black tide. | ✓

0.5; texts

"they're all the same, they never learn." - comeback, ella eyre.

✞ ✞ ✞

Over the next few weeks, I and Aiden continued to meet up in the same spot every Saturday and we suddenly reconnected, becoming closer than ever before.

When we were little, I, Aiden and Allison were literally the best of friends - we were brought up together, our parents being best friends from high school, and spent almost every day in each other's presences.

We went to school together - well, Aiden's always been a year above us but oh well - and were always talking about how we would stay besties for the rest of our lives and when we were really young and didn't know any better, about how Aiden and I would get married and make a family of our own some day. That was until we grew up and realised how much we didn't want that to happen.

Along with that, growing up also made us - mostly Aiden - discover a lot of other things, such as a little bitch called popularity.

Aiden obviously moved up to high school the year before us, and we were all naive enough to believe that things would continue the way they were, we would still be friends and nothing would change. Ha.

He was immediately loved by his other classmates starting their freshman year, and discovered his undeniable talent for football. Everyone suddenly became his best friend, they formed their clique, and although he tried to stay friends with us on the "down low", as soon as he realised how uncool it was to be best friends with his little sister and a weirdo, he stopped speaking to us.

Well, to me, really. He didn't really get a say in whether or not he spoke to Allison, but he dropped me and stopped acting like his little sister was his best friend as soon as humanly possible, without a simple explanation.

I still hold a grudge to this day.

And he's never explained, to this day.

But we kept ignoring the situation and pretending it never happened. Each week we found different things to talk about, and occasionally we would just sit in silence appreciating being with another human being, and each week we grew closer, until eventually we were practically back to normal. If you can forget about the fact we were both hiding our desperate depression from Allison leaving underneath all the fake smiles and pretend happiness.

The second Saturday we saw each other we'd talked about school mainly, and he filled me in on the other gossip from the populars I was missing out on, yet he still managed to avoid letting me know who was moving to England.

The next week we remembered Ali some more, talking about our favourite memories of her.

The week after that, the conversation led onto our memories of each other, and we ended up talking about the time when we were 5 and got "married" in the Browne's back garden, with Allison as our "vicar".

The week later he complimented my hair. And if you could die from blushing I think I would've been down there with the other corpses surrounding us in the ground.

And when we weren't by Ali's grave, we were constantly texting, even sometimes during lessons instead of running the risk of falling asleep due to mind blowing boringness. I had managed to keep my hurt emotions about Aiden ignoring me for a few years in the back of my mind, but every now and then, even if we were having a great time together, the nagging voice in my brain would scream out to confront him.

I knew we had a good thing going, and I didn't want to ruin that.

So I ignored myself.

Even though we were back to being pretty much best friends again - which surprised me too, trust me - it was nowhere near public. Aiden hadn't mentioned to any of his popular friends our friendship, and when I overheard his best friend Luke questioning who he was texting in the corridors a few days earlier, he responded with "Oh, just my cousin."