Boys Don't Cry

Alternative Reality

October

"I saw him at the gym yesterday."

She'd meant to say it casually, but the sadness laced in her voice made Rory look up from his papers, frowning at her and screwing up his nose.

"What on God's earth were you doing at the gym?"

She laughed breathily and he smiled. It was easy to distract her from sad things, really, if you knew the right thing to say.

"Millie and Scarlett dragged me," Isabel confessed, sipping her tea and running a hand through her hair. "They've started working out. They keep saying it'll de-stress me, but all I can think about when I'm there is how much work I need to do."

"What's the point of running on a treadmill?" Meera pondered helpfully. "You're going nowhere."

Isabel sighed and went back to her papers. They were reading through the first lot of applications for the film festival, the date of the event having now been confirmed for Sunday the thirtieth of November. It was going to be a long, laborious process, and Isabel was beginning to freak out. She still had course work to do, a grade that needed pulling up before graduation, and work twice a week, and she was starting to seriously consider that she had bitten off more than she could chew.
Rory and Meera were, in all honesty, life savers, and their meetings together every few days had turned into Isabel's favourite moments of the week. Rory was surprisingly sarcastic and exceptionally organised, and Meera sweet and enthusiastic, and although Isabel had thought at first glance the three of them had little in common, that didn't seem to matter really. And somehow, although they often spent their time together talking about their respective partners, or exes, or romantic interests, she found she was least sad about Harry was when she was with them.

"So you saw Harry?" Rory said, typing some figures into the calculator and squinting at the answer. "What did he say?"

"Nothing," Isabel said, swallowing loudly. "He looked right at me and then pretended he hadn't seen me."

Rory sighed, putting the calculator down and throwing Isabel a stern look. "You broke his heart, Isabel, and he's a twenty year old boy. What do you expect him to do?"

"It's not like he didn't break my heart, too!" she snapped, and Meera looked up from her papers in alarm. "Sorry. I just - I don't know though. I don't even know why I'm upset. I don't want him to talk to me."

"What?"

"I dunno. I moved my shifts around at work this week so I wouldn't have to see him as well."

Rory frowned. "Why?"

"I'm scared it'll hurt too much."

Meera frowned. "Who cares if it hurts? Isn't that meant to be the point?" She looked pointedly at Isabel, and Isabel tried her best not to let this uncharacteristically profound statement surprise her too much. "When it stops hurting, then it's not love anymore. That's the point."

~~~

Isabel found herself back at the gym later that week trying her best to find her inner calmness or whatever people concentrated on when they ran on a treadmill, but between the pain in her stomach and the burning in her lungs all she could find was a wad of stress that left her body on edge and, rather cruelly, the memory of the day in June she and Harry had stayed in his bed till two in the afternoon, the day he'd left teeth marks that had stayed in a certain spot for weeks.

The whole of June seemed like a scrapbook of memories like this one in a way that it almost didn't seem real to her anymore. It was hard for Isabel to ever imagine a time when she and Harry spent every second of the day together, but it had happened in June for two weeks straight. And even though it didn't seem real, she kept having these cruel flashbacks in the most inappropriate of moments, such as now.