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junedenim · 24 days

Text

2004

beneath the boardwalk, part 2 (series masterlist)

i bet you look good on the dancefloor

warnings: fluff, angst, a little smutty, the whole shebang, offensive language (posh-shaming), etc.

word count: 19.6k

In Alex's bedroom, there is a splatter of ink on the wall that looks like a Rorschach test. It has a big splotch in the middle with droplets surrounding it. It's on the wall next to his bed and you could look at it for hours, study layers of it. Butterfly, moth, bat, or what I would later insinuate several times: a vagina.

Despite the distance between High Green and Wakefield, I would drive over to Alex's house about every other weekend once the spring semester had begun. It had started as a plan to work on our writing with one another before it became more of an excuse to hang out with one another. Alex would later confess to me that he never did much songwriting in general, minus a few exceptions, when we were there. Instead, he did unrefined, rough drawings of mostly clutter-filled nonsense. Later, when I went away to university, I found one of the sketches cut into a bookmark, placed by Alex in my notebook. The sketch was of a girl with hair that was too long drooped over while writing in her notebook. It wasn't what critics would consider good, but it was me in Alex's eyes, and I think that did me greater justice than any other portrayal of me.

We didn't talk much. For those months, his mum would joke that we were "going steady." I wrote more than I ever did in my life because Alex wouldn't allow me to do anything else. He'd shush me when I tried to speak to him, insisting that he was in the middle of a lyrical masterpiece. In reality, he was practicing writing with his left hand.

Most of that material is lost to time. That notebook disappeared around '07 and is suspected to have been lost when my parents moved out of our Wakefield home. During that time I mostly wrote fiction, personal essays were reserved for my diary. Alex never read anything in that notebook with the exception of one page that I had ripped out, folded up into a swan, and placed in his pocket before I left for university. It's the only page that remains and still sits in Alex's nightstand drawer.

I stayed for dinner for the first time in February. His mother, Penny, insisted that it was ridiculous I make the drive back home on an empty stomach. I don't think Alex had people over for dinner often, maybe Matt occasionally when they were younger, but I think most nights were confined to him and his parents.

They spoke quietly, much like Alex did, but they were funny and had an overt interest in me.

"Have you lived in Wakefield your whole life?" His father asked me.

"Uh, no, I lived the first few years of my life in Frankfurt, Germany—"

My explanation was cut short by Penny gasping. I feared the kitchen had caught fire. "Alexander!" She chastised, for the first time hearing someone call him by his full first name. "You didn't tell me this."

Alex tried to keep his laughter over his mother to himself, looking down at his plate. "I didn't know."

"Did Alex tell you I'm a German teacher? Probably not since he apparently doesn't tell anyone anything." She pointedly said to her son.

I laughed because it was sweet and, more obvious to only me, even then, my parents never did this. Stacey didn't even joke around anymore. We didn't eat dinner at the table unless we had guests, which were almost exclusively my dad's co-workers.

"Are your parents German?" Penny was eager. She had found a connection with the girl who had been taken hostage in her son's room for the past month. Alex's parents were reassured that nothing was going on between the two of us and that they had no issues with closed doors. I suppose my parents didn't either but they were likely in a different parenting style than Penny and David.

"No," I said, "my dad's work was over there. He grew up near Newcastle. My mum was born in Moscow but grew up over in the States."

"Wow, so, how'd they meet?"

I laughed. I didn't plan to tell the story but Penny was curious and my laughter had to be explained. "Um," I cleared my voice, "my parents met through my dad's wife. Ex-wife." A famed story in our family. My parents oddly toted this loudly to us as children like it was some romantic tale.

I sipped my water, laughing into it as I watched the members of the table try and contain a reaction. Then, Alex let out his laughter and I had to join in. Rumbling the glass of water I was drinking out of. David and Penny, with our invitation, joined in.

At the end of the night, Penny hugged me and told me to get home safely. "I'd like to hear more life stories from you."

Alex, overhearing, chimed in, "Yeah, she should write a book about them."

It began the tradition that at least once a month, I would have dinner with David and Penny.

The following week, right at the tail end of February when the heating in Alex's room broke, I sat on his bed, under the covers. He, of course, sat over top of them in his jeans and trainers. It was disgusting but it was his bed so I was rejected the right to criticize him over it.

I had grown bored of writing and had become interested in Alex. Since my kissing faux pas, I had made a great effort to uninterest myself in Alex. It was going okay until he forced me into these writing sessions. I was never able to crack Alex completely. I could figure out things about him, read my way through him, but I was never able to fully deduce why he refused to kiss me but wanted to spend time alone with me. Now, I'd tell you he was being a friend. Then, I'd tell you, he had to be gay.

