Love Song (LGBTQ+) (COMPLETED)

41. Her

As my feet repetitiously collided with the ground one after the other, my mind continued to drift off to that night with Jay. I churned my brain trying to figure out what he had meant when he said all that to me, but I was left only scratching my head every time. While I clearly never had a mirror around when I talked about Grace, I never did much differently. I had honestly thought that I looked the same as always whenever I talked about her to others. But according to Jay, that simply wasn't true.

The way he explained it made it sound like my whole face changed when it came to her, and while that may have been true of my feelings and emotions, I had a hard time understanding what he was trying to say. Jay was the type of person that never would've said something without a foundation or base at some level, which was the only thing that made me question what he said to me.

What struck me as odd was the last thing he said before he went back inside. He said that something told him I wouldn't have been waiting too much longer, and by that, I was only able to infer that he was talking about Grace. He said so many weird things that night and I had no answers for any of it. Why would he have said something like that about Grace when he hadn't ever seen her? Why had he said that about me to begin with?

Coming to a slow as I met the ramp that led back into the facility, I found myself covered in a thin layer of sweat even through that morning's cold weather. Breathing heavily as I sat down and slowly leaned myself back onto the chilly concrete, I was shown the surprising sight of a blue sky. It was expected to rain some, and the weather the past few days only seemed to give substance to that prediction, but there lied a perfectly blue sky.

In between the meetings with Rebecca and the group sessions, I caught myself lying around and doing nothing worth my time. That had been what led me to start running again. It allowed me to think about the stuff going on in my head and sort them out, good or bad. If anything, the running I was doing was similar to the exercise I had done specifically for Grace. The only difference now was that I was, comparatively speaking, out of shape.

Even after Grace left my daily life, I hadn't exactly stopped exercising. While it had mostly been out of habit, I would've been lying if I said that I hadn't kept doing it in hopes of seeing her again. Every choice I made had her in mind, and when she had essentially left me behind, I lost all the motivation I had to keeping doing silly crap like that. All I had been focused on, at least at that time, was staying by her side until she woke up.

Before I knew it, the worst year of my life had slowly passed by and I found myself stuck in this place. I met Lucas and found Joanna in this place, too. Then there was Jay. The Jay Ward, the young genius. The next lyrical, musical, and vocal prodigy to bless the world with his art. Even in the short time I'd stayed at this place, I had experienced so much and felt things I never thought I would feel again. The good and the bad, the withdrawals and the crying, the truth - all of them happened and came out here.

The first four words that came from Jay's mouth had been "you look like shit." and followed that up by stating how pretentious I was acting. If I looked back on the day I walked in on him about to get into a fight with Lucas, it was easy enough to see where he had gotten that idea of me. I'd only gotten over a panic attack moments earlier and hadn't said a word to him. He wasn't wrong at all.

Based off that alone, I almost thought that bad attitude and crude mouth were the real Jay Ward. I was the one who had been wrong to him all along. I was the one who never said a word to him and barely looked him the eye. Yet, it almost seemed as though he showed up whenever I needed another mouth and brain to talk to. Even if his way of thinking and talking brought more questions, they had an answer lying in wait somewhere. Jay slowly became something other than a musician to me, it was something so much more human. He simply became a friend.