No Time For Us - Jerrie Fanfiction AU ✅

15th September 1949

Chapter 4

Days and weeks went by and I could not comprehend what had happened with Jade, I spoke to no one about it, not even Jesy or Leigh-Anne who was now to all intents and purposes my best friend along with Miss Nelson.

The memory of the kiss with Jade reappeared at every moment, it took away my sleep and even my dreams were haunted by her face and lips.

Meanwhile, my father had almost finished organising the wedding. I found myself hoping that the same wedding I had despised so much would somehow bring me back to the right path, but every time I thought of Chris... I felt only disgust. Every time I looked at his lips... I longed for the brunette's. Every time I touched his hands... I longed for Jade's touch.

The wedding was only a few days away, then that whole thing would be over and one day forgotten, but I didn't want that to happen.

I looked for answers in my beloved books, but the love described was always and only between a man and a woman, I inquired among feminist circles, there I discovered that not everything was as it seemed, I began to read the poems of Sappho or the writings of Virginia Woolf, who had died only a few years earlier, and I found out about the rumoured affair with the poet Vita Sackville-West or Emily Dickinson and her alleged affair with Susan Gilbert.

The more I read, the more I felt understood, but that wasn't enough to extinguish the fears and emotions I felt towards Jade. Homosexuality was seen as a disease and I found myself in limbo not knowing my place or my identity.

My readings were frowned upon by my father who considered them too progressive and scandalous, more and more riots were occurring, on the one hand for women's rights, on the other for black people's rights.

Change was getting closer, but it required sacrifice, the same sacrifice I felt I had to make for myself.

I decided that keeping it all bottled up inside wouldn't help me and I would end up going crazy if I didn't tell someone about it, the only person I could ever confess such a dark secret to was Jesy, but for the first time I found myself fearing her reaction and judgement.

I made up my mind that it was time to take a risk, hoping that my friend could give me the comfort I so desperately needed, so I went to her house, as I did a few weeks before. Her mother let me in and accompanied to Jesy's room, where she was already waiting for me.

I sat on her bed and took a deep breath ready, perhaps, to admit my deepest, darkest secret.

"Do you want to tell me what's going on with you?" she asked.

I wondered if it was so obvious, in the eyes of others, that I felt lost, wondered if my mother, or even my father, also realised that something had changed in their daughter.

"I don't know how to say it, Jesy. Something is happening to me and I don't know how to explain it" I admitted to my best friend.

"It's about... you know, what we talked about a few months ago?" she asked me raising both eyebrows. I nodded uncertainly not knowing how to continue, "So are you ready to tell me who made you fall in love?" she asked smiling.

"I'm not in love!" I exclaimed having never considered the possibility that I might be, but now that the idea had been put on the table, new fears and doubts assailed me. 

Could I have been in love with Jade? Could I have been in love with a woman?

I wasn't like those writers and poets with lives full of lovers and debauchery, I was just a girl trying to understand who she was and what her role was in the world, but still, deep down I only felt understood by those poetesses full of lovers and with dissolute lives.