Yet, I knew he wasn't and I couldn't stop wondering why he didn't like hanging out with me when other people were involved. Joanie had brought up the idea of a double date but Alex made a sound and shook his head before insistently saying, "Jane's just me friend." He didn't like hanging around Joanie much, I could understand that much. But we didn't hang out with Matt together and he rejected hanging with AB & Claire, which was fine. We weren't dating or anything.

Joanie and Claire would both tease me about Alex. They both figured we spent Saturdays fucking our brains out, not silently sitting across from one another. Not talking with his mum more than him. I, like Alex, would insist we were nothing more than friends, but in my head I was playing another game where Alex and I were in a secret relationship, hiding it from our friends, so secret Alex didn't even know about it.

I didn't delude myself much. I didn't expect him to change his mind on me but I did fantasize maybe he would. I liked being his friend too. I liked looking at him like "friends" do.

"I'm done!" I announced. I shut my notebook and placed my pen on top of it.

He didn't look up from his book. He shushed me. Scrunched up his nose and moved his pen quickly. This might have been one of the few times he was writing.

I folded my hands into my lap and waited. His pen rushed across the page, then scratched something out, then continued for another surge of writing. Alex looked up, squinted at me, and then returned to writing.

"It's time for me to go!" I began to move over to him at the end of the bed. Fists on his mattress like a gorilla.

Alex shushed me again. I was about to start beating my chest. I laid my head next to his legs, criss-crossed under his notebook. I stretched myself out and saw his eyes glance down at the gap my shirt had created, belly button exposed. I yawned and he kept writing.

"Aren't you going to say goodbye?"

He didn't even bother shushing this time. He was reaching the bottom of the page but I was whiny and bored and desperately didn't want to go home.

I sat up and attempted to spin my pen like Matt did with his drumsticks. I'd tried to learn but Matt wasn't a very good teacher or maybe I wasn't a very good student, likely the latter. I stared intensely at Alex, bulging my eyes, trying to will his head to look up. Writing, writing, writing.

Then, my pen flew. It launched out of my hands, spinning quickly before smacking against his wall. The ink landed and I covered my mouth with my hands, trying to hide my laugh.

Alex looked up, searching for the sound, "What'd you do?" He followed my eyes and looked at the stain forming, and then he looked back over at me, silently laughing into my hands.

"I'm so sorry." My laugh was noticeable no matter my efforts to hide it. I became loud and tried to take deep breaths to hide it but then it grew uncontrollable. "I don't know what happened." And then he laughed too.

Alex liked my car. It was a black 2002 Volkswagen New Beetle. Besides AB and me, none of our friends had their own cars. AB only had a car because he worked in his father's garage shop and the car was a clunker. Will used to have one too but he crashed it on New Year's Day 2003.

Alex would insist, mostly when I got bored of writing and complaining in his ear, that we take a ride in the Beetle. He made too many Beatles puns that I rolled my eyes at but to this day, I wish I had written them down to have as relics from that period of our lives. He'd flip through the radio too many times. Then, he'd shut it off and ask if I had any CDs.

"Sugababes?" He'd once question with a chuckle. He has a habit of distracting me while driving.

I furrowed my brows. "What's wrong with Sugababes?"

Then, he'd pull his face together and put it back in the console. "Nothing, nothing."

We never drove anywhere in particular. Sometimes we went to City Centre, sometimes I drove Al to work. Most of the time we just drove around. I didn't know too much of High Green but quickly learned every corner of it with Alex as my tour guide.

One time we stopped at the Charlton Brook Dam and I was lying on my stomach, kicking my feet behind me, and writing in my notebook. Very teenage dream writing in "Dear Diary..." For the first time, Alex groaned.

I looked up and he was staring up at the sky, almost directly into the sun. He hadn't bothered to take his notebook out, still in his back pocket.

"What?" I asked.

He slowly shook his head.

I sat up properly. "No, come on, what are you groaning all about for?"

Alex sighed and rubbed his eye. "I don't think—I don't know—I don't think I can write near water." This was long before I knew of his mostly empty writing sessions.

I threw my head back in laughter.

He chuckled along with me but asked, "What's so fun about that?"

"No, no, nothing," I told him. I calmed myself down and we held eye contact.

The dam seemed to bring something out of Alex. Something about the water reflected something onto him. "Can I ask you something?"

I nodded. "Yeah."

"What are you going to do after Barnsley?" It was like a confrontation. One that I needed. My parents were too far off to care where I was most of the time. I don't think they had thought about my future, not as much as Gary, my older brother. My older sister, Harper, did one year of university before dropping out and marrying Ian. I think Harper wanted to get away as much as I did but then she got pregnant and was never able to escape. Just had to accept her fate as a Cavendish.

