She’s finally having The Talk with him tonight, and I know she’s nervous, but she won’t talk to me about it. So we’re talking about me. Again.
“Don’t be a child.” She scolds me by pointing a finger at me like a mom.
“Don’t be a mom.”
“Did you develop an attitude over the holiday break?”
“Years of living with you have finally rubbed off on me.”
“I’ll rub off on you,” Jade says with a wink, and I raise my eyebrows at her. She shrugs. “But seriously, Jessie, it’s been more than a month.”
While Jade and I talked on the phone nearly every day of the break, I still haven’t exchanged a single word with Mac. It feels like it’s been much longer than a month and also like no time has passed at all. I attempted to sort out all my feelings over the break. I sorted and unsorted, I cried and almost called him. I spent so much time journaling and processing and trying to figure out what to do that most nights I went to sleep with a little bit of a headache. We’ve been back at school for five days, and every day I wake up with butterflies.Am I going to see him today?It’s been a few days of classes already, and he isn’t in any of them so far. I still have a couple days left, and I can’t help but think he’s going to be in one of them. If I run into him without seeking him out, will we talk? Will we reconcile? Do I keep ignoring him?
A headache at the base of my skull thumps to life.
“My feelings are still hurt,” I say with little to no conviction. This is my excuse for not talking to him, for not having called or texted.
“Maybe what you need is an apology.”
“Maybe,” I mumble.
“Which you can’t get from him unless youlet himapologize.”
I sigh heavily and throw myself back on Jade’s bed. The cloud of her down comforterpoofsaround me. She’s right, and I’ve admitted as much to her. But my pride is a goddamn brick wall that isn’t easy to topple.
“Listen, my little cabbage,” Jade says.
“You spent too much time in France.”
“It was just a week,” she says, dabbing at her cheeks with a bright-pink makeup sponge. “But you’re not going to like this, so brace yourself.” She turns, setting her makeup down, so I prop myself up on my elbows, giving Jade my full attention.
A loose knot in my stomach tries to prepare me for whatever is coming next.
“There’s no such thing as avoiding hurt feelings. And ultimately, the point is not ‘Oh, he hurt my feelings.’ The point is, did he own up to his actions? But if you don’t open up a conversation and open yourself up to him, you might—”
“He could have reached out and apologized anytime,” I say, sitting all the way up. It’s a fight I’ll probably lose, but I stick my flag in the ground anyway.
“No. No, no, no. You don’t get to do that. You know as well as I do that yes, a text apology is an apology, but if he had done that you would have bitched about how he didn’t say it to your face, that he took the easy way out. If he’d called, you wouldn’t have picked up. And you sure as hell weren’t meeting up with him to give him a chance to say it to your face.”
“Why are you taking his side?” I cross my arms in front of my chest.
“I’m taking your side. You deserve an apology, and you deserve happiness. You deserve to be with someone who sends you into another universe when he kisses you. Throwing away what you and Mac have because you’re too stubborn to have one conversation with him is dumb. I can’t be more on your side than I am.”
“But he hurt me,” I murmur. It’s the only defense I have, and it’s weak and crumbling with every word Jade says.
She huffs, rolling her eyes. “Jessica Mae Matthews, listen very closely to me. Even if he didn’t hurt you with this, and you two went on to be exclusive and you started bumping uglies, he would have eventually hurt you somehow. Because this is what we do to each other. We hold each other’s hearts and sometimes we squeeze too hard. And sometimes we accidentally drop them. No one is one hundred percent safe, Jessie. Someone will always hurt you. But the good ones are the ones who apologize.”
The knot in my stomach tightens and unravels and then tightens again. My wall of excuses crumbles to debris. I don’t want to hold these truths, but they force themselves into my hands. But that is the funny thing about the truth: it demands to be seen. And now there’s nothing left between me and Mac. No excuses, no really good reasons to stay away. Just me and my pride.
“You know, it’s actually really annoying when you’re right,” I say.
“I’ll try not to make a habit of it.”
Jade makes the final touches to her makeup, and when she walks out of the room into the living room to gather her purse and jacket, I follow her.
“And by the way, he deserves an apology too,” Jade says.
“What!”
