I have never been more appreciative of Lola than right now as we walk up the front steps of Justin’s house. I knew eventually I would have to see him but the thought of doing it alone wasn’t sitting well. I need someone here for this. And being a true best friend, Lola didn’t even need to ask me if I wanted her to come. She merely asked when we were going to his house and which one of us was driving.

“Don’t worry,” Lola says when we reach the top step. “I’ll keep the asshole away from you.”

I sigh a bit at her words. “Don’t be too mean to him okay?”

She rolls her eyes. “You just aren’t being mean enough. I’ve got to make up for it somehow.”

I stay silent and stare at the stone steps. I should be madder than I am but it’s like I can’t force up that emotion in me. The sting of everything is fading a bit as time slowly passes and while it still hurts, I just can’t make myself as furious at him as Lola thinks I should be. Maybe I am just too nice. But as much as I don’t want to, I can see where he’s coming from and why he did what he did. Not that that puts him in the right, but it keeps him from being completely in the wrong.

“He’s still…one of my best friends though.”

“Is he?” Lola asks, looking confused. “How are you guys going to go back to being best friends after dating? That doesn’t happen in real life.”

When we were dating, I never thought about what our relationship would be if we ever broke up. And over the past few days I just kind of assumed that eventually we would go back to being best friends. Suddenly I’m thinking about what if that doesn’t happen? Am I not only going to lose my boyfriend but a best friend too? Did I really do something that horrible to deserve that?

My already not great mood was sinking as I thought about that and I didn’t even realize that Lola had pushed the doorbell. Hearing the lock disengage yanked me back to the present and I began to question things. Why was I here? Why did I think that seeing Justin so soon would be a good idea? How am I going to act like nothing is wrong around this huge group of people that are going to be here in an hour? I’m not that great of an actress. I don’t think I can do this.

I’m close to turning and running for the car when the door swings open and reveals Justin. A small bit of satisfaction goes through me when I see that he looks like shit. At least all this is affecting him too.

“Hey.”

His voice is soft and directed at me but Lola takes charge.

“Anyone else here yet?” she asks, pushing her way into the house and pulling me behind her.

He shuts the door behind us and shoves his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “Just Trace. He said he wanted to talk to you.”

Lola scoffs and rolls her eyes. All three of us know it’s a lie. Justin just wants to get rid of her. “Want to go outside, Em?”

Before I can answer, she’s dragging me through the house to the door leading to the backyard. I follow helplessly behind her but not before throwing a look behind me at Justin, who’s still standing in the front hallway.

Just seeing his face is making all the memories of him breaking up with me fresh in my mind. I can see his face when I open my apartment door and the look of regret in his eyes when he tells me he can’t go out with me anymore. Forgetting those things had made it a bit easier to deal with everything but seeing him was causing a fresh wave of pain to run through me.

“Does it make you feel a little bit good that he looks like he hasn’t slept in days?” Lola asks as we step onto the patio.

I can’t help but smile a bit. She knows me well. “Maybe just a bit. Is that wrong?”

“Nope,” she affirms. “If you didn’t, I’d be worried.”

I glance around the backyard. I was supposed to come over early and help set up. At least that had been the plan a week prior. The idea sounded less than appealing and I had opted out. Instead, I had planned my arrival to be at a precise time where it would be before most people arrived so any initial awkwardness would be out of the way but not long enough before where there would be a lot of alone time with him.

My eyes are pulled to the back door when Justin steps outside. Lola follows my gaze and when he begins to walk towards us, she gives me a push towards the hammock in the corner of the yard.

“Come on.”

I’m grateful that she’s being a diversion for me so I won’t be forced to just stand around Justin but at the same time…I kind of want to talk to him. He may have hurt me but I don’t hate him. I dated him for over a month and it feels like I’ve been best friends with him forever. Having absolutely no contact with him for a few days after such a whirlwind relationship feels so strange.

“Is Mitch coming?” I ask as we situate ourselves on the hammock.

Lola begins to make some comment about how he’s coming from work but I’m not really listening to her. My eyes wander away from her and to Justin. He’s talking to Trace and a shiver goes through me when his eyes turn to me. He stops talking and simply stares at me. Trace turns to look at me and then he says something to which Justin shakes his head. Trace says something else and Justin brings up a hand to run over his face.

They’re talking about me. It’s a bit uncomfortable but I still can’t look away. This is such a weird situation. I don’t even know what to do.

When Lola’s cell phone begins to ring, I tear my eyes away from Justin and look at her. She pulls it from her purse.

