The art of avoidance had always come fairly easy for me when it came to my friends at school. And now that my friendship with Maddy had taken a turn for the worst, this avoidance was made even more simple and painless.

Despite the disagreement between Anne and I at the beginning of the week of where I should stay, I had decided that I would rather deal with the wrath of my family than live with awkward tension with Harry. Anne tried her hardest to get me to stay when I walked down the stairs Monday night with my belongings and met her in the living room to say thank you again for everything.

But even though she had given me multiple reasons not to go, the realization of my feelings for Harry and our distant disposition while still under the same roof, made everything inside of me collapse, and my decision to leave wasn't going to change no matter what she said to me. Being there, knowing that he was too, keeping himself as far away from me as possible, burned me. I was like a ticking time bomb without the timer. I could blow up at any second without warning. I couldn't and wouldn't let it happen there, because God only knows what would have been said, or done. And things are already bad enough.

And so I took our distance and stretched it even farther. Isolated myself from the world as I did before him. Only this time, I had a broken heart and it absorbed my existence. It made getting out of bed even harder than before. It made falling asleep impossible. It made those moments I had to be near him in class, unbearable, and even sometimes I felt that breathing was challenging. And to top it all off, the period cramps and hormones made an appearance, making just about everything intensified.

It was now the end of the month, and the demand of my father's uncalled for rent money had come due. It was disappointing that I hadn't made enough money at the bookstore yet to pay for the entire month I owed, but to avoid another catastrophe in the form of discolored skin, I took the extra money from my savings to be able to pay him despite my internal fight with it all. And luckily for me, I was able to slip downstairs Thursday morning before school, and place the rent money on the coffee table in an envelope labelled 'Jayde's Rent Money,' in hopes that it would keep my father happy for at least a little while.

As content as I was that it was now the end of the week and the art of avoiding my friends could be even easier now that the weekend was starting, knowing over the next two days, I was forced to go to work with Harry, devastated me. The distance between us was needed for my sanity and soon that distance string was going to be cut short, keeping us in a room that I'm sure will feel much smaller than any other room I have stepped into. The thought of it made me feel sick.

"I think we should talk," Kate suggests as I'm about to leave my locker. I turn to meet her gaze, to see that she's looking at me with sympathetic brown eyes, anticipation written in her features waiting for me to reply. "Please? Let's just wait until everyone's gone. I'm on your side, remember? I'm not your enemy."

In behind her open locker, Maddy scoffs, making me look at her. She's rolling her eyes at me, which just makes me want to punch her. Fortunately for her sake, she doesn't say anything before walking to the other side of the hall. She looks back at us with a devious proud smile upon her lips as she stands next to Niall and Harry waiting to leave for the day with them.

Before they walk away together, Harry's eyes turn up from the ground in our direction. It's the first time we have made eye contact all week and it makes my heart pound. It makes my insides want to scream out, because for as many times as I have seen him this week, the stone cold look upon his face has disappeared with this one gaze at me, making me wonder if there's any chance he could be missing me as much as I do him. Either that, or he's completely done caring about everything.

"I'll see you at work tomorrow," Harry says, as they start to walk down the hall, his eyes still on me. He waves a small wave and all I can do is nod. He didn't sound mad, nor upset or happy. Emotionless words, unreadable eyes. Unable to show any sort of reaction, everything within me is having an uncontrollable outburst, making me wish that I was anywhere but here.

"Work?" Kate asks, furrowing her brows at me.

I let out a long breath trying to stable myself before speaking. "I work at Harry's mom's bookstore with him on weekends."

Her eyebrows rise slowly as she stares at me. "We'll get to that later," she says with a small smile after a long silence. She sits down against our lockers, motioning for me to sit next to her, and despite my wanting to leave right now, she's right. She's on my side, not my enemy.

We wait for the hallway to clear out to even speak a word to each other. Me on one side, content to stay quiet, Kate on the other, impatiently tapping the tips of her shoes together as she watches the students walk passed us every which way.

