After I Found His Secret Reddit Confession to My Best Friend

Sloane had been back four days when I started counting something new — not calories this time, but the seconds between Kellan's phone buzzing and his hand reaching for it.

Three seconds, usually. Sometimes two.

I noticed it Tuesday night while I stirred the risotto he liked, the one with the truffle oil that cost too much for a college kid's grocery budget but I bought it anyway, because I'd read somewhere that the way to a man's heart runs straight through his stomach, and I was done leaving anything to chance.

His phone lit up on the counter. He didn't even pretend not to look.

"Work stuff?" I asked, stirring.

"Yeah," he said. "Sloane's helping me figure out that gallery thing. The internship paperwork."

I kept stirring. "That's nice of her."

"She's good at that kind of thing."

I plated the risotto with the herbs on top, the way the recipe video showed, a little flourish of parsley like a green comma. He said it was delicious. He ate half of it and pushed the rest around his plate while he texted under the table.

I logged four hundred calories before bed. I told myself the truffle oil didn't count if I only tasted it.

That week I started running the Hudson path at five in the morning, before the sky even bothered to lighten. I liked the cold. It made my skin feel tight in a way that felt like progress. I'd come back, shower, and sit cross-legged on my bed with my laptop balanced on my knees, watching contouring tutorials until my eyes burned — how to carve cheekbones out of nothing, how to make a round face look like it had angles. I practiced in the mirror above my dresser. I got good at it. Good enough that Amber looked at me twice one morning and said, "You look different," and I said, "Just new blush," and she didn't ask again.

I bought a dress online at one in the morning, a size two, which was two sizes smaller than the one already hanging in my closet. When it arrived I hung it on the back of my door where I'd see it every time I left the room. It became a kind of altar. I'd look at it and think: *when I fit into that, everything will be different.* I never once asked myself different from what.

I started reaching for Kellan at night, too — pulling him closer, initiating things I didn't actually want, because some old animal part of me thought if I could just make his body want mine badly enough, the wanting would leak backward into his heart. I watched his face the whole time. Not out of intimacy. Out of research. I was looking for a flicker, a crack, some proof that he was there with me and not somewhere over the Atlantic, or in a bar in Bushwick, or wherever his mind actually lived now.

I never found it. His eyes stayed closed most of the time. I told myself that was normal. I told myself a lot of things.

He noticed something, though. Men always notice the thing that's convenient to notice.

"You've been weird lately," he said one night, propped on his elbow, studying me like I was a painting that had shifted slightly on the wall. "Distant."

"I'm fine."

"You flinch when I touch you."

"I don't."

"Ellie."

"I'm *fine*, Kellan." I softened it with a smile because I always softened everything. "Just tired. Midterms."

He believed me, or decided to. Two days later a delivery guy showed up at our dorm with a bouquet of white ranunculus, the expensive kind, the card signed just *K* with a little heart, the same heart he used to end every text. Amber opened the door because I was in the shower. When I came out, towel around my hair, she was standing there holding the flowers at arm's length like they might be radioactive.

"These are for you," she said. She didn't say anything else. She set them on my desk and went back to her side of the room and put her headphones in, which for Amber was its own kind of commentary.

That night he took me to a restaurant he'd "surprised" me with — a reservation, candles, the whole performance — and he held my hand across the table and told me I was beautiful in that low, private voice he used to use before any of this started, and I said thank you, and I meant it the way you mean anything you've said so many times it stops requiring you to be present for it.

I ordered the salmon. I ate half. I logged five hundred and eighty calories before I fell asleep, and I lay there afterward thinking about the dress on the back of my door, doing math that had nothing to do with numbers — how many more mornings on the Hudson, how many more skipped desserts, how many more versions of myself I'd have to shave away before there was nothing left to catch his eye and hold it.

Across the room, Amber opened a blank note on her phone. I saw the light of the screen against the ceiling before she turned it off.

I didn't ask what she wrote. I didn't need to. I already knew, somehow, that whatever it was, it had my boyfriend's name in it, and none of the softness he still performed for me at dinner.