In the middle of a raging house party, Tori Vega slammed the first door she could find behind her, grunted angrily, and made a mental note to never bring a boy to a party again.

"Slam it a little louder, why don't you?" A distorted, yet all too familiar voice echoed throughout the dark room from the opposite side.

"Jade?" The other girl sighed loudly, and confirmed that it was her.

"Should've known it was you." Jade hiccupped loudly just as Tori flipped the light switch, revealing the huge bathroom they were in. Across the room, Jade was sitting in an empty bathtub with her feet propped up on the edge. Her eyes were red and she was picking at the ends of her hair, trying not to look at Tori.

"Are you gonna be in here long?" She asked, making sure she sounded as annoyed as possible. Tori just hopped up onto the counter top by the sink and nodded energetically. She could tell her friend had been drinking, which meant she had a chance to play with her a little, and Jade wouldn't do anything about it.

"You know, I heard you were a friendly drunk. Guess that's not true, is it?"

"Not drunk." Jade mumbled, knocking over a glass bottle with her elbow and immediately scrambling to pick it back up before the rest of the liquid inside went down the drain. Tori hadn't noticed what was in the tub with Jade until just then, and she lost all desire to mess with the girl as she grew concerned.

"Oh my God Jade, how long have you been in here? Did you drink all of that?"

"I didn't have that much." Jade replied, pulling her legs into the tub and attempting to stand up.

"Almost half of the bottle is gone." Tori pointed out, as her "friend" stumbled and almost fell out of the tub.

"Don't judge me." Jade spit out, sitting carefully on the edge of the bath tub and placing the bottle of vodka down beside her without tipping it over again. "I spilled some of it…" Clearing her throat, she added "It's not like you don't have problems. What are you so mad about anyway?" Tori just sighed and jumped down off the counter, her mood having turned around once again at the thought of why she was hiding out in the bathroom.

"Well, I just caught my date making out with that freshman that cut in front of me in the lunch line yesterday. You know, the one who bumped into you and would have been punched in the face if I hadn't stopped you from hitting her?"

"Ugh, I hate that girl." Tori smiled a little at Jade's reaction and explained with a shrug,

"He's a jerk though." She felt more like an idiot as the words left her mouth. She should have known he would pull something like that. She was stupid for letting herself fall for his little act.

"I'm sure he is."

"All boys are. " Tori added, with a loud sigh.

"Maybe not all," Jade mumbled, responding much differently than Tori had expected her to. "but most." She wrapped her fingers around the bottle and started to lift it, only for Tori to take it from her before it could reach her lips. "Okay, all." She amended, sticking out a demanding hand.

"You don't need any more of this." Tori assured her. She turned and set the bottle next to the sink, far enough away that Jade wouldn't try to go after it.

"What's wrong with you?" Tori asked softly. The other girl looked up at her, a deeply offended expression taking over her already reddened face. "You know what I mean."

"Well, I just…I guess…" Her head snapped up and she looked right into Tori's eyes as her frenemy sat down beside her on the bathtub. "This doesn't leave this room, right?" She received a quick nod in response. "Tell anybody and you'll regret it." She nodded again. "Okay, well," Jade tried to cross her legs as she spoke, but lost her balance and fell against Tori, who helped her sit up and then flung one of her own legs over the side of the bath tub, straddling the edge while she waited for the rest of the story.

"Idon'tthinkIloveBeckanymore." Jade said in one breath, staring into her lap for a moment before she saw Tori's reaction. Shock covered the sober one's face, but it soon disappeared and turned into the same look that Tori usually reserved for stray dogs that she saw on the street.

"I just…" Jade tried to explain, but had to turn away from Tori to do it. "Okay, so about an hour after we got here, Beck and I went upstairs to…well, you know…"

"I do, but I really didn't want that mental picture..." Tori muttered, motioning for Jade to go on.

"and it just…I wasn't into it. At all. I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Nothing's wrong with you. You're at a party with a hundred other people. It's not exactly romantic."

"No, you don't get it. It was like this the last time too. It's not where we're doing it…it's just that I don't want to anymore…with him."

"Then…with who?" Tori asked, starting to feel a little uncomfortable with the conversation, considering her advice-giving expertise didn't cover situations like this.