I shrugged at his question. "I thought about university. That seems like the likely thing to do but I feel too unsure. Like I should go get a job or gallivant through Europe for a year. Fuck off to America or something."

He laughed. "Fucking off to America sounds nice. You'd get a lot more sun. You look good in the sun."

An upturn of my cheeks and a vow not to take his compliments too seriously occurred. "I've applied but haven't heard."

Alex picked at the hole in his jeans, no longer looking at me. "Do you think it be crazy to do the band for, you know, a living or summat?"

I shook my head. "I don't think so. I like your stuff."

"You're one of the few. Have a gig with just you and Matt's mum handing out pastries."

"Despite your disdain for my Angels with Dirty Faces CD, I know good music when I hear it. When I read it too."

"You've only read one of them."

"And I know it's good. You've read nothing of mine, yet you insist I come over every weekend to write."

Then, he said, quickly and sure of himself, "That's just because I want to see every weekend."

I hid my reaction. I must have. In between, my heart beating and my throat closing, I contained my excitement because he didn't comment on it. "Is that so?"

I wanted to pester him further. See the map of his brain and what road it leads down. But he stood up and said, "My shift's in a half hour."

I lamented. "Has this relationship grown so one-sided you don't even properly ask me for a ride anymore?"

I was whining in place and he was eager to get back to the car, but I'm not sure why he didn't tell me to move or push me up the little hill we were sitting on, instead, he grabbed hold of my hand. Not in a yanking motion. It was soft and little and he never commented on it. He intertwined himself with me and said, "Come on, Janie." Then, pulled me up the hill and didn't let go until I reached the car door. In the car, we laughed and listened to Sugababes, but he didn't touch me again. Didn't grab hold of my knee or wrap his arm around the back of my seat. He sat with his hands on his own knees and when I knew he secretly loved a song, he'd tap away with his left hand on his thigh.

When March neared an end that year I decided I was not going to celebrate my birthday. I resigned myself to the cupcake AB and Claire got me for lunch and it ended with that. Joanie had other plans.

Ambushing me was never a good idea, let alone a surprise party. Ambushing with alcohol was always a good idea. I guzzled it down while we sat in Joanie's basement, smaller than Will's but bigger than the White House's (exaggeration but not far off).

Unknown bodies filled the room but I had Claire by my side and Joanie hanging off my back. As much as we had drifted, I was touched by Joanie's closeness to me, instead of Matt. We resembled our former trio before The Grapes gig.

Alex sat across the room. He was sitting on a table next to Matt. At one point in their conversation, Matt pointed over to us and Alex's eyes landed straight on me. He nodded at me and then smiled. I waved him over but he didn't move. He averted his eyes and kept chatting with Matt.

But then a minute later, he looked over at me again and I waved him over again. He smiled but his lack of response remained the same. "Oy!" I yelled.

He looked over and I curled my finger at him, urging him to come hither. He pointed at himself unsurely.

"Yes, you, you wanker!" I shouted.

Alex chuckled and stood up to make his way over to me. He bent down to meet my eye level, flashing a charming smile at me. "You beckoned?"

"I beckoned? I beckoned? You were making the eyes at me over there. It's not proper to ignore the birthday girl."

"You've got two girls hanging off of ya."

"That's a dream for most men."

He laughed, grabbed my hand, and picked me up from my seat. "I'm not gay, Janie." I laughed hard, throwing, not only my head but my whole body back, forcing him to hold me close. "And you are very, very drunk."

I pouted. "What else is a girl supposed to do on her birthday?" I had been drinking on my birthday since I could remember. I used to sneak down into the fridge and steal beers when I was 6. It only got bigger as I got older. Most vices do.

In a perfect sequence, I twirled and he lifted his arm to let me under. When I came back around, I smiled and leaned my chest into his. The little boobs I have pushed up against him. "Do you want to have sex with me tonight?" I don't know where it came from. Well, I mean, I do, a fresh 18 and a mighty amount of alcohol applies, but I had lost all boundaries. A year filled with less sex, less partying, less Will, led me to a clear mind, which only slipped back into past habits.

Sex. Must have sex. If we have sex then he'll like me. He'll love me even. I'm great at sex and he's a little groundling that I'll have to entertain.

"No, Janie, not tonight." I had never corrected the usage of Janie. I abhorred the nickname from everyone else's lips but Al's. He always struck the right chord within me and let it play out for decades.

I rounded my arms onto his neck. I pulled him close, close to kiss, close to French, close to makeout, close to fuck, close to make love, close to eat him alive. "But someday?"

I knew I'd be devastated by whatever response he gave me. Devastated that then wasn't now, devastated that then was never. Alex looked down on me. I was eager. A gosling looking for mother goose to follow. "Do you need to sit down?"