"I've let you wallow in whatever this pain is for the whole week," she starts when there's only a few people left down the hall. "But I can't stand to see you this way anymore. It's worse than it ever was before. And I hate that you're avoiding even me. I've been eating lunch alone too, ya know."

"I'm sorry," I say quietly.

"I don't want an apology," she says. "I want you to talk to me. I let you keep everything inside for way too long when you deserved better friends. I know that something is going on with you right now, and I want you to know I'm here."

My eyes meet hers, and I suddenly feel like it's the first time someone is willing to listen to me, even though I know it's not. But the fact that I can tell just by the look in her eyes that she cares, means everything at this particular moment.

I know that she has always been one person that I could trust. That despite the many times she had been better friends with Maddy, somehow she has almost always taken my side. And despite the fact I can feel myself already fighting to stay quiet, I'm not sure I want this internal argument to win. Because I know that now more than ever, I need a friend. Someone more than Carter. A girl's perspective of all of this.

Harry had let our secret out to Tenley without even caring that he did so. Although I cherished our secret, and who we were within it, the meaning behind it was already lost. Our secret didn't mean anything anymore. There was nothing left to protect.

This realization sprung tears to my eyes. For as long as I had been fighting with him over his feelings, his feelings for me are what pushed me to want to be better. No matter how many times we ever said it was just about the sex, it never was. It was always in the way he looked at me. Always in so many of his sweet words of how pretty he thought I was. The way that he smiled at me or how easy and comfortable he made everything. He somehow always believed in me, and the sex, I realize was just a small part of who we were. For every time he touched me, he brought life back into me, as if it all had held so much meaning.

Unable to keep the tears from falling, I sniffle. "I think I'm in love with Harry, and I feel so broken," I breathe out quickly. "I ruined everything and he broke me."

"In love with Harry?" Kate asks. The fact that she sounds shocked isn't surprising. Her reaction is exactly what I would have anticipated if I had ever actually thought of this moment happening. "What did you ruin?"

"Everything," I sob. "I pushed him away. I fucked up, Kate. I fucked up so bad, and now he doesn't care anymore. He doesn't care about me." I take a breath and wipe the tears from my face. "I miss him and I fucked up and I want him back. But not how he is now, how he was before. Before I fucked up. When he was warm and cuddly and thought I was pretty."

"I'm so confused right now," I hear her say under her breath as she brings me in for a hug, allowing me to cry upon her shoulder, as she rubs my back gently. "You're going to be fine, Jayde. I promise."

As she leans away from me, I look at her through my blurred vision. "You can't tell anyone. It's a secret."

"Apparently," she smiles. "I had no idea. I don't think anyone had a clue. You guys were actually together?"

"Not really," I sniffle again. "We were more like secret fuck buddies."

"You were sleeping with him?" she belts out, her eyes wide. I feel as though her words echoed through the halls, the words so out in the open where they shouldn't be. "How long was this going on for?" she adds more quietly, trying to compose herself.

"A couple of months," I answer.

"It makes sense now," she says after a long silence. Her eyes had flicked back and forth as she played it all back in her mind. "The night he got in a fight with Niall, when he only wanted you to take care of him. And you tried so hard for Maddy not to like him," she laughs. "And the switcheroo. He didn't want you to go on that date with Niall, so he went there just to do the switch. Awww, Jayde. I love that I understand now. I love that I can see it for what it all truly was."

"Was," I emphasize. "For what it was. Meaning, not anymore, Kate. I lost him."

Her little bout of cheer for understanding things withers away when she sees now why I'm crying as hard as I am. She slumps her shoulders back down and gazes at me. "You really think you're in love with him?" she asks slowly.

My eyes meet hers, letting out a long sigh, brushing away more escaped tears, and all I can do is nod. Me being in love with someone seemed so out of the ordinary. Sure, I had loved Carter, but this was entirely different. This was not a love made as children, growing together and knowing every single thing about each other. This was finding love in someone new. It was as if when my eyes met his that night by the fire, and in that one moment, my soul pointed at him and whispered to my heart, him.

"Have you told him how you feel?" she asks, taking my hand to comfort me.

