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Note: Hi, hey. My stupid dial-up at home won’t let me post notes with my stories for some reason? So, here: there are some things going on in this story that might be triggery and some of them might just upset certain people because this story totally upset me while I was trying to write it, so please note the tags!
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It's not like Jade needs Beck. It's just that, since they broke up, there's this kind of giant gaping hole in her chest that she can't seem to get rid of. It's not a big deal or anything. It's just there, for everybody to see, this empty space where Jade thinks her heart used to be. She tries to act normal, but it's all too morbid, even for her.
She off-handedly makes Robbie cry one day during class, and Tori tells her not to be so heartless.
She wants to tell her that it's kind of hard, since Beck kept hers.
*
Even her dad notices.
He comes home early one Sunday, the first time Jade has seen him all weekend, with a bag of takeout Thai food that they eat in silence in front of the TV. They sit through two History Channel specials on vampires. Normally, one of them would have left by now, but Jade's not been spending a lot of time around people lately, and it seems like her dad has something he wants to say.
When he finally shuts his styrofoam container and slides it onto the coffee table, Jade turns to look at him, expectantly.
He clears his throat, makes a face, says, "I haven't seen your boyfriend around, lately."
That's because I buried him in the backyard, Jade thinks. But you didn't hear it from me.
"That's because he's not my boyfriend anymore," she says, instead.
Her dad nods his head. He gets up and starts to pack everything into the plastic bag he brought it home in. Before he takes it to the kitchen, though, he turns back to her and says, "You're a very strong girl," like Jade didn't already know that.
It's a lot easier to be strong when you have somebody holding you up.
*
There reaches a point where Jade isn't even sure what she wants anymore. She puts up with everyone and goes on stupid zany adventures with Cat and Tori and Andre. She studies more than she ever has. She doesn't really look at Beck.
Nobody asks her out, because everyone is scared of her. She's pretty sure she wouldn't say yes, anyway.
After the first few weeks where she hated him and hated him, she started thinking, "I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it," because she didn't. She has to be honest with someone, and she's being honest with herself right now. It was a show, because when Jade is scared, she has to hide it somehow. And Jade was scared, because a Beckless world isn't a world she remembers how to live in, and their easy relationship suddenly wasn't easy anymore.
So, Jade went for ultimatums and drama because they're actors and if they can't act like themselves, then they can act, but Beck didn't play it right. He missed his cue.
If she was someone awful, she would write Beck a song and sing it to him in the hallway, and he would be so shocked and touched by such a public display of affection that he would be forced to take her back.
If she were Tori freaking Vega, she'd have already done that and everything would be fine. She's not, though. She's Jade West, and she's scared that she doesn't know what that means.
*
The day before they broke up, the only time they stopped fighting was when Jade pulled Beck into the janitor's closet and bit his lower lip and Beck pressed her up against the wall with her hands over her head. He's got big hands, big enough that one can pin both of her wrists and the other can press hard into Jade's waist, into her ribcage, just below her breasts.
"You make me so mad, sometimes," he had said, into the junction of their lips, slick and red.
"I know the feeling," she'd replied, and then the bell had rung, and they'd separated like nothing happened. Jade had felt his fingerprints on her wrists for the rest of the day.
Now, there are faint bruises forming that she can't stop touching, and she wants to show him.
When bruises are left with mutual intent, when someone wants them and someone else wants to give them, they seem like they linger longer. Jade's not sure why, but she remembers Beck worrying over the marks he leaves on her when they're alone, what people would say if they noticed that he’s totally a biter. He never really got the way Jade wanted to wear them like they meant something, how she’d keep worrying scratches he would leave while they were making out on her neck until they opened up and bled again because she liked the gasp and pull of it.
Whenever they're near each other, Jade makes sure to have her sleeves pushed up.
She catches him staring more than once, but he never meets her eyes.
*
The last time they broke up, it was mostly a joke, and she went to Tori for advice.
This time, it looks like they're in it for the long haul, and Jade doesn't want to talk to Tori. She wants to break Tori's stupid gorgeous cheekbones every time she looks happy, sometimes, but that's it. Lane keeps chasing her down in the hallways, trying to get her to finally accept that she needs counseling, but Jade's been deadset against counselors since she went to a string of them after her mother died and all of them told her she just had to accept it.
Jade doesn't have to accept anything.
When she finds herself at Tori's house one night, sometime after midnight, she chalks it up to a mental break and manages not to ruin any priceless throw pillows this time. Instead, she sits at Tori's dining room table and tells her a story about how, when Beck and her first started dating, he had just started memorizing monologues from Shakespeare and would recite them to her as dramatically as possible. One time, he stumbled over Romeo's lines as he stands under Juliet's balcony, and Jade had laughed because Beck never messed anything up and he got mad at her. He didn't talk to her for a whole day and night, until Jade walked right up to him in the hallway the next morning and kissed him on the lips and said, "I laughed because I just figured out you're not perfect," and he'd quirked his lips, left a hand on her hip until she continued, "I like you even more now."
And Tori listens to her talk and, slowly, the baby deer in the headlights look goes away and she just starts to look sympathetic.
"I didn't think he wouldn't come for me," she says, eventually.
Tori bites her lip and says, quietly, "None of us did, either."
She could have gone to Cat's house, but Cat would have just cried with her or something, and Jade's done with that. Tori makes uncomfortable faces and fancy cocoa, and the awkward silences are just enough to keep Jade level.
It's easier for her to put things in perspective when she's not wallowing, when she's not alone.
She doesn't know when it got so hard to be alone.