"I don't know." Jade grunted and rubbed her eyes, hard. "Look, I know you'd rather not be having this conversation with me right now, but the only other person who really likes me enough to talk about stuff like this and is intelligent enough to be of any use is Beck…"

"Are you thanking me?" Tori asked her as a big smile took over her face. She was pretty sure she'd never gotten anything this close to a thank you from Jade before.

"No. I don't thank people." Jade lied, and if she hadn't drank almost a third of the vodka sitting on the counter, she would have been able to stop herself from smiling back.

"That stuff is disgusting. Cheapskates." She admitted, laughing. "I just took it because it was an excuse to sit in here all night and avoid Beck." Tori awkwardly placed her hand on her companion's shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting way. "I'm pretty sure he knows something's up. He's just too much of a gentleman to talk about it. Or maybe too much of a coward. I don't know. I just don't think it's gonna work. I need to break up with him."

"Don't say that! You guys have been together for so long. You can't make a decision like that in one day."

"Well what if I think about it for a week and don't feel any differently? What about two weeks? What do I do then?"

"Well then…I guess you'd just have to break up with him, if you decided that that's what you really wanted." She responded, growing more and more disappointed by her inability to help.

Jade nodded and they sat in silence for a moment. Tori stared down at her feet and wiggled her toes as she tried to think of either something else to say, or an excuse to leave the bathroom. Jade was completely still, wearing a blank face that gave no hints about how she was feeling. She ran her tongue over her teeth, not saying another word until after she turned to Tori, placed her hands on either side of the girl's head, and completely out of the blue, pulled her into a deep kiss. Several seconds later she let go, pausing for a moment in that position, with Tori's breath on her face and her shocked eyes looking right back. Once what she had done sunk in, she backed away so fast that she fell to the ground, with her eyes growing even wider as she returned to her feet.

"Oh God. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to- I'm so sorry." She snatched the glass bottle from the sink and pulled on the doorknob so hard that it slipped from her sweaty hands. "This didn't happen. I won't tell if you don't." She stated before she disappeared, slamming the door behind her and leaving Tori in the bathroom alone as the one light bulb in the fixture above her head flickered.

Half an hour later, Tori finally made her way back to the large living room, where the majority of the party was taking place. She spotted Jade by the opposite wall, vodka in hand, even though by now the bottle was empty and most of the remaining contents were covering her shirt. Pushing several people aside, Tori managed to cross the room just as Jade saw Beck and followed him into the kitchen.

"Hey, I need to talk to you!" Jade spat at him as she ran into the corner of the island counter top like she hadn't even noticed that it was between them.

"Yeah?" Beck responded, confused, just as Tori burst into the otherwise empty room.

"I think-" The rest of her statement was incomprehensible, as Tori spoke – loudly – over her.

"Hey Jade! I just decided I wanna leave too, so I can give you a ride. Beck looks like he's having fun, huh? Wouldn't want to make him have to leave early, would we?" She nodded enthusiastically, staring hard into Jade's eyes until she agreed.

"Right…"

"Okay…" Beck muttered, puzzled by the two girls' behavior.

"Well, see you later then." Tori said to Beck as she snaked an arm around Jade's shoulders and helped her walk out the back door, since she was now too drunk to do that properly on her own.

"Feel better, babe!" Beck called after them. "Goodnight!" Jade looked over her shoulder and smiled a little, but then managed to trip over her own feet, and would have fallen down if Tori hadn't been there, waiting for that exact moment.

"What are you doing?" Jade asked loudly once they were outside.

"Stopping you from breaking up with Beck while you're drunk and confused."

"Oh, okay." Jade said calmly as they searched the yard for Tori's car – or rather, the car she shared with her sister, but had managed to take for the night even though it was supposed to be Trina's weekend.

A couple minutes later, after yanking a giggling Jade around the yard, Tori recognized her red car next to a similar one in blue. She helped her suddenly cheerful friend into the passenger seat and got behind the wheel, carefully maneuvering the car out of the packed temporary parking lot. Neither girl said a word for almost thirty minutes, until Tori accidentally passed the road that she was supposed to turn on.

