Strangers No More || Jerrie

Chapter 2

Perrie Edwards sat on her bed in her still-unfinished apartment as she went through the contents of the bag that had stayed by her side for the four years she’d traveled around the world. It felt strange that the four years that had changed her entire view on the world could be condensed into the contents of one backpack, but really, Perrie knew that the letters were more than just tales of her adventures wine tasting in Italy and getting lost in Austria. The letters folded into individual envelopes each held the promise Perrie had made to the woman she loved.

Six years ago, Perrie Edwards had borrowed a phone from a stranger and had dialed what she’d believed was her best friend’s phone number. She’d dialed the wrong number and it had been the best mistake she’d ever made. She’d accidentally dialed the number of another girl, a girl with whom she’d spent hours on the phone with over the course of two months before she finally met her in person. A girl who turned out to be the famous singer, Amelia Thirlwall. Perrie and Jade had spent the following months falling more and more in love, getting engaged just under a year after they started dating. They were engaged for four months when the stress of Jade acting on location halfway around the world got to be too much and they’d ended their relationship. It had broken both their hearts.

The couple had made a promise though.

Perrie had promised to write letters to Jade for as long as she still loved her and the hundreds of envelopes in her backpack were proof that her love had not died. The status of the envelopes, however, was proof that Perrie wasn’t the most organized person in the world.

For four years Perrie had traveled the globe, writing letters whenever she felt the need to tell Jade something. She would write a letter, seal it in an envelope and date it before hiding it away in the backpack. Needless to say, the hundreds of letters were not organized in the slightest.

Sitting on her bed with the hundreds of letters surrounding her, Perrie felt slightly overwhelmed at the task at hand. She knew that she had to organize the letters chronologically. She’d gotten lucky the night before when she’d found the first letter right away and read it over the phone.

She’d read it to the woman who still had her heart. The woman who chance had forced her back into contact with. And now she had twenty-four hours to make sure they were all organized.

Not yet ready to begin the task at hand, Perrie withdrew her phone and opened to her contacts, flipping to the contact that had been updated the night before with its new number. Jade Thirlwall. Her contact photo had been the same for five years, a selfie the other woman had taken holding up the engagement ring Jade had given her the week after Jade had proposed to Perrie.

Perrie’s finger hovered over the text message button for several moments before she swiped away from Jade’s contact and opened up another instead. She found Jesy Nelson-Roche’s phone number and dialed it. The woman picked up on the second ring.

“Look who finally feels bad about screening my calls all day yesterday,” the woman huffed. Perrie thought she could hear the sounds of a screaming child in the background.

“Is that my godson in the background?” Perrie responded. “Because it sounds like you’re ignoring the cries of a precious child just to hear potential gossip.”

“He’s fine, I just put him down for his nap and he wasn’t too happy about it. He’ll be asleep in minutes I’m telling you,” Jesy explained. “And wait, what is this about potential gossip? Are you just taunting me because my contact with anyone over the age of twenty months is limited to my husband who complains non-stop about dirty diapers?”

“He complains about them because you refuse to change them,” Perrie laughed in return. Both Jake and Jesy were still working, despite having an twenty-month-old and a seven-month-old, but somehow Jesy had managed to work her schedule as a personal trainer around her children’s bathroom schedules.

“It’s not my fault that the boys seem to s**t around him more than me,” Jesy deadpanned in return. “But that’s beside the point, I need to know. Gossip? How is New York? How did the meeting about that mural go?”

“Funny you ask,” Perrie laughed into the receiver. “You’ll never guess who the mural is for.”

“Who? Is it someone we know? Someone famous? Was it one of the Real Housewives of New York? Tell me!”

“Danielle Peazer and her wife, for their daughter,” Perrie explained.

“No. f*****g. Way.”

“Do you normally swear in front of your children?” Perrie asked, disapprovingly.

“Meh,” Jesy responded. “The little one can’t understand and the other one is used to it by now. Which you’d know, if you ever visited. But again, not the point. That’s crazy. So how’d it go?”

“It was fine actually,” Perrie admitted truthfully. “Surprisingly, it wasn’t awkward at all. Her wife also seems really sweet. But, actually, that wasn’t the weirdest thing that happened to me yesterday.”

“There’s something weirder than finding out that your new client is your ex-fiance’s ex-girlfriend?” Jesy scoffed.

“Yes,” Perrie affirmed strongly. “I uhmm…” Perrie paused, unsure of how to break the news to her best friend. “I sort of accidentally called Jade.” There was silence on the other end of the line, causing Perrie to turn to rambling. “Before you ask how I could possibly accidentally call her, I swear there’s a reason. You see Danielle switched your phone number with Jade’s in my phone after I said I had to call you back, so then I went to call you back last night and instead I called Jade.”

“Okay,” Jesy finally responded calmly. “What did you say when you figured out it wasn’t me?”

“Well, I didn’t actually figure it out right away, just because I went right into a rambling speech before she could even get a word in.”

“Naturally.”

“But then the conversation flowed, and oh my god, J, it was like I was twenty-four again and talking to her for the first time.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“It was the best possible scenario for me calling her seemingly out of the blue. We only talked for probably two minutes before we hung up.”

“You’re right, it did get weirder,” Jesy confirmed.

“Then I called her back about five minutes after we hung up.”

“Perrie Louise Edwards! What the hell?! Why did you do that? And please don’t try and pull some nonsense on me that you’re still in love with her. You literally haven’t spoken to her since the day you broke up five years ago.”

“So that’s the thing,” Perrie spoke awkwardly. “That’s not entirely true.”

“I swear, I don’t even know who you are.”

“It wasn’t for that long though,” Perrie insisted. “We just sort-of spoke almost every day for a few weeks following the break up.”

“I honestly don’t even know why I’m so surprised. You guys were always so gross.”

“I guess,” Perrie sighed. She wasn’t used to speaking about Jade with other people. Her friends and family knew better than to bring the girl up to her.

“So you called her back and then what?” Jesy prompted.

“We talked for a while. We’d uhm…we’d sort of made promises to each other to write letters to one another and not send them for as long as we still loved each other. It turns out neither of us actually stopped writing them. So now, I’m meeting her in person for the first time in almost five years tomorrow and we’re exchanging our letters and mine are all totally unorganized and I need to organize them and I’m freaking out because I don’t know if I’m ready to see her again, but at the same time all I want to do is see her again, but I’m scared. What if this whole letter thing was a stupid idea and we’ve just been living in denial for five years?”

Jesy quickly interrupted Perrie’s rant, having heard enough. “Okay, Perrie, here’s the thing. All I heard in that is that you and Jade wrote love letters to each other over the course of five years despite not actually talking to each other in that time. Oh! And you never told me about them.”

“Uh, yes?” Perrie questioned cautiously.

“I swear you’re not even a real person,” Jesy huffed. “Either of you. You’re just a pair of idiots who don’t know how to exist without each other, even five years later. I’m hanging up now.”

“But!”

“Goodbye, Perrie.” The phone clicked and Perrie sighed. She knew going into the conversation that Jesy most likely wasn’t going to take any s**t from her.

Having successfully distracted herself from the task at hand for a few minutes, Perrie realized she couldn’t put off sorting through the letters any longer and got started.