It took everything in Jade not to drive to San Francisco to stay with her dad. She hadn't seen him since Christmas – hadn't wanted to see him since Christmas. But she stayed in the driveway of her mother's house instead, desperately trying to keep her breathing steady. The task was much more difficult than she had bargained for. She squeezed her eyes shut and forced in a breath and then forced it out again. And repeated until her lungs stopped throbbing. The clock on her dashboard told her it was quarter to midnight. Her brothers would have been asleep for hours now, and her mom and stepdad would have been, too. They weren't getting much sleep as of late with Jensen being so young.
Her father's house grew more and more appealing with every moment she loitered in her car on the edge of the driveway. She didn't have anything packed, and she left little of her belongings when she was last there. She hadn't thought she'd be back… not for a long while, anyway.
It would take her five and a half hours to drive to San Francisco, so she'd arrive at around five the next morning. Which was far too early for a Sunday morning. That was a no.
Tori's house then filed its way to the forefront of her mind. Even though she'd just left the place mid-panic attack. Although Tori made Jade feel the way she was feeling at the moment, she could also make her feel better. Tori was her safe space. She always had been, despite Jade vehemently stating otherwise – pretending otherwise. But, the thought of having to go back made her heart seize up and plummet to the pit of her stomach. She crossed that off her list.
Previously, she would have gone to either Cat or Beck's if she felt like this. But both were off the table. She hadn't spoken to Beck since they permanently broke up in his RV the night of the Full Moon Jam, and Cat was staying with her Nona. So, Jade unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out of the car.
The house was quiet and dark. The radiator in the entranceway gurgled and her stepdad Michael's snores crept downstairs as she locked the front door behind her. She removed her boots and carried them upstairs with her, managing to step on every single creaky spot on her way up. How did she manage to always be louder at night?
As tired as Jade was, all sleepiness evaded her as she climbed into bed. Her sheets were cold. Her head hit her pillow with a muted thump, and she stared at the silhouette of her open closet door in the dark. Curling her body into the foetal position, she sighed, wishing what happened with Tori had gone aeons better. She wanted to kiss Tori. Had been thinking of doing so since the day they met. At first begrudgingly, but slowly the thought became more and more alluring. It was supposed to. Tori was her soulmate. It was all meant to feel right. But it didn't.
Somehow, Jade's relationship with Tori simultaneously felt completely right and entirely wrong. They were perfect together but were like opposing magnets trying to get too close to one another. They repelled one another. And Jade didn't understand why. It was fate, or some alike force, that they should be together. But they didn't work. This was all a cruel joke, and it wasn't funny anymore. It had never been funny.
Jade turned to her other side and forced herself to fall asleep. It took what felt like hours, and not one moment of her slumber was peaceful. Her heart was still sprinting behind her ribs and her fingers were tingling with nervousness. It was a wonder she got to sleep at all.
Jade woke up to an empty house the next morning. Her almost-dead phone told her it was almost noon, and a text from her mother told her that her family had gone shopping. She also had seven missed calls and thirteen texts from Tori.
She stared at them for a moment, debating whether she should open them or not. She didn't want to leave Tori on read. But leaving her on delivered seemed equally cruel. Jade was constantly on her phone – and the brunette knew that. She'd know she was being ignored. Plus, Jade wasn't mad at Tori. The thought of being around her was just making her claustrophobic. There was a clear and distinct difference.
Without making a decision, she plugged her phone into its charger, stuffed it under her pillow and left her room. She went to the bathroom and washed her hands and face and brushed her teeth. She needed to shower too, but she needed to eat first.
She took leftovers from her parents' dinner the next before and put it in the microwave and went to make herself coffee. The buzzing of her ringing phone vibrated through the ceiling of the kitchen. She ignored it. She ignored the second and third and fourth and fifth times it rang, too. It was probably Tori and she didn't have the heart to speak to her. It was awful, and Jade knew that. She knew that she was always awful to Tori, but this was different. She was afraid to speak to Tori. To get yelled at and for all of her greatest fears to come true. As much as she knew it was inevitable, she wasn't – and never would be – ready for it.
Jade ate her breakfast and drank her coffee and her phone continued to ring. She washed her dishes and unloaded the dishwasher and her phone continued to ring. She washed her hands and went upstairs, and her phone continued to ring.
She thought it would start to irritate her by now. But, it didn't. Just made her feel like a terrible person. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She walked through her bedroom and into her en-suite bathroom, pulling her hair from the mess of a bun she'd piled atop her head before collapsing into bed the night before. She turned on the shower, stripping from her pyjamas as she waited for the water to heat up and for steam to fill the room. The fogged-up mirror revealed Jasper's drawings in the condensation from a few days ago when he'd toddled in and climbed up on the toilet. Jade had forgotten to lock the door. She smiled at the thought and got into the shower.
