I'M BAAAAAAAAAAAACK. Holy crap, has it been awhile! I have been sitting on this for so long and didn't realize I had two unpublished chapters already finished! Don't hate me, please. I'll try to keep up with it this time, if y'all will have me back :) Just as a warning, this chapter is told from Emma's perspective. I'll post the next one hopefully tomorrow! Let me know what you all think.
It never should have happened. That much you're sure of as you lay in your unkempt bed, with a taste that strongly resembles regret more than the aftermath of that entire gallon of wine the two of you drank the night before.
You're left staring at the ceiling while your best friend sleeps fitfully next to you. Nothing about this scene seems abnormal at first. Leila frequently would crash in your room instead of her own, even after she came out to you. It was just something the two of you did.
What was abnormal about your current situation is the fact that her hair is mused and the pair of you are quite underdressed for a platonic friendship. You look down to your own bra-clad body to see a rather large purple mark forming on the curve of your hip, and you're suddenly doused with the full blown memory of what the two of you had done the night before:
It had been about three days since Leila found out that Jade lied about her relationship with Tori. Up-herself bitch, you had thought as you watched your best friend mope on the couch with tear-stained eyes.
"I knew it, you know? I really fucking knew it," Leila griped over the Chinese food you finally got her to agree to eat.
When you arrived at the apartment toting the brown paper bag and a gallon of red Lambrusco, Leila's eyes lit up slightly and you automatically began to set up your meal on the coffee table, knowing that Leila only ever sat at the kitchen table when she was doing homework. Any meals were always eaten on the floor with her back against the sofa and her legs stretched out in front of her.
You had decided to take the backseat in the conversation, realizing that now was the best time to bite your tongue and let her get it all out of her system before you turned around to rip apart Jade West.
"What do you mean?" You asked when she didn't elaborate on her thought.
"You didn't see them together. You didn't see the genuine surprise on Jade's face when Tori showed up at her apartment that day. And it wasn't like the I haven't seen my friend in three years. It was like I'm seeing the love of my life again after three years."
"Why didn't you say anything to her about it?" You asked quietly.
Leila shook her head with a bitter smile. "I guess I was just trying to ignore it. I didn't want to see it, so I tried to convince myself it wasn't there. Then there was this thing that happened, and it seemed so stupid to get hung up on it, so I let it go."
You remember quite clearly rolling your eyes as you dove into your pork fried rice. Leila always took forever to get to the point of her stories. You almost always had to coax it out of her. It wasn't that she didn't want to tell you, she just always wanted to make sure you really wanted to know.
"So, after a few days of Tori hanging around, I asked Cat about her," Leila said as she kicked around her orange chicken with her fork.
"How did that go, exactly?" You asked, wondering what exactly Leila thought asking Jade's best friend would do to help her.
She let out a sigh and her eyes met yours. "I just asked if there was something that I needed to worry about when it came to Jade and Tori. Cat gave me a funny look and asked what would make me think that there was anything like that going on."
"Were you expecting a different result from asking your girlfriend's best friend about her?" You had asked bitterly, beginning to think that entire group of people just worshipped the ground Jade walked on.
"I don't know. I just thought that maybe I'd get some semblance of the truth. All Cat said was that Tori and Jade had a very complicated and misunderstood friendship."
You snorted at that. "No fucking shit."
"Why exactly do you hate her so much?" Leila had asked you, her words sharp like razorblades as her eyes narrowed.
Caught completely off guard, you sat for a moment with your mouth slightly open as you thought about what exactly it was about Jade that made you so angry.
If you were being honest, you didn't really have anything to say. You had no concrete reason for disliking that girl as much as you did. There was nothing wrong with the shining of Leila's eyes whenever she spoke of her. There was nothing wrong with the fact that Jade bought Leila absolutely anything the girl even muttered having stricken a liking to.
So what was it?
"I don't trust her," you finally contended to saying.
Leila's brow arched high and you knew that wouldn't be a good enough answer for her. "Really? You don't trust her?"
"Call it a gut feeling."
Leila scoffed at that and rolled her eyes before drinking heavily from the wine you had brought her. A quick glance to the coffee table showed you that nearly three quarters of the gallon of sweet red wine was gone.
"What exactly happened?" You asked carefully.
"What do you mean?"
"What happened that made you think something had been going on?"
"That night that I was there with all of her friends, one of the first nights when Tori came back, we all passed out in the living room. Tori's phone woke us up in the morning and Jade told her to shut it off."
You rose your brow skeptically. "I'm not following."
Leila sighed and looked at her lap. "You know how she always calls me Fitz?"
You rolled your eyes again. "Yes." It had irritated you in the beginning of their relationship. You didn't understand what was so hard about just fucking saying Leila's first name. Leila had defended it and told you she thought it was cute.
"Fucking hell, Vega. Turn that shit off," Leila said simply.
Confusion settled for only a moment before realization took its place. You knew that if you been in that same position, you would have called Jade out immediately. She couldn't even try to hide the fact that there had been something else going on between the two of them. Obviously something that had the intentions of being personal had been shared between Tori and Jade.
"Fucking hell, Leila. Why didn't you ask her?" You found yourself exclaiming, feeling incredibly irritated with your friend's passive nature.
"How the hell was I supposed to do that?" Leila's voice rose with yours, her own frustration with herself leaking out.
You took a moment to calm down, knowing that shouting would not solve anything. Once most of your anger at your friend had petered out, you found yourself shrugging casually. "I don't know. She asked me."
Leila's face scrunched in confusion, "She what?"
