Chapter Text
“Do your therapy sessions usually have this much awkward silence?”
She’s sitting on the floor of Marnie’s chicken coop, criss-cross applesauce. The spring breeze drifting in through the windows is cool, and she’s thankful she threw on a cardigan before leaving the house. She picks up a piece of hay from the wooden floor and rolls it between her fingers, trying to calm her nerves. A fluffy blue hen pecks at Shane’s boot, clucking quietly.
“Nah,” Shane snorts, picking the bird up. “I figured it was a good idea to let you commune with the chickens a bit. Thought it might help you feel more comfortable talking about your big, scary feelings.”
Ava frowns. “Look, if you’re just gonna make fun of me…”
“No, no, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be dismissive or whatever. You helped me a lot, back when I was depressed. Not that I’m not still depressed, but, healthier coping mechanisms. Therapy. You know.” He gestures vaguely.
“I didn’t really do anything.”
“You were around when I needed someone, and, honestly? That helped,” he says matter-of-factly, stroking Charlie’s feathers. “So, you know, I wanna do the same for you. Not sure how much good it’ll do, in your case, but…”
She hums, twirling the piece of straw between her fingers. There’s another tense beat of silence, and, honestly, she’s also kind of starting to wonder whether this will actually do anything to help her get over Sebastian, but… Well. Harvey had seemed insistent.
“Right, okay, so, how does this work? Do I just… Talk?”
“Uh, usually there’s a questionnaire at the beginning. I don’t have one of those, so…” He shoos Charlie off his lap and gives Ava his full attention. “How’ve you been feeling?”
“I’ve been great!” she says with confidence, forcing a smile on reflex.
He raises an eyebrow. “You spent last night throwing up flowers. Try again.”
“I’ve been…” She twirls the hay between her fingers and averts her eyes, her smile sliding into a grimace. “Mostly great?”
“Okay,” he says, scratching at the stubble on his jaw, like he’s thinking. “And, uh… Yeah, what does ‘mostly great’ look like for you?”
“I’m keeping up with my farm work pretty well! This last week’s been really productive, actually, despite the, uh”—the day Sebastian and I spent hanging out together in the city, she thinks and then shoves down, despite the flowers taking over my lungs—“everything else going on.”
“Uh-huh.” He frowns a little, like this isn’t enough to convince him, and she rushes to add more to the pile of evidence that she’s coping super well with this whole hanahaki thing.
“I just filled a special order for Gus yesterday! And I’m making good progress on the greenhouse, and my first crop of strawberries is shaping up pretty well this year, and, uh… Oh, you’ll like this one— I’ve been incubating a bunch of chicken eggs!” Seb’s been excited to see the baby chicks, she almost says, but she catches it before it leaves her mouth and chokes it down. He can see the baby chicks once she gets over herself.
“Cool,” he says, and she thinks she’s done well, until he adds: “None of that is an answer to what I asked.”
She frowns. “You asked how I’m doing.”
“I asked how you’re feeling.”
“Oh.” She picks at one end of the hay until it splits. She pulls it in two slowly, watching the uneven halves come apart in her hands, then discards them and picks up a new piece. “Is there a difference?”
“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure you know that.” He waits for a beat, and then, when she doesn’t elaborate, asks: “So? How’re you feeling?”
“I am feeling,” she says, snapping the straw in half, “like I don’t want to think about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because this sucks!”
Her voice comes out angrier and louder than she expects it to. She drops the straw and looks at Shane, worried that she’s offended him, but he doesn’t look upset. Instead, he’s nodding encouragingly, a hint of a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth.
“Yeah!” he agrees, eyes bright, like he’s trying to egg her on. “It sucks!”
“Right? It does suck! So bad!” Now that she has affirmation, she can’t stop the words from tumbling out. “And the worst part is that I’ve been trying to be good, you know? I’ve been trying so hard to keep this big stupid horrible crush under wraps and just think of him as a friend, but I can’t even do that right, because, like, everything he does makes me feel—!”
