by Jessica Roe
“Just things, Ivy!” I explode, and God that's not fair to her, but the words are spilling out of my mouth and I can't stop them. “We're not in a relationship, I don't have to tell you every little detail of my life.”
She blanches. “Nash. . .”
I hate, I fucking hate, the hurt that sweeps across her face, that stiffens the muscles in her body and causes her to shrink back into herself. I hate being the sick bastard who did that to her. I hate that I can't apologize, because the second I do I know I'll end up spilling all this crap in my mind and then we'll have to talk about it. I'm not ready to talk about it.
So instead I do the cowardly thing and I spin on my heel and leave. I can't be around her right now. I just can't.
Chapter 16
Ivy
There's an awful, heavy feeling clawing away at my chest as I watch Nash slam into his car and speed out of the street like his butt is on fire. I don't know what just happened to make him freak out and run like that, but I suspect it has something to do with how cold he's been with me these last few days. It's like he's been slipping further and further away from me and there's nothing I can do to stop it. It just hurts, and not because we're sleeping together, but because I feel like I'm losing my best friend too.
If I at least knew why he's acting this way then maybe it might ease this feeling of utter wrongness, though I doubt it. I doubt anything would ease it apart from getting Nash back again. My Nash, not the cold, distant one I barely even know. For days we've been living in an in between place and it's torturous. The not knowing, it's the worst.
I was so desperate for answers that I even became one of those girls, the kind that calls up his friends to fish for information. Luckily Nathan is my friend too otherwise that might have been seriously awful. But he denied knowing anything was wrong with Nash, then he took me to the movies so we could yell at the screen and throw popcorn at strangers like we used to when we were kids. He'd tried to hide the pitying glances he'd been sending me, but I'm not blind. The jerk was lying to me – he totally knows something. Unfortunately I know better than to try and get around my guys when they have their secrets.
I've tried to forget about it, because Nash isn't my boyfriend and I don't need to be acting like his clingy girlfriend. That's not what we're about. But the harder I try not to think about, the more I end up obsessing until it drives me nuts. I feel like I'm going crazy and it just makes me wants to scream. And cry. And eat lots of ice cream.
Leaning my head against the back of the bench, I stare up at the roof of the porch, trying desperately to swallow down that thick feeling in my throat. I will not cry over this. I cannot cry over this. Not over Nash. Because that would be. . .that would be like admitting that I have feelings for him, and I'm trying so hard not to do that.
“Nash? Ivy? Are you out here?” Felicia calls. She pokes her head around the front door, her eyes shining mischievously like she's hoping to catch us in the middle of making out or groping or something. Our moms are so weird. If only she'd come out five minutes ago then they'd really have had something to be happy about. Before it all went to crap, that is.
“Nash left,” I tell her, trying hard to disguise the shaking in my voice. I don't do a very good job of it. It's so stupid, I'm not even sure why I'm shaking.
She blinks rapidly three times, her lashes fluttering up and down against her cheeks like butterfly wings. “He left?”
“He left for home,” I elaborate, even though I'm not sure that's where he went. Telling her that was harder than it should have been, almost like I was coming clean about something else. Like I was admitting that he left me. It leaves a hollow feeling in my chest.
Felicia doesn't know about Nash and I, she can't know. We haven't told her, and the others promised they wouldn't. Yet there's something in her eyes as she pads towards the bench and sits next to me, something almost. . .pitying. I hate to be pitied.
Her fingers casually brush underneath the arm of the bench, right where Nash and I scratched our initials years ago. It had been the very first day we'd made our pact. Originally Nash had wanted to prick our fingers and do a blood brother like oath, but I'd been terrified of needles at that point so we'd compromised with our initials on the bench instead. It was the first thing we'd ever done together.
“You two thought I didn't know about this, didn't you?” she says, a smile in her voice as she taps the wood with her nails. She's right, we'd totally thought we'd gotten away with it. I'm surprised she didn't hang us up by our pesky teenage toes. “But I knew.”
