Heartbreak; if you were a dragon, you could smell it in the air, maybe even taste it. A salty, sour, tear-like mist. Spike wished he had the luxury of sampling it from afar, instead of wading and wallowing through it like a morose swamp. It was a lot easier to appreciate the subtle aromas of spoiled romance if you didn't happen to be the recipient yourself.

At length, Spike had contained himself to his room for weeks. It wasn't a secret to anypony that he'd had eyes for Rarity since the first day he met her, and a crush that had built up over that long could theoretically take as long to heal as there was time left in the observable universe. It was therefore either a miracle or a direct defiance of entropy when Sweetie Belle found time to amble over and attempt to cure the poor dragon of his sorrows. Though the two of them were friendly enough after years of Spike's visits to Carousel Boutique, it wasn't as though they'd ever spent a lot of time together; Spike was always busy pitching woo at Sweetie's older sister, and up to a point that had been all he was interested in. Sooner or later, somepony had to clue him in on the situation, and who better than Rarity herself?

And though he had sequestered himself, and cried and grumbled that all his years of affection were for naught, Sweetie Belle had forced her way through the haze of grump and reminded him that whether or not Rarity wanted to be his special somepony, she was still his friend, and, besides, weren't there plenty more pegasi in the sky, metaphorically speaking? And Spike had gone on, oh, but Rarity, and Sweetie Belle had rolled her eyes and hit him with a pillow and promised to keep it up the next time he got misty eyed. She'd promised to come over every day that week for lunch, and she did, and by the end of the week, Spike practically felt like himself again. He'd argued about taking down the poster of Rarity on his ceiling, but Sweetie was quick with a pillow, and the argument hadn't lasted long.

Only two years ago. Strange, in a way he couldn't find another word for, the way time changed everything. It was like watching yourself grow up sometimes; you remembered a day picnicking under the sun when you were barely tall enough to see the apples at the tops of trees... and then in the blink of an eye, everypony you knew was grown up, going to school, concerning themselves with mortgages and foal-rearing. Maybe that had been part of the problem the whole way: where Rarity had always wanted to be mature, and distinguished, Spike felt perpetually like the little ball of purple-and-green scales that had emerged from his egg-shell only yesterday. All the world was new, even the way the sun looked at the break of each day. The way it glowed so radiantly used to remind him of Rarity. Now it just reminded him how nice the sun was.

One of Spike's favorite parts of friendship—and that had gone on with Rarity, even as much as it pained him to see her, she was still always available to talk and listen as much as Spike could bear without creeping into his old stock of x's and o's—was the way you could rely on someone else. You could rely on them in a way you couldn't rely on yourself, when you stared the clock down at the beginning of a new day and the blankets felt too heavy to throw off even for a second. You could count on somepony like Sweetie Belle, especially Sweetie Belle, to give you three solid knocks on your bedroom door before barging in, yanking off the covers and demanding you get up and face the day. Usually she'd be wearing the same outfit from her morning jog, and though Spike hadn't admitted it to anyone, the sight of Sweetie's bulging buns wrapped up tight in her shorts was a more mouth-watering sight than any breakfast waiting downstairs. Spike made certain to keep those thoughts to himself, on account of not wanting to ruin another friendship with untoward thinking. Even if he found the mental image of those two cream-coloured cheeks bouncing into his brain before bed from time to time...

Focus. Sweetie Belle had said 'yes' to lunch, and that's all they were going to do. Spike was bringing the iced tea.

It was a wonder with so many impromptu get togethers and hastily arranged meetings that anyone in Ponyville managed to track each other down on time, frankly. Spike had developed a talent for appointment-keeping after years as Twilight's assistant, but any amount of inactivity will render a skill rusty eventually. Spike was maybe fifteen minutes early. He considered promptness an accessory to politeness, only because Twilight had repeated that about fifty times a day when she was still in school. Spike reasoned you could respect somepony and be late for an appointment, but he'd never come out on top in an academic sense of the debate.

Still. Whether he was late or early, lunch with Sweetie Belle was a bright spot in an otherwise sour week. Twilight had started a new project apparently necessitating the retrieval of seemingly unending volumes of old, dusty scrolls, which of course Spike was assigned to assist with, since Twilight was too busy reading them to be of any real use. Before he'd showered, Spike felt like he'd rolled in a ten-century old carpet and come out as some kind of dust-bunny mummy. He was warm and clean now, but there was still a layer of grime that wouldn't come off until he got to kick his claws up and relax with a good friend.