He was ignoring the issue altogether. After all this time of going back and forth in my head about Alex—about why I could crack the code on everything else about him, except what his interest in me was—I had decided to ask him, "Why are you ignoring me?"

He chuckled at my slurring and I dreamt he found it endearing. "I'm not ignoring you. You're hanging all over me."

"Do you not like it when I hang all over you?" I threw myself at him pathetically, especially when I was dripping in alcohol.

"Let's sit." He removed his arms from around him and dragged me over to sit down. Joanie had left to sit on Matt's lap. Claire had shifted to talking to Rosie, currently broken up with Will. Rosie had seemingly taken my place in Will's bed and I was no longer upset about it. I was upset with Alex, or really with myself for not being good enough for Alex.

We sat down and I, sleepy drunk, laid my head on his shoulder. I whispered, low and quiet, that I was shocked he heard over the music, "I just want to know what it is."

"What what is?" He questioned.

"Why don't you like me?" I clarified. I wish I wasn't such a baby. A child begging for her mother to pick her up. I desperately wanted him to like me. I wanted him to fall at my feet in the way no man had. Beg for my forgiveness and call himself an idiot for ever rejecting my kiss.

"I like you."

I hesitated, even drunk I knew we were treading on crossed boundaries. Then I let what I had been dying to know the truth for months slip out. "Why won't you kiss me? I'm not trying to flatter myself but why won't you want to kiss a girl? You're not gay but why won't you kiss me?"

He didn't answer for a moment. Alex has always been a person to think his thoughts out but I imagine he struggled to answer my question. "I like being your friend," Alex said.

"Friend?"

"You're one of my best friends, Janie." He was calm and he pushed my stray hairs behind my ear.

I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to never see anyone again. If I was an ounce sober, I'd swallow the pain and rejection, but my bloodstream was alcohol and I was throwing a pity party. My head left his shoulder and fell into my hands with a sob.

"Jane." He was concerned. He patted my back and urged me to sit up and look at him.

I was too embarrassed to look at him with tears and tell him he was the reason why. Even if he obviously knew he was the reason why. I took a deep breath and sat up. "I'm a sad old drunk. Sorry."

He was concerned but said nothing. We never talked about it again.

Later that night, after everyone had mostly left except our close friend group—minus Will, who had puked on himself about 10 minutes before—Alex handed me a cigarette and lit it for me. No lighters tossed.

We sat in the corner pocket of the couch with one another. Everyone else was lying about but we were talking slowly and tiredly to one another, except Joanie, of course, more perky than ever. "Let's dance!" She cheered.

I groaned and everyone else seemed to feel the same way. Matt wasn't even indulging her anymore. But then she played Spice Girls and I had to join in. I stood myself up and rocked about with Joanie.

Halfway through Alex yelled, "Now do the robot!"

I yelled back over my shoulder. "Oh, fuck off now!" But I did it anyway, rough and drunk as ever.

When the night winded down for good, Alex slept over at my house. The hour was late, everyone was drunk, and it was decided that High Green was just too far. On the walk back home, where our minds sobered up and we walked feet apart from one another. Alex's hands were deep in his pockets and my arms crossed, hands hidden away in my armpits.

About 5 minutes into the walk he asked, "Good birthday?"

I nodded. "Fine."

"Just fine?" He chuckled.

I shrugged. "Birthdays have never been too exciting for me. They've always sucked in some way."

Alex moved closer to me and took a hand out of his pocket, throwing his arm over my shoulder and tugging me into him. If I closed my eyes I could fantasize he meant something else by it. I had wished in my head, with the absence of birthday candles, to have him. Looking back it feels stupid to put that much weight on a guy but I was 18 and he was Alex.

"Anything I can do?" He asked.

In my head, I had a million answers. Any action of interest would shoot rockets through me and fireworks out of me. I didn't say anything. I was sober enough to know that I shouldn't be an idiot. I shouldn't beg for his affection. He was one of my best friends now too and to lose that to some fantasy would be a far greater crime than him not kissing me.

"Not really. I think I'll just go to bed and leave my birthday at that."

Then, he stopped moving. His arm around me held me back. "What?" I asked.

He tilted his head and I'd ponder what it meant. "Nothing," Alex said. We continued walking and never spoke about it again.

The following morning, Alex drove my car. After dealing with my father at the door, who I am sure was drunk from watching Newcastle United lose and had no clue who Alex was, my father, to feign caring, questioned Alex at the door. Alex mumbled away, which could've left a bad first impression on my father if he wasn't too out of it to remember. My father didn't remember my friends' faces anyway.

When Alex and I escaped my father, who grumbled his way back to the tele, Alex drove me for the first time ever. "You're a lot better than I thought you would be."

