FRIENDS

24

Michael's POV

After Ivy had left LA, I spent a lot of time thinking about everything she had said to me.

At first, I had just been angry. Who the fuck did she think she was, trying to tell me who I could and couldn't sleep with? I was fine with never speaking to her again. She thought she could tell me what to do and I wasn't okay with that. I could make my own damn decisions and nothing she said or did would change my mind.

But after a few days of her being gone and my bandmates refusing to talk to me, it started to hit me.

She loved me. She was in love with me and she had walked in on me screwing her friend, who knew how she felt about me. No wonder she fucking hated my guts now. I had broken her heart.

The day that I realized that, I went to Calum and asked what I could do to try and make things better. I needed my best friend. I couldn't picture my life without Ivy. It would suck. Being at home would suck. I'd look out my bedroom window and see her house, see her playing with her dog in the back yard and it would be fucking awful.

"Just give her space, mate." Was all Calum said. That was his worldly advice, to just give her space. I hated it, but he was probably right. I should let her cool down and then she'd call me, and we'd talk it over. Things might never be the same again, but at least we'd be best friends.

I started to really think about her and all of the signs I missed. How could I have spent the past fourteen years not realizing how she felt about me?

I was a bigger idiot than I thought.

It all started when we were six years old, when a girl had tried to sit next to me during snacktime and Ivy had bit her hand so hard she'd bled and had to go to the nurse. She'd had such a smug little grin on her face when the girl ran away crying and she got to sit next to me. She'd even offered to share her raisins with me, which had been her favourite snack at the time.

When we were ten, she told me that we were going to get married one day, even our parents thought so. At the time I had thought that if our parents said it was going to happen, it was going to happen. And so we began planning what our wedding would be like, down to the smallest pieces of information. She told me I would have to write vows, which would include all the things I loved about her and I had thought to myself, love? You have to be in love to get married? I don't love Ivy. But I had gone along with it anyways, just to make it happy. By the time I had turned eleven, we never spoke of it again.

I had my first girlfriend just after I turned thirteen. It didn't last long, maybe a few weeks, but we spent a lot of that three weeks kissing and holding hands in my backyard. I didn't see much of Ivy in that period of time, but when I did, she looked like she would burst into tears at any moment. I had had no idea what was wrong.

At fifteen I lost my virginity to an older girl at a party that I'd gone to with Calum and Ashton. The girl had gone to Ashton's school and I didn't even know her name, but I had been drunk and it had been fun. I never even spoke to her again. But when I told Ivy about it the next day, she'd looked like I'd just smacked her. Her eyes watered and immediately she looked away from me. Then she'd claimed she didn't feel well and wanted to go home. I'd said goodbye and let her leave me alone to reminisce about my first time.

Then at sixteen, I started going out with Zoe. Looking back, I felt awful about the whole situation, about how I treated Zoe, but I couldn't change it now. Zoe and Ivy had been best friends, almost as close as Ivy and I, but the moment Zoe and I started dating, Ivy cut off all contact with her. Zoe had even cried to me, so unsure about what it was that she had done to make Ivy hate her. I had even tried to find out, but Ivy refused to tell me. I barely saw her during the time I dated Zoe. I hated not ever seeing my best friend, so I planned on breaking up with Zoe, but the night I planned on doing it, she suggested that we have sex. It's pigheaded and disgusting, but I did it, and then I never called her again.