She bites her lip and tilts her head back, blinking up at the dust motes that dance in the slanting shafts of afternoon sunlight. She takes a deep breath and tries her best not to cry.
“It’s just so unfair,” she says to the rafters, her voice quivering in an embarrassing sort of way, “that I have to lose my best friend over some damn flowers.”
Her chest hurts. She takes another deep, shuddering, breath, then one more, waiting for the inevitable coughing, but it doesn’t come. She lowers her gaze and locks eyes with Shane, who’s studying her with an expression that’s as close to approval as she thinks his particular face can get.
“Alright,” he finally says, “and how do you feel about that?”
.
“So, I tried that mood tracker thing you suggested,” she tells him a few days later, settling in on a bale of hay. She unwraps a honey-flavored cough drop and pops it into her mouth. It doesn’t do much for the actual cough, but her throat’s feeling a little raw. “I think I need to change the app I’m using. I keep feeling unproductive, and it doesn’t have that listed as an option in the feelings wheel.”
“That’s because ‘unproductive’ isn’t an emotion.”
“Sure,” Ava says, even though she’s not sure she really agrees. “Anyway! The good news is, I’ve been pretty happy, generally speaking.”
“Uh-huh.” Shane squints, looking skeptical. “And the bad news?”
“The bad news is that it’s probably because I’ve still been texting Seb?”
Shane has said, before, that he sometimes feels like everyone in the world is scrutinizing him, watching him, judging him, like he’s some sort of disgusting insect. The look he gives Ava makes her wonder if he might be projecting.
“I know,” she insists, immediately launching into defensive mode. “I’m probably not supposed to, but, like, I’ve been thinking about it…”
Shane grumbles something under his breath that vaguely sounds like, Have you?
“The problem isn’t that I’m texting him, it’s how I feel about it. If I can just make myself feel platonic about it or whatever, the way I should—”
“That’s a ‘should’ statement,” Shane grunts, giving her a sharp look, and she rolls her eyes.
“Right, okay, the way that’s healthy for me,” she corrects, while really still meaning should, “then— voila! No more killer flowers, and we get to stay friends! And,” she adds proudly, holding up a finger, “last time he texted me, I waited a whole ten minutes before reading it!”
“And that helped your symptoms?”
“Um… I coughed so hard that I threw up again?”
Shane looks like he’s about to say something, but then, almost like she’s summoned Sebastian by talking about him, Ava’s phone buzzes. She reaches out for it on instinct, and the phone is in her hand before she can think twice. Shane clears his throat, and she slams it face-down on the bale of hay next to her and folds her hands in her lap.
“See? I can put it down. I’m super good with this.”
The phone buzzes again. Her hands twitch. Her throat tickles.
Shane heaves a long-suffering sigh. “Right. Are you gonna get that, or…?”
Ava snatches up the phone and unlocks it immediately. Sebastian’s sent her a frog meme. It’s funny. She giggles, typing out a response, and then, remembering that she’s supposed to be reigning herself in a little bit, deletes the text before sending it and just likes his message instead. There’s another tickle in her throat when she does it, but coughing a few times seems to clear it out, so she counts it as a win.
“Hoh-kay.” Shane sighs again, standing and moving to the far corner of the room, where the feed dispenser is. He picks up a bucket. “So, there are two options, here. On the one hand, we have: Cutting off contact entirely, and letting your friendship die a slow, painful, completely unnecessary death.” He yanks a handle attached to the wall, and a chute neatly dispenses some chicken feed. “On the other hand, we have: Talking. Like grown-ups.”
She frowns, setting her phone down beside her and settling back on the hay bale. “Okay, that sounds really biased.”
“That’s because it is.”
“I thought therapists weren’t supposed to tell you what to do.”
“Well, it’s good thing I’m not a therapist, then, isn’t it?” he deadpans, moving towards the center of the room and tossing a fistful of corn to the chickens. “Look, if you’re gonna get over him, you’re gonna have to actually cut him off, and, uh, honestly? That seems like a non-starter, for you.”