The steady rush of water almost drowned out her phone. It didn't, but it tried its darndest.
Jade took her time in the shower, washing her hair twice despite black and charcoal dye staining the tiled floor. Her mother had told her the highlights were purple when she'd bleached her hair and put the colour in, but Jade hadn't seen it until a week later when Tori's hand had brushed hers in their shared English Literature class. She liked it, but she preferred the royal blue.
The ringing stopped once she'd gotten out of the shower and wrapped a fluffy grey towel around herself. Relief calmed her for a moment, and she brushed her teeth, having to force back the laugh that caught in her throat at the sight of the badly drawn butterflies in the mirror. She didn't wipe away the fog. The drawings were too precious.
Jade dressed in her usual black sweater and skirt and tights without bothering to put on makeup or dry her hair. It was the first time in a long time she'd done it, but she truly didn't care enough to do anything about her appearance. Honestly, she was proud of herself for not wearing sweats and a giant hoodie.
There was a knock on the door. Jade started short-circuiting. No one ever visited unannounced, and her mother or stepfather would have told her they were waiting for a package. She toed on her slippers and walked to the top of the stairs, peering over the bannister in an attempt to figure out who it was through the frosted glass in the front door. She couldn't.
She almost went back to her room to ignore it, just like she'd ignored the million and one phone calls. But this felt much more urgent than a phone call. Whoever was would see two cars in the driveway – her car and her stepfather's car – and would know someone was home. They rang the doorbell twice.
Jade sighed and tried to muster up the courage to slip downstairs and answer the door. It really wasn't that difficult. She'd answered the door before, also while home alone. She could do this. She could do this. She could do this.
It was Tori on the other side of the door. Of course it was. Jade had to stop herself from slamming the door in her face from sheer panic.
"What are you doing here?" the raven-haired girl demanded, anxiety creeping into her voice. It wasn't supposed to. It was supposed to sound aggravated, even angry. She didn't sound like herself. She was going to have to talk to her mom about that.
"You weren't answering your phone and I was… I was worried about you. And I need to talk to you about what happened last night."
Every muscle in Jade's body tensed. She nodded and shuffled backwards, allowing Tori into the house. She didn't want to talk about what happened last night. Ever. It was mortifying, and she wished she'd never gone to the party at all. It all had been a terrible idea. She should have known it would turn out terribly; everything always did. She flexed her fingers and shut the door.
The two them stood silently for an excruciatingly long time. Jade felt rooted to the spot, like her feet had been super-glued to the floor. This was humiliating. Tori shifted her weight from foot to foot and crossed her arms over her body. She kept her gaze fixed to the fraying doormat. Jade internally thanked her for that. She thought making eye contact with her might send her back into the panic attack from last night. Perhaps she'd even be sick.
Eventually, Jade managed to unstick herself and walk to the sitting room. Tori followed her without her. They sat on one of the large overstuffed sofas, shoulder-to-shoulder. Too close. As always.
"Do you want to watch something?" Jade asked, searching the couch cushions for the remote. She found it and traced the outside of the centre button with her thumb. Nervous habit.
Tori didn't answer the question. She just posed her own. "Are you okay?"
The answer was I don't know, perhaps with a half-hearted shrug. But Tori wouldn't accept that.
"Yeah, I'm good. I just needed to sleep off whatever that was. I'm fine." She topped it off with a dismissive wave of her hand. As if she could ever act more out of sorts.
Tori didn't accept that, either. She raised an eyebrow and turned her body to look at Jade; stared at her. Jade had been right; the eye contact did send her into a panic. Her lungs contracted and her bare face burned scarlet.
She couldn't understand why she felt like this. She never felt like this. It was exhausting. She was Jade West, for crying out loud! She was supposed to cause these feelings, not experience them. And definitely not at the fault of Tori Vega, either. This was all wrong. Every single detail of it. She loathed it.
"I thought you were good at lying," Tori said, all traces of probably intended teasing absent from her tone. It came out more like an accusation than a joke. Jade's stomach twisted.
"I wanted to kiss you – I really did. And, I liked it. I… I don't know what happened. I just – uh… I felt…"
She couldn't finish the sentence. She didn't know what the end of it was. And she didn't know how she had felt, never mind articulate it. Her mind just felt messy. Incomprehensible. That wasn't an emotion. She put her head in her hands, frustration ballooning in her chest. What happened to relationships with one's soulmate being easy? This wasn't easier. It was the farthest thing from.
"Did you mean what you said last night?"
Jade couldn't remember what she's said. Everything was a blur. She stared blankly at Tori, blinking slowly. A feeling of stupidity mounted on to everything else. This was torture.
"You told me that you want to be with me – properly. Not whatever we're doing now."
