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“Hey Steve?” Robin called.
Steve hummed in acknowledgement, not looking up from his computer.
“Do you think it’s weird and bad for me to have a physical reaction to Vickie coming back to Instagram?”
Slowly, Steve raised his head to make eye contact with her across the couch. “...Depends what the physical reaction is,” he responded cautiously.
“Like, my stomach dropped and my heart started beating faster and I’m maybe a little nauseous now?”
Steve closed his laptop and sat up, reaching for her phone. “What the hell are you looking at?”
With an embarrassed expression, Robin surrendered her phone and buried her face in a pillow. Steve looked down to find a carousel of photos of Vickie, hair now highlighted blonde and with a freckled brunette by her side. The caption read, “Returning to insta ONLY to show off my beautiful girlfriend @melissab! Probably won’t be very active on here but these pics were too good not to share. Love u baby! 💕”
“It’s bad, right?” Robin asked, barely giving him time to read the post. Steve swiped through the photos of Vickie and her new girlfriend looking blissfully happy in a meadow, a sympathetic sinking in his stomach.
“It’s not —”
“Bullshit, it’s not bad!” Robin exclaimed. “I’m the one that broke up with her, I have no right to care who she dates! I was the one who couldn’t do long distance and she didn’t want to commit to a whole thing and now she just — she just has a girlfriend?” She gestured wildly, face red.
“I guess she’s had some personal growth?” Steve offered, not quite sure how to react (and not used to Robin using the b-word in front of him).
Robin visibly stopped herself from rolling her eyes. “I — yeah, and that’s great, I just — I can’t — It’s so —” She threw the phone down on the couch and sighed. “Why can’t I just be happy for her? It’s been years.”
Steve paused and did the math. “It’s only been a year and a half since you stopped talking.”
Robin huffed. “It feels like longer.” She sagged. “And also like yesterday.”
Steve leaned forward and took her hands in his own. “Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay, okay? It’s normal to be attached to an ex. Especially your first ex.”
Robin nodded, squeezing her eyes shut and breathing deep. “I just,” she started, eyes still closed so she didn’t have to admit it face-to-face, “Why couldn’t she do it with me?”
Quietly, Steve’s heart broke, watching his favorite person be so distressed over something he couldn’t fix. “Robbie…”
“We had so many conversations about it,” Robin said, the words spilling out of her. “She said she just couldn’t be tied down to one person, especially after being with Dan for so long. She was, like, allergic to the word ‘girlfriend’. She said the thought was her nightmare.”
Steve chewed on his words. “People change,” he tried.
“I know!” Robin cried. “I know, and I know she has the right to change her mind, and I know that I probably have very little to do with it, but does she know how much she mattered to me? She was the first person I ever did anything with. She set the standard for everyone I’ve been with since. Does she know that? Does she know how much she changed my life?”
Her grip on his hands grew crushing, and Steve suppressed a grimace. “It sucks,” he acknowledged. “It always sucks to see people you care about move on.”
“And her new girlfriend looks just like me,” Robin moaned. “Just to really rub it in my face.”
Steve sucked in a breath. He hadn’t really noticed it, but now that she mentioned it, they did have the same hair color, the same haircut, the same smattering of freckles all over… “Damn.”
“I’m not seeing things, right?” Robin demanded. “She does?”
Steve nodded and patted her arm to calm her down. “She does. That’s rough.”
“Tell me about it,” she groaned, tipping her head back with a sigh. “Fucking… Instagram was supposed to be my safe space! She wasn’t on it! I wasn’t supposed to be ambushed with her face as soon as I opened the app!”
“Yeah, that sucks,” Steve agreed, rubbing circles into her arms now where he held her. “...Pizza and movies?” He offered, their tried-and-true cheering up protocol.
Robin nodded, a frown still on her face. “No romcoms.”
“No romcoms,” Steve agreed. “I’ll get the pizza out of the freezer.” Robin was one of those people who genuinely enjoyed frozen pizza to the point of preferring it over the gloriously greasy restaurant stuff. She was so weird. Steve loved her so much.
He set the oven to preheat and joined her blanket cocoon on the couch, remote in hand as she scrolled through Netflix. “Anything looking good?”
Robin’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “No.” She kept scrolling.
“Hey.” Steve gently stopped her button pressing, laying his hand over hers. “You want me to pick?”
She wordlessly handed the remote over and sank into the couch. “I just feel so stupid,” she moaned. “Why does it even matter so much? It shouldn’t matter this much! It’s been so long! There’s been other people, I mean, I’ve moved on!”
Steve turned to look at her, chest heaving with her outburst. She was red in the face and was wearing an expression he’d hoped he’d never have to see again after the week of the breakup. “You can move on and still be hurt by the people you used to love,” he said gently.
Robin was silent for a long moment. “We never even said we loved each other.”
She keeled over into his arms, crying as quietly as she could make herself, and Steve caught her. He would always catch her.