About You. (Matty Healy)

11- I Hate to Think About You with Someone Else.

Content Warning: Drug Use.

Question...? by Taylor

"Does it feel like everything's just like second best after that meteor strike?"

Hollywood by Marina

"Do anything for a dime, looking for the golden lie."

April 2015

Jade was lying across her couch, her neck against the armrest and a laptop sitting on her stomach. She couldn't stop thinking about last night with Matty. On a surface level, it had seemed his mind was made up, so her mind should be too. The truth was that she was overthinking his place in her life. The space and significance he had taken up in her brain had vexed her. They had only hung out four times. She couldn't distinguish between her initial thoughts, her gut instincts, and what she had convinced herself to feel. On the one hand, Matty gave her a sense of clarity. If she was a flower hungry for a light source, he was the sun diluting the opacity of grey clouds. With the clarity he had provided, she was able to heed every word that came out of his mouth. It was a catch twenty-two. She couldn't ignore that he was dead set on the fact that he would break her heart. Had he already? No one had written concrete rules on love, or infatuation even. Every idea expressed on the topic was confusing and contradictory. Why did she feel so inclined to subject herself to such a paradox? There was no way that the human brain would be able to solve such man-made problems on its own, organically at least. This was something Jade often further pondered upon, making her resentful towards science or god or whoever. It was in crises like this that Jade thought she would do what she did best, write.

Suddenly, there was a knock at her door. A fresh urgency forced her to stand up as quickly as she could. She looked down at her bare thighs and legs and panicked. Her feet and eyes acted as partners in crime as she now shuffled sporadically around the room for pants.  All sense of lucidity quickly deteriorated. In an attempt to repair a sense of organization, she called out to the person behind to door, "Uhh...who is it?"

"It's just me."

Jade stopped in her tracks and stiffened. An animal seeing traffic for the first time. She didn't dare speak of the devil aloud, so why was he at her door? After hesitating to open it, Jade stuck her head out from the small opening she created. There he was, dressed and put together in a pair of black jeans and a t-shirt, unscathed from the night before the current morning.  Jade made sure to depict her annoyance, "What are you doing here?"

"It's good to see you, too, Smith.  Can I come in? I brought coffee," Matty responded.

Jade had a feeling she would regret it, but she gave in with caution. She swung the door, revealing her body was only covered by a pair of underwear and an oversized t-shirt. Matty walked in and then looked her up and down with intentions of her seeing him do so. "Is this normally how you greet all of your guests?" He smirked at her.

Jade did her best of not buying into his charms, "Oh, shut up. Let's not pretend you haven't seen me naked. Are you going to give me my coffee or what?" She extended a demanding arm toward him.

"You clearly need it. Someone's got their knickers in a twist." He handed her the paper cup. Jade took it with aggressive haste. She sat down on the couch, cross-legged like a child would sit on the floor. Her hope was that her body language could disprove his theory that she was mad at the world. However, she didn't mind if he thought she was mad at him, "Did you come here just to mess with me, or do you actually have something to say?"

Matty took the empty space she had left on the couch as an invitation to sit down. He held his coffee in his lap and lightly drummed on the black plastic lid. "I just wanted to say sorry about last night. I shouldn't have slept with you knowing that I just want to be friends. That was shitty of me."