Strangers No More || Jerrie

Chapter 6

After Gary had taken Jade home, she’d made herself some leftovers before plopping herself down on her writing couch. She watched a little TV as she ate before she finally called Leigh-Anne. Leigh picked up almost immediately.

“Hey,” Leigh-Anne answered. “Nice of you to finally call me.”

“Sorry,” Jade apologized, feeling bad. It was bad enough that Leigh hadn’t heard about her interaction with Jade from the source, and now she’d made the girl wait around all day for more information. “I was actually with Perrie until only about an hour ago.”

“You were with her the entire day?” Leigh asked, shock evident in her voice.

“We’re just…” Jade paused, not even entirely sure herself what she and Perrie were doing. “It’s just something we need to do. We’ve been catching up.”

“On every single thing that happened in the past five years?” Leigh-Anne scoffed.

“Sort of,” Jade relented. “Did Jesy tell you why Perrie and I decided to meet up again?”

“No,” Jesy answered. “All she told me is that Perrie called you by accident, and that it probably wasn’t entirely by accident and that Danielle was behind it, then she called you a second time and that you two were seeing each other today. Am I missing something?”

“Sort of,” Jade admitted. “We’ve both been writing letters to each other for the past five years,” she explained. “We didn’t send them though, so now we’re reading them to each other.”

Jade expected a response of shock to come from her friend, but instead she got the opposite. “I know.”

“What?”

“I mean, I know about the letters,” the woman on the other end of the line clarified.

Jade took the TV clicker in her hand and turned off the television, wondering if it was interfering with what she was hearing. Because surely Leigh-Anne couldn’t have said she knew about the letters. Right? “What?” Jade asked.

“I know about the letters,” Leigh repeated. “I wasn’t aware that Perrie was writing them as well, but I knew you were.”

“How?”

“I saw you writing a few of them,” she explained. “I didn't realize what you were doing originally; I just assumed you were writing lyrics or something. I saw the one you wrote the day of my wedding though. It was in your purse.”

Jade took a moment to remember the event from three years earlier. She remembered writing a letter to Perrie the morning of the wedding and putting it in her purse, having forgotten to bring an envelope. She’d also been in charge of holding several items belonging to Ally and Leigh-Anne, as her purse was the largest.

“I thought they were just lyrics at first,” Leigh-Anne continued. “But when I started to read it, I realized what it was. I was so mad at you at first. I thought you’d been staying in contact with Perrie while she’d just cut me off entirely.”

“Oh my god,” Jade sighed as she remembered Leigh giving her the cold shoulder for the second half of the wedding reception and being cold to her for the weeks following the wedding. Before Jade had been able to ask Leigh-Anne about it, however, the woman had suddenly changed her tune and was overly eager to spend time with Jade and talk to her.

“When Ally and I stayed at your apartment that weekend the month after our wedding, I accidentally stumbled upon the other letters. I didn’t read them or anything, but I saw that they were all to Perrie, but none were addressed. They just had dates on them. That’s when I realized that I’d been a total ass to you and assumed the worst. I never told you I knew though, just because it seemed like it was such a personal thing to you.”

“It was,” Jade agreed. “You see, we agreed to keep writing letters for as long as we felt love for each other, but after a while it sort of just became something that was part of my everyday life. It was like I had someone to talk to, someone I could tell anything to and not have to worry about their reaction. I never expected anyone to read them.”

“Not even Perrie?”

Jade paused as she came to face the realization that no, she hadn’t expected Perrie to ever read them. For a while she’d hoped that she would, but as more time passed, the letters just became an outlet. A way to get out how she was feeling without hurting anybody.

Jade loved Leigh-Anne. Leigh was one of her best friends, but there was only so much Jade was willing to admit to her. That was why she’d turned to the letters to let everything out.

Jade wasn’t ready to admit to Leigh that she’d been afraid to think about Perrie reading the letters, at the time, because that would mean that Perrie had continued to love her, as well. And that prospect scared her because it meant that they may not have needed to break up in the first place. Or it meant that there was such a thing as a soulmate. Jade wasn’t sure which scared her more.

Obviously sensing that Jade wasn’t going to answer her question, Leigh-Anne diverted the conversation to a new topic. “Did Perrie mention me at all?” she asked.

“No,” Jade admitted. She felt bad about it, but she knew that Leigh-Anne wanted the truth from her. “I’m meeting up with her again though. She’ll probably ask about you. I’m sure she knows that we’re still friends.”

“It’s fine,” Leigh responded, but Jade knew it wasn’t fine. “If she does ask about me, just let me know, okay?”

“Of course,” Jade responded.

“Anyway I should go, Ally is whispering in my ear and it’s getting very distracting. And she’s being a HORNY LITTLE s**t. YES, YOU!”

Jade laughed at the interaction Leigh-Anne was clearly having with her wife. She could picture them sitting together in their home, and Jade’s heart warmed at the thought. The two of them argued a lot, but they were a happy couple. They’d managed to get over every speed bump they’d come across. For a while Jade had thought they wouldn’t make it when the year before Ally and Leigh-Anne had fought over having children and Leigh had come up to New York to stay with Jade for a week. They made it though. They’d finally come to the decision together to adopt a dog, then revisit the idea of children in another three years.

“Sorry Jade, my stupid wife is now stripping and well, when that happens I can’t be trusted with what comes out of my mouth,” Leigh spoke. “So I’m going to have to go and tie this woman to our bed and show her who’s really in control.”

“Okay, too much information, Leigh-Anne!” Jade yelled into the receiver. She heard both Ally and Leigh-Anne’s laughs on the other end of the line and she hung up on them.

After ending the call, Jade looked down at her phone and saw that she had a few messages from Perrie.

Perrie: Do you need Danielle’s address or do you know it?

Perrie: Because I’m too lazy to look through all the emails from Demi to find it.

Jade laughed out loud at the text, realizing that Perrie really hadn’t changed much at all. She was still the same person Jade had fallen in love with. Jade just hoped she’d have the chance to become a part of the woman’s life again. Even if it was just as her friend.

Jade: No need to strain yourself, I know where she lives.

Perrie: Good :)

Perrie: I’m getting there at 8am to start priming the walls (thank god for Starbucks!) but you can come whenever.

Jade: I have a meeting in the morning, why don’t I come around 12? I’ll bring lunch.

Perrie: It’s a date.

Perrie: s**t.

Perrie: forget I said that.

Jade found herself unable to wipe the smile off her face as she read Perrie’s texts.

Jade: Don’t worry Perrie haha

Perrie: Let’s just pretend I never said anything.

Jade: I’ll be there at 12.

Jade: We can call it a friendly date

Perrie: Psh, that’s totally what I meant when I said that.

Jade: Sure…

Jade wasn’t expecting Perrie to respond to her after the last message and was surprised when an hour later her phone vibrated with a new message.

Perrie: I found something I think you might like.

Jade: What is it?

Perrie’s next message was a picture message. It was a selfie of Perrie holding up a red mask. The same one that had inspired Amelia’s song Masquerade.

“And you danced in a storm wearing red

You wore red

And hid behind a facade

Your smile lit up the room

A Venetian princess

Mercutio save me from this

Masquerade”

- Masquerade (2017)