“How?”
“A mother always knows.” She wraps an arm around my shoulders and smooths back my hair, much in the same way my own mom would when comforting me. Felicia has always been like another mom to me. “A mother always knows everything.”
I think then that she's no longer talking about the initials, that she's talking about something else entirely. I don't know for sure, but I'm not all that willing to find out. Right now I don't want to talk about it, especially not with Nash's mom. I just. . .I feel too much of everything. I'm stretched too thin and I feel breakable. No, worse than that.
I feel like I'm already broken.
+++
“What the hell?!” I demand when I get home an hour later, slamming the door shut and stomping into the kitchen. Throwing my coat and bag over the back of the sofa behind me, I turn to face Nash with folded arms. He's hunched over the kitchen table with a beer in one hand and his forehead in the other. He looks exhausted, like he's going through as much crap as I am right now. But I don't care about that, because I am PISSED. At some point over the last hour my hurt was replaced with a thick wall of anger as I remembered that I am Not That Girl. Not that girl who lets anyone, let alone a guy, push her down and make her feel like hell. I am the girl who bitch slaps anyone who tries to push her down. I am the girl who knows Nash better than anyone, who rolled around in the dirt with him and ate worms with him and shared secrets and hopes and tears and laughter with him. So whatever is going on with him, I will find out. “Yeah, I see now that you had really important things to do.”
“I just needed to get out of there,” he says without looking up at me. “I'm sorry, I was an ass. You didn't deserve that.”
“You're sorry for when? The porch, or the past few days?”
His eyes squeeze shut and he rubs a hand over them wearily. “I'm just fucking sorry, okay? Sorry for everything. For treating you like shit, for walking away from you. For starting this whole thing to begin with when you tried to tell me it was a bad idea. I get it now. You were right. We never should have hooked up.”
My body forgets how to function as his words hit me. A shard of ice lodges into my heart. Back when we'd made the rules, I'd thought it would be so easy to end this when we inevitably decided it would be over. I'd thought we could walk away and look back with fond memories and it wouldn't hurt at all. God, I was so wrong. It feels like. . .it feels I'm being crushed. Nash is crushing me. “So that's what this is all about? You want to end things? Then why didn't you just say so? We said no drama. You should've just. . .said.”
He glances up for a brief moment, and the amount of pain and conflict in his eyes surprises me. Downing the rest of his beer in one, he stands and makes his way to the fridge for another. I quickly intercept him, placing my back against the fridge door because getting drunk is the last thing we need to be doing right now. Nash glares at me for the longest time, like he's genuinely thinking of picking me up and removing me, but eventually he steps away and runs a hand through his hair, messing it up.
Spinning away from me, he says, “You have feelings for me.”
You have feelings for me. Such a small, simple statement, yet the response my body makes to it is overwhelming. Adrenaline pumps through me, making my heart race and blood rush through my ears so loud it's all I can hear. My body goes numb, then hot and cold all at once. I clench my fists so tightly my nails cut into my palms, but I welcome the stinging pain. It proves to me that this is
not a nightmare, that this is real.
Hearing him say it out loud, basically confirming that this is why he's been such a douche, is devastating. Simply devastating. I want to deny it, to call him an arrogant jackass and tell him to pick his giant head off the floor and get out of here, but he knows me too well. He knows when I'm lying. “Maybe,” I whisper.
He twirls back to face me, looking shocked, as if he hadn't really expected it to be true. As if he'd wished for it not to be. “Maybe?”
Shrugging helplessly, I storm by him to the kitchen table, needing to be moving, needing to be doing something other than just standing there. Fighting with Nash like this, it makes me feel wrong. It makes me feel itchy inside, like an army of ants are crawling away beneath my skin. I scratch at my arms, fidgeting uncomfortably. “Maybe,” I repeat. “No. I don't. . .I don't know, Nash! What do you even want me to say here?” When I turn back to face him he's just standing there, his arms hanging limply by his sides. He looks shell shocked. “Jesus. It's not like I'm in love with you. Stop looking at me like I've just proposed and begged you for babies.”