“Mitch,” she says. “He’s probably lost.” She flips open the phone. “Hey. Where are you?…No, you were supposed to turn off the freeway before that…Ugh, hang on.”

She jumps up from the hammock, sending it swinging, and begins to walk toward the fence, giving Mitch directions on the way. I’ve just barely steadied the hammock when Justin’s quiet voice meets my ears.

“Hey.”

My eyes jerk to him. I had been so focused on staying steady in the swinging hammock that I hadn’t noticed him cross the yard and reach me. I stare at him for a second and wet my lips. “Hi.”

He clears his throat. “Can we talk before everyone gets here?” He pauses for a second and I watch his eyes flicker to Lola, who isn’t currently paying attention to us. “Maybe in private?”

He knows what’s up. If we talk out here, Lola will see and get off the phone and come over to get rid of him, most likely not being too pleasant about it. And if we don’t get this talk out of the way, it’s going to be a long, awkward barbeque.

I nod silently and get up. I don’t know where he’s leading me but I follow him into the house. There’s not a single word spoken until we’re up in his bedroom and the door is shut behind us. This silence is so abnormal between us that I don’t even know how to break it. Justin takes care of that for me.

“So are you okay? Have you been okay?”

I bite my lower lip and nod. “I’m okay.”

“You haven’t answered any of my calls or returned any of my messages.”

I shut my eyes briefly and take a deep breath. “Did you really expect me to?”

He stops at those words and a sigh escapes him. “I guess not.” He sits down on the end of his bed and drops his head into his hands, letting out a larger sigh this time. I stand still and watch him. He’s great at hiding his emotions when he wants to but he’s letting his guard down and I can see that he’s frustrated with this situation. He begins to talk but doesn’t lift his head, instead speaking to the floor. “I know I’ve said this but I’m just really really sorry. I didn’t want this to happen like it did.”

I fold my arms over my chest and bite the inside of my cheek. I vowed that I would not cry today. I knew being over here and seeing him would be hard but I wasn’t going to cry. I had done way too much of that already.

“I just wish you knew how bad I feel.”

Turning my head to the side, I stare out a window. Him saying this isn’t helping me feel any better.

“Em, are you going to tell Ben?”

I look back to him to find that he’s now staring at me. My eyes narrow a bit as his words replay in my mind. “Is that why you wanted to talk to me? To find out if I’m going to keep this all a secret?”

He quickly shakes his head. “No. But I need to know.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

He gives a visible sigh of relief and then his head returns to his hands. “Thank you.”

I don’t respond. What am I supposed to say? ‘No problem, Justin. Any time’?

Justin rubs his hands over his face and then raises his head. His look of frustration is now mixed with one of sadness. “I really miss us,” he says softly.

A lump rises in my throat but I force it down. I am not going to cry. Instead of saying anything, knowing my voice won’t be too steady, I shrug.

His left hand raises and he rubs the side of his face before dropping his face back into his hands. It’s like he can’t keep eye contact with me. “Can you forgive me for doing this to you, Em?”

His voice is so quiet but I hear it loud and clear. Justin is one of my best friends and I love him in a lot of ways. I could never hold anything against him. “You don’t need to ask that.”

“Yes I do.”

“Of course I forgive you.”

He nods and then abruptly gets up. He walks to his dresser and fiddles with the loose coins lying on top. “I really just want you to know that I never meant for this all to happen the way it did. And I know this really sucks how everything turned out but I think it was probably the best thing for all of us.”

My eyes begin to narrow at him. How can he stand there and say this is the best thing for us? How does he go from saying he misses me and he didn’t want us to break up the way we did to this being a good thing for us?

Oh what you say
That you only meant well, well of course you did
Oh what you say
That it’s all for the best, of course it is
Oh what you say
That it’s just what we needed and you decided this?

I can’t bite my tongue at his words. “You don’t get to decide what’s best for me,” I say softly but there’s a hard edge to my voice. “If you have to say that to make yourself feel better about the whole situation then that’s just fine. But don’t for a minute try and tell me that we’re somehow going to benefit from this.”

His jaw goes a bit slack at my words. I had shocked him by arguing with what he said. Good. I let him talk his way out of things way too often and sometimes he needs to be put in his place.

He stares at me for a second before turning back to his dresser and pushing the coins into a pile. “I didn’t exactly say that,” he finally mutters.

I breathe out a laugh even though nothing is funny. “Not exactly but close enough.”

He finally turns to me and gives me actual eye contact. “I don’t want things to be awkward between us, Em. We’ve always been best friends. I can’t lose that.”