"I'm so drunk right now" Jade said, laughing at herself, "but even I know you were supposed to turn back there."

"I would hope so. It's your house." Tori responded, her voice full of annoyance.

She pulled into an empty driveway to turn around, and eventually made her way onto the correct road. She focused on the mailboxes as she slowly rolled down the road, looking for the one with WEST painted in white on both sides. She nearly hit a raccoon due to not paying attention, but Tori managed to pull into Jade's driveway without incident. She turned the car off and turned to her passenger, who was staring into her lap and smiling about something.

"Do you have your key?" Jade started patting her hips despite the fact that her pants didn't have pockets, and her smile immediately disappeared.

"…No. Do you?"

"Why would I have a key to your house? I've only ever been here once."

"Well I don't know. You don't need to be mean." Jade complained, reaching for the door handle. "I can just go through the dog door." Jade didn't have a dog, but the previous owners of her house had put a pet door in for their obese black lab, and the West family had never gotten around to taking it out. Tori had noticed it when she'd visited Jade's house for the first time with Beck, Cat, and Andre the month before, and Beck had explained it to her.

"Are you sure you can get through it without hurting yourself?" She asked the unusually happy girl climbing out of the passenger seat. The rumor that Jade was a friendly drunk had actually turned out to be true, only now Tori had to wonder how many times Jade had been drunk enough to actually get a rumor like that started.

"Are you calling me fat?"

"No, I'm calling you drunk. You could hardly walk when we left the party."

"Well, I can walk now." She responded bluntly, only tripping once as she went around to the back of the house, where the dog door was.

Tori followed her, but waited outside on the deck, rather than trying to squeeze through the door behind her drunken friend. After disappearing into the house, seconds ticked by and Jade didn't come to open the door for Tori, so she ended up crawling through the tiny hole in the wall anyway.

Jade came out of the hall bathroom just as Tori stood up, and looked very surprised to see Tori standing inside her house. She stuck a hand out, trying to use the wall to support herself, only for the wall to be a few inches further away than she'd planned.

"I thought you left."

"I'm not gonna leave without making sure you get to bed without dying first." Tori responded, as if it were obvious.

"Oh." Jade mumbled, before she started for the stairs. Tori followed her up to her bedroom, but waited in the doorway while Jade searched through her dresser, making sure to look away once she started to undress. She wasn't even sure that Jade really remembered what had happened anymore, but she didn't want to be caught looking and make things more awkward.

"I kissed you, didn't I?" Jade suddenly asked, as if she'd read Tori's mind.

"Yeah, Jade, you did."

"Oh. So that wasn't a dream. I'm sorry." She tilted her head to the side as she apologized, like those words in her mouth had caused some kind of kink in her neck.

"It's okay." Tori replied immediately. The rest her sentence didn't come out though. She couldn't find the words to come up with an excuse for what had happened.

"You know…I should thank you. You saved me. If it weren't for you, I'd still be at that party, looking like an idiot and breaking up with Beck in a horrible way."

"You're welcome." Tori smiled through a loud yawn. "Just, you know…before you decide what to do about him, sleep on it. Think about it, okay? Just remember how much you regretted it the last time."

Jade nodded, and then said loudly, "I think I'm gonna pass out." Tori finally entered the room, and helped the inebriated girl get into bed.

"Do you need a bucket or something? You're not going to puke, are you?" She asked as she pulled Jade's blankets up over her.

"I already puked in the bathroom." Jade answered, pushing Tori away. "I think I'm okay."

"Your parents will be home soon, won't they? You'll be okay if I leave?"

"Yeah, yeah. Get out of here." Jade spit out, rolling onto her side. "But next time I'm mean to you, remind me how much I owe you. I probably won't be any nicer, but I might buy you a soda or something."

"I will. See you later, I guess." Tori whispered as she walked out of the room and made her way back downstairs and out to her car – through the front door, this time.

Tori's own house was only about 10 minutes away, but she spent much longer than just the drive home thinking about the many possible outcomes this situation could have, while trying to convince herself that she wasn't waiting on one in particular.

Funny story - Right after finishing this chapter I locked myself out of the house and had to crawl through the dog door to get back inside.

Hope you enjoyed this and the irony though. :)