First Kiss, Last Kiss, Every Kiss
Copyright© 2026 by SpankLord40k
Chapter 19: What We Cannot Say
The therapist’s office was small and warm. Not central-heating warm but radiator warm, the kind that ticked and hummed in the corner and made the room feel like somewhere you could stay for a while. Two chairs sat at a slight angle to each other, a low table between them holding a box of tissues and a small succulent in a terracotta pot. The walls were a color that lived somewhere between green and gray, chosen probably because it upset no one and calmed almost everyone.
Sophie had made the appointment. She’d sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and her coffee going cold and she’d searched and read and compared until she found someone with experience in trauma and in couples work. Then she’d booked two consecutive slots without telling Emily first, because she knew if she asked, Emily would say she’d think about it and nothing would happen.
She told Emily the night before. Sat on the edge of the bed and said, quietly, “I made us an appointment with a therapist tomorrow at eleven. I’d like you to come with me.”
Emily was lying on her back staring at the ceiling. She didn’t move. The only sounds were the radiator and the traffic somewhere below.
“Okay,” she said.
Sophie had braced herself for harder. She’d prepared arguments, reasons, evidence. The word okay landed so softly she almost asked Emily to say it again.
They took the subway in silence. Emily wore her gray coat and kept her eyes on the floor of the car. Sophie stood beside her, close but not touching, watching the stations slide by.
The therapist’s name was Dr. Weiss. She was in her fifties, silver-haired, with reading glasses pushed up from her face and a way of sitting very still that made the whole room feel steadier.
She introduced herself, explained how she worked, said that nothing they shared would leave this room. Then she looked at them both and asked, simply: “What brought you here today?”
Sophie spoke. She was good at talking. She described the visit, their friends arriving from home. The way the weekend had started gently and then tipped. She talked about the things that had been said in their apartment, the questions that had been less questions and more verdicts about Emily’s career, her finances, her marriage. And then the words at the door before Lola left. She described the weeks that followed. Emily withdrawing into the bedroom, into silence, into a version of herself Sophie couldn’t reach.
Her voice was careful throughout, and only once did it crack, on the sentence: “I don’t know how to reach her anymore.”
Dr. Weiss listened without writing anything down. When Sophie finished she turned to Emily.
Emily was looking at the succulent on the table. Its leaves were thick and waxy, sitting in its pot like it had been there for years and expected to remain.
“Emily?” Dr. Weiss said. Patient. Not pushing.
Emily said nothing. Her hands sat folded in her lap.
Dr. Weiss let the silence breathe. Sophie shifted slightly. Emily kept looking at the plant.
After a while Dr. Weiss said, “You don’t have to speak today. You can just be here.”
Emily nodded once. That was all.
They sat for the rest of the session with Sophie answering questions and Emily beside her like something carefully sealed shut. When the hour ended they walked out into cold November air and Emily pulled her coat tighter and didn’t speak the whole way to the subway.
Lola had been counting the days.
She wasn’t sure exactly when it had started, the counting. At some point it had just been there when she woke up, the number sitting in her chest before she’d even opened her eyes. Thirty-eight days since she’d walked out of that apartment. Forty-one. Forty-seven.
She went to work. She came home. She stood at the kitchen counter eating things from containers and not tasting any of it. She stared at her phone and opened Emily’s contact and closed it again.
She’d said those words. She’d actually said them. Maybe if Em had married someone different. When this all falls apart, don’t come crying to us.
She’d heard them leaving her mouth and had watched Emily’s face change and had known immediately, completely, what she’d done. There had been a fraction of a second where she’d thought she might be able to reach out and pull the words back from the air. But then Sophie had stepped between them, and then the door was closing, and then she was standing in the stairwell with Tiffany and Erika and the door was shut.
On the train home she’d cried without sound, face turned toward the window so the other two couldn’t see.
She sat down one evening and tried to write to Emily. She knew she couldn’t call. Not yet. She needed to find the words first, to arrange them somewhere she could look at them before they went anywhere.
She wrote: Emily, I don’t know how to start this.
She stared at the sentence. Tore the paper in half. Started again.
She wrote about that night. About what she’d said and where it had come from, the closest she could get to where. She’d been scared, she wrote. She’d sat in that apartment watching Emily’s life and felt the gap between them and hadn’t known what to do with it. She’d turned that fear into cruelty without realizing she was doing it. None of that was an excuse. She knew it wasn’t.
She wrote: I miss you. I know I don’t have the right to say that but I’m saying it anyway.
She addressed the envelope. Left it on her kitchen table for two days. Then mailed it.
She didn’t hear back.
She wrote another, a few weeks later. And another after that. Each one an apology, each one trying to say the thing differently, as if the right arrangement of words might unlock something. The bin beside her desk filled with crumpled false starts and she stopped emptying it.