"Why'd you think I'd be bad?" He was winsome in his long-sleeve sweater, his jacket thrown into the backseat due to the hotness of that car.

"You have me drive you around all the time. I figured your mum was too afraid to give you her car."

The previous night we had slept in the same bed. My daydreams weren't fulfilled in any way, we were laid like sardines, Alex's head at the foot of the bed, mine at the head. My bed, at the pretentious time in my life, was king-sized. An ocean of linen sheets separated us.

In the morning, he grabbed my car keys and insisted.

Alex pulled up by Charlton Brook Dam and we didn't say anything. It was a wordless movement to the water that ran through the park. We sat side-by-side, in the same spot we always sat in, cushioned under two oak trees that had acorns falling at our feet.

He pulled out a cigarette and handed it to me first. He put that pack away and looked at me mute and waiting. I snorted a horrid snort that I think about to this day (I might as well have said oink!). I pulled out one from my purse and handed it to him. He provided the lighter.

"You're no good for me, Janie." I conceded. I decided then I would never dream of being with Alex again. Why lose a friend—a friend like Al—for some fiddly fake romance I had made up in my head? "I smoke too much when I'm with ya." That was true too.

We puffed away and talked about nonsense mostly; shit from school. The dam blew perfectly onto our skin. I was wrapped up in a cardigan and Alex had thrown his jacket to the side, dirting it in the dew.

His voice was soft, like the dew at our feet, and he spoke emotionally, like a vow from his heart. "Your eyes are so blue." I am well aware of the powers of my blue eyes. I've batted them since I was a baby and crowds fell to their knees in adornment. But the way he spoke it sounded like foggy desperation. A thing you only say between two cigarettes deep in the morning or night.

"Yours are very brown." I laughed but he didn't. He stared down at the grass and fiddled with his cigarette. It felt awkward and rigid.

Alex looked up at me carefully. His eyes sculpted over me. "I have thought about it. What you asked me about last night."

Breaths were short and the heart was quickened in beats. "What did I ask about it?" I need this to be clear. I wanted to not fear what would come out of his mouth.

"Never mind."

I realized he needed me to be clear. Though I was in a fit of drunkenness and I would—and had the reputation—of sleeping with whoever would allow. He thought he wasn't special. He looked off into the dam and I asked, "About someday?"

Alex's head turned over and he took a while to answer, in fact, he never answered. He leaned over and kissed me. Slow, steady, and the non-slobber variety. The perfect first kiss.

"You want to have sex now on the hill?" I joked. I was fun. I was cool. I was screaming inside.

He laughed this time. "No. I just wanted to know what it would be like to kiss you."

We didn't get together right away. There was this weird stretch of time lasting from after my birthday until the end of May where we would hide out with one another, in my room after school and in his room where Alex tried to uphold our writing session before dissolving into sex sessions. I don't know if either of our parents knew what would happen upstairs. His parents would either be home late or hold no objections to the shut & locked door. My father wasn't home when Alex came over. He'd always go to the pub after work. My mother sat in front of Coronation Street or had her friends over. Alex never stayed for dinner at mine. I stayed more and more often at his.

The first time we had sex was 2 days after our kiss. We went to my house after school with no intent to do much of anything except a hang out disguised as an excuse to make out. After 10 minutes of snogging, Alex reached under my skirt and touched my underwear. He was hesitant and seemed as if he didn't mean to go that far but didn't retract his hand. Mine furthered lower to his jeans, rubbing in between my legs.

Our lips parted and Alex pushed a small gap between us to see me. "Jane." It was his way of giving a warning sign. There was no pushing further. "Would it be alright...?" He stretched the sentence out, mumbling nerves to me.

"If we had sex?" I attempted to finish. "Yes. If I haven't made it clear I want to have sex with you then we should get your brain checked."

He laughed and placed his head in the nook between my shoulder and neck. I'd wanted him to stay there forever. Forever 18 in that corner of our world. "No, no. I was just—never mind."

I rolled my eyes at his habit of having to decipher his message. I still roll my eyes at this affliction to this day. "You're so cocky and now I've got you tongue-tied."

He rubs his eyes, buggy and alluring. "I'm not cocky. Just mighty hard."

Laughter spurted from my mouth. "You've got no sense."

Alex insisted, "I've got perfect sense."

I've never been one for the term "making love." It's reserved for romance novels and cheesy songs my mother played in the car. I've grown out of the phase of "fucking" but in my late teens, this seemed the appropriate words for my past rendezvous. Quick-fulfillment and non-long-lasting. "Sex" was the preferred word; plain and simple. Alex and I were definitely shagging too. I won't object to that.

Alex looked star-gazingly and held sentiment too deep for me to understand at 18. Then he said, "You're hot, Janie." I settled down a bit after that because he was the sweetest candy I could bite into but he was also an 18-year-old boy.

