Fics like Bittersweet Thing

Ellie slips the photo out of the back of her phone, it’s folded and creased between her mother’s seventeen-year-old face and the boy beside her. They’re both looking into the camera, both grinning, both a bit blurred by the glow of streetlights behind them. A snapshot in time, a freeze-frame moment from seventeen years ago… she’s been staring at it so long that her mother and the boy blur together until Ellie finds herself in the smear of it. (His smile, the dimples that sit in the edges of a sharp-toothed grin. Her mother’s hair, the curve of her cheek and nose.) The train lurches as it slows and Ellie tucks the photo into the back of her phone again with unsteady fingers as she pushes to her feet. Some of the other people in the car do the same. It’s late enough that she’s aware she doesn’t quite blend in, too young looking in sneakers and leggings and one of her school sweaters, but she’s got pepper spray hanging from a keyring jangling around her wrist and she’s too nervous about meeting him to worry about anything else. The paper crinkles in her hands and she looks down at it again, just as the subway doors open on a rush of warm, stale air. His name, in blue ink. Nicolas Cordova

Fics like Bittersweet Thing

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