Zoe hadn't planned to see Dahlia that day.
She was supposed to be avoiding drama, not walking straight into it, but fate—or maybe terrible luck—had other plans. The campus coffee shop, where everyone knew her as "extra caramel, no whipped cream, no patience", had suddenly become a battlefield.
And there she was.
Dahlia.Table in the corner. Hoodie sleeves pushed halfway up. Head bowed over a notebook. A pen tapping a nervous rhythm.
The literary assassin herself.
Zoe stood there, heart thudding against her ribs, cheeks hot with things she didn't know how to say yet.
She could've walked away. Could've pretended not to notice. But then she thought about the memes, the online polls, the comments dissecting her feelings like she was a character in someone else's fanfic.
No. Not today.
Today she wasn't Team Zoe.
Today, she was Zoe.
She walked straight over and sat down across from Dahlia.
The pen stopped tapping. Slowly, Dahlia looked up, eyes steady but wary. Like a cat who knew how to bolt if things got bad.
"Hey," Zoe said.
Dahlia closed her notebook. "Hey."
Silence.
Not polite silence. The sharp kind. Like two people circling the same finish line with completely different ideas of what winning meant.
"I read your post," Zoe said softly. "Or—I guess, your story."
Dahlia's fingers curled slightly against the closed notebook. "I didn't post it."
"I know." Zoe's voice stayed even. "But it's out there now."
More silence. The tension was thick enough to stir into coffee.
Finally, Dahlia sighed, leaning back in her chair like the weight of every unwritten sentence she'd ever thought was pressing down on her spine. "I didn't write it for them," she said quietly. "I wrote it for him."
"That's the problem," Zoe shot back before she could stop herself. "We all wrote it for him."
Dahlia's gaze sharpened now. "Do you think this is a competition?"
"I don't know what it is," Zoe admitted. "I don't want it to be a competition. But—" She swallowed hard, blinking fast. "I've been here the longest, okay? I'm not smarter, or cooler, or mysterious, or—God help me—an internet celebrity. I'm just me."
Her voice cracked on that last part. Just me.Just Zoe. The friend. The predictable one. The one people forgot until someone else made them interesting.
But Dahlia didn't roll her eyes. Didn't dismiss it. She looked at Zoe like she understood too well, like she'd spent whole lifetimes feeling that kind of invisibility.
"You think I'm brave?" Dahlia said suddenly. "I'm terrified."
Zoe blinked. "What?"
"I'm terrified every time I speak. Every time I put a word on a page. You think hiding behind poetry is bravery? It's not. It's just hiding."
For the first time since they'd sat down, Zoe didn't feel anger.She felt… sad. Tired. Not at Dahlia. At all of it.
"I don't hate you," Zoe whispered, surprising herself. "I just—"She looked down at her hands."—I just don't want to lose."
They sat there, two girls in two different flavors of heartbreak, surrounded by people pretending not to notice them but sneakily filming under the tables.
The internet might have wanted a catfight.
But all it got was this: two exhausted hearts quietly breaking in public.
Finally, Dahlia spoke, soft and brutal. "Maybe we both already have."
Zoe didn't know if she agreed.
But she didn't leave either.
They just sat together, quietly daring the world to misunderstand them again.