After the sex, there was the headwork he may or may not have attempted to do before I redirected him to the proper location of the clit. He wasn't bad, much better than anything Will or other losers had done, but he was a man boy and I enlisted myself to be the girl that all his future girlfriends would thank for teaching him how to fuck.

He was sweet as a teddy bear. I pictured him as a little cub bear and me as the pot of honey he was holding. After we had finished for the first time, I went up to pee and he disposed of the condom. He had placed his boxers and shirt on when I had returned. I prepared to dress myself, he grabbed hold of my hand, smooth like a baby's skin, and didn't say anything. He tugged me toward his bed and when he laid down, he pulled me beside him.

I'm sure my look was one of peculiarity causing him to respond with "Come on, Janie, you love my blankets so much."

Alex mindread that I was uncomfortable. I felt naked because I was naked. He handed me my clothes. We were still awkward and gangly teenagers and the idea of wearing one another's clothes was a distant thought. I placed my bra and panties on for good measure, not wanting to wrinkle the rest of my clothes.

I lay beside him on his bed. He rounded his arm over my shoulder and we both stared up at his ceiling. I was being gnawed away inside by one thing, so I asked, "Why'd you change your mind?"

"Me mind on what?" He questioned.

He was warm. Heat radiated off his body and mind. We had both turned to lie on our sides. We faced one another but our eyes were darting over the other's body, at least Alex's were. I focused on the way his hair looked perfect despite what we had just done. "Kissing me. Last year, which might be one of the most embarrassing moments of my life and that's saying something."

He tilted his head down to look me in the eye. "I didn't really know you then."

"I've done a lot more with guys I've known a lot less," I said it lightheartedly but he seemed to take it seriously. He has always been more stoic about these things.

Alex dithered in his mind. Then, he reached his hand out and held my side. It was a slow-moving force pulling me to him. "You're my friend. Matt told me about these conversations you'd have over a smoke. Then, we had our talk outside The Grapes. I couldn't help—I'm not sure who wouldn't want to talk to you."

I almost laughed. It felt ridiculous the notion that people enjoyed hearing me talk. I had spent a whole life being yelled at not to talk at the dinner table, to be seen, not heard, to sit up straight and mind my business, and to not interrupt when my father was talking. I thought of words as something to fill a void in our lives. I wrote my words away and locked them up and wondered: who would ever want to read what I had to say, think, feel? Al.

Alex continued, "And I know you now. I know you differently, but your reputation preceded you."

"As a slut?" I replied.

He didn't reject the idea, although he shook his head. It wasn't something he could highly reject because everyone knew it was true. I didn't have such a problem with it then. When Arctic Monkeys got famous, in turn Alex, and in turn me as his girlfriend, the word felt different. Maybe because it wasn't who I was anymore. I hadn't been in a long time. I was also a university student shying away from my past adventures, unable to shed my skin like everyone else. I was also more than Al's girlfriend. I was more to Alex himself than I was just his girlfriend.

"I didn't want to be bedded, I suppose," Alex admitted. "I didn't want to never see you again."

"You would have seen me again," I insisted.

"From the corner of a party?"

"We didn't see much of each other anyway after that."

"I know. Eventually, we did. And I don't know how many times we would have sat with each other writing instead of shagging."

"You think we couldn't control ourselves?" I teased.

He narrowed his eyes at me. "Did we just have sex with each other or was that your evil twin?"

I laughed and pushed him back. I sat up and pulled my skirt on. "So now you don't care about our writing?"

"I figured I'd just give you a little inspiration."

I whipped him with my top. We had exploded into laughter and, once again, he was right.

In my first year of knowing Alex, we had developed this fantasy of escaping England. While I had a privileged life traveling to places that likely gave me skin cancer, I had never had fun doing it. My mother often weighed things down, splashed out on the bottle since Tom, my eldest brother, died in 1996. Trips weren't pleasant before then but there wasn't much need to put on an effort after that. Places where drinking was encouraged and never discouraged were key. Vegas, The Bahamas, Cancún, etc. It sounded fun to me in the moment until I realized I'd be spending months trapped with my drunk mother, groaning father, and poor Stacey. Harper and Greg got out of it once they graduated from university.

I told Alex all of this early on, at some point in one of our first writing sessions. The idea came up every once in a while. Often after we'd have sex. I'd lay in his arms (something we started doing out of convenience since Al's bed was too small, of course, this continued to my bed, despite its much larger size) and we'd be heavy and rushed, staring at the ceiling, completely caught up in one another. He'd sigh and say, "Where do you want to go today, Janie?"

It became a tradition, continuing to this day. I'd list off a new place I wanted to go. When it first started it was my dream destinations, then Alex kept telling me to find new places and research, which I did. I would later graduate with A-levels in geography.