*
Beck doesn't date anyone, either, or at least he doesn't show it. She spends too long on his Slap page, staring at the pictures of them that he hasn't taken down yet. For awhile she thinks about taking them off of her page, but she doesn't really want that.
Instead, she closes the tab and opens up the porn site she has bookmarked and browses listlessly through the screencaps. She slides a hand over her panties, pressing down on her clit with two fingers, and she almost gives up on finding anything when she sees a shot of a girl with long dark hair on her knees with her hands tied behind her back.
She's never really gone that deep into the pornography rabbit hole, but it's like something shifts in her head, like she flipped a switch and the outcome was a five minute clip of a girl being fucked on her knees with her back arched to meet the place where her wrists are tried together and her face pressed against the floor and Jade having the best orgasm of her life before the four minute mark.
After she recovers, she shuts her laptop and thinks about Beck and touches the last traces, faint gray and brown, of his fingerprints.
*
Jade lets herself go crazy. She screams and freaks people out on purpose and shaves Cat's hair off. She writes the most disturbing monologues she can manage for class, and Lane keeps trying to talk to her about her feelings, but she's not interested. There's only one person that knows how to calm her down, and she's going to wait for him. In the meantime, she writes angry poetry in black sharpie all over the walls in the girl's bathroom and throws a tantrum about the sandwich she buys at lunch and threatens to kill Tori at least five times more than usual.
She sees the way Beck changes every time she does something, the way he shuts his eyes and locks his hands together like he has to keep himself from grabbing her arm and pulling her away to tell her she's being a brat. When they were dating, he would put her in time out and then break halfway through and come make out with her. Now, he bites his lower lip and only glares at her when he notices that she's looking at him.
"Jade, you're not going to snap and kill everyone, right?" Cat asks, earnestly, when she's the only one who shows up to sit with Jade at lunch.
"I'm not making any promises," she says, and Cat makes a concerned noise. If Jade was a nicer person, she would tell her that she's just trying to get Beck's attention, but she's not.
Cat tries to cheer her up and eventually just starts trying to inspirationally sing to her, and Jade leaves to go sit in a hallway somewhere when she starts to sing "Cat doesn't want to die, want to die, want to die, Cat doesn't want to die so please don't bomb our school," to the tune of Mary Had A Little Lamb.
*
Beck's stronger than he used to be. He stops looking at Jade altogether, and it's like she's screamed so hard for so long that her voice has started to give out. She's running out of ideas when Sikowitz pulls Tori and her up onstage to do an improv scene about twin sisters who can communicate telepathically.
It hits her all of a sudden, and she rocks forward on her toes between their stilted dialogue, whispering, "I'm going to slap you, I'll apologize later," and Tori yelps, "WHAT," before Jade slaps her across the face with all her frustration behind it. Tori stumbles back and falls.
"How dare you insult me in my own mind?" Jade yells, when she almost forgets to keep up the scene, and Tori whimpers, "Not a stage slap, not a stage slap, oh chiz."
Everybody else is distracted enough worrying about Tori that they don't notice when Beck leaves the room or when Jade gets a text that says: parking lot after school and makes a small, excited noise that she can't choke back.
When the bell rings, Tori comes up to her and asks, "Is this some weird kind of foreplay for you two?"
"We'll see, I guess," Jade says, and Tori shakes her head and lets out a tired breath.
"Because I want you to get back together, too," she says, following Jade out of the room, "but not as much as I like my face not being broken."
"Yeah, yeah," Jade says, not looking at her, "Did I apologize for that? Because it was for the cause."
Tori calls after her, “That wasn’t an actual apology,” but Jade’s already halfway to the front doors.
*
Jade cuts out of her last class. She pulls herself up onto the bed of Beck’s truck, sits delicately on the edge. Her tights are torn at the knee, and she’s feeling like she might have a panic attack anytime now, even though she hasn’t had one in years, not since the week after her mom’s funeral when the walls of her living room wouldn’t stop closing in on her.
People glance at her and then glance away as they stream out to their cars later, and she sees Robbie and Andre leaving together on the other side of the parking lot. Robbie’s got his guitar strapped to his pack, and he raises a hand when he sees Jade, just for a second.
Jade raises her hand back and tries to pretend like it isn’t shaking.
When she zeroes in on Beck heading towards her, she jumps down, straightens out her skirt. She’s so nervous that she’s pretty sure her heart is beating somewhere near her throat, but she meets his eyes head on when he stops in front of her.
He says, “You have to stop,” and she’s going to keep playing because she doesn’t know what else to do.
“Stop what?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.
Beck rolls his eyes and turns away before he says, “Stop acting out. Stop making me pay attention. Stop making me want to. . .”
And, there, that’s it, because she knows Beck. She knows him better than anyone, and she knows that this is the mood that would make Beck crowd her up against his truck, bite at her lip, kiss her until neither of them can breathe. She’s driving him crazy, and that’s all she wants, right now.
“Want to?” she repeats, and she can’t hide the hope behind it, the way she takes a small step forward just to hear Beck’s breath hitch and know. She knows him.
“We’re broken up,” Beck says, quietly.
“I think that’s stupid,” she says, “I think that I’m stupid and you’re stupid for letting that happen. I think that I need you so much that I’m willing to physically harm people to get you to pay attention to me, and that’s probably not great, but I need you.”
She takes another step forward, and Beck touches her arm.
He says, “That’s a lot,” and he touches her arm, fingers closing on her elbow.
She says, “There’s so much more, but I really need you to kiss me right now, if you still want to,” because there’s time. There’s time to talk, but she’s missed him so much that she presses forward on her toes to meet him halfway, to wrap her arms around his neck and hold on.