"No," I say quickly, my eyes widening. "God, no."

"Well, maybe—"

"No," I interrupt. "Feelings were what pushed me away from him."

"So, he liked you?"

"And he doesn't anymore."

"You don't know that," she tries.

"Yes, Kate. I do," I argue. "He told me he doesn't. And have you ever had sex with someone who had literally zero feelings for you?"

She shakes her head slowly at me, and I can tell that her heart feels for me. That only imagining what it would be like to have sex with someone who didn't care at all, would feel like, knowing it can't be a good feeling.

"There's nothing worse, trust me."

"Maybe just talk to him, Jayde," she says. "Maybe talking will fix it all. Tell him how you feel. Maybe it'll fix everything."

"I'm not telling him, Kate," I sigh. "We weren't even supposed to feel anything in the first place. It was just meant to be about sex. Look, I appreciate you willing to listen to me, and trust me, it feels nice to actually tell someone about this, but I don't want to talk about it anymore. It hurts too much. It makes it all too real, and I have done so much crying this week, I'm just tired of it all. I just need it to stop."

I'm happy that she doesn't push me further to talk about it. That when we stand, all she does is hug me. I allow myself to hug her back, to feel how much someone cares to make me feel better within this embrace that I so desperately needed.

"Promise not to tell anyone about this?" I ask. "No one can know."

She looks at me and smiles a soft smile. "I promise you can trust me. Your secrets will always be safe with me."

**

My house had been quiet all week. Even last night, for it being a Thursday night, there was no fighting downstairs. There was no keeping me awake all hours of the night, and I had been able to get out of bed this morning for school on time. The quietness continued through to this evening, the silence a strange eerie feeling. Although I liked that there was no screaming, no breaking glass or anything that usually transpired, the stillness made me nervous. Made me feel like it was a calm before the storm.

I wanted to be positive about it. I wanted to think that with everything that went down last week, my father had a change of heart. That somehow he realized what he did and how he treated my mother was wrong and so he had decided to be nice this weekend. I knew that he was home, his old rusty truck was sat in the driveway, and yet nothing was the same. I didn't dare open my bedroom door, or think twice about going down the stairs to see why everything had changed, I simply just let it be. Hoping that if I pretended not to be here, the quietness would resume and they would forget altogether that I was up here.

Needing to take a break from writing my 'Family' report for English class, not wanting to think about the difference between my family and Harry's anymore, I decided as the sun started to set, it was time I revisited my spot in The Clearing on top of the hill, not having been there in a while.

It was a clear evening, no clouds in sight, the sky set on fire with bright orange and yellow as I walked up the hill. The wind slightly blew my hair around, and as I stood at the top, I closed my eyes for a while, breathing in the warm breeze, needing to feel at ease with the world surrounding me. Needing to forget the pain of my broken heart.

I let out a long sigh as I open my eyes and sit down in the grass, taking in the beauty before me, remembering why this place had always meant so much. The city in the distance, as it always had, gave me hope that one day everything would be better. Seeing the city made me realize that there is more to life than just this place, more than what I know and what I live through, and one day I would be in the center of it all. One day I would be there, and the sun would be setting on me, in a place much different than this one.

Just as the sun had fallen behind the edge of the world and the stars started to appear in the now darkened sky, footsteps come from in behind me. I don't dare to look back to see who it is, not wanting it to be who I think it might be. My heart starts to pound when they stop not far from me and I listen as he lets out a long breath.

A few moments later, Harry is sat next to me. I can see from my peripheral vision that he is looking at me, but I keep my eyes on the city in the distance that now has lit up the sky with lights.

Although everything is so very different with us, as time passes and the silence continues, the comfort of him being here next to me consumes me. I had been missing nights in silence with him, sitting here together. Allowing for time to pass, not saying a word. And despite the fact nothing is what it used to be, I make sure not to take for granted that he's next to me, giving me exactly what I need. Someone to sit with me in silence, and just be there.

This is just one of the many reasons why I love him. He knows exactly what I need without having to say a word.

A/N: Thoughts?

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