When he got to the door of the Carousel Boutique, Spike considered waiting around a while before knocking. He wouldn't have minded so much, but if the iced tea got warm, that would put a damper on the entire lunch. So Spike knocked, somewhat apologetically, and waited for Sweetie to let him in. Probably she'd be wearing something light and suitable for the season... maybe a nice, semi-translucent sundress. It was purely an aesthetic appreciation, Spike told himself.

It took longer than usual for somepony, presumably Sweetie Belle, to come to the door, and even longer for them to unlock it. Spike hadn't realized, even coming over for frequent visits, exactly how many locks were affixed to the front door. You could never be too careful when it came to fashion secrets, Rarity always said. Spike tried not to think about it.

Spike was all smiles waiting for the door, even as long as it took. When Sweetie Belle's face peeked out into the sunlight, Spike smiled even brighter.

"Hey, Sweetie Belle," Spike said. "Sorry I'm a little early. I brought drinks though!" He held up the pitcher of iced tea he'd carried from home, standard recipe with a little extra lemon because Sweetie liked it sour. Spike could always add extra sugar if he needed to (which he did).

At first, Spike was certain he'd just goofed by arriving before their appointment. Sweetie Belle looked anxious, or maybe that wasn't the right word for it, just a little—off her guard, almost? She kept darting her eyes from side to side, and her face was all... wet, or... sweaty? It seemed like she'd just gotten out of the shower, in which case Spike couldn't blame her for being a little grumpy.

But the more he looked past the boutique doorway and studied his cream-white companion of the last two years, the more Spike noticed things surely couldn't be exactly as they seemed. For one, Sweetie Belle was only greeting him with her head poking out, the rest of her hidden behind the door. For another thing, though her face and mane were damp, it didn't seem they were wet, at least, not enough to indicate that Sweetie had been standing under a spray of water recently. It was more like she'd been sweating, profusely, and was even panting a little, trying to hide the fact that she was out of breath.

Spike sniffed the air, and tasted it with the tips of his forked tongue. The same way heartbreak resonated with its own distinguished scent, Spike's olfactory brain put two and two together and recompiled inside his head the peculiar, familiar smell, unique to everypony, but shared in broad strokes between moments of hot, sweaty passion, cloistered in bedrooms and underneath too-warm sheets.

Sweetie Belle smelled like sex in other words. In polite terms, like... pony-sweat. And that peculiar, unnameable aroma that permeated the air, the same tinge of smell that Spike recognized from his own sessions with claw and dampened pillows, but Sweetie's with less salt and more the hint of flowers, and damp, wet earth.

"Uh... hi, Spike," Sweetie Belle said. "Can this wait until another time? I wasn't expecting you, and I'm kinda, uh, busy, at the moment..."

"You forgot we were having lunch?"

Spike's face fell, as did his arms, holding the pitcher of iced tea perilously close to the ground.

Sweetie swept through a range of emotions, most of them focused under the governing lens of overall panic. Her eyes snapped from Spike, to the pitcher of iced tea, to the bright overhead afternoon sun, back to Spike, to something inside that Spike couldn't see, then to the iced tea. Then back to Spike.

"Uh," Sweetie Belle said again. The sweat on her forehead glistened under the sun. "No, it's just... look, today isn't a good day for me, okay? Can't we just reschedule?"

It was hard not to take any rejection personally, but somehow Spike felt he wasn't getting the full story anyway. And he still hadn't gotten to sit down, or drink any of the iced tea.

"What's going on?" Spike asked. He tried his best to crane his neck inside the boutique and peer around to what Sweetie's overall state might be, but she pushed the door further closed and scowled at him when he attempted to enter again.

"Nothing's going on!" Sweetie Belle snapped. Spike had barely heard her like this before it was a rarity that her normally; calm and adorable demeanor slipped into any thing resembling a fit.

But that's what she was doing now, and Spike felt himself at a strange impasse. He collected, in the back of his head, a strange vision of himself stepping overboard a sinking vessel, deep in the murky blue ocean, and finding himself sinking to the very bottom, heavier than the densest stone.

There was always the moment, turning back, when you either let them push you away, or pulled them in for the hug. Spike felt like he had read about this once before.

"Sweetie," he said. "Come on, what's going on—"

"Nothing's going on! Can't you see I just wanna be left alone right now?"

A sour sting sizzled in the back of Spike's recollections. The same voice that Rarity used to use, when her wallowing took on in full form.

"Sweetie," he said again.

She was off, running upstairs to her room and sobbing without any more care to keep the door shut.

Spike made sure to put the iced tea in the fridge before following Sweetie to her bedroom.