XIV
Jed hesitated for a long moment. "Um... hey?" he said finally.
"Yeah." Abbey smiled and hugged herself. "I know it's late, I just-"
"Yeah, sure, come in," he said quickly, guiding her in with an arm across her shoulders. He closed the door, and she stood inside the hallway, looking awkward.
"What's wrong, Abbey?" he asked tentatively. She hadn't come to his house before; it wouldn't have been appropriate, even less so than him hanging around in her house on the night of the storm. This late at night with nobody about... there had to be a reason she was here.
Abbey's face crumpled, and she shook her head. "I just... I don't know. Me and Ron, we're not... I don't know."
She moved forward, and in some instinct that he hadn't known he had, he wrapped his arms around her. She rested her head against his shoulder, and he could feel her pulse and smell the scent of her hair. For a long moment they were both silent, and he fancied that the rhythm of their breathing became synchronised.
Abbey tilted her head to look up at him, and her eyes were so sad... "I don't know what to do, Jed," she confessed. "I really don't."
"It's okay," he said gently, and meant it even if he didn't know how to make it. "It's okay." Despite himself he found his hand moving to gently stroke her hair, and she gave a fragile smile. Their gazes locked and lingered for a long moment.
And then he kissed her.
Except he didn't. Because he wasn't that guy and she wasn't that girl, and... And.
Jed pulled back, and smiled at her softly, slipping his hands safely into his pockets. "You want some coffee?"
They sat on the stairs together, drinking coffee. Abbey perched halfway up while Jed sat with his back against the corner wall so he could look up at her.
"Seriously, I... I don't know what to think," she told him. "I- Ron's a great guy," she said, almost pleadingly, as if she was begging him to disagree with her.
And he wanted to. He wanted to cast Ron down and tell her all the ways that Ron was bad and wrong and no good for her. He wanted to tell her that Ron would treat her wrong, that he didn't love her, that she had to get out now and walk away.
And he wanted to stand up and move towards her, and let her see what it was in his eyes that he kept so guarded, let her see him, the real him, and then just... And then just let it be whatever it was going to be.
Oh, he wanted to. But he'd never been a liar, and the look in her eyes as she turned to him for comfort and for understanding...
He just wasn't that guy. He'd never been that guy.
Jed sighed, and looked down as he swirled the coffee in his cup. It was already growing cold, but he couldn't bring himself to drink it. He hadn't really wanted it, but he needed something to occupy his hands, and somewhere to turn his attention in the silences where speaking aloud would have damned him.
"He tries so hard for me, and I know he loves me so much, and..." She played with the ends of her hair. "I feel so bad, Jed," she burst plaintively. "I feel so bad that I don't- that he loves me so much and I just don't know how to feel."
"It's not your fault," he told her softly.
"It is my fault! I'm so cruel about him, Jed," she said. "In my head, I'm cruel about him. He's my boyfriend! How can I just... how can I just judge him like that? How can I just look at him, and see... and see all these things that I think are missing?" She fell silent for a beat. "Do you know what I was thinking at the party? I was thinking that he doesn't dream enough! As if anybody could ever tell that about another person."
"I think you dream enough for anybody." The words were torn from him before he had the time to consider their advisability.
Abbey smiled at him, almost shyly. "I was looking at him, and thinking that he's... he's content. He's happy where he is. He just wants things to keep going like they are, and I want-" She shook her head at herself. "I don't know what I want."
"Abbey-" his voice cracked in a way that he knew he shouldn't have let it, and he quickly looked away lest he meet her eyes in that exact moment. He wanted very much to reach out and take her hand, but that would be... That wouldn't have been right.
"I think," he continued, picking his words very carefully, "that you... you know where your own heart wants you to go. And if you could never be happy in... in being anything other that what you know you have to be, then..." Jed slowly looked up to meet her eyes. "You should never settle, Abigail. Never take less than what you deserve, because you deserve-"
He shook his head, not ready to finish that.
Abbey gave him a wry look over her coffee cup. "But am I settling for Ron... or am I just afraid?"
"I don't know," he said, because he couldn't trust his own gut feelings when he knew what lay behind them.
"Ron would... he'd never try to hold me back," she said earnestly, setting her drink aside. "I know that. Anything I wanted to do he'd be there, right behind me."
