The room you stood in was quiet. In fact, it held a chaotic silence. A silence that craved an interruption, that needed a break, just like you. The lack of noise assisted in eating you alive, along with the melting eyes you were looking into. The cool blue walls iced you into a spontaneous chill that was immediately noticed by him.
You took a moment to step back, making the floor creak slowly. The delay distracted you from what was right in front of you, but only for a split second. You reflected back on why you were even here, still maintaining eye contact with him. He reached his tired hand out to you one last time, but you didn’t accept. His face transitioned from concerned to showing pure anger like the flip of a light switch. His light was on, and suddenly his light was off.

You knew why you were here; you knew why you were here with him. While looking into his blue eyes, glancing at his blue shirt, feeling the concrete blue of his walls pressing down on you, you realized his cool blue didn’t match with your fiery red. You didn’t want to disrupt his peace, but he couldn’t understand.

“How much longer are you going to play this game with me? You can’t keep closing yourself off to people and getting mad when they can’t understand how you feel, and I’m sick of being the first person you go to blame. This needs to end, please,” he begged you, helplessly.

You were at a loss for words. You found it extremely difficult to even move your mouth from slightly open to closed. However, you didn’t feel alone for the first time in a long time. Something about the environment you were in, the air, the feeling he gave you of wanting to know you, gave you hope. But for now, you ignored it.
“Do not put this on me!” you yelled, “I don’t need this, you don’t need this. If you’re not happy, then why are you still waiting for me to change?”

“Are you kidding me?” he said in almost a whisper, with watery eyes. His eyes were melting.

“You don’t understand, and you’re right, it is because I won’t let you in. But you don’t want to be let in, Cole. You don’t and I know you don’t. But you keep persisting and you make me feel bad for protecting myself, and I get that you feel left out but trust me, you’re not missing out,” you expressed to him in the most sympathetic way it was possible for you to do so in that moment, which wasn’t too sympathetic at all.

He stared you down as if he had been offended. It hurt you to see how much you have affected him by trying to make yourself unaffected by him. It hurt you just as much as you thought opening up to him would.
He continued to stand there in awe, wondering “how could you say such a thing”, but you didn’t know the answer. He asked you why you didn’t trust him. You didn’t know the answer. He asked you why you compare your relationship with him to other friends who have left you in the past. You didn’t know the answer. So, he assumed the answers for himself.

“You act as if I haven’t been here for the time that I have. Does nine months mean anything to you? You have been there for me for everything that’s happened with my brother and the family business...I’ve told you some of my biggest secrets, the ones that I had never even told myself before you heard them first, and you have the audacity to say that you can’t trust me? How the hell do you think I feel?” he said. He was so angry. You never thought he was capable of possessing this anger. “But, you know what? You’re selfish. You’re straight selfish, that’s the problem. You have some nerve to ask for me to stay with you when I don’t even know you.” You gave him a very confused look. “Yeah, that’s right, I have no idea who you are.”

You took a brief pause and clicked your phone on to check the time, in hopes it would remove you from this guilt that was pulling you down onto the wood floor. You scrolled through a few notifications that caught your eyes.

“You have got to be kidding me, right now. Really?!” he snapped at you. “I want to talk to you and you whip out your phone? Maybe that’s your problem. You don’t know how to communicate with people. And maybe it’s not just you, maybe your old friends didn’t know either, but I do. And I am here now. I am right in front of you. I’m not going to walk away from you either. I’m not that type of person but the fact that you think I am is so painful.” He paused. “Maybe this is why people walked out on you.”

At that moment, you knew you had made a big mistake. You reflected back on your past. The backstabbing friends, the persuasive boys, the unreliant parents, the numbing that had been done to your conscience, and everything else that you experienced during your ugliest days. They had all failed you. They had all failed you epically. When you couldn’t tell the difference between a good day and a bad day, they didn’t care. When you told them every detail of your mind and how you were feeling after they asked, they didn’t listen. When you needed help dealing with your lack of personal identity, they left. You didn’t want to put Cole in the same position they were in, in fear he would behave in the same manner. You feared he would be shocked by what he discovered inside of your head, and distance himself from you.

You felt icicles forming above your head from the frost that began to grow between you and Cole. You knew what he wanted, but you didn’t know how you could give it to him. The piece of you that he wanted had snapped long before him, and you never had the faith in yourself to tie it back together.

“Are you just going to stand there and stare at me?” he asked you.

“I don’t know what to say,” you mumbled.

“What was that?” he asked. You hadn’t spoken loud enough.

“I just don’t know what to say!” you yelled at him. Tears built up around your eye’s waterline. You felt a lump grow in your throat and you sniffled.

Cole sighed, “...like you always do.”

The look on his face made your eyes burn and your heart crack in two. His cheeks were red and the bottom half of his face fell to the floor. His melting eyes sparkled like never before, but his smile that had always been their pair, was nonexistent. You took a small step forward, hoping to be accepted by him, but your roles had reversed. He stepped back, retreating, just like you did to him for so long.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered as you stared at your feet.

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said, forcing the tears out of your eyes.

You reached for him in hopes of not only touching his arm, but touching his soul. He wouldn’t allow it. He stepped away and turned his head; it was the first time he turned his head away from you since the conversation started. You turned around, slowly took his sweatshirt off of yourself, folded it and held it tightly against your chest. You wiped a salty tear from your left cheek and turned to face him again.

“I’ll leave this here,” you said, not letting your eyes leave his even when you placed the sweatshirt on the chair next to him. He didn’t say a word. His face expressed anger, but mostly disappointment.

You felt it was hopeless to stand in front of him hoping that something miraculous would solve this problem and return you two back to “normal,” so you left. You left and as you walked out, you pulled the door shut, making a moderately loud creak until you heard the click of the bedroom door, the same click that declared that the damage was done. You slowly walked down the hall steps and let yourself out onto the front porch.

You felt the cold air blow up against you, not even phasing you. Your red, short sleeve shirt did not protect you from the December wind, but you couldn't feel the cold anyways. Tears strolled slowly down your face, and you realized something that terrified you: building up your wall didn’t prevent people from leaving or hurting you, it only pushed away the one person who cared about you. Now it was too late.

•••

You barely felt the buzz of your phone vibrate against your frozen leg.

“Cole” flashed on your screen. You answered, “Hello?”

“Let me know you.”