Jay found Loid sitting alone on the low wall behind the gym, the one nobody used much because it was always in shade, which was probably exactly why Loid had chosen it.
He didn't say anything at first. He just sat down next to him, quiet for once, none of his usual teasing energy anywhere in evidence, and Loid appreciated that more than he would have known how to say.
"You look terrible," Jay said eventually.
"Thanks."
"I mean it kindly."
"Doesn't feel kind."
Jay huffed something that was almost a laugh, but it faded quickly, and for a while neither of them said anything, just sat there while the sound of the rest of the school carried on somewhere out of sight — someone laughing near the courtyard, a ball bouncing rhythmically against pavement, ordinary noise from an ordinary day that Loid felt entirely disconnected from.
"You gonna tell me what happened," Jay said, "or am I gonna have to guess, because I will, and I'll probably get it embarrassingly close to right."
Loid sighed and told him. All of it — the jealousy he'd been sitting on for weeks, the careless thing he'd said, the look on Charlotte's face right before she walked away. Jay listened without interrupting, which was unusual enough for him that Loid almost stopped partway through just to check he was actually paying attention.
When he finished, Jay was quiet for a long moment, turning something over.
"Can I say something, and you don't get to be weird about it?"
"...Fine."
"You didn't mess this up because you're a bad person, or because you don't care about her. You messed it up because you care about her a lot, and you got scared, and scared people say stupid things." He paused, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. "If someone matters to you, don't punish them because you're scared of losing them. That's all this was. You were scared, so you pushed."
Loid didn't say anything right away. The words sat there, simple and uncomfortably accurate, and he turned them over slowly, feeling something shift into place that he hadn't quite let himself look at directly until now.
He hadn't been angry at Ethan, not really. Ethan hadn't done anything except be friendly, the way new students usually were. What Loid had actually been afraid of — what had been sitting underneath the jealousy this whole time, unnamed — was the possibility that Charlotte might choose someone else. That whatever had grown between them, slow and quiet and unspoken, might just quietly stop mattering to her the way it had started mattering, more and more, to him.
He hadn't even known when that fear had taken root. It felt like it had always been there, once he actually looked for it, buried under weeks of easy conversations and shared notebooks and walks home that always seemed to end too soon.
It was a strange thing, realizing you'd been afraid of something for a while without ever naming it. Loid thought about all the small moments over the past month that suddenly made a different kind of sense in light of it — the tightness in his chest whenever Ethan's name came up, the relief that had flooded through him every single time Charlotte chose to sit beside him instead of somewhere else, the quiet, persistent way he kept track of things about her that had nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with something he hadn't let himself call by its real name yet.
"You've gone quiet again," Jay observed. "Different quiet than before, though. This one looks more like thinking than sulking."
"It is thinking."
"Good. Thinking's a start. Now go actually do something with it."
"I don't even know when she started mattering that much," he admitted, mostly to himself.
Jay shrugged, uncharacteristically gentle about it. "Does it matter when? It happened. Doesn't really matter if you can point to the exact day."
"I said something awful to her."
"Yeah, you did."
"That's not helpful."
"I'm not trying to be helpful about that part. That part's just true. The helpful part is this—" Jay bumped his shoulder against Loid's, a small, solid gesture. "Go fix it. Actually fix it. Don't just apologize for the words. Tell her why you said them."
Loid sat with that for a long moment, looking out at the empty stretch of pavement in front of them, and felt something settle into place — not comfort, exactly, but clarity, which was maybe more useful right now anyway.
"Thanks," he said finally.
"Don't mention it. Seriously, don't, it's weird when you're sincere."
Loid managed something close to a laugh, the first real one in two days, and got up off the wall with something that felt almost like resolve, even if his stomach was still doing something complicated and nervous at the thought of what came next.
"Hey," Jay called after him, when Loid had gotten a few steps away. "For what it's worth — I've never seen you like this about anybody. Not once. That's gotta mean something, right?"
Loid stopped, glanced back. "Like what?"
"Like someone who forgets his own lunch is sitting right in front of him because he's too busy staring across a cafeteria. That's not a small thing, man. I've known you three years. You've never once looked at anyone the way you look at her."
Loid didn't have an answer for that, not one he trusted himself to say out loud without it turning into something bigger than he was ready for, so he just nodded, once, and kept walking, Jay's words trailing after him the rest of the way across the courtyard.
He rehearsed the apology in his head the entire walk to the front gates, discarding version after version — too formal, too casual, too much explanation, not enough. In the end he decided the best plan was probably no plan at all. Just find her. Say it plainly, the way his grandmother had told him to, and let whatever happened next happen honestly instead of according to some script he'd talked himself into overthinking.
His heart was going faster than the walk really justified by the time he reached the gates, and he told himself that was just nerves about the apology, nothing more complicated than that.
He mostly believed it.