“So, what? You’re saying I don’t have enough self-control to do it?”
“I’m saying you need to have more realistic expectations for yourself.” He throws out some more feed, and the chickens gather at his feet, ruffling their feathers and clucking. “The thing is, uh… How long have you been into him?”
“I dunno, pretty much since we met? Or, wait”—she leans forward, because this is an opportunity to deflect and redirect, and she’s going to sieze it—“okay, do you mean romantically? Or, like, sexually? Because those have two different answers.”
He wrinkles his nose. “Ugh. Forget I asked.”
“I mean, I’ve been kicking around the romantic feelings since, like, probably last summer, but sexually, I mean— I dunno where you’re at on the Kinsey scale, but you’ve got eyes. You’ve seen him in skinny jeans before, right? And his hands—”
“Nope, nope, I really don’t wanna know. Point is, if this has been going on for, what, a year or so? It’s not gonna be easy to get over.” Her phone vibrates again, and he raises his eyebrows pointedly. “Especially if you keep texting him.”
“I know that!” She crosses her arms. “That’s why I’m here! Look, you’re, like, the expert on quitting things that’re bad for you, right? So can’t you just—”
“Did you just compare alcohol abuse to having feelings?”
She stops short. “No? I mean, maybe, but when you put it like that, it sounds…”
He dumps the rest of the chicken feed on the ground unceremoniously, then turns on his heel to face her and asks: “You know why I used to drink?”
“Um…”
“Because I was depressed,” he says bluntly, without waiting for her answer. “Folks think depression’s just being sad all the time, but that’s not really what it’s like. Mostly, it’s just… Numb. Like all of your emotions are dead in the water.”
(Ava thinks back to her time at Joja, and wonders: Huh, there’s a word for that?)
“And it’s scary, feeling like that. So instead of facing it head-on, I tried to ignore it. I went to the saloon every night and drank myself under a table because then, at least, I had an excuse to feel numb, you know? And because nothing really felt like it mattered, and sometimes because if I was drunk, I could avoid existing for a bit, which was…” He shakes his head. “Point is, I was doing everything within my power to ignore what I was feeling. Sound familiar?”
He strides across the room and slams the bucket back down on its hook.
“So, you know, if you ask me— which, for the record, you did— it’s not the feelings that’re killing you, here.” He whirls around and fixes her with a glare. “It’s your insistence that those feelings don’t exist.”
“Look, just because I don’t want to ruin our friendship over some stupid crush—!”
Shane scoffs. “Oh, is that what you think this is?”
“What do you mean?” She laughs, feels the roots in her chest go tight. “What do you think it is?”
“I think you’re in love with him.”
She chokes on air. Opens her mouth. Closes it.
“I didn’t think so, at first, but the way you talk about him makes me pretty freaking sure this isn't just the ‘stupid crush’ you keep insisting it is.” He glances over at her expression and rolls his eyes. “What, now you’re embarrassed? You were so eager to explain how sexually attracted you are to him, two minutes ago, but fessing up to loving him is a step too far?”
“I— Yes, fine!” she bites out, crossing her arms. “It’s, I dunno, love, or whatever. Probably.”
“Great. Now try saying it without a bunch of conditionals attached.”
She groans and kicks the hay bale she’s sitting on with the heel of her work boot, burying her face in her hands. “I’m in love with Sebastian.”
He slow-claps. “There we go, thank you.”
She drops her hands to her lap. “But I can’t just tell him that!”
“You can. It’s very easy. You go down to his little basem*nt lair, preferably with a bouquet in your hands, and then you open your mouth and say words.”
“No. No! The whole point of this”—she jabs a finger between the two of them—“is to help me get over it! I should be able to get over it, if I just…!”
“I really don’t think you can. Not within the next week or two, at least, which is… Probably about how long you’ve got, if you’re coughing up buds, already.” Ava’s phone buzzes again, and he heaves a sigh. “Buh, I really shouldn’t be saying this, all things considered, but dammit, Ava, you’re pretty much already dating him, you know? You spend enough time with each other that it’s practically a part-time job. Do you really think he’s going to turn you down?”