Frowning at me, he asks, “How can you not know? Either you do or you don't.”
“I just don't, okay? We were fooling around and it was fine and then I realized that I liked being with you too much and things got-”
“Complicated.”
I glare at him, getting unreasonably angry. Despite the horrible way he's gone about this, I know that in his own pig headed way, he's just trying to understand. I'm the one who went and made things weird by developing feelings. Ugh! Feelings. No wonder I've avoided this crap most of my life. Telling someone you're into them is hard. “Yeah, complicated. Things got complicated. It's not like I meant for this to happen. God, Nash! You were the one who started this, remember? You just couldn't stay away!”
He pulls at his hair, leaving it sticking out wildly. “I know that, Ivy!”
“Why are you acting like this is so awful? Why can't we just keep-”
“I saw Bambi,” he interrupts quietly, and my heart drops right out of my chest. It flops around on the floor between us a couple of times like a fish out of water, then it blackens and dies. Just like that. Because I already know where this is going, and suddenly these past few days make much more sense. This isn't about me. This isn't even about me and him. This is about him feeling guilty because he wants. . .something else. “She wants to get coffee.”
I don't ask him if he's going. It doesn't matter. What matters is that just the thought of going made him question everything between us. “You're not over her,” I state quietly. It's not a question, and even if it was I wouldn't want to hear the answer out loud, not when I already know it. Just because I realized that I was well and truly over Lambert, doesn't mean that Nash ever got over Bambi.
I feel. . .I feel so stupid. So naive So idiotic. What's wrong with me? I was the one who made him promise that there'd be no strings.
“I'm sorry, Ivy,” he chokes out. He really is, I know that.
“Don't be,” I reply, shaking my head. “We both knew this wasn't a forever thing. I just got. . .stupid. Give me a few days, I'll shake it off. You know me.” We both chuckle, but its humorless Forced. “We let it go on too long, that's all.”
“We probably should've stopped after that first time.”
A heavy weight settles over my chest. “Or maybe we never should've hooked up in the first place.”
“Don't say that,” he replies sadly. “I don't regret it. Besides, I couldn't have stayed away from you then even if I'd tried. Hell, I did try. Didn't work out.”
We regard each other in silence for the longest time, this unspoken thing in the air that neither of us quite has the courage to say. Eventually it gets too much, and I force myself to say it. “It needs to be over.”
Nash nods silently, his eyes shining.
Knowing that I'll probably fall apart if I say anything else and not wanting to do that in front of him, I turn to go to my room, but he comes after me. He grabs my elbow and twirls me back to him. “Tell me I'm not going to lose you, Ivy,” he pleads hoarsely. “Please tell me I'm not going to lose you. I couldn't stand it. I just. . .I couldn't. I'd never forgive myself.”
All my earlier anger, it's completely gone. It drifted away to be replaced by this sadness. It's as if we're not saying goodbye to the sex, but to us. Nash looks distraught, wild with distress at the idea of not having me in his life, and it cuts me deeply in ways he can't possibly imagine. Or maybe he can – we both know what the stakes are here. “You're not going to lose me,” I vow, my voice small and uncertain. “We're too awesome for that, remember?”
Nodding wordlessly, he wraps me up in his arms and holds on tighter than I ever thought possible. I cling to the back of his t-shirt with my fists, unwilling to let him go, because this. . .this may very well be the last time we get to do this. Things probably won't be the same between us, not for a long time. His body is warm and hard and it surrounds mine in such a familiar way that it makes my eyes sting. I memorize the way he feels, the way he smells.
He holds on to me like he'll never let go, but I don't think that has anything to do with why I suddenly can't breathe.
