First Kiss, Last Kiss, Every Kiss
Copyright© 2026 by SpankLord40k
Chapter 20: Lola
The building was older than Emily remembered. She stood on the sidewalk in front of it for a moment, her bag slung over her shoulder, gazing up at the facade the way one looks at a place one has heard about many times but has never seen. Lola had lived here for as long as Emily could remember. Just the thought of those days when they used to run around the house and play hide-and-seek warmed her heart.
She rang the doorbell.
Lola’s mother answered, a small woman with Lola’s same wide eyes and a face that had clearly been through something in recent weeks. She looked at Emily for a moment without speaking, and Emily understood from that look exactly how bad things had been. Then she stepped aside.
“She’s in her room,” she said. That was all.
Emily followed her down the short corridor and stopped outside the door at the end. Lola’s mother knocked twice, softly, then opened it and looked inside.
“Emily is here,” she said, and then she stepped back and let Emily go in alone, and pulled the door closed behind her.
Lola was sitting up in bed with her back against the headboard and her knees drawn toward her chest. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt that was too big for her, the sleeves pulled down over her hands. She looked smaller than Emily remembered. Not physically, exactly, but in some other way, a diminishment that had nothing to do with size. Her eyes found Emily’s and then moved away, down to the bedspread, to the middle distance somewhere near Emily’s left shoulder.
Emily looked around the room for something to sit on and found the desk chair. She pulled it out and sat down and put her bag on the floor beside her feet.
Neither of them said anything.
The silence sat between them, and Emily let it. She had prepared things to say on the train, had turned sentences over in her mind, had rehearsed small openings that might make this easier. None of them came now. There was just the room, and Lola sitting in the bed looking at her lap, and the muffled sound of the city outside the window.
After a while Lola cleared her throat. “Thanks for coming,” she said. Her voice was rougher than usual, the particular roughness of someone who had not been talking much.
“Yeah,” Emily said.
Another silence.
“How was the train?” Lola asked.
“Fine,” Emily said. “Busy.”
Lola nodded. She looked at the window and then back at her lap. Outside a car honked once and then it was quiet again.
Emily watched her. She looked like someone waiting to be told something. Like she was braced for it, whatever it was. Her shoulders were pulled in slightly and her hands were hidden in her sleeves and the whole posture of her communicated a readiness for more pain that was almost unbearable to look at. Emily thought about herself in her own bedroom three months ago, the curtains shut, the sheets gone stale, the specific quality of lying very still and waiting for the next bad thing to arrive.
She looked away from Lola and looked at the desk instead. There was a glass of water on it, half empty. A phone charger snaking off the edge. A small stack of library books with their spines turned away. Everything in the room had the feeling of things that had been left where they landed.
“I need to say something,” Lola said.
Emily looked back at her.
Lola’s hands came out of her sleeves and she pressed them flat against her knees, a gesture that looked like trying to hold herself in place. “I’ve been going over it. What I’m going to say. I’ve been going over it for weeks.” She paused. The words seemed to cost her something even at this speed. “I wanted it to come out right.”
“Okay,” Emily said.
“I’m sorry.” Lola said it carefully, like she was setting something down. “For what I said when I left your apartment. About Sophie. About the marriage.” Her jaw tightened. “It was cruel and I knew it was cruel when I said it and I said it anyway.”
She looked up at Emily, waiting. Her eyes were wet at the edges.
Emily sat with it. The apology had the shape of something that had been prepared, something practiced until the edges were smooth. It was sincere, she thought. She believed that Lola meant it. But something in her chest stayed quiet, not hard exactly, just still. Not ready to move yet.
“That’s not why I’m here,” Emily said.
Lola blinked. Her mouth opened slightly and then closed.
“I mean,” Emily said, “I know you’re sorry. I believe you.” She paused, trying to find the right words, the honest ones. “I came because Sarah told me what happened. And because you’re my friend.”
The room went very quiet.
Lola did not say anything. She sat there with Emily’s words in the air around her and her hands pressed flat against her knees and she did not speak. Her mouth was slightly open but nothing came out. Her eyes had filled completely and she was not wiping at them now, just sitting with them full, looking at Emily with an expression that Emily could not name exactly but recognized. It was the expression of someone who had been braced for something else. Who had been waiting for the door to confirm that it was closed, and had heard instead that it might still open.