Her lungs twinge. “He might.”
“But if he doesn’t?”
“Yeah, sure, Shane, what if he says yes?” she asks, flinging herself up off of the bale of hay and stalking towards the opposite side of the room. The chickens scatter. “If he says yes, then— then we do go out for a while, sure, and that’s great, but then what happens when he changes his mind?”
“Why the hell would he change his mind?”
“Because I’m not enough!” she snaps, and it’s not what she was expecting to say, but it feels true. It must not be the answer Shane was expecting, either, because the annoyed skepticism drops from his face. “What happens when he figures out that I skimp on sleep and food when things get too busy, and then get snippy with other people about it? That I take too many requests from the help board and then get overwhelmed and don’t fill them all?”
“Everyone knows you do that.”
“Right, but what happens when he gets tired of it? What happens when he decides that actually, a swanky six-figure programming job in Zuzu City is better-aligned with his goals than freelancing from a run-down cabin in the middle of nowhere that doesn’t even have decent wifi?
“Which is fair, by the way,” she adds in a rush, “because he’s talented and smart and kind and he’s an amazing person who deserves so many good things, he deserves someone who…”
The next breath she pulls is more of a gasp, and the coughing fit that wracks her body is one of the worst so far. It’s painful, and the only short breaths she can manage between coughs are shallow ones. Her eyes water, and then she’s properly crying, and maybe it’s because of the flowers in her throat but also maybe it’s because she’s scared. And hurt. And—
“He’ll change his mind,” she chokes out. She pulls a breath, and her lungs make a horrible, unsettling crackling sound on the inhale. She coughs again. “And then, we’ll break up, and then everything will be over, because there’s no way you can go back to being friends after something like that.”
When he finally speaks, Shane’s voice is almost sympathetic. “People do.”
“No, they don’t,” she says miserably, sitting down on the hay bale. She tucks her knees to her chest and looks away, wiping the tears from her face. “Not when they’re friends the way we are.”
.
Seb — 3:45pm
You wanna hang out later?
New episode of Odder Happenings just dropped
Or we can watch Queen of Sauce or Lattimore Ladies reruns if you’re not in a horror mood
Ava — 4:17pm
ahh no sorry! i’m going into the mines again tonight
maybe some other time?
Seb — 4:34pm
Sure.
.
“Jiangui.” Sebastian stares at the linker errors littering his terminal and groans, running a hand through his hair. I swear to Yoba, this library’s static! I built it with static flags, ldd says it’s not a dynamic library, so why the heck does the compiler keep throwing this stupid dynamic linker error?
Really, the problem is that he’s distracted. He glances down at his phone again.
Maybe some other time, she’d said, but she’s been saying that a lot, lately.
He shakes his head, queues up a lofi cover album of Take This To Your Grave, and tries his best to refocus on the task before him.
He sips his coffee.
Opens one of the header files. Checks it for obvious errors.
Closes it.
Takes another sip of coffee.
Pokes around in the configure script a bit, a little halfheartedly, just to make sure he didn’t comment out a few lines by accident or forget some flags, but nothing looks amiss.
Sips his coffee again.
He’d thought things were going well, is the thing.
Focus on your work, his brain gripes, but it’s already joined his heart in wallowing.
He’d thought things were going well, and he doesn’t think he was misreading the signals. He collects shreds of evidence and tacks them on a spongy little corkboard in his mind: They’d gone on a fun outing that could theoretically be categorized as a date, if he squints and looks at it sideways. She spends a lot of time hanging out with him, or at least, she did, until last week. She gives him cool stuff she finds in the mines.
She gives him these looks, too, when she’s a cider or two in and thinks nobody’s watching. Sometimes the looks are soft and warm, her hazel eyes shining and her mouth curved up in a pretty smile that makes him want to wrap her in one of his hoodies and hold her close to his chest. And sometimes, late at night in the saloon or alone, on her living room couch under a shared blanket, her warm thigh pressed against his while they both pretend to watch a cooking show, the looks she gives him feel a bit more… Well.
