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

Chapter 4: the 1 (jade)

Jade was doing good. She was doing fine. She was doing great, really.

So she'd been royally told off by Tori Vega and probably broke her own heart just a little bit and maybe she'd sunk into a slightly depressive funk, but like, she was doing good.

She'd fucked up and that was, you know, a thing, but life was moving forward. She was back at school and classes started tomorrow and she had better things to do than think about the unending line of mistakes she'd made in her life that had turned her into the pleasantly bitter person she was today.

So like, yeah. When she said she was doing good, she meant it.

She was doing good.

//

"Bro. You look like shit."

Okay, well. She was doing good, and just because her annoying asshole roommate didn't see it, didn't mean she wasn't. Beth simply wasn't privy to Jade's internal process.

"Fuck off."

"Damn, okay. What happened to you over the break?"

And, cool, not that everyone was as emotionally mature as Jade, but if Jade had seen Beth laying in her bed under a mountain of blankets and watching The Evil Dead on her laptop, then she would've known to leave the girl alone. Like, this was just common sense. Whatever, though, some people had absolutely no self-awareness.

"Nothing," Jade muttered. "I'm good."

"You're obviously not."

And the bottomline was this: when Jade had moved into her dorm armed with the knowledge that she would have to cohabitate with another girl for an entire school year, she'd worried that she'd be rooming with someone who would always be in her business and never leave her alone, but, good news, she could see now that she had clearly worried for nothing.

She pulled the blankets over her head in an effort to make Beth go away .

But Beth was not so easily shut out. "Did you see your ex?"

"She's not my ex." And there it was, so plain and clear, and now Jade was crying. But whatever, she was good . Not her, crying over Tori Fucking Vega. Again.

Fuck this. She was totally good.

"You want to talk about it?"

Jade grunted. "No."

Beth hovered for a minute, because she was one of those people. Then Jade heard the door open and close, and she was blissfully, peacefully alone again.

So like, yeah. She was doing good.

//

Beth was back and she had brought reinforcements.

"Sit up."

"Leave me alone."

"I brought coffee."

Jade grunted. "You can't just bribe people to speak to you with coffee."

"I'm not bribing people. I'm bribing you."

"No."

Beth tugged the covers off of her face. "Sit up and drink the damn coffee, West."

"I literally hate you," Jade muttered, but she sat up and drank the damn coffee.

"I'm heartbroken." Beth stared at her for a long moment, waiting until Jade had like, wiped off most of her ruined mascara or whatever. "So... it was the girl, huh?"