Swooped | ✓

Chapter 12: Birds of a Feather Stick Together

As we chatted over our disgustingly overpriced lunch that, to be fair, wasn't disgusting at all, Lark filled me in on everything that was going on at uni; about her criminology course, the weird guy that keeps hitting on her during lectures, and how she's been loving living on campus surrounded by friends. 

She also filled me in on some (possibly confidential) interesting cases her mum was investigating, like mutilated bodies dumped in the river, and a string of incidents of homeless people going missing. Despite holding lukewarm feelings for her mother, Lark had inherited her mother's interest in crime and solving them, though that wasn't enough for her to want to follow her mother's footsteps.

Even after breaking up, we messaged basically daily, and called sometimes. But ever since I had the wing incident, I had been otherwise preoccupied. Plus, Lark and I had an arrangement.

Okay, 'arrangement' made it sound like we were using each other for sex whenever we were lonely. Maybe that was what we used to do, until things became unhealthy, but now we were purely platonic friends who understood each other; our 'arrangement' was that if either of us were lonely, or having a hard time, we would drop anything to help each other out. That's what friends did, sure, but Lark and I just got each other.

Sure, we were very different people, at least on the outside. Lark was pretty, gentle and smart, and I was... pretty, loud and scatterbrained. I had seen beyond all of that though, behind the skin of a popular high schooler, to the girl that was just like me. Lark saw something in me as well, that day on the balcony. A kindred spirit.

Like mine, Lark's parents were rich. Her father was a doctor and hospital director, and her mother high up in the police force. Their jobs gave them very little time to be at home, and Lark was popular and mature and collected enough to be fine with that. Right? And I was fine, in my mansion with everything I could want, always smiling and without a care in the world. Right?

The truth of it was, we were just a slobby prince and an eloquent princess wandering around in their lonely castles; no one expected the prince to be much, and everyone expected too much from the princess.

But when we were together, our castles weren't as lonely, not when we had each other to hold on to. We forgot all about how cold our houses were when we were tangled up in each other's arms, our blanket blocking out the chill. Our loneliness cancelled out the other's loneliness. That's why we had gotten along so well together, much to everyone's surprise. Lark's high school friends thought I wasn't her type (or good enough to be her type), and my friends were shocked that I was actually somewhat serious about someone. But that was the crux of the problem.

We were serious. Too serious. To the point where it wasn't healthy any more.

Somewhere along the way, we had become co-dependent; we had melded into one, and I couldn't tell where I ended and the other began. We were a warm amalgam of loneliness and desperation, and we couldn't see anything beyond each other. It wasn't a relationship any more, but a weird desperate need to be with each other to make ourselves feel less lonely. It wasn't until we were lying in bed one night, spines touching, that we realised we had to stop.

So we did. We started to untangle ourselves, trying to keep each other afloat instead of deciding to drown together. Lark decided to move into on campus accomodation at the beginning of second semester, and I found solace in my friends, who had always been there for me even when I couldn't see it. Especially Milo. Always Milo.

And we were fine, now. We found that our dynamic as friends - pure friends - was far more comfortable than as a couple. But, like now, if one of us was feeling a little down, we'd be there.

"So, some of the girls on my floor keep trying to get me to date this guy, but I've got standards, Culver," Lark said, sipping her cappuccino. "Yeah, he's hot, but there isn't much else to him. Chatting with him was like talking to a brick wall with abs."