Want Him, Can't Have Him.

Are We Friends?

I stepped aside and he drifted past me, only stopping when he slumped onto the sofa. 
"Everything okay?" I asked flatly and he slowly shook his head.

"I'm not sure. I... Mike... we broke up."

"Yeah, Jason told me. He said it was your decision?"

"Yeah."

"Then why the blank expression? You look like you're the one that's been dumped."

He frowned up at me, "would you be happy about breaking up with someone?"

"I guess not." I sat down on the sofa but not very close to my bandmate, and he looked at his hands which were resting on his lap.
"What's wrong?"

"Nothing I..." he looked up at me, "are we still friends?"

I blinked, "I guess..."

His already gloomy face dropped even more and he looked back to his hands. "That's a no then."

"If you're asking if I still want to be your friend, then yes, I do. But after everything that's happened... do you really think it would be the same?"

"I guess I hoped, ya know? I wanted it to be able to go back to normal, but if you're saying it can't..."

"I'm not saying it can't, I'm just saying that we can't just snap back to the way things were."

"I wasn't expecting that... How can we make it work?"

"I don't know." I admitted and looked away. Could I even be his friend anymore knowing that nothing would ever happen between us? Not to mention how much he was able to hurt me.

"Tré..."

"Yeah?"

"I want you to know that it didn't mean nothing to me, what happened... in many ways I'm glad it happened... I didn't realise that I wasn't that into Mike until something challenged it, and to be honest I didn't even want it to work out."

I looked over at him, "What are you saying? What do you mean by that?"
He was quiet and shrugged a shoulder.
"No, you wouldn't say something like that if you didn't know what you meant." He looked away from me and I moved closer to him so that I could put my hand on his arm. "If you want things to be back to normal, you've got to be able to talk to me again, right? You used to tell me everything... well, before you went out with Mike..." The distaste must have shown on my face because Billie looked confused.

"Did you have a problem with me seeing Mike?"
I must have taken too long to reply because he was quick to snap at me, "What was wrong with Mike? Did you not want us to be happy? Did you not approve of us?"

"It's not that, it's just that we used to all be so close and then it all changed when you started seeing each other, and me and Jason-"

"Jason felt that way too? When we're you ever going to tell us?"

"Well, we weren't. It wasn't our place. You two were happy so we had to get on with it, regardless of how pushed away we felt."

"Pushed away?" He looked at me sadly, "you both felt pushed away?"

"Well, yeah... we had to just follow you guys around all the time and you were always talking to each other instead of us... it wasn't your fault, you liked him."

He breathed out slowly. "When you were outside the studio, you said that you couldn't hear those songs without dying inside... what did you mean by that?"

"It doesn't matter-"

"Yes, it does matter, it matters a lot."

"Why? Why would it matter? I didn't mean anything by it."

"You're lying, what did you mean?"

"Can't we just leave it? I don't want to talk about it."

"Tré?" My eyes met his, "when you said that you wanted a relationship like I had with Mike... did you mean that you wanted that... with me?"

"What? No. No, I..."

Before I could finish my lame attempt at denying anything, his eyes darted briefly up at me before falling to his lap again, "because I wrote those songs for you."