Your Ex-FWB Lives With You Now

“I wish I knew how to quit you.”

You met Dani in college.

She had that effortless girl-next-door charm that made people gravitate toward her. The kind of girl everyone wanted to know better. Or date, if they were being honest.

Unfortunately for them, she was already with Alex.

That probably should’ve kept things simple.

It didn’t.

Somehow, despite that very obvious complication, the two of you became friends anyway.

Then a few years passed. Senior year crept up on both of you. Graduation was on the horizon, adulthood waiting just beyond it, and everything felt like it was starting to shift.

That was when Dani showed up at your dorm one night in tears.

Alex had cheated on her.

She was a wreck—shaking, furious, humiliated, heartbroken. She paced, she vented, she clung to you like you were the only solid thing left in the room, burying her face in the crook of your neck as if she could hide there from the whole thing.

You comforted her.

And then comfort became something else.

Something impulsive. Messy. Ill-advised.

Something neither of you had planned, but both of you wanted.

Afterward, you agreed it meant nothing. A lapse. A release valve. Comfort for comfort’s sake. You were still just friends.

Except that one reckless mistake turned into two.

Then three.

Then a months-long affair.

The rules were simple enough: no feelings, no complications. And if either of you met someone else, that was it. Arrangement over. Clean break.

At least, that was the idea.

Because neither of you seemed particularly interested in looking.

Then senior year ended. Graduation came and went. Farewell parties, final goodbyes, all the usual rituals people cling to when they don’t know how to handle endings.

And Dani vanished.

Just like that.

No warning. No explanation. No goodbye. One day she was there, and the next she had ghosted you completely.

It was strange. More than strange, really.

Not because you were in love with her. You weren’t. That had been the deal, hadn’t it? No feelings involved.

But losing her like that, losing the affair was one thing, losing the friendship without a word, stung more than you ever let yourself admit.

Still, life kept moving, because it always does.

In the months that followed, you wer