||Twenty-Three||
"How'd it go?" Jade asks as I walk up the porch stairs. She's sitting on the swing, wrapped up in a knitted blanket with a book in her lap and a glass of red wine clutched lightly in her hand.
"Terrible," I say as I sit on the porch swing with her and take her glass of wine. "Tell me again why I thought lunch with my ex was going to be a good idea?"
"Because you thought you were going to get closure," My best friend shrugs.
"I wonder whose stupid idea that was." I mumble under my breath as I finish the wine in her glass and pass it back to her.
Jade takes the empty wine glass and rolls her eyes before setting it on the floor. "What happened?"
"We talked," I told her. "We talked and it went absolutely fucking nowhere."
"And whose fault was that?" Jade mumbles under her breath as she fixes herself on the porch swing.
I narrow my eyes at her, "What's the supposed to mean?"
Jade shrugs and folds her sweater sleeves over her fingers, "You're stubborn. When you don't want to hear something, you don't."
"Trust me, I heard everything he had to say."
"But did you try to understand where he was coming from?"
"He gave up, J. I understood that."
Jade exhales, frustrated. "He didn't give up. He thought you gave up, Im. You told him to stay."
"You know why I told him to stay."
"But he didn't. He was fucking miserable after you left to Texas. If I had a dollar for every time he called Rob drunk off his ass after you left I wouldn't be drinking this cheap wine from the fucking grocery store. I can't even remember how many times Rob and I had to go pick him up from some bar or some random street because he couldn't get home. So no, Im, he didn't give up. He just respected your wishes."
YOU ARE READING
Rooftops
General FictionThey fell in love when they were young, in a city that never felt like home, at a time in their lives when they both knew nothing could be serious. But five years later, they met again, this time not on the side of the road, but on a rooftop.
