Exchange

Chapter 30

This chapter goes out to @soroke, for her enthusiastic support, sweet messages, and idea to give Mason and Rose a ship name. Her idea was Raison! If anyone else wants to give their own ship names, just mention them in the comments. Love you all and enjoy!

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I suppose it's funny how easily one can fall back into old patterns. Old habits. Old ways. Human beings are the most adaptable species on earth, or so I was told by my ninth grade biology teacher. And it's true- old habits die hard.

Three weeks had gone by since we had arrived home, and it hadn't taken long for me to shift back into the usual, mandatory repetitions of my life.  Wake up, attend school, get swamped with homework, go to bed, and repeat.

It sometimes felt hard to imagine that only a few months ago I was parading through the streets of London, attending clubs and dances and rugby games, without a care in the word. The glittering lifestyle stood in stark contrast to my one back home.

However optimistically, I was with my mother again; and my friends, more specifically, Kate, who I had missed sorely in the past few months.

On the first evening back, she'd visited me. We'd both been in tears, hugging and laughing in my doorway like kids. And it was during the same night, lying on my bed whilst my mom cooked dinner downstairs, that I told her everything that had happened between Mason and I. The good's and the bad's and the mess we'd become.

"Wow."

"Yup."

"Wow."

"I know."

"How the hell am I only hearing about all of this now?" Kate exclaimed, her mouth dropping open with accusation.

I sighed, dropping my head into the pillow. "Because you were over three thousand miles away and I don't think Skype would have covered it all."

Kate just shook her head, her expression appearing perplexed as she struggled to fathom what I'd just told her.

Eventually she gathered her thoughts.

"And now?"

I shot her a look. "And now what?"

"And now what's going to happen between you two? Are you going to confront him at school? Call him-"

I sat up in my bed, looking at Kate as though she'd gone insane.

"Did you even listen to my story? Specifically, the end? Specifically, the part where he decided that we weren't compatible for each other and I insulted him by calling him a coward and a fake? Because I thought that was a pretty clear indication that there is nothing between us anymore."

Kate rolled her eyes at my sarcastic tone and promptly folded her legs beneath her.

"You guys were in the heat of the moment." She reasoned.

It was my turn to roll my eyes. "You can't blame this on the 'heat of the moment'. Heat or not, Mason meant every word he said."

I quickly forced myself to steer away from the specific memory. His words had been doing an endless and torturous loop in my head throughout the last eight hours.

"We're complete opposites that come from completely opposite worlds- I just can't see it working out."

I flinched, closing my eyes briefly.

"And did you?"

I opened my eyes, confused by Kate's question.

"Did I what?"