tangled up in blue

33

break up together- theo katzman

AN- p.s. smut

trigger warning, mentions of SA

Jace was gone when I woke up.

I'd planned on disappearing before things got too awkward, but he was one step ahead. Clearly, he remembered his confession.

He likes me.

Maybe I imagined it.

No, he definitely said he likes me.

Surely he had to be messing with me, right? I'd often imagined a parallel universe where Jace and I were friends and we hadn't gone through all of that hatred and hurt, but never in all my years of knowing him did I think he could care for me. Well, seeing him again was inevitable. I'd soon find out whether he felt the same way I did; whether his heart sped up when he looked at me, if he smiled when he saw a notification from me appear on his phone, and if lying next to each other in bed made him feel as safe as it did for me. Until then, all I could do was panic.

I lay in Jace's empty bed like a lovestruck idiot staring at his alarm clock move from minute to minute without his return. A mixture of hopeless melancholy and overwhelming worry were flooding my nervous system. I switched between pacing his room with my nails between my teeth to flopping onto his carpet and making melodramatic sobbing noises of despair. What if he never comes back? I thought to myself in silent horror. What if this is the end of our non-relationship relationship?

I had no choice. It was time to bring out the break up playlist and stare sadly at the wall.

It's not like we were even dating. I just liked him so much that our little domestic interactions became my entire world. It was like we were living together, and I could pretend that he actually liked me and his soft touches weren't just foreplay. Except now it was highly possible that I wasn't losing my mind, he did like me, and was now running for the hills. Either way, everything sucked.

I brushed my teeth alone and stared sadly into the mirror at the disheveled face between my headphones. I had bags under my eyes from staying up and moving between the two options of, it was just meaningless drunken talk and, drunk words are sober thoughts.

I'd fallen hard enough that I missed the simple act of him putting toothpaste on my brush for me. I missed crossing our arms to brush each other's teeth, and almost spitting the white foam out when one of us inevitably laughed. I missed him drying my hair after I got out of the shower and pulling the duvet higher over my shoulders when he thought I was asleep. I even missed him insulting me, because it was him. I missed everything. Even the sad parts. Especially the sad parts. I wanted to kiss every cold, dark and broken inch of his heart until it fell back into place and beat just for me. Maybe I was selfish to need him like that. Maybe he was the selfish one for making me care so damn much.

I even picked up the blue chalk and wrote a pathetic message for him on the blackboard, but when I got round to aimlessly staring at the pictures of him on my phone I realised enough was enough. I needed to get out and distract myself from the dumb, romantic drama that mostly existed in my head.

The summer was almost at its end, so my friends dragged me outside for a picnic. But no matter how much I tried to focus on them, it was haunting me. Those four words were always rolling around in my mind, no matter how many times I shoved them away. His name is Noah. His name. My name.

The sound of Pacey calling me a bitch made me snap back into reality. "Wait, what?" I said with a dazed blink.

"We've been calling you names for the past five minutes just to see if you were listening," Beth said casually. "I was just about to move onto Spanish swear words."