The Ex Returns

Chapter 5:

Amber came back into the picture on a Tuesday, completely out of nowhere, the way exes always seem to, as if they have some cosmic radar for the exact moment you've finally started to feel okay again.

"She wants to get coffee," Jake told Mia over the phone that evening, his voice sounding strange, unsteady in a way she rarely heard from him. "Says she made a mistake. Says she's been thinking about everything."

Mia felt her stomach go cold, the phone suddenly heavy in her hand. She was standing in her kitchen, one hand braced against the counter. "What did you say?"

"I said I'd think about it," Jake admitted. "I don't know why. It just came out."

"Oh." The word came out smaller than she meant it to.

"Mia—"

"No, it's fine," she said quickly, forcing brightness into her voice that she absolutely did not feel. "It's fine. You guys had something real, once. Two years, right? It makes sense you'd want to hear her out, get some closure, whatever you need."

"That's not what I want," Jake said, quieter now, and she could hear the frustration in his voice, though she wasn't sure if it was directed at Amber, at himself, or at the whole tangled mess they'd made of what was supposed to be simple. "I just don't know how to say no to closure, you know? After everything with her ended so badly, so unfinished."

Mia hung up not long after that, feeling like something had cracked open in her chest, spreading slow and cold. She told herself it was nothing. Friends with benefits didn't get to feel this way about exes coming back into the picture. Friends with benefits didn't get to feel like their entire world had tilted sideways over a single coffee date that hadn't even happened yet.

But she did feel that way, sitting alone on her kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets, arms wrapped around her knees like she was trying to hold herself together. And that scared her far more than anything Daniel had ever done to her heart.

She didn't sleep well that night. She kept replaying the conversation, kept imagining Jake sitting across from Amber in some cozy coffee shop, the two of them slipping easily back into old rhythms, old inside jokes, two years of history that Mia couldn't compete with, hadn't ever tried to compete with because she wasn't supposed to be competing at all.

Jake went to coffee with Amber three days later, on a rainy Thursday afternoon. Mia spent the entire afternoon at work pretending she wasn't checking her phone every ten minutes, pretending the knot in her stomach was about a difficult client email and not about a man two miles away sitting across a table from the woman who'd broken his heart.

He called that night, close to nine, his voice sounding tired but clear.

"It was closure," he said. "That's all it was, Mia. I promise you."

"Okay," Mia said carefully, curled up on her couch with a blanket pulled over her knees.

"Mia, I mean it. Sitting across from her, listening to her talk about wanting a second chance, all I could think about was you. The whole time. I kept wanting the conversation to end so I could call you."

Her heart pounded so hard she thought he might be able to hear it through the phone.

"Don't say things like that," she whispered, closing her eyes.

"Why not?"

"Because it breaks the rules, Jake. It breaks all of them."

"Maybe the rules were always going to break eventually," Jake said, his voice soft but sure. "Maybe we just didn't want to admit it out loud, because admitting it means this stopped being simple a long time ago, and neither of us knows what happens next if that's true."

Mia sat with the phone pressed to her ear, tears she hadn't expected pricking at her eyes, and for the first time since they'd made their careful, foolish pact, she let herself really wonder what would happen if they stopped pretending this was something it clearly wasn't anymore.

"I'm glad you came back and told me," she finally said. "Instead of just... not saying anything."

"I'll always tell you the truth, Mia. Even when it's complicated. Especially then."