The Arrangement

Chapter Twenty

My bed is empty as sleep recedes the next morning, a delicious ache stretches through my muscles as I stretch the sleep from my bones and glance through blurred eyes at the late hour. Though being fucked into oblivion, abandoning sobriety and not sliding into bed until 3:30am after a bumpy ride with still sober Alfie and Sam seems like a good enough excuse for it all.

Ringing in the new year with Hugo and all the people I love made warmth erupt in my chest, with a slurred voice note from Cassie and taxingly optimistic text from my parents. It helped remind me that the sinking loneliness that seems to follow me around like a bad smell isn't a forever thing, it won't hang around for eternity.

Knowing Bentley isn't back home celebrating the very same thing still feels like salt in the wound but the sensation that someone is standing, stabbing the hole bigger has rescinded slightly.

"I'm so glad that you aren't naked" Sophie murmurs, a squeal leaves my lips as I shoot up from the warmth of the comforter and whip my head in the direction of my desk.

Low and behold, there sits Sophie with her blonde hair hanging long by her tits and green eyes wide in amusement, spinning on my desk chair and with my eyeliner spinning between bored fingers.

"What the fuck!" I gasp, heart pounding and fingers shaking. There were a lot of things I was expecting this morning, a sleeping Hugo wrapped around me was one of them, stalker Sophie sitting quietly while I slept was not the others. "What are you doing in here?"

"Not sure" She shrugs, "Hugo woke me up on the couch and said he had to go, didn't want you thinking he was disappearing on you"

"Ugh" I groan, falling back down against my pillow as Sophie crawls into where Hugo had been sleeping. Snuggled on her side and watching me with curious emerald orbs, "I've never cared about someone leaving in the morning before, I hate that it seems like I will now"

"Seemed like a nice gesture to me" Soph shrugs casually, not trying to ruffle my feathers, not a great start to the year if this is the side of the bed I am waking up on. "One that I don't think is shrouded in this idea that your fragile or clingy now, but perhaps he's just trying to bring you comfort even when you aren't asking for it"

"Do you have to make such good point?" I huff, rolling over to face it with my hands sandwiched beneath my cheek.

"It's a personality flaw I'm afraid" She pouts, "Can we talk about it though? How are you feeling?"

"You were right about the waves" I confess, "I never forget that he's dead or how, or why but sometimes I wake up and it's easy to breath even knowing he's gone. I think every morning I wake up worried that I might have been swallowed by another downpour of grief, and I hate who I become when I am"

"How do you mean, because you don't want to be around any of us?"

Sophie shuffles closer, our legs pressed together but remaining attentively on the other pillow. "Yes, because on the good days I am reminded of all of the things I love and how we all care so greatly for each other and on the bad one's it's like none of that exists. I hate that, that side of my brain that I have never had to deal with before, it feels like losing myself and... then I get so angry because it was someone else's decision that's led me to do this"

"You're the same Claudia we have always known, you're just as brilliant and hilarious as you always were, Bentley didn't take that away from you when he left" Sophie assures, not letting my eyes flicker away. "Having bad days, hard moments doesn't make you an imposition on the rest of us, as long as you know that underneath that feeling we all love you with everything we have"

"Maybe not at first but you were here and... I knew it was a side effect of the guilt and now that my brain is capable of processing everything that's happened. I do always know, I always remember, and I've been forcing myself to find one of you and just be there, even if there's no talking while that happens"