Jade remembered it vaguely, and it was true. She may have been a bitch, but she was not a liar. She nodded. Words were becoming increasingly difficult to form. Then she shrugged, scrubbing her hands together. The skin around her fingernails was peeling.
"Then why are you acting like this?"
Tori put a hand on Jade's shoulder and rubbed small circles. Jade startled and whipped her head around again. Now facing away from Tori, she clicked on the TV and a rerun hockey game came on. She watched it for a moment, trying to ignore Tori's presence in the room. What the hell was wrong with her?
"If you're still not ready, that's okay. You're allowed to need to take time. We have so much time to figure this out."
Jade didn't want time. She wanted everything to stop, just for a moment, so she could catch her breath. She hated this. Everything about it. This wasn't the way things were supposed to be.
"I want to be ready," she said. She sounded thirsty for air. Her heart pounded in her chest. "I don't want it to be this way."
She kept her eyes on the TV, watching the players collide with one another and the walls of the rink. She used to love this – the violence, the competitiveness, the way it made her mom wince – but the zoom-in shot of a player losing his teeth made her feel queasier than she already did. She flicked up the channel and landed on baseball. She felt her eyes glaze over. Tori took her hand off her shoulder.
"You don't get to choose when you're ready, Jade. I'm sorry I gave you a hard time about it before. That wasn't nice of me." There were other things Tori had done that weren't nice of her. Organising Prome the night of Jade's performance and refusing to change it, stealing up all the lead roles she wasn't talented or qualified enough for, coming to Hollywood Arts at all. Jade's growing anxiety quelled slightly to accommodate another swelling force. Resentment. She didn't mean for it to. She'd thought her resenting Tori was a thing of the past. As if she could ever let go of a grudge.
"We've both done some not-very-nice things. At some point, we're both going to have to get over it." The words were more for herself than Tori. Jade had been more than terrible to the other girl over the two years they'd known one another. If they didn't forgive one another for the awful things they'd put each other through, then they'd never be able to function. The resentment didn't shrink, but it stopped growing.
Jade had always thought that the communication issues she'd had with Beck had stemmed from them not being soulmates. That, inevitably, their relationship would crumble, and it was taking its natural course. It had nothing to do with either of them, and they were experiencing such turbulence because they dared to defy the will of the universe; pretend they didn't have soulmates who weren't one another. But, as Jade watched Tori from the corner of her eye, observing her stew in their manufactured silence, the fear that it hadn't been a Beck-and-Jade problem, but rather a Jade-on-her-own problem. She'd never been much of a talker; preferred her problems be chased away with urine trickling down the inside of their legs rather than be solved. It's what her father had taught her, she supposed.
Tori and Jade watched the remainder of the baseball game without uttering a single word to one another. Neither of them knew how the game worked, who the teams were, or who was winning. But, it was better than exploring the can of worms they'd just opened.
Jade's family came home an hour and a half later. Tori and Jade sat in the same position they had when they'd first sat down: Shoulder-to-shoulder, hands in their laps, feet planted on the floor. If left undisturbed, they would probably have stayed like that permanently.
Jasper came first, sprinting into the sitting room with his new toy, and his blankie tucked safely under one arm. His sandy hair was getting too long, and his shorts revealed scabbed knees from when he fell at the playground last weekend. He flashed Jade his widest grin.
"Jadey!" He exclaimed, launching himself at his older sister, knocking the wind from her and completely ignoring Tori sitting next to her. He wrapped his arms tightly around her, snuggling his head into her shoulder. "I haven't seen you in years!" That was more than an exaggeration. It had been a little under twenty-four hours. She'd seen him the day previous before she'd left for Tori's party.
"I know, bub. I think you've got bigger." Jade ruffled his hair and rested her chin on the crown of his head, then turned her head slightly to find Tori staring at her as though she'd sprouted seven spare heads. "What?" she whispered as Jasper sat up straight and held up his new toy triceratops to show her. She smiled encouragingly at him.
"You're… you're so good with him," Tori said, almost breathlessly.
"What, did you think I'd be a terrible sister?"
"No, of course not. I've just never seen you this affectionate with… anyone."
Jade scoffed but said nothing more. Jasper was too busy babbling about dinosaurs for her to pay attention to anything else. The little boy was an attention hog.
Jade's dad, stepdad and her other brother, Jensen came in a few minutes later with groceries, and Michael called for Jade to come help pack them away. They hadn't realised Tori was there.
She lifted Jasper from her lap and placed him on the couch next to Tori, who was now the subject of his prehistoric ramblings.
The kitchen island was filled with reusable grocery bags. Jade's mom stood in the small breakfast nook, burping Jensen. Michael was organising the produce drawer of the fridge.
"Who is Jas talking to?"
"Tori's here."
Jade's mom turned around to face her, eyebrows halfway up her forehead. "Tori Vega?"
