Have you ever ridden those teacups at Disneyworld? You know, the ones where you sit down and spin the circle in the middle to go faster and faster until your arms are dead, you feel like you’re going to be sick any moment, you stumble off the ride like you’ve just knocked back a few (a great look for a six year old by the way) and you swear you will never, ever go on the teacups again?

Well, imagine that and then add in a blinding headache, a pressure on your chest as if an elephant was doing jumping jacks on your sternum and the sudden feeling that your throat was closing up and you would come fairly close to what Spencer was feeling at the very moment when Ashley asked her a very simple question.

“So, where do we go from here?”

Up until that point, Spencer had been doing fine. Okay, not fine – she did just find out that the girl she was in love with had cancer – but she was managing. There were no tears falling down her face, no innate need to hug the brunette and never let go, most likely because it hadn’t hit her yet. It was as if she was having an out of body experience; she was looking down on Ashley, watching her tell the story and all she could do was just float there, watching her body in a trance.

For some reason, though, when Ashley spoke those seven words, it was as if the brunette had slapped Spencer across the face, letting loose all the emotions that were dying to be released. These tears didn’t come slowly or one by one, they gushed out of her blue eyes as if a dam had just been released. Her breath, when she finally got to breathing again, was fast, hitched, and interrupted with hiccups. Tears were spilling down her cheeks, the taste of salty drops finding their way into her mouth and even down her chin and dripping onto her chest.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit shit.

Spencer never said a word, just kept rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands trying to make them stop, but it didn’t work. The tears kept coming and there was nothing she could do to stop it.