. "We did it to survive. That's all. To keep this apartment, to keep us together, to keep—" I stopped. What was I even trying to say? To keep you from having to face how bad it's gotten? To keep pretending we were still the same people who moved in here two years ago?
Mateo stared at us. At me. At Jade. At the money on the table. At the life we'd built and the lie we'd told and the truth that was now sitting in the middle of the room like a bomb that had already detonated.
And in his eyes, I saw it: not concern for what we'd endured. Not guilt for his own absence. Not fear for what this would do to us.
Betrayal. Pure, simple, selfish betrayal.
Not because of the danger we'd faced. Not because of the pain we carried. But because we'd done something without him. Something he couldn't control.
Something that proved, finally and completely, that we didn't need him to survive.
That night, everything changed.
He didn't leave. Not then. Not yet. But something in the apartment shifted—the air grew thinner, the walls closer, the silence between us deeper and more absolute. We moved around each other like strangers sharing a subway car, careful not to touch, careful not to speak.
I lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling, listening to Jade's breathing on the other side of the thin wall. Listening to Mateo's restless tossing beside me.
And I thought about knots, and how they tore.
I thought about three people standing at different bus stops, all hoping the same vehicle would somehow carry them in opposite directions.
I thought about love—how it could look so many different ways. How it could be tender and fierce and desperate and destructive. How you could love someone and still be wrong for them. How you could love someone and still fail them. How you could love someone and still have no idea how to keep them.
I thought about Jade's forehead pressed against mine, her breath on my cheek.
Together, I'd said.
But together required all of us pulling in the same direction. And I wasn't sure, anymore, if we even remembered how.
Outside, the city roared on, indifferent and vast.
Inside, three people loved each other in all the wrong ways.
And none of us knew how to stop.