I'm Yours to Keep, I'm Yours to Lose (Long Story Short, I'm All About You)

Chapter 3: 'tis the damn season/august (tori)

Four months.

It had been four months since Tori had gone to New York, four months since she'd left LA.

Four months since she'd seen Jade West.

When she'd decided to come back for the holidays, she'd waffled back and forth between wanting to see Jade or not. On one hand, she had a lot she wanted to say to Jade. She had four months of things-left-unsaid on her mind and that list only continued to grow the longer she didn't say them.

On the other hand, she was afraid that seeing Jade would reopen a painful wound that was only fractionally held together anyway, and that didn't exactly sound like a great way to spend her Christmas.

Ultimately, she'd decided it would be in her best interest to avoid Jade for the time being.

Except Trina had dragged her to do some last minute Christmas shopping at Wanko's Warehouse, and she had ventured into the electronics department, and oh , there she was, in all her beautiful, gloomy glory: Jade West.

Tori skidded to a halt at the end of the aisle, shock stopping her in her tracks.

Jade hadn't seen her yet. No, Jade was looking at something on display, her eyes narrowed in that hyper-focused way that Tori had increasingly found sexy, and she had not yet seen Tori.

She looked the same, Tori thought. Same ripped black jeans, same black sweater, same dark makeup. Just her hair was different. Wavy, like she sometimes wore it, but the dyed strands were blue now, not green like they'd been when Tori had left.

Tori stood there frozen, unsure what to do.

Jade had still not seen her, but it would only be moments before she looked up, surely, and... then what?

Then they had words in Wanko's? Made up? Completely ignored each other?

Tori didn't know. She didn't even know what she wanted to happen.

(Well. Maybe she did.)

(Maybe she really, really did.)

Before she could decide what to do, though, Jade started to look up, to turn her head, and Tori took a quick step backward, using the aisle-dividing shelf to hide. She pressed herself against the boxes on the shelf, her heart pounding.

She wasn't ready. Whatever she wanted (or really, really wanted), she wasn't ready.

Because once she saw Jade, once she said what she needed to say, there would be no turning back, for better or worse. And as long as everything remained so unresolved, so without closure, then Tori could continue to fantasize a scenario that went her way.

If she said her piece to Jade, and it didn't go well, then that was that.

But if she never said anything at all, then Tori could still give in to the possibility of hope.

And no matter what she told herself, she just wasn't ready to give up that possibility quite yet.

//

The worst part was that she just didn't get what happened.

She didn't know where or when the disconnect between them occurred. One minute she'd been kissing Jade good night, and the next she was texting and getting no response. One day she'd been working up the courage to tell Jade how she felt, the next she'd been ghosted. Like night and day.

Things with Jade had always been a little like that, though. Jade was a master of the bait-and-switch, and Tori had always fallen for it. It seemed their early relationship had almost entirely consisted of Jade luring her in with the possibility of friendship only to give her coffee from the trash or rides to school that left her traumatized.