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I don’t hesitate and take off toward the parking lot. I catch her heading to the apartments.
“Jade,” I yell after her, but she doesn’t turn. I jog to catch up with her but slow before I reach her completely. “Jade, come on. Let’s talk.”
She still doesn’t slow or turn, and I speed up to catch her by the arm.
“Jade, what are you doing? Talk to me.”
She spins around, and I rear back as the ends of her hair whip my face.
“And what if I don’t want to talk?” she asks, a tight edge to her voice.
“You don’t think you owe me a conversation?”
“I don’t owe you shit, Ian. I’m not your girlfriend.” She starts to walk away again.
A crack of thunder rolls across the sky, a storm threatening to bowl through.
“I’m asking for clarity, Jade, not a fucking marriage proposal,” I say.
“Two weeks ago, I thought we were on the same page, and now I feel like I’m not even reading the same book as you. I just want to understand what’s going on. You don’t owe me anything, but I think I deserve to understand what’s going on, because I’m confused.”
Jade crosses her arms and shifts her weight, considering my words. She uncrosses her arms to crack each knuckle and then sighs, recrossing her arms. I wish I could fast-forward to the part where she starts talking and puts me out of my anxious misery. My stomach swirls with anticipation.
“Okay,” she says. “All right, fine. Here it is . . . I think we had a good run, and this was a really fun couple of months, but the show is over, and we’ve got graduation and postgrad to deal with, and so this is probably not the best time for anything anyway. I’m sure we’ll see each other around. I’m not saying we can’t be friendly, and, you know, if you want to hang out sometime, I’m sure Jessie and Mac would love to see you too. If you want to be friends, we can.”
I barely know where to start.
We were never together, so she’s not breaking up with me, but we were definitely more than just friends. And now she’s making it clear she wants to step back from whatever we’ve been and not forward. We’ve been in some kind of limbo since that first kiss in the stairwell, and I was okay with not having any kind of label for things. I guess I assumed the feeling between us was so undeniable that even Jade couldn’t say it didn’t exist and would agree we should at least give this thing an honest go.
But my lie has just crashed and burned. Jade isn’t coming around. Jade is backing off.
And she wants me to do the same. She wants me to just shut off my feelings like she’s doing. But it doesn’t work like that for me. It would be impossible to just be Jade’s friend—my feelings are too strong for that. I fight the heat behind my eyes, tears threatening to spill. I’m not going to cry right now, because I am not giving up on this. Not yet.
“I don’t have ‘just friends’ feelings for you, Jade.”
She shakes her head, eyes closed, like what I just said was a matter of opinion and not fact. Another low rumble of thunder cuts across the sky. Jade cranes her neck toward the sound, searching for rain.
“No. No, see, you’ve gotten your feelings from the one-act all mixed up with us. I know how you think you feel, but I’m telling you, it’s going to pass.”
“It’s not a fucking kidney stone, Jade. These are real feelings that aren’t just connected to our characters. I know that, and you know that. You feel them too, and it scares the fuck out of you—that’s why you’ve been avoiding me.”
“Stop talking like you know me so well. It’s been—what, two and a half months? You don’t fucking know me.” She stares at me like I just stabbed her. Her nostrils flare, and she grinds her teeth.
“I do, Jade. I do know you. I know you prefer canned Diet Coke to bottled. I know you put on makeup like armor—that you feel more confident when you have it on than when you don’t. I know you wear those space buns in your hair because you watchedStar Warsonce with your mom when you were a kid, and she commented on how cute Leia’s hair was, and so you’ve been doing your hair like that since you were eight. I know there’s a scar on your palm from cleaning up broken glass in your kitchen when you were fifteen. I know lavender is your favorite color to wear, but sunflower yellow is your actual favorite color. I know?—”
“None of that proves anything, Ian,” she says, but her voice is shaky. She doesn’t even believe the words she’s saying.
Hope dares to bloom in my chest.
“It proves you wrong, Jade. It proves that I do know you, and that maybe I’m right. That you feel all the same things I feel for you, and you’re fucking terrified.”
Her eyes glisten the same way the ocean does under moonlight. She’s on the verge of tears, and I am too. I know she can see how much she’s hurting me right now. Her chin quivers, but her lips are sealed.
I can’t make her say the words I want to hear, and she isn’t budging.
“I’m fighting for you,” I say, pleading. “Can’t you see that?”
“Why? We don’t want the same things. You want a wife. You want a picket fence and a two-car garage, and you want to know where your next paycheck will come from, which is why you’re struggling to decide about the job at Red Barn. You think you want a life of traveling the country and hopping around, but youlikesafety. You like stability, and I just don’t give a shit about that—about any of it—and I never will. I don’t want that life.”
