The Girl in Blue

24- The Girl Consoles

Sutton

"The gala is coming up so quickly," Carmen tells me as we're sitting on the floor of my living room with invitations in front of us that we're hand stuffing and sealing. The New Year's Eve gala that she's putting on isn't going to be invite-only but donors, student government, and specific clubs are getting invitations. They're very elegant looking which goes well with the elegant style of this gala.

"You still have basically two months," I remind her. "You have all of the time in the world."

"We've barely sold any tickets yet. What if nobody shows up?"

"Okay, you haven't really been advertising yet," I say. "Once December comes along, people will be fighting to buy tickets to your gala. It's going to be legendary, nobody's going to forget it."

"Alright," She sighs nervously but lets it go. This gala is like her baby, she's in charge of it and other than a few people in the humane society club, she's almost doing all of the work herself which is seriously impressive considering how big this gala is planned to be. She's really passionate about animals though, so she doesn't mind putting in all of the work. "Thank you for helping me today, by the way, I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Me neither," I say jokingly. "I tried to get Jonah to come help out but he's got a project to finish that's due tomorrow."

"How's that going by the way?" Carmen changes the subject on the mention of Jonah. "It's been a few weeks now."

"Yeah, we're good," I confirm with a small smile that starts creeping onto my face. "We had a sleepover Friday night. Our first one, actually."

"Really?" She raises her eyebrows at me with an excited grin widening on her dark cheeks. "That's exciting. How was it?"

"Pretty fucking amazing," I admit, smiling even more and blushing a little bit at the wonderful time I had with Jonah on Friday night. We had sex but it wasn't exactly night time yet so we ordered fried chicken and hung out in my room in our underwear for a few hours before we fell asleep together.

"I'm completely jealous," Carmen tells me with a long sigh. "Not that you were with Jonah, just that you were with anybody. I've been dried up for two solid months now. But I'm happy for you. Do you love him?"

"No, we haven't gotten that far yet," I shake my head at her. "It makes me nervous just thinking about it, I want to just take this day by day, I think. Love is a stupid word anyway; emotions are too fluid for that shit and it just makes things complicated."

"That's very artsy of you," She says. "You're starting to sound like your sister."

I just laugh at that as I move on to the next fancy invitation. We look to be about halfway through all of the invitations that need to be put into the envelopes and we've been going at this for about an hour so just another hour to go and then we're done.

"And Devon is leaving you alone, right?"

"Yeah," I confirm with a nod. "He just texted me that one day but he hasn't said anything to me since then."

"Good," She says. "Because you know that we'll kick his ass if he starts bothering you. It's bad enough that he hurt you like he did, he doesn't need to rub it in now that you're finally moving on from him."

"Yeah," I say again with a halfhearted laugh. I feel like my friends are too hard on Devon sometimes but that's only because I'm too hard on him too. It's really the only way that I have gotten over our relationship.

The truth is that we were both to blame for why our relationship didn't work out. I was spending a lot of time with my friends and my sister, going out during weekends and just not giving up my time to be with him. He was busy too, he's really into robotics so he was always spending his time in the robotics lab here on campus. We had a really good relationship for a long time, he always made me really happy and we had a really good time together.