"What other Toris do we know?"
"Attitude. I didn't know you two were friends again. You told me she hasn't talked to you since what happened with Beck."
"What happened with Beck?" Michael's head shot out from the fridge.
"None of your business. She wasn't but we worked it out last night. It's all fine," Jade said. She was worse at lying to her mother than she was at lying to Tori. Something was severely off with her.
Jensen started crying.
"Help Michael with the groceries."
Jade did as she was told, keeping her focus on Jasper's babbling and Tori's overenthusiastic responses. She'd heard her mother pad upstairs but wasn't certain she wouldn't go snooping in the sitting room before Jade was done doing her chores. Delilah Carter was as nosy as the day was long. Jade was almost completely sure that's why her mother became a psychiatrist.
Thankfully, the groceries were packed away before her mother came back downstairs. Jade slipped back into the sitting room and stood directly in front of Tori.
"We have to go."
"But Towi said she was going to play Hot Wheels with me!" Jasper protested, sticking out his bottom lip.
"Sorry, bub, but we have some very important school stuff to do. Maybe we can all play Hot Wheel another time?" Jade suggested, taking Tori by the hand and pulling her off the couch. Her vision shifted from black and white to cream and ivory. Jumped from one monochrome to another.
Jasper continued to huff as the two girls left the house, yelling their partings as they slammed the large front door behind them. They packed themselves into Jade's car and reversed out of the driveway.
"Why do we have to go?"
"My family is at home."
"And?"
Jade gave Tori a pointed look. How was this not obvious to her? They had to be subtle at her house, why would it be any different when they were at Jade's? Plus, Tori's house had the extra added benefit of always being blissfully empty. Between the Vegas' frequent vacations and Trina finally finding a place closer to college, Tori constantly had the place to herself.
They couldn't just sit in Jade's sitting room have continue the conversation they'd been having earlier (because it did need to be continued). As far as her parents were aware, there was some man out there with the key to their daughter's technicolour vision. And she was content for it to stay that way for the time being. She'd like to know, at the very least, where she stood with Tori before she went around announcing their soulmate status. She just wasn't ready.
Of course, Jade couldn't read minds, but she could guess that Tori felt the same way about her parents. The brunette rarely had something nice to say about them, she was hardly open with them about this. Not that they'd ever notice anything was off with either of their daughters. They weren't around enough to know what was normal.
"Where do you want to go?" Jade asked, leaving her gated neighbourhood. She chewed the inside of her cheek as she drove.
Tori shrugged, crossing her legs. "You can just take me home." She turned around in her seat and stared out the window. Jade had hit a nerve. She didn't know how or when, but she'd seen the brunette shut down like this enough to know something was wrong.
Jade nodded and did as she was asked. The drive was a little over thirty minutes, and her musical theatre playlist hummed softly from the speakers. The last time they'd been like this was on the way to Karaoke Dokie for TinkleAid. They'd screamed along to the Little Shop of Horrors soundtrack, butchering the high notes and not even caring.
Tori's house, as always, was empty. No cars in the driveway. No lights on inside. It was incredibly sad.
"Do you want me to come in?"
"I don't know."
Jade huffed out a breath and pulled a hand through her hair. The ends were still damp.
"I know we have to talk about this, but I don't know how to," she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She was bordering on anxious again.
Tori around, looking at Jade as though she had the answer to every question the brunette had ever had. "How are you feeling?"
Jade opened her mouth then promptly shut it again. How was she supposed to answer that? To explain that, somehow, she was feeling everything yet nothing at all? She'd sound crazy. She shrugged. A cop-out.
"Do you feel better or worse than you did when you left last night?"
"I feel different than I did last night?" Why did it come off as a question?
"But do you feel better or worse?"
"Better. I think. Maybe."
"Okay."
Jade swallowed harshly. She didn't understand what Tori was doing, or why this impromptu therapy session was necessary. It didn't matter what she was feeling. The only thing that mattered was fixing their sorry excuse for a relationship.
"Can I kiss you again?" Tori asked. As casual as asking about the weather. Jade would rather be set on fire. She shook her head. Tori nodded.
"What are you doing?" Jade asked, suddenly finding great interest in her hands twisting together in her lap.
"I'm trying to set boundaries, so we don't have another episode like last night, all right?"
Jade nodded.
"How do you feel about starting over? We've put each other through a lot the past two years, and I think it might be impeding on us starting our relationship. What do you think?"
Jade didn't think this would work. It was ridiculous. It was perhaps the worst idea Tori had ever had. But what would be lost in trying? They had to make this work. It was imperative they did.
"Yeah, sure. That sounds okay."
Tori smiled. "Okay then. I'm Tori, nice to meet you."
"I'm Jade. It's nice to meet you too."