You nod your head. "Yeah. When she came by yesterday. She accused me of being in love with you and assumed that was why I hated her. Heaven forbid anyone not like the queen bee," you said in a distasteful voice.
"That's crazy," Leila said almost immediately.
You appraised her behavior. Her body had gone rigid and her eyes managed to land on anything that wasn't attached to you. "Right," you agreed skeptically as you analyzed her rather peculiar behavior further.
After a few more moments of tense silence, her eyes finally fell back to yours as your gaze had never left her face, "Isn't it?"
"Isn't it what?"
You watched as her eyes slid down to your lips before you realized exactly what she was asking of you. As the distance between the two of you closed, you found it difficult to swallow because it felt like your heart had crammed itself into your throat. You felt panic rise in your chest before you saw the raw vulnerability in her eyes.
"Crazy," she breathed before you let her kiss you. Her lips were soft, but softer than any other person you could recall kissing. As it went further, you realized that this didn't even feel like a kiss. It was a question.
Is this okay?
Should we stop?
Why couldn't she love me?
When you grew tired with your friend's uneasiness, you decided to make the choice for the two of you and found yourself pulling Leila closer by the back of her neck. It should have felt weird. It should have felt fucking wrong to have your best friend pressed closely to you that way, but instead it felt right. Not in the sense of I-just-found-my-soulmate, but more like...this is what needs to happen.
So you let her lead you in a dance of flurried kisses and exploring hands. Your discarded cartons of food sat forgotten on the coffee table as Leila gently pushed you onto your back on the carpeting. You began accepting her kisses more openly as her lips became needy. You accepted the responsibility of showing her the way she should be loved.
Your memory begins to fail you as you try to recall when exactly the two of you relocated to your bed and where along the way your clothes had been discarded. But little else mattered except for trying to figure out where you should go from here.
The rustling of the sheets draws you out of your mind as you turn your head to look at your waking friend. Leila groans as she stretches out her lithe body, making noises that now cause a flush to rise in your cheeks as you think of the other instances you've now heard those noises.
Her eyes open and fall onto yours, "Hi," she says meekly.
You scoff and roll your eyes. "One night of a good romp and all I get is hi?" You ask sarcastically.
Leila sighs in what seems to you as relief. "Oh, thank fuck you aren't going to make this weird."
"It's weird enough without me doing anything else in addition to that," you comment dryly.
And that was the end of it. Leila got out of bed and offered to make the two of you breakfast as you showered and thought about how you had fucked your best friend multiple times.
You never mentioned anything about what had happened, and were eternally thankful that Leila wasn't making any efforts to bring about the topic either. You thought it was something you could just leave in the past, seeing as it hadn't negatively effected your friendship in anyway.
Until the day it did.
You were sitting on the couch when Leila's phone began buzzing. She swiped it up and you casually listened to her side of the conversation. Something was wrong with Cat and she needed help. Leila did what you would have done and iced Cat out, at first, but then she did the typical Leila thing and agreed to go see her.
"You're kidding me, right?" You asked her as she fumbled for her shoes.
"She's still my friend, and Jade's gone recluse," Leila argued.
"You're too good," you said as you continued to flip through your textbook.
And out she went. A few hours pass and you find yourself lying on the living room floor with a Bright Eyes vinyl playing on your record player. You weren't one for histrionics, but you were in a mood and Conor Oberst's unique voice was the only remedy.
Leila bursted through the door with a little smirk on your face. You knew that smirk. You spent the last two years learning the many smiles and looks of Leila Fitzpatrick. That smirk meant trouble.
"What is it?" You said before she could even set her keys down.
Leila suddenly looked worried and slightly shameful as she let out a sigh. "It was Jade."
"Pardon?"
"Jade was there. At the coffee shop. Not Cat."
You couldn't believe the audacity of that girl.
"Well, I don't see any blood. I take it went well?" You said sarcastically. As if you gave a damn.
"She asked me on a date," Leila said, practically bursting with excitement. The kind of excitement that should be contagious to a best friend, but instead felt more like a poison.
"And you told her to shove it up her ass, right?" You asked.
Leila's grin faltered and her shoulders fell, and you instantly knew the answer. "Well...no, but she apologized and explained to me the situation."
You're sitting up now, staring at your friend in awe that she could be so stupid to just take the girl back after everything Jade had done. "Is that it? An apology is all it takes?"
Leila rolled her eyes at that point and tossed her purse onto the couch. "I figured you'd act like this."
"Are you gonna tell her about us?" The words came out sharp like gunfire and you sat surprised that you had even said it. Leila was clearly surprised too, because her lips were parted in surprise as she contemplated what you had just asked.
"We're starting a clean slate."
You snorted at that idea and lifted yourself off of the floor before walking into the kitchen. "Think that'll work?"
"I don't see why not."
You scoffed and shook your head as you took a water bottle from the fridge before heading to your bedroom and slamming the door. You couldn't figure out why you were so angry. Why finding out that Leila was going to take Jade back made you so upset. Or was it the fact that Leila was okay with not telling Jade that the two of you had slept together?
Groaning dramatically, you flopped on your bed while listening to Leila turn on the shower in the room next door. Part of you couldn't believe that Leila would let herself be brought into this position again, but you knew how stubborn your friend could be. If she had agreed to give Jade a second chance, you knew there was a good reason for it. You resolved to do exactly what your friend was doing: take it one day at a time and see how things would go.
One thing you knew for sure was that if Jade West messed up one more time, the gloves would come off completely.