I don’t want that either. But how do you go back to being friends after dating the person? The balance of friendship has been completely disrupted and trying to establish it once again seems impossible at this point.

“Me neither.”

I’m surprised when he comes over to me and his arms go around me. It’s unexpected but entirely welcome. I’ve been craving physical contact from him for days and it’s easy to wrap my arms around him and hug him back. I feel his chin on my shoulder and hear him breath in deeply.

Sometimes you can get more across when you don’t speak at all. I can tell by his hug that he’s sorry and that he misses me and that if it weren’t for Ben, this wouldn’t have all happened. I knew this all before but it does make it a bit easier to feel it from him.

“Think maybe one day we can go back to exactly how we used to be?”

I pull my head away form his chest and look up at him. He offers me a small smile and I try and return it.

“We make pretty great best friends,” I force myself to say. Yeah, we make great best friends, but much better boyfriend and girlfriend. He can pretend it’s not true and I can go right along with him but we both know it.

I pull away completely from him even though I don’t want to. Hugging him and being close to him isn’t going to help me get over this. It’s only reminding me of what I’m now missing.

“People are going to be here soon,” I say simply so we’d go back out in public. I cannot take being here alone with him and not being able to do anything. It’s torture.

He gives a slow nod and leads the way down the stairs. Halfway down, he stops and turns around on the step below me and we’re almost eye level. “I mean what I said that I want it to go back to us being friends,” he says in a low voice. “I can’t take this not speaking thing. It’s killing me.”

I had done so well with not crying. He had said some things which definitely made me want to cry but I had held it back. But there’s something about how he said what he just did and it causes tears to immediately well up in my eyes. I blink rapidly to try and hold them at bay but one ultimately escapes.

“Sorry,” Justin mumbles, realizing too late that his words had the power to bring tears to the surface. “But I mean that.”

I quickly wipe away the tear and blink away the rest of the moisture in my eyes. “I know.”

The doorbell rings and his eyes pull from mine to the front door. He doesn’t say anything else to me and takes the steps two at a time to get the door. I take a deep breath and follow him down the stairs at a slower pace. I don’t wait around to see who’s at the door, needing a minute to myself to collect myself. I thought I could get that in the backyard, but as soon as I step through the patio door, Lola practically tackles me.

“Sorry I left you alone with him,” she quickly says. “I didn’t even see him come over and then you guys were both gone.”

I nod silently and begin to walk towards the hammock. It’s in the corner of the yard and slightly shrouded by trees, which is what I need. Lola follows behind me, practically on my heels.

“What did he say?”

I sink into the hammock and pull my knees up to my chest. Lola doesn’t sit but instead stands in front of me. I shrug at her question. “Exactly what you’d expect.” I roll my eyes a bit. “Except he did ask if I was going to tell Ben.”

“You should,” Lola mumbles.

I sigh. With my finger, I draw circles on my denim covered knee. “Maybe. But I’m not going to.”

Lola motions for me to move over and I shift to the right a bit so she can sit beside me. “Did he apologize again?”

I nod silently and move my head forward so I can rest my chin on my drawn up knees. I stare at the grass in front of us. “He could hardly look me in the eye. It was like he was completely ashamed.”

“He should be,” Lola says. “He did a really stupid thing.”

I don’t respond to that. I don’t need to. I know as well as she does that it’s true. “And he wants us to go back to being actual friends.”

“You don’t want that.”

I turn my head so my cheek’s resting on my knee and my eyes are on Lola. Her eyes examine mine and she nods as if confirming her words.

“You still want to date him.”

I close my eyes and turn my head back to its original position. I don’t say anything because I don’t trust my voice.

“You know I’m pissed off at him.”

I nod. It’s not like she’s been subtle.

“I’m pissed at him and I still think he’s an asshole.” Her voice softens. “But maybe…if he didn’t actually want to break up with you what if you just didn’t accept it?”

I raise my head and look at her. “What?”

“Neither of you wanted to end it so just don’t. You both still like each other and he won’t be able to resist you.”

I roll my eyes. “No offense, but I think that’s shitty advice.”

Lola shrugs and stands, sending the hammock into motion. “You’re persuasive. You could change his mind.”

With that she walked away, leaving me sitting alone in the rocking hammock. Her words echoing in my head, I look around the backyard and after a moment, my eyes land on Justin, standing by the barbeque. And the longer I stare at him, the more I wonder how persuasive I exactly am.

Hide and Seek-Imogen Heap