Like she wants to eat you alive, his brain supplies, entirely unhelpfully. Like she wants your hands in her hair or on her waist. Like she’d make some really fun, pleased-sounding noises if you pinned her up against the nearest wall and pressed your lips to hers and trailed your fingers along her thighs, like she wants you to finally be brave and find out what her vanilla mint lip balm tastes like firsthand—
He clears his throat, his face hot, and refocuses on the monitor. Ava’s his friend. This is absolutely not a path he should be going down, especially right now.
Anyway, it had really seemed, on the walk home, like she’d been about to tell him something big. Something important. Something like…
Something like, she’s figured out we like her, and she doesn’t want to hang out anymore, his last brain cell interrupts, knocking the first corkboard out of the way unceremoniously and replacing it with his own. The new corkboard is helpfully labeled, “Evidence Ava Totally Hates Us Now.”
First point of evidence: She ditched the pool game, which, if he’s honest, was really just a thinly-veiled excuse to make physical contact. He’s never been so overt with his flirting before, and the timing of her sudden coughing fit is too convenient to be a coincidence. And then she’d asked him to leave, after they got back to the house, which she’s never done before, especially not while looking so viscerally uncomfortable.
The only logical (horrifying) conclusion is that she’s upset by the flirting, and she’s too polite to say so. She knows he’s got feelings for her, and she’s avoiding him.
She was also sick, part of him wants to argue, and, okay, sure. Under different circ*mstances, he wouldn’t be overthinking this. Or, well, he’d overthink it a little, but then he’d step back and counter with the fact that she’s hung out with him a lot since then, or at least texted.
Except, second point of evidence, she hasn’t.
She hasn’t swung by his room, not even once, since last Friday. (Spirits, he knew murmuring in her ear like that was too much too fast. Standing behind her? Touching her arms? What was he thinking!?) He’s tried initiating a few times, suggesting a movie or asking her to help him debug, but she always has some work-related excuse. Yesterday, he got desperate and asked her to bring over a jar of strawberry jam. When she’d asked what he needed the jam for, because he hates jam— and he should’ve known better, of course she knows he hates it, because she knows him as well as he knows her— he’d had to lie and say it was for Maru.
It turns out the strawberry harvest hasn’t come in yet. Even if it had, he has the feeling she would’ve found some other reason to avoid dropping it off.
She’s been busy, he tells his catastrophizing brain, because that’s what she keeps telling him. When she’s not busy with the chickens, she’s working on sprucing up the greenhouse; if it’s not the greenhouse, it’s the next batch of crops; if it’s not the crops, it’s the latest request from one villager or another; if it’s not a request, it’s another trip to the mines—
And if it’s not the mines, it’s hanging out with Shane.
And there it is, his brain sneers, pinning this third piece of evidence above all the others.
Ava only ever mentions it in passing, and she says they’re just talking, but Sebastian’s not stupid, okay? Ava’s stopped spending time with him, suddenly, after he tried to make a move, and started going over to Shane’s place nearly every day. He can put two and two together to get four.
He just wishes she’d’ve talked with him about it instead of playing this weird avoidance game.
And, well, maybe the fact that she didn’t care enough to try to save their friendship just means it matters less to her than he thought he did. The thought hurts more than it has a right to, but also, some part of him feels like maybe he deserves better than being ghosted like this. Deserves a chance to salvage what little he can.
Deserve it? No, he thinks, sipping his coffee. Want it? Very badly, yes.
The other thing is— he knows he’s being uncharitable, but— he’s a little insulted that Shane, of all people, is his replacement. At least Sebastian had made half an effort to be polite, when Ava had first moved to town. (Maybe closer to a third of an effort.) At least Sebastian has ambition (but, admittedly, no steady job). At least Sebastian has friends and hobbies (although, come to think of it, chicken breeding is kind of a hobby, and at least Shane likes his family). At least Sebastian isn’t in the saloon every night drinking himself into an early grave (but Sebastian’s still out at the lake every night smoking himself into one, and Shane’s been clean for two seasons, at least).