Chapter 17
Nash
Weeks drift by, moving blurringly fast one minute then achingly slow the next. Ivy and I exist in this unforgiving haze of uncomfortable politeness. It's awful, like we're two strangers who haven't spent their lives together, who don't know every inch and detail about the other. She swore to me that I wasn't going to lose her, but I can't help feeling that as each day goes by, I lose her a little more and more. I'm helpless to stop it. She's so out of reach, so untouchable. All I need is to fill this gaping chasm between the two of us, but I don't know how. I don't fucking know how.
I want things to be how they were before we ever hooked up, before that day in the rain that changed everything between us. I want things to be easy again. I want to come home and share a beer with her, watch TV with her, tease her about Space Head and laugh about our day and eat too much take out because neither of us can cook. I want her to send me video messages again. I want to find the courage to hit send on the hundred video messages I've recorded for her. I want to be us again.
Ivy is considering moving out. She hasn't said so out loud, but when I borrowed her laptop the other day I found it full of places to rent she'd been looking at. I freaked out, because the idea of her not being here with me. . .it scares the mothering shit out of me like nothing else ever has. Like an idiot, I cleared her search history and deleted all of the apartment listings, but it's not like she can't just look them up again. She must have known I'd seen them when she next used her laptop, but she never said anything and neither did I.
But then, we don't say much of anything at all to each other now, not anymore.
I never did go grab that coffee with Bambi. She didn't call me, and I didn't call her. I don't know why. For days I kept telling myself I'd get around to it, I'd do it later, but I never did. It just didn't feel right.
But after weeks of living in this weird place with Ivy, I realize that I have to do something to get us back to normal before it's too late. Something that the old me would have done, something she's more than used to seeing.
It seemed like a really good idea at the time, but bringing a date home. . .yeah, it was probably the shittiest thing I could have done.
“So this is your place?” Keila spins around, nodding approvingly when I bring her back for drinks after we go out to dinner. She's an intern at the office, provocative and flirty and all over me every time I see her. She's undeniably gorgeous – leggy and doe eyed with sultry curves – but I'm not feeling it. With every minute that passes I'm wishing I'd never suggested coming back to my place, that I'd never asked her out in the first place. I don't even know why I brought her here, other than that I knew she'd come if I asked and the old me would never have passed the opportunity up. With hair the color of fire and freckles that cover her nose
and her ample cleavage, she's about as opposite to Ivy and Bambi as one can get. Maybe that's why I asked her out.
“Yep.” I nod my head up and down, shoving my hands in my back pockets. Before Ivy, before Bambi, I'd have already had Keila out of that little pink dress by now.
“You gonna offer me a drink or what?” she demands with a smirk, kicking off her heels and perching on the arm of the sofa. I don't like it – that's where Ivy sits when she gets home from work and she's eager to share gossip with me that 'just can't wait'. Or it was. No one else should sit there.
“Yeah, of course. You want a beer?” I call from the kitchen.
“You got any wine?”
I used to always keep a bottle of wine chilling. Not for me – I never drink the stuff – but for the women I brought home. But then I stopped bringing chicks home and Ivy's always been more of a beer drinker – it's one of the things I like about her. “No, just beer.”
“Yuck.”
That's when I hear Ivy's bedroom door open, and my heart jumps into my throat. This was such a bad idea.
“Nash?” she calls softly. “That you? I wanted to talk about you and me-” Upon entering the living room, she immediately spots Keila and pauses. Frozen to the spot, I watch as her shoulders sag. “Oh.”
Suddenly I feel like the biggest fucker on the entire planet. “Hey. This is. . .um, this is Keila. We work together.”
Keila frowns at me for that, not happy that I've demoted her from date to co-worker.
Ivy fiddles with the tie on her pajama shorts. I can tell she isn't fooled. “You brought home a date?”
Glancing between the two of us, Keila asks, “This your girlfriend or something?”
“No,” Ivy and I reply at the same time, probably too forcefully.
“Good. I don't do threesomes.” Keila tilts her head and eyes Ivy. “Although. . .”
“What about Bambi?” Ivy wants to know, ignoring Keila.