Strangers No More || Jerrie

Chapter 14

Later that night, Jade’s Harry Potter marathon was interrupted by the sound of her phone. She groaned, hoping it wasn’t Karl, and paused the movie. The phone continued to ring as she placed her cup of honey tea on the table and searched around in the blankets she was covered in for the offending device. When she noticed it was her sister calling at such a late hour, she answered the phone nervously.

“Car? Are you okay? What’s wrong? Where are you? Do you need someone to pick you up?” She barely took a breath between questions. Carson’s freshman year of college, a group of boys who had figured out who her father and half-sister were had gotten her especially drunk at a party. The boys had been in the middle of taking her home when Carson had frantically called Jade asking for help. She’d spent the rest of the weekend at Jade’s and since then, Jade had fought off panic attacks when her sister hadn’t responded to texts promptly, or when she called her late at night.

“Jade, I’m fine!” Carson interrupted Jade’s stream of questions. She didn’t sound annoyed at Jade’s gut reaction though; she knew what it stemmed from.

“Well, you could have started with that,” Jade huffed.

“I would have if you’d given me the chance.”

“Okay, fine,” Jade sighed. “What’s up?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Carson’s words were slightly slurred and Jade wondered if she’d been drinking.

“What do you mean?” Carson was a junior in college; Jade wasn’t about to chastise her for drinking.

“You and I both know that I’m not into gossip magazines,” she began.

Jade did know that, in fact. All too often, Carson had come across untrue articles about her father and family friends, as well as many hurtful things about Jade. She’d decided not to read them after realizing it wasn’t worth it. As soon as she brought up the magazines though, Jade knew exactly in which direction her sister was going.

Carson quickly continued her train of thought. “I am, however, very much into Tumblr.” Jade knew this as well. Carson brought it up often. Apparently, she was a bit of a lesbian icon simply because she came out in a YouTube video that went viral her junior year of high school. “Anyway, it’s not infrequently that photos of you come up on my dash, but I generally ignore them.”

“Gee, thanks,” Jade laughed. “I feel so loved.”

“Not my point,” Carson spoke. “Getting back to my point now. Anyway, I saw some interesting photos from your birthday. Since when are you seeing Perrie again?”

“Did you and Karl purposely decide to ambush me on the same day?” Jade groaned as she fell sideways on her couch and wrapped her blankets back around her curled up form.

“As funny as that would be, no, we did not.”

Jade groaned into the receiver as her response.

“You didn’t answer my question, Jade.”

Realizing that Carson wasn’t going to rest until she got the details from her, Jade gave in and told her everything. She told her more than she’d told Karl. She told her more than she’d told Leigh-Anne. And after giving her the final details, Jade felt a sort of weight fall off her shoulders. It was nice to have someone to talk to about the whirlwind in her life that was Perrie Edwards.

“Well, s**t,” Carson finally responded after Jade said her piece. “You say you’re just friends, but I call bullshit on that. That’s not going to last long.”

“Karl pretty much said the same thing,” Jade laughed. “He said that it’ll probably just end the same way it did last time. That if anything more than friendship happens between us, we’re basically fucked.”

“Karl is wrong.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You two are meant to be, any i***t could see that,” Carson explained. Jade gulped at the words. “There’s a reason you wrote each other constantly for nearly five years.”

“It wasn’t constantly,” Jade hesitated. “I stopped for a while.”

“When you were with Selena?”

“No,” Jade responded quickly. “I wrote to her while I was with Selena. Which really should have been an indication that that relationship was never going to work.”

“When did you stop?” Carson asked. She didn’t wait for Jade to respond though, as she quickly figured it out herself. “Oh. I…yeah. Okay. That makes sense.”

“Yeah,” Jade trailed off.

“We’re not done talking about you and Perrie, but while we’re on the topic, how was your doctor’s appointment this morning?”

“It went well,” Jade responded honestly. She then went on to tell her everything Doctor Jackson had told her, glad to be away from the discussion of Perrie. It had been nice to share it all with Carson, knowing that she couldn’t tell Leigh-Anne everything, but she didn’t want to be forced into overanalyzing anything either.