Fragile Little Things ✓

18 nothing

I BARELY MAKE IT INTO THE APARTMENT—barely have any time to let the giant gash in my chest mellow and heal over, when there’s a knock at the door. Again. My heart picks up a beat—because it’s Jem. It has to be. He changed his mind, and he’s here to give me my flowers back and I can give him his ring back and we can pretend this was all just a nightmare that never really happened.

Without thinking, I leap to the door, opening it.

Only to realize how stupid I am.

Because this time, it isn’t Jem.

It’s Kade.

And something about the way my mood plateaus should be a big, universal warning sign, but I don’t know what to do anymore. How to think. What to believe. And then it hits me. Jem always means what he says. So when he said goodbye—he meant it. But what did I really expect? For him to stay for a friendship he didn’t want? And what kind of relationship would I have left with Kade?

“Hey,” Kade murmurs. In the dim light, the green in his eyes almost match his dark hair. “What’s wrong?”

I figure I must look like I’m on the verge of tears, so I blink three times and try to inhale slower. “Nothing.”

But it doesn’t work, so the tears end up streaming down my face instead. I look away as I try to wipe them off my cheeks frantically, but it’s futile. Everything’s become such a giant, festering mess. And now I can’t even cry alone. In the safe, undisturbed sanctuary of my room.

“Indigo,” Kade says, reaching for me. “Something’s clearly wrong. What happened?”

“Nothing,” I say again because there’s not really any feasible way to answer his question.  I turn to check if Scarlett and Mae are still asleep. They are, so I lower my voice when I turn back to face him. “Why are you here?”

“You didn’t reply to my text,” he says.

“What? I did.”

Kade frowns, checking his phone. “I didn’t get anything.”

I pull out my own phone to check, and find that for some reason, my text didn’t go through. “It didn’t go through. Sorry.”

“It’s cool.” He shrugs. “I take it you’ve been studying all day and you’re having a bad day. Do you want to grab something to eat? Get some fresh air?”

I look up at him, brows pulled together. He rarely initiates outings, so this is pretty rare. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Why would I be joking?” He cocks his head. “C’mon.”

“Okay.” Slowly, I nod. “Okay. Let me get my bag.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, “It’s on me.”

I nod, following him to the door. When we’re outside, it’s darker. The sun has disappeared in between the time I arrived and now. And for some reason, it’s so much colder than I remembered. And now all I can think about is Jem’s black shirt absorbing the sunlight, and I want to cry all over again.

“What do you want to get?” he asks, once we’re on the sidewalk. “Anything you want.”

Now that it’s the third time we “broke up” and he came back, I notice a pattern. There’s always this grovelling period where he’ll do a lot of things he wouldn’t normally do, so I’ll feel bad and forgive him quicker.

I sniff, still not totally in the mood. “I don’t know.”

He’s silent, but I know it annoys him when I’m indecisive. And that would be fine, except every time I come up with something, he always finds a way to knock it down and propose his own idea instead.