But you want someone who'll be beside you. Somebody to hold your hand and walk right out into the unknown with you. He knew it, but he was distracted by the image of Abbey as a shooting star, blazing a trail through the darkness. Who could keep up with her? Who could ever be the one to be beside her every step of the way?
The moment to speak was lost, and Abbey was moving onwards in her hesitant mental journey. "I know Ron wouldn't drag me down, so am I... am I just making excuses for myself? Am I just finding reasons to not be in love with him, to not let this be any realler than it is? Am I that afraid of being in love?"
"I think..." Jed hesitated, and spoke his heart. "I think being in love is strong, and it's powerful, and beautiful, and anyone who isn't a little bit afraid of it doesn't really know what it means. Love is... it isn't flowers and candy and holding hands at the prom, it's... it's real. It's something that, that moves inside of you, and it changes you, and... and how can you not be afraid of that?"
He looked up, and Abbey was smiling at him with something unreadable in her eyes. "You really have words, you know that? You know how to wrap things up in words when I'm still... when I'm still trying to figure out how to think them."
Jed smiled sadly in response. "Sometimes I think my words don't do enough."
"Dad told me you transferred out of theology," she said softly. He looked up, startled.
"I didn't tell him that." He hadn't wanted... He didn't know why he hadn't wanted Abbey to know.
"Father Clifton did. I-" she smiled wryly. "Is it wrong of me to want to say 'good'? Because you would have been an amazing priest, but... There are so many other things you could be, too, and... and somebody deserves you. Somebody out there should have a Jed Bartlet to call their very own."
He couldn't even blush when so much of him wanted to cry. He could have said a thousand lines from a thousand stupid love songs, but none of them were right and none of them would have changed the fact that... this wasn't about him. It was about her, and she'd come to him because she trusted him, and she knew he'd tell her what she had to do.
And so he told her what she had to do.
"You should talk to Ron." He looked down at his undrunk coffee as he spoke, because he couldn't look at her. "You owe it to him. And you owe it to yourself. It's... I think anyone would be afraid, where you are. It's the people who aren't afraid; they're the ones who aren't ready. Being in love is... It isn't a little thing, and it shouldn't be. If it's easy to say 'I love you', then the words don't mean anything. It's natural to be afraid, to have doubts, to wonder what you're doing. But I know... You're brave, Abigail Barrington. You're one of the bravest people I know. And it's not in your nature to try and run away."
Abbey was silent for a long time, and he didn't know whether she was looking at him. Finally, she stood up, in a whisper of cloth against the stairs.
"You're right."
He smiled up at her, lopsidedly, where his head was tilted to rest his forehead against the wall. "I usually am."
"But you know what?" Her voice had lightened somewhat, and he rejoiced in it even as it twisted a knife through his heart. "You're brave too."
He snuffled quiet laughter at that. "I'm not brave."
She looked down at him in amusement. "You have no idea what you are, do you, Josiah Bartlet? Do you think every guy in the world can stand up at twenty and say 'I want to be a priest'?"
"I gave that up!" he refuted.
"Oh, and that was any easier?"
Jed stood up as she descended the stairs towards him.
"You don't just have dreams, you- you know how to turn them into new dreams! You just picked up your whole life and turned it around and said 'That didn't work, so now I'm doing something different'. You think that isn't brave?"
"I don't know what it is," he admitted.
She was one step above him, and now they were almost face to face, and this close he didn't think there was any way of hiding what might be in his eyes. And he thought for a second he saw something a lot like it in hers, but maybe that was just a reflection. And then she was descending the stairs past him, and the air was rushing back into the room, and he wished he could have been dying of oxygen deprivation for just a little longer.
Feet back on the ground in more ways than one down in the hallway, Abbey coughed a little self-consciously.
"So. Um, I should go."
Please don't. "Yeah."
She smiled awkwardly, and then blurted "Listen, I'm really sorry for coming round here and-"
"Don't even say it," he warned, catching her wrist in his hand to quiet her. Abbey sighed, and relaxed, and he felt the muscles in her arm move under his loose grip.
"You're a great friend, Jed," she said. She stood on tiptoe and rested her hands on his shoulders to plant a soft, lingering kiss on his cheek. "Thank you," she smiled softly, as she took a few tentative steps back.
Abbey hesitated in the doorway for so long he thought she might have something more to say, and then she turned and she was gone.
Jed stayed standing exactly where he was. If he moved so much as a tiny fraction of an inch, then he thought he might shatter into a billion pieces.