Pushin' Me Away • {Joe Jonas}

07. c a n ' t . d o . t h i s

tw: this chapter has mentions of drug use!!

"Don't fucking lie to me, Alexandria. You're not in love with me."

Joe's words were biting and Lex almost physically recoiled from them. She shook her head, not particularly wanting to argue with him anymore.

"You can't be in love with me. You broke up with me. You broke my heart."

His words hurt, but she knew they were true. She had been the one that had ultimately ended their relationship, and she knew she'd broken his heart. What he didn't seem to know, though, was that she'd broken her own heart too.

"None of it matters, okay? It just doesn't. I don't want to argue about it anymore. We've been arguing for so fucking long, Joe, and I'm tired. You know the truth now. You know all the shit I never told you, and it doesn't change a goddamn thing, and that's fine, but I just don't want to argue about it anymore. Nick and I are done. We're just friends now, and that's all we'll ever be again. Since that's all you seem to care about, that should be enough for you to just leave it alone and leave me alone and just let us both move on," she told him, closing her eyes and scrubbing her face with her hands much like he'd done before.

She hoped he didn't know how full of shit she was. She was serious about wanting to move on, but whether he believed her or not, she absolutely was still in love with him. In her dream world, they'd work their shit out and somehow end up together someday, but she knew they weren't in her dream world. He had a girlfriend and looked at Lex like she was a disease and probably always would. None of it mattered.

"You're so goddamn irritating, you know that?!" he yelled a moment later, startling her. Annoyance rose inside her own chest and she was about to throw something that probably would've been less than kind back at him, but he was talking again before she could. "You're the most irritating person I've ever known, Lex. It's been ten goddamn years. I've spent ten years having absolutely no clue what happened between us, trying my hardest to forget about it. Now, you decide out of nowhere to finally tell me what happened, tell me you've been fucking my brother, and tell me you're still in love with me? Now you want to just tell me none of it matters and act like I'm supposed to be able to just drop it? Fuck that."

"I don't know what you want, Joe. You know everything now and there's not really anything else I can say. All my cards are on the table. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't tell you what happened, I'm sorry about Nick, I'm sorry about a lot of shit, Joe. I'm sorry about almost everything I've done in the past ten years. It hardly matters, though," she told him, shrugging.

He didn't respond. Instead, he moved closer to her on the couch and before she even realized what was happening, caught her lips in a deep kiss. His arms snaked around her and held her tightly and she was just about to let herself let go and hold him back but caught herself at the last second and pulled out of his grasp.

"We... I can't do this," she told him, shaking her head. "You should go."

"What?" he asked, seemingly dumbfounded. She kept shaking her head.

"We can't do this, okay? I can't be this girl. You have to go," she repeated, and he closed his eyes and nodded.

"I... okay," he said simply, standing and heading towards the front door.

As soon as he was gone, Lex stood and made her way to the kitchen, pouring herself one shot and then another. She wanted to run outside and tell him to come back. She wanted to call Nick. She wanted to go back in time and fix everything. She wanted to feel okay again. None of those things happened, of course. Instead, she just sat on the couch for most of the day, drinking herself stupid and crying on and off.

By that evening, she was drunker than she'd been in a long time. She felt sick; her head pounded and she'd already thrown up a couple of times.

Her head swam with thoughts, none of which were entirely coherent. She'd picked up her phone to call Nick multiple times throughout the night, but had put it back down and decided against it every time. She knew it was fucked up that she'd become so dependent on him and wanted to break the habit. She didn't have anyone else to call, really. She could've called Meghan but wasn't in the mood to really tell her what was going on.

Instead, she got it in her head that it would be a good idea to take some pills to top off her night. She rummaged through the cabinet in her bathroom and finally found something. The bottle didn't have a label and she didn't remember what they were, but it didn't matter. Anything would work.

She downed a handful of them and started feeling fuzzy just a few minutes later. It was a nice feeling at first, comfortable, and then it wasn't anymore. Her whole body felt like it was on fire and she felt like she couldn't move. She cried out, but obviously there wasn't anyone to hear her. She fell to the floor in the bathroom, hitting her head on the side of the tub on her way down. Pain ripped through her at once and she called out again, falling quickly into unconsciousness a few seconds later.