"I'd like to go to LA. I've never been to LA." I was on top of his chest. It was late one night at my house and I often wondered if anyone knew we existed. We were hidden away in this cocoon with only each other to survive. It felt fitting. It has always felt like there is room for the two of us, never too close together, never too far apart.

Alex was tender with me. In the early stages, we acted awkward with one another, but it never felt awkward. Each step was some natural continuation even if it was performed weirdly. We weren't dating but I knew I loved Alex. I felt he loved me too by the way he clumsily petted my shiny hair back. "I went to Disney once with me grandmother."

"I want to go to Joshua Tree," I told him.

"Like the U2 album?"

I laughed. "It's a National Park, you idiot."

"Oh," he chuckled, "you and your parks. You're always wanting me to exercise. You think I'm unfit." Alex spoke jokingly but I got the feeling that parts of him did have concern over his body. He buried so much down that I think he couldn't even feel it at times.

The way his hand moved down my hair calmed me. I figured it might do the same for him. I brushed back his hair, out of his eyes and pushed back. I smiled at him and the fact I was lying on his bare chest after a round of pretty great sex should have been clue enough. "You're the fittest man at Barnsley College."

"Oh, fuck off, Janie. Ya play with me heart too much."

I didn't know what else to say, so I just kissed him.

I don't know if no one ever found out, but nobody said anything. I figure most people guessed we were already doing it considering the ribbing Matt would give Alex sometimes. Everyone was too caught up in themselves anyway. Or maybe the whole Joanie and Matt drama when they broke up in the first week of April, got back together the second week of April, and then called it quits in the third week of April. Alex will deny ever caring about this gossip circus but we had too many intense debriefs on drives from Barnsley for him ever to get away with it.

Alex and I also talked about everything anyway. I'll we ever did was talk and fuck but I think that's what most of existence is anyway. Although, we took it to another level. The only place we didn't talk was a writing session but they were starting to grow farther apart and more an excuse to have sex & talk than to write.

I think I had never met someone willing to talk in such a way. We talked about intelligent things, dumb things, and, mostly, pointless things. Everything got rather complicated around April with people splitting up, splitting off, and looking to split. Somehow—and I really don't know how, considering how dumb and immature I was—Alex and I stayed intact. Alex deserves some credit but not all. He was the glue but I was still the piece he glued himself to.

We still weren't "official" or had a label but I wasn't seeing anyone else and neither was he. Even if we wanted to see other people there wasn't enough time because we were always hanging out with each other.

Except one thing. The future. I had decided to go to the University of Greenwich in the fall and Alex was going to focus on the band. Only I would be down in London, he would remain up North. I had a hard time believing that graduating from Barnsley wasn't graduating from us. There was still the promise of summer and Alex, more determined than ever, was playing gigs non-stop.

My mother was planning some bon voyage trip for me, although the destination had not been determined and it was sure to be more about her than me.

Before Alex could ask me his usual post-coitus question, I asked, "What if we went on a trip?"

We were lying side-by-side like bodies in a crypt. He stretched himself out with a moan. "Where would we go?"

"Hmmm, Japan?"

Alex chuckled. "You want to go to Japan?"

I sat up straight and stared at him. "What's so funny about that?"

"You think I can afford a trip to Japan?"

"Okay, what about France? We could take the train to Paris."

Alex's eyes squinted. He had detected the clear reason. He asked me, "Where are your parents going this summer?"

"I haven't been told yet." I was trying to act nonchalant. I threw my hair up, swung my legs over his bed, and dressed myself in underwear and my shirt.

"Do you even know if they let you?"

I shrugged. "If we plan the whole thing they can't deny it. We should buy the tickets right away." I hopped onto his bed, giddy. The idea of a month away from them was glorious. I imagined a week in Paris with Alex as romantic as teenagers could be. We'd be rough and dirty and then go out and have dinner over candlelight while looking at the Eiffel Tower. I mocked the idea in my head but couldn't deny myself the pleasure of thinking about it. About him, scruffy and boyish, wrapped in a tuxedo. After the week was up, I'd have the house to myself, and Alex could come over and we could do whatever we wanted. I could throw a party with everyone I knew and people I didn't. I could throw a party just for him.

I crawled toward him on the bed. He chuckled at my preying behavior, marching my way toward him. "We should get a hotel and it doesn't have to be fancy. In fact, let's get a really shitty hotel. Like one that doesn't have a toilet but also doesn't have bed bugs."

He laughed and wrapped his arms around my neck. I was pulled into him with a thud. It was a kiddish hug, like two children fighting on the playground. "It sounds nice." His tone said it all—slow, comforting, and never-going-to-happen. My parents would likely find a way to get a refund on everything or let the money wash down the drain. I didn't have much of a right to complain about the life they had given me. We'd likely go to some fabulous island and bake our skin. I had no problem with the islands. I had issues with the company.

