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If we’re okay.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’m just . . . distracted.” She waves her hand around.
“And since we got back Wednesday . . . you’ve barely spoken to me . . .”
I don’t mean to bring it up, but my anxiety gets the best of me. The gnawing won’t stop until I have answers.
She presses her lips together in a tight line. “I guess, but it’s only been two days,” she says. It’s hard to tell in the low light, but I think she holds my gaze for just a second before it drops down to her shoes.
Is she not going to explain why she was distant? I assumed it was because of the stress of catching up, but what if it’s something else? What if she’s feeling really vulnerable after—well, everything, and she just doesn’t really know what to do with all that vulnerability? Something inside me softens. The gnawing eases. This isn’t about me.
I reach for her, placing a hand on each arm in the hope she’ll find it comforting. “If this is about your mom, I want to assure you that I don’t see you any differently. Like, nothing has changed for me.”
“I’m not— It’s not that, Ian.”
“What is it?” My mind whirs like an engine coming to life. If it’s not about her, then what is this about? I’m running through the list of things it could possibly be in my mind, but I’m only coming up with one thing.
But surely Jade isn’t like that. I thought . . .
“Is it because we had sex and you were my first?” I withdraw my hands, but she grabs them, reassuring me.
“No! No, Ian, it wasn’t that. I don’t care about that.”
“Okay, because that was, like, a nonissue for me, and you said?—”
“It’s what you said after,” she says, and everything goes still.
My heart stops for a beat. And then it beats too hard. Too loud.
I thought she was asleep.
She heard me tell her I love her.
And she didn’t say it back.
And she started avoiding me afterward.
Fuck.
The gnawing in my stomach settles and turns into full-on dread, because it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what’s about to happen between me and Jade. And this is not how this was supposed to go.
“You heard me?” I ask. She nods—that much I can see in the low light. “And you don’t— You . . . Why didn’t you say anything?”
I can’t decide whether the squeezing my chest is humiliation or disappointment or anxiety, or all three.
“What did you want me to say, Ian?”
I love you too. I wanted you to say “I love you too.”
She’s quiet, like she’s holding back from what she wants to say, or like she doesn’t know what to say. It’s likely the first thing, as Jade has never had any problem finding words or saying them. Her holding back now makes the dread in my stomach spread to my chest, my back. It wraps itself around my arms and creeps up to my neck. My chest feels heavy, and I have to remind myself to breathe. I’m running out of time to resolve this. We’re going to have to go onstage soon, and we can’t do it like this.
But I’m hurt. She heard me confess my feelings for her, and not only did she not say anything in the moment, but she hasn’t said anything all week. She’s pulled back and she’s pulling away, and I may not be very experienced, but I know when I’m about to be dumped.
Jade told me from the very beginning who she is—that she isn’t someone who does feelings—but I can’t reconcile that with everything that’s happened. What I feel isn’t one-sided. It can’tbe. I want to shake her; to tell her to look at what she’s doing, how she’s acting, and to wake up.
“You could have at least acknowledged that you heard me. Pretending to sleep after I said that is kind of shitty,” I snap, the anxiety making me irritable.
“And you could have just had the courage to say it to my face, not while I was sleeping,” she says, her snappy tone matching mine.
