The Playlist Ends

The playlist took me three weeks to build.

Not because it was hard, exactly. Because every song had to mean something. Track one had to be the first song we ever slow-danced to at that stupid homecoming after-party sophomore year, when Harry was drunk enough to admit he liked the way I laughed and sober enough to remember it the next morning. Track seven had to be the one we screamed in his car the night we drove to the beach at 2 a.m. just to watch the sunrise, except we fell asleep and missed it and didn't care. Track twelve was the one his mom played in the kitchen the first time I ate dinner at his house, the one he hummed without realizing while he helped her wash dishes, and I stood in the doorway watching him and thought, *oh no.*

I burned it onto a CD because Harry's car still has a player. He refuses to upgrade. Says it reminds him of his dad.

The night before the trip, I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor with a Sharpie in hand, writing his name on the disc in purple ink. Then I crossed it out and wrote it again, smaller. Then I crossed that out too and just drew a tiny heart in the corner, which was embarrassing, so I tried to scratch it off with my thumbnail. It smudged. I left it.

"Just give it to him," Hanna said through the phone, which was propped against my lamp. She'd been on FaceTime for the last hour, watching me spiral. "You're being weird about this."

"I'm not being weird."

"You literally just had a full conversation with yourself about whether the heart was too much."

"It's not too much. It's a *heart*. People draw hearts."

"People who are in love draw hearts."

I didn't answer that. Hanna knew it. She also knew I'd never say it out loud, not even to her, because saying it would make it real, and real things could be taken away.

Harry and I weren't together. That's the thing everyone refused to understand. We were friends. Best friends. We were the kind of friends who fell asleep on each other during movie nights and woke up with his hand in my hair. The kind who texted at 3 a.m. about nothing and everything. The kind whose bodies knew each other's rhythms without ever crossing the line that would make it complicated.

Okay, sometimes we crossed it. Sometimes, when it was late and we were alone and the world felt too heavy, we found comfort in each other in ways that didn't need labels. Friends with benefits, he'd called it once. A joke. Except it stuck.

Everyone else called us "the couple who refuses to admit they're a couple." Harry said it too, laughing, like it was funny. Like it was a joke we were both in on. I laughed along because what else was I supposed to do? Tell him the truth? Tell him that every time he said it, something in my chest cracked a little more?

No. I laughed. I always laughed.

---

The morning of the trip, I stood in the parking lot outside the athletic complex with my duffel bag and the CD clutched in my hand like a confession.

Louis was already there, sprawled across the hood of Liam's SUV like a cat in the sun. Aria sat on the ground beside him, her sketchbook open on her knees, drawing something I couldn't see. Zayn and Emily were arguing about snacks. Hanna was reorganizing the trunk for the third time because she had a system and nobody respected it.

And Harry was leaning against the driver's side door, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, curls going everywhere in the wind. He spotted me and grinned, that slow, crooked grin that made me forget how to breathe for a second.

"Hey, Martinez."

"Hey yourself."

I walked over, trying to play it cool, trying to pretend my heart wasn't doing gymnastics in my ribcage. He pulled me into a one-armed hug, casual and warm, and I let myself lean into it for exactly two seconds before pulling back.

"I made you something," I said, shoving the CD at his chest before I could chicken out.

He caught it, looked down, and his whole face changed. Softened. That grin turned into something smaller, quieter, more dangerous.

"You made me a playlist?"

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm not making it weird. I'm making it *special*." He turned the CD over in his hands, reading the tracklist I'd written on the back. His thumb traced over the smudged heart in the corner. "These are all..."

"Just listen to it. Or don't. Whatever."

"I'll play it first thing. Promise."

He said it like a vow. Like it meant something. And I believed him, because that was my problem. I always believed him.

---

Chloe showed up ten minutes later.

I didn't know her. None of us did, really. She was a friend of a friend, some girl Louis knew from his psych class, invited last minute because her roommate bailed on her and she had nowhere else to go. She had blonde hair and a laugh that carried and a way of standing just a little too close to people when she talked to them.

Harry introduced himself. She smiled. He smiled back.

Something cold settled in my stomach.

"Alright, load up!" Liam called, clapping his hands. "We're burning daylight."

The seating arrangement was unspoken but understood. Liam drove. Spencer rode shotgun. The middle row belonged to Harry and me, always had, since the first road trip freshman year when we claimed it and never gave it up. The back was for everyone else, a rotating cast of whoever wanted to nap or makeout or argue about music.

I walked toward the car, toward my seat, toward the window side because Harry always took the aisle and I always took the window and that was just how it was.

But Harry wasn't behind me.

I turned.

He was standing by the trunk, helping Chloe with her bag. She said something I couldn't hear. He laughed. Then he walked her to the back door and climbed in beside her, sliding across the seat until their shoulders touched.

"Coming?" Hanna asked, already settled in the middle row with Niall.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm coming."

I climbed into the middle row alone. The seat beside me stayed empty.

Aria caught my eye from the back. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. Her face asked the question I was already trying to answer: *what just happened?*

I shrugged. Smiled. Turned to look out the window.

Hanna reached forward and squeezed my shoulder. She knew. Of course she knew. She always knew.

"I'm fine," I said, before she could ask.

She didn't believe me. I didn't believe me either.