Closest I Get

Chapter One

Early April

The only thing she can think about is that his feet are always cold.

How she hates getting into bed and feeling the coldness of his feet against the warmth of hers. How much it annoys her that he purposefully puts his cold feet on her legs when they're sitting together on the couch in the living room. How winters under the covers is the absolute worst because his feet are cold and all she wants is to be set on fire.

She can't live with someone whose feet are cold.

She sweeps her eyes around the cozy judge's quarters, her eyes passing her friends – their witnesses – who are giving her excited smiles and thumbs up. Her eyes eventually land back on him and he's smiling right at her, completely enamored.

A sinking feeling, something she'll later identify as panic, settles in her stomach.

Today she's getting married. But all she can think about is cold feet.

.

Jade barely snaps back into consciousness when they repeat her name several times. She frantically looks from Beck to their friends and to the judge before she slowly steps out of the claustrophobic space she has somehow caged herself in between them. She has to get out of there as soon as she can. The worried frown on Beck's face consumes her (later, she'll have nightmares of nothing but his faces of disappointment and anger).

"Jade..." She can hear him. She can hear her name, but she can't make herself stop backing away.

This isn't anything like she expected (and it's not until much later where she admits that it isn't anything like she wanted, either), so she tries to escape. She yanks her purse away from Cat who leaps in surprise before she continues to find an exit.

"Jade, stop!"

"No, I can't do this. This isn't-"

"What?" He quickly catches up to her and blocks the door.

She can feel the sting in her eyes of oncoming tears, but she refuses to drop them here, not when he's still in front of her, but for very different reasons.

"What is it?"

He's a good guy that hasn't given up on her. She wishes that he did, a long time ago, so they don't have to be here and she doesn't have to become the enemy.

"It's not. I'm sorry, but this isn't happening."

He walks closer to her, tries to make a private moment private again. "I swear to god," he starts to whisper, "you walk out of here and that's it. This is the last time, Jade. The last time."

She looks at how heartbroken he is and wishes that this is – that he is - what she wants. But she sighs and pushes the small bouquet of tied up fresh flowers into his hands.

"Beck, for the both of us, I fucking hope so."

She takes a final glance at her stunned friends behind her before she pushes past him. When she passes the threshold, she doesn't dare look back once. She hears echoes of her friends' protestations behind her but she ignores them all. She doesn't hear anything but the off-beat sounds of the pulsation of her heart in her ears and the clicks of her heels on the floor. She pushes past the city hall doors and gasps for air, trying to regain some sense of control.

She resists the urge to lean on the walls of city hall and cry, so she rushes to the streets and hails a cab instead.

She doesn't get a taxi until the seventh one stops for her and the very first thing that she does when she's inside the cab is take off her shoes.