She had written four letters. She had watched the phone go quiet. She had heard a call she thought was a goodbye. And Emily had just used the word friends, and said she hoped it was still true.
Lola pressed her lips together. She looked down at her hands. She breathed in carefully.
“Okay,” she said, very quietly. It was not an answer to anything specific. It was just the only word she had.
Emily let it sit. She did not rush past it or soften it or add anything. She just let Lola have the moment, the full weight of it, without trying to carry it for her.
After a while Lola looked up. Her eyes were still wet but something in her posture had shifted, the shoulders less drawn in, the bracing eased by a fraction. “Do you want to know what I did?” she said.
Emily looked at her. “Yes,” she said. “If you want to tell me.”
Lola’s hands pressed harder against her knees. “Pills,” she said. The word came out flat, drained of drama from being repeated to doctors and her mother and whoever else. “I took too many pills. I don’t want to go into all the details. But that’s what happened.”
Emily said nothing. She stayed where she was and let the words exist in the room.
The silence that followed was different from the ones before it. Heavier, but not worse. It was the kind of silence that comes after something true has been said and both people know it and neither wants to rush past it with words.
Emily thought about the phone call. Her phone call. The one she had been so proud of. She had sat on the edge of the bed in their Brooklyn apartment and called Lola and said the hard things, the honest things, the things Dr. Weiss had helped her build toward. She had said them clearly. She had said what the words had cost her. She had said she did not want this to be forever. She had been so careful.
She thought about how that call had landed.
“There’s something else,” Lola said. She was looking at the window now, her profile toward Emily. “When you called. The week before.” She stopped. She started again. “I had been waiting. I kept thinking you might call or write back to one of my letters, and then you did call, and I heard you talking and I tried to hold onto all of it. But what stayed with me was what you said about destroying something you couldn’t get back.”
Emily went very still.
“I know that wasn’t all you said,” Lola continued. “I know there was more after that. But I couldn’t hold onto the rest. I was already so bad by then, and I heard that part and I thought.” She stopped again. Swallowed. “I thought you were saying goodbye. I thought the call was you closing the door.”
Emily looked at her hands in her lap. The afternoon light came through the curtains and lay in pale stripes across the floor.
She had meant that call as an opening. She had meant it as the first step back toward something. She had been so careful about what she said. She had chosen every word. And it had landed on Lola as a closing.
She did not say that’s not what I meant. She did not say anything for a while. She just sat there with the understanding of it, the weight of how two people can hear the same words and receive completely different things, how context and timing and the particular state of a person on the day they hear something can transform a sentence entirely into something else.
“I know what this room feels like,” Emily said.
Lola looked at her.
Emily was looking at the window, at the pale stripes of light. “I was in mine for days. After your visit. The curtains shut. Not eating.” She did not explain further. She did not offer the whole story. She just said it, simply, and let it sit there between them.
Lola looked at her for a long time. Something was happening in her face, a careful rearranging, a shifting of the features toward something less defended. She was seeing Emily differently. Emily could feel it.
The silence that came after was the first one that did not feel like a wall.
After a while Lola said, quietly, “I knew where to hit you.” Her voice had changed, lower now, less rehearsed. “I knew exactly. I’ve known you since we were little. I knew where it would land.” She pressed her lips together. “And I used it. I stood in your apartment and I used everything I knew about you to hurt you as badly as I could.”
Emily felt something loosen in her chest. Not forgiveness, not yet, not a clean resolution. Something more like the moment when you stop bracing for impact. When you let your shoulders down.
“Why?” Emily asked. She did not say it angrily. She said it the way you ask a question you genuinely want answered.
Lola’s hands came up and covered her face. She stayed like that for a moment. “Because I was scared,” she said, from behind her hands. “Because your life was doing things mine wasn’t and I didn’t know what to do with that. Because I missed you and it had been so long and the weekend was going so badly and then I started talking and I couldn’t stop.” She lowered her hands. Her face was blotchy. “I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It makes sense,” Emily said.
It did. That was the strange thing. She could feel the shape of it, the fear underneath the cruelty, the particular way that people sometimes aim at the people they love when they are afraid of losing them. She understood it in a way she could not quite explain without going into things she was not ready to go into yet.
She did not say it’s okay. It was not okay yet. But she did not pick up her bag.