He wears cargo shorts, and his sweatshirt has holes in it, Sebastian thinks sourly as he pecks at his keyboard, knowing that he’s grasping at straws. And they’re not even cool on-purpose holes, like my sweatshirt has.
He jabs the enter key to recompile the code, then huffs out a frustrated sigh and grabs his phone.
He tries writing a text to her. He does this in his notes app, because accidentally sending an overly honest outpouring of emotions halfway through the drafting phase will just make his current situation, which is already kind of a nightmare scenario, so much worse.
Do you hate me now? Too negative. Delete.
Hey, it’s been a minute. I miss you. Can we hang out? Too needy. Delete.
Living without you feels like living without one of my limbs. True, but horrifying to admit. Delete.
I know you know I’m kind of in love with you, and I know you don’t feel the same way, and for the record that’s FINE, but please for the love of Yoba could we at least just talk? Because I haven’t seen you all week and I’m starting to— Delete. Delete. Delete.
“Screw it,” he sighs, tossing his phone on the desk.
As much as he wants to hide behind a screen and have time to think out his responses, this really doesn’t feel like the sort of conversation that should happen over text… But he doesn’t know when he’ll see her next, and he’s itching for answers. If he shows up at her place unannounced, she’ll feel cornered, which is the opposite of what he wants.
His one saving grace is that even if she’s figured out that he likes her, she doesn’t know exactly how deep his feelings go, so, when they do talk, he can downplay it. He can pretend like it’s just a small crush, a passing thing, like he doesn’t squirrel away every cool rock or note she gives him in a wooden box under his bed for sentimental reasons. Like he hasn’t had the “remote positions only” filter checked on his usual job search sites for the last two seasons. Like he hasn’t kicked around the idea of finally quitting smoking, because she makes him care about what his future looks like. Like he hasn’t found himself actively seeking out books about farming in his spare time, because it reminds him of her.
Like he hasn’t imagined living on the farm with her, in some of his weaker moments.
Ta ma de, he thinks, running a hand through his hair. This is so, so bad.
Anyway, if he can just talk to her in person, he can convince her it’s nothing serious, lie and say that it’s something he’ll be able to get over easily (or get over, ever), and then, they’ll… Go back to how things were, he supposes. With him pining, burning in silence, never making a move, and her inches away from him but completely untouchable. At least he knows she’s untouchable, now. Knows better than to try again.
It’s not ideal, the burning in silence, but it’s better than whatever fresh level of hell he’s in right now.
Now, the question is, how does he talk with her one-one-one without making things worse? He bites his lip, thinking it over, and his gaze falls on the stupid blue suit hanging next to his closet.
The Flower Dance is in two days.
Ava had actually asked him to dance, last year. It was out of pity, he’d thought at the time, because Abby’d gone and paired herself off with Leah. He’d told her no, and then he’d watched in horror as she’d apologized profusely and then marched herself across the field and invited Elliott to dance with her, instead. He’d sulked by the refreshments table like a child, drowning his sorrows in salsa and under-salted tortilla chips and trying, very hard, not to think about what the sick churn of jealousy in his gut implied.
But… She’s going to be there this year, too. She said she’d be there.
He groans, running a hand over his face. He can feel an idea formulating. It’s a bad one.
He’s not under any illusions that she’s going to accept, but dammit, he wants answers, and this is the most socially-acceptable way to get them, isn’t it? He wants closure. He wants to have a conversation about this. If this friendship is sinking, he’s sitting on the deck, playing a piano rendition of Moonlight Sonata on the electronic synth keyboard he got in the tenth grade and clinging to the railing of the deck for dear life. He’s not letting this die without a fight.
He’s going to have to ask Ava to dance with him.
Right, his brain scoffs, lighting a cigarette. There’s no possible way this could go wrong.