The apartment was very quiet. She hadn’t noticed before how much noise a friendship could make just by existing, even at a distance. Now its absence was the loudest thing in every room.
She found herself thinking about small things. About being ten years old in Mrs. Patterson’s class, Emily grabbing her hand because there was a spider on the classroom wall and pretending to be braver than she was. About the way Emily used to laugh at her own jokes before she’d finished telling them. About standing in that apartment watching Emily’s face go very still and pale.
She’d known where to aim. She’d known exactly where the soft place was.
She sat on her couch on a gray evening and thought about that, and felt sick with herself.
Dr. Weiss suggested, after the second session, that she speak with Emily alone for a while. Sophie nodded and went to sit in the waiting room, and Emily found herself in the green-gray room with just the ticking radiator.
She looked at the succulent.
“How are you sleeping?” Dr. Weiss asked.
“Fine,” Emily said.
“What does fine look like?”
Emily thought about it. “Four hours. Maybe five.”
“And when you wake up, what’s the first thing you feel?”
Emily’s hands tightened slightly. “Heavy,” she said. The word came out before she’d decided to say it.
Dr. Weiss nodded as if this were completely ordinary. “Can you tell me more about that?”
And something about the way she asked it, without alarm, without the particular careful pity that Sophie sometimes couldn’t quite keep off her face, made Emily start talking. Slowly. She talked about the heaviness, how it had been there longer than the visit, how it lived underneath everything and usually she could hold it quiet but lately she couldn’t. She talked about the curtains. About not being able to look at the easel. About eating not because she was hungry but because of what Sophie’s face looked like when she didn’t.
She did not talk about Lars. She wasn’t ready for that.
She talked about growing up, a little. About being ten years old and knowing something was different, about the particular loneliness that had lived in her parents’ house. About Sarah, who had always been her closest person. About what Lola and the others had said that weekend, the whole accumulation of it, the questions that had been less questions and more verdicts. About how it had all landed on the old place in her, the place that had always been afraid she wasn’t really what she thought she was.
Dr. Weiss listened. She asked small questions that opened rather than closed.
A week into the individual sessions, Emily mentioned Lola.
She’d been keeping the letters in a drawer unopened. She recognized Lola’s handwriting on the envelopes and every time she reached for one her chest would tighten and she’d put it back.
“I haven’t read them,” Emily said. “I can’t.”
“What stops you?”
Emily looked at the window. “I don’t know what’s in them. But I’m afraid of what’s in them.” She paused. “Lola is capable of anything. She stood in my apartment and said my marriage was a mistake. She aimed right at the thing she knew would hurt most.” Her voice tightened. “I can’t handle more of that right now.”
Dr. Weiss was quiet a moment. “Have you considered that they might be something different?”
Emily said nothing.
“I’d encourage you to read them when you feel ready,” Dr. Weiss said. “Not today. But at some point. There’s usually more in a letter than we expect.”
Emily looked down at her hands. She thought about Lola sitting down to write, the effort of it. She pushed the thought away.
“I’ve tried to hate her,” Emily said, after a silence. Her voice came out differently, lower and more honest. “I’ve really tried. It would be easier.” She paused. “But I just keep thinking about what those words actually did. I was in bed for days. I couldn’t eat. I locked Sophie out of the bedroom.” She stopped. Her hands were tight in her lap. “Sophie was crying on the kitchen floor in the dark because of me. Because of what Lola said to me. And I couldn’t even open the door.” Her voice cracked slightly on the last words. “All of that came from one sentence she said on her way out.”
Dr. Weiss let that sit.
“And I still can’t hate her,” Emily said. It came out almost bewildered. “I don’t understand why I can’t just hate her.”
“You don’t have to understand it,” Dr. Weiss said gently. “You’re allowed to be hurt and angry and still not hate someone.”
Emily was quiet for a long moment. “I just want things to not be like this,” she said finally. “I don’t know what I want exactly. I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen. But I don’t want this to be how it ends either.”
Dr. Weiss nodded slowly. “When you feel ready,” she said, “it might help to say some of what you just said to her. Not to fix anything, not to demand anything back. Just to let it be said and heard. What her words actually did. What they landed on.” She paused. “Sometimes saying a true thing out loud to the right person lightens what you’re carrying. Even a little.”
Emily said nothing. She carried the idea home and set it on the kitchen counter and looked at it over the following days.
Sophie came back in the following week. She sat in her chair and looked at Emily with the careful held-back expression she’d been wearing for weeks. Emily looked back.
Dr. Weiss said, “Emily, is there something you’ve wanted to say to Sophie that’s been hard to say at home?”