so, do we like each other or not? // JENLISA

Chapter 39

The next three months passed in a haze. The ache in Lisa's chest eventually began to subside, although she couldn't pretend it had fully gone away just yet. Sometimes whole days would go by without her noticing it, but then she would see something – a flash of red lipstick, a pair of impractically high heels – and a sad little thump beneath her ribs would remind her why she wasn't quite okay again yet.

She cut her hair, even though Chaeyoung warned her not to until she was certain it wasn't some kind of self-mutilation. Lisa had ignored her and walked into the office one Monday morning with it suddenly swinging above her shoulders, and her friend had just sighed. She refused to admit that it looked good because that would have involved encouraging Lisa's self-destructive behaviour, and that was increasingly dangerous when she was only one bad day away from getting an angsty tattoo on her forearm.

"Thank God for that," was what Cherin said when she passed by her desk. "I was getting so sick of looking at those rat tails all day long."

Lisa glared back at her. "My hair was never ratty."

"You looked like a Disney princess after a particularly long bachelorette party," Cherin informed her. "This is much better. You're an actual grown up at last."

Then she'd kept walking, going into her office and not shouting for Lisa to get her a coffee because Lisa didn't have to do that anymore. After a month of forcing herself not to think about Jennie or wonder why she wasn't calling or wish that she would, Lisa had finally proven herself worthy of being a member of the editorial team, and had been transferred there full-time as a junior editor. Violet, meanwhile, had turned out to be a better assistant than Lisa had ever been – she actually wanted to take Ingrid's notes, for one thing, and she didn't constantly disappear for long lunches that really involved her sleeping off a hangover in the break room.

Really, things should have been good. Lisa finally had a job she enjoyed, as well as her own apartment and a totally healthy bank balance. Her promotion had come with a raise, albeit a small one, and she'd managed to buy enough furniture to make her new house feel like a real home. She didn't have rent or a mortgage to pay, thanks to the person who she wasn't allowed to think about, and so for the first time in her life she actually possessed a savings account. It was looking good, too. So maybe Cherin was right – maybe she was a grown up at last. Maybe the whole Jennie incident had been the sort of character-building origin story that would only lead to bigger and better things for her.

Except there was a hole in her chest that never seemed to fill up, and Lisa was exhausted from ignoring it. She started working out again because going to a gym and beating the crap out of a punching bag was a much healthier way of channelling her sadness than her preferred method of drinking until she passed out, but her newly sculpted arms and toned stomach did very little to make her feel better about herself.

She'd also started dating again, but never with women. She told herself that that was one step too far, but in reality she knew that no woman could ever match up to the one who'd broken her heart. It was unlikely that any man could either, but at least they were unlikely to look like her or smell like her or wear the same fuck-me heels that made Lisa's palms go sweaty.

So she went out on a few dates. Most of the time she took the guy back to her apartment afterwards, because she preferred bad sex to sleeping alone, and then she gave him a fake number and never saw him again. Whenever she and Chaeyoung went out on a Friday night, Lisa made sure she found a stranger to curl herself around in the back room. She had a kind of half-idea that if she slept with enough people, the depression would eventually be fucked out of her. In reality, all she ended up with was a very low opinion of herself and a shitty reputation in the drug store where she went to get her Plan B.