Until There Was You

two

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NOTE:
The gorgeous cover above was created by my amazing friend siremay. Let's just take a minute and appreciate its beauty. I hope you enjoy this edited chapter and don't forget to vote, comment, and share. Point out any errors and leave your thoughts so far.

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0 2 | Until There Was You

When Jude returned home he found himself grabbing his phone and stalking his ex-girlfriend's Instagram page with eagerness. His heart swelled as he lay sprawled across his sofa. There was this churning sensation consuming his stomach. It was telling him not to. He knew how wrong it was to look back at their history. He knew it would hurt even more when he remembered and recalled those bittersweet memories. He knew he was setting himself up for sadness and more heartache. But what did he really have to lose? What more could a broken heart endure in spite of a few old memories?

It didn't take long for that fragility to dawn upon him. His eyes were analyzing every picture and holding onto every moment. He knew that in a heartbeat it would be gone. He knew that all of it was gone. His thoughts seemed intolerable, rereading the cheesiness and cliches of the captions beneath the images. There were so many pictures of the two of them, it nearly overcrowded the page.

Jude's thoughts lingered and those demeaning notions scratched frantically in his mind; she didn't love him as much as he had loved her. The pictures on her page weren't evident, it seemed, her profile portrayed the exact opposite. Maybe it had all been for show. Some kind of publicity stunt then.

He stared at a picture, his favorite, where they were on the beach. It was summer vacation and Beverly's hair was frazzled from the heat. Still, she looked beautiful. Jude had his arms encircled around her waist, his lips in the crook of her neck, and Beverly was smiling brightly. Seth loitered in the background with a cup raised to the sky, talking to Bridget, someone that was in their friend group. Jude even remembered who had taken the picture that day. Lincoln. Suddenly, Jude felt nauseated with those sporadic happenings and the uneventful mishaps that occurred to him in the course of twenty-four hours. Why did this have to happen to him?

If it were up to Jude he would have flung Seth off a cliff into an abyss filled with utter darkness. If it were up to Jude he wouldn't be in this predicament at all, but as always, fate had other plans. If it was even that or Jude simply being oblivious from the start.

He tossed his phone aside, sighing into the air that was as hot as he was when he lunged for Seth. Eventually though, Jude got up and decided to go into his room and sleep for the rest of the day. It was clear he had lost all energy to do anything that day. That was all he could really do, until his parents came home, scolding him for what he had done. They'd take away his car keys or worse his cellphone privileges.

Jude collided head first onto his mattress, allowing the ground below his feet to shake. Fucking hell, he thought. He sat there, deprived of his sleeping abilities before he finally gave in. He finally let his memories vanish away for a bit. For a moment he could forget any of it ever happened. And for a while, as he slept, he believed it didn't. However, when he woke up again, his eyes flashed with the memories of his former friends and the way he was drowned in the black holes of sorrow.

He rested there, eyes trained on the blackness above him, hair unkempt with a throbbing head. There was hardly a minute that went by where Beverly didn't tumble into his mind, sliding in like clouds in the sky. She was stuck there, much like everything that made him himself. She was as close to his heart as his passion for football and as close as his (now crumbling) reputation. He tried ignoring her presence completely, but that thought ceased to exist. He told himself that if he ignored her the pain would wither. If he ignored her he wouldn't love her as much. If he ignored her...