It Was Never About Me

Eddie stands still and quiet. He looks at me and he sees me utterly exhausted and emotionally drained and I think he sees something more, because when he speaks next he only has a question to ask.

"What did I do to you?"

I shake my head, shaking off the memories that don't need to come to pass.

"It's not what you did to me, Eddie. It was never about me."

I swallow hard and turn before I say too much. He doesn't need to know that history and he doesn't need to understand...

I worry we've been gone too long.

In the time we've been chatting, Rachel and Blake have been getting closer. Either she's got the shortest memory in the world or she was never really as upset about last night's unremarkable performance as she let me believe. That or Blake is far more charming than I ever thought he was.

Actually considering my history with the two of them it's probably some combination of all of those factors.

Right now she's laughing at what is no doubt some dumb joke he made. He's standing a little taller and going a little gregarious, playing his charms while she eats them up. Her hand slapping him lightly in the chest, playfully, before she reaches up to curl a lock of hair behind her ear and incline her head towards him.

For all the world it looks like she's smitten with him and I watch her almost shyly respond to his advances as the seconds seem to take hours to pass. And oddly out of all of this, my feelings on it are harder to parse than I could have ever imagined.

They're a mix, one that I can't quite get a grasp on. Fear is there. Anger and disappointment. Frustration at Eddie for putting her in this position and at Rachel for not seeing through the thin facade that Blake keeps up. More too but none of them really matter because the strongest emotion out of all of them happens to be the one that scares me the most because it's the one that makes the least sense to me and it's the one that I have the hardest time controlling.

And the more I focus on it the stronger it becomes, which to me indicates it's probably the dominant emotion. In spite of the fact that I don't want to admit it and in spite of the fact that I absolutely don't want it, I can't deny it either.

The strongest emotion that I feel, watching the two of them so close together, is jealousy.

A little voice in the back of my head remembers that Blake chose me. The first day, cornering me in the library. The first night, choosing to pull me away from the party and literally try to charm my pants off. At the club fair when he drew me away from the crowd. At the movie night when he laid hands on me first.

Blake chose me first. Rachel was there in every single one of those moments but it was me that he isolated, he that me pursued. But today that somehow changed and now it was all about her. Rachel, who could have any guy in the group, had drawn the attention of the one guy who only had eyes for me.

And I think I hated it.

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