They sat together in the room while the light moved and the sounds from outside came and went, and after a while Lola’s mother brought in two cups of tea without asking and left them on the desk and went away again without a word, and Emily thought about mothers, about the small acts of care that did not require explanation.
They talked a little more. Small things. Careful things. Lola asked about Sophie without asking, just left a space where the question would have gone, and Emily mentioned her briefly, naturally, and Lola listened with something concentrated in her expression.
When it started getting late Emily stood up. She picked up her bag.
Lola watched her. She did not say anything at first. She watched Emily’s hand close around the strap and watched her face and then, quietly, without any drama: “Can you stay?”
Emily stopped.
She looked at her bag. She looked at Lola in the bed with her knees still pulled toward her chest and the sleeves of her sweatshirt still pulled down over her hands. She thought about the apartment in Brooklyn. About Sophie at home, who knew where she was, who had said okay when Emily said she needed to do this alone.
She put her bag down.
Lola’s mother made up the couch with sheets and a spare pillow and left Emily a clean towel without being asked. They ate dinner at the small kitchen table, the three of them, and the conversation was quiet and ordinary, and afterward Lola’s mother cleaned up and said goodnight and left them in the living room, and they sat and watched something on television without really watching it, just letting it run, just existing in the same space. The sound of the city outside. The lamp in the corner making the room warm. Emily tucked her feet up under herself on the couch and Lola curled at the other end with a blanket and they stayed like that until Lola’s eyes started to close and Emily said, go to sleep, and she did.
Emily lay awake for a while on the couch in the dark. She thought about the locked bedroom door in Brooklyn. About Sophie on the kitchen floor. About her own voice on the phone saying you destroyed something I couldn’t get back, and how those words had landed somewhere she had not intended. She thought about the distance between what we mean and what we say and what the other person hears, and how that distance can stretch across months and swallow whole friendships and sometimes people.
She did not feel resolved. She felt tired, and soft around the edges in a way that was not unpleasant, and she fell asleep before she expected to.
Morning came through the curtains gray and mild. Emily lay still for a moment, aware of the unfamiliar ceiling, the smell of someone else’s home, before everything came back in order. She heard movement in the kitchen. She sat up.
Lola’s mother was making coffee. She turned when Emily appeared in the doorway and nodded toward the table and said, “Sit down.” Emily sat down.
Lola came in a few minutes later, still in the sweatshirt, her hair flat on one side from sleep. She looked at Emily and said, “Hi,” in a voice that had the ordinary quality of morning, and Emily said, “Hi,” back, and they sat across from each other with coffee cups and the particular slightly awkward awareness of having spent the night and now needing to figure out what came after that.
Lola’s mother put toast on the table and left them to it, and Emily buttered a piece and Lola did the same and they ate without talking, which was different from the silences of yesterday. These were just morning silences. Unremarkable.
Then the toast burned.
Lola was pressing down the lever on the old toaster for a second round when it stuck and the toast came out black, a thin curl of smoke rising from it, and the smoke alarm on the ceiling went off in a short sharp shriek that made them both jump and then swear simultaneously, and Lola grabbed the toast and ran it under the tap and Emily climbed onto the chair to wave her folded sweater at the alarm until it stopped, and then they both stood in the kitchen in the sudden silence and looked at each other.
Lola’s face did something. A tremor around the mouth. Then she smiled, just slightly, quickly, before she could think about it.
Emily felt herself smile back.
It lasted only a second. But it had happened, and they both knew it, and something in the room was different after.
They drifted into the day without any plan. Neither of them suggested anything. Lola wasn’t up to going anywhere and Emily did not push. They moved from the kitchen to the living room in the gradual, undeliberate way of people who have known each other long enough not to need a schedule. The television went on. Some cooking show neither of them cared about. They sat on opposite ends of the couch and watched people chop things and talk about flavors and neither of them commented for a while and that was fine.
It was familiar. That was the strange part, how familiar it was. Just sitting in the same room without performing anything. They used to do this all the time, when they were younger, when Lola would come over on a Saturday or Emily would sleep over at Lola’s and they would spend whole afternoons doing nothing in particular, passing their phones back and forth, watching things they forgot immediately, just being in the same space without it having to mean something.
Emily felt the recognition of it but did not say anything, because saying it would make it self-conscious and she did not want that.