Alex let me breathe and stood up to dress himself. He turned around and said, "I have something to show you."

I relaxed with my elbows on my knees and looked at him with eager eyes. He grabbed something out of a bag in the corner of the room and walked it back over to me with it hidden behind his back. He looked sheepish (more than usual). "We, uh, recorded some demos at that 2fly, you remember I told you about that." I nodded. He was fidgety and rubbing his hair. "Anyways, we burned them into CDs." He revealed the jewel case from behind his back. "For helping me out and all that, you know," he allowed himself to let out a chuckle, "I figured you deserve the first copy free."

He handed it over to me. There was artwork by Matt inserted into the front and a small tracklist on the back with about 6 songs on it. I tried to find the CD about a month ago after a curious individual asked to see it. Like most things from those early days, it's likely been disposed of somewhere between London and Wakefield. There were so many of those CDs that Alex eventually became less nervous to hand over to me first to get my review. One of them is likely stuck in my mother's old CD rack that she gave away once she discovered Pandora.

"You know where I'm going to listen to this first?" I asked him. My smile overwhelmed me. Alex's interest in my opinion was a boost of confidence that it seems weird to think where we would both be without the other, solely from the other's encouragement, even in separation.

"Where?" He grinned back at me.

"In my car while I'm driving you to work." I teased as he groaned and covered his ears dramatically.

I continued, "If you make me drive you to work it's what you get."

He laid back on the width of his bed. "I'm giving you a gift and you're punishing me."

I rolled my eyes. "You complain about Sugababes, you complain about your own band. Do you want to just sit in silence?"

"We talk over all that music anyway." Alex had a point.

I leaned over him to make eye contact with him. "So does it matter what we play anyway?"

"I can't listen to meself and talk at the same time. And I'd like for you to be able to hear the thing and tell me what you think."

I sighed. "Alright. Who else are you giving them to?"

Alex shrugs. "Me parents maybe. Whoever buys them."

I scoffed.

"What?"

I shook my head and sat back on top of my feet. "Nothing."

Alex smiled and shook his head. "No, no, no, out with it."

"Who's going to buy some rubbish CD?" I questioned.

"Hey!" He sat up. "You haven't even listened to it and you're already telling me it's rubbish."

I tilted my head. "I'm not saying that. I'm saying the general audience member isn't going to drop 5 quid on some CD when they could use the money for something else. I'm not saying people won't buy it. But I wouldn't."

Alex scoffed. "Me own girlfriend won't buy me CD."

I stilled for a moment and tried my best to not be obvious about my reaction. The word rolled off his mouth so I was going to let it roll off my back. Maybe we were dating. Was this dating? To me, it was a glorified bang. A friends-with-benefits situation with his chauffeur. I wasn't opposed to the idea. I wasn't over the moon that dating Alex would mean just this. Sex in his bedroom while we talked for an hour until I drove him to work. Maybe that's what dating was, even if no one knew about it. In the following years, dating Alex would mean just this. Not fully, but mostly talking and sex in a bedroom that wasn't mine. At least, I didn't have to drive him after 2006.

"I'm not saying that but it is a rare thing for me to buy a CD at a random gig, especially if you aren't the headliners," I explained.

He laughed and asked, "What do I do with all the ones we made?"

I tossed my head around and suggested, "Give them away."

"What to Salvation Army?"

I giggled and moved over him. My arms were on both sides of his head, closing in on him like a praying mantis. "No, at your gigs. You've got good tunes—"

"A few good," Alex interjected.

I rolled my eyes and continued, "You've got good tunes and people love free stuff."

"Who knew for a posh girl you were so giving?" He taunted me.

I pushed on him, rolling him down the length of his bed. "I am not posh! Take that back right now."

"You were just complaining over your month-long trip to The Bahamas. That's as posh as it gets." He was teasing but it felt like an insult. I always hated coming off as an ungrateful spoiled brat. I knew in some regard I was. When I wanted to get what I wanted it was an advantage. When I had to spend time with my family, it was a disadvantage. Even if he was right, it felt mean.

I removed myself from him and stood up. "I drive you everywhere you wanker and you grumble out some thank you and think it's alright because I let you fuck me."

The smile faded from his face and he sat up stiffly. "Huh?"

"And that!" I pointed my finger at him. "Those one-word responses that you do to placate me."

He furrowed his brows. "I'm not placating you."

"If anyone is posh, it's you." If I looked around the room at that moment, posh would not be the word to describe it. He had a point, my house was pretty posh. "You take advantage of people and twist them all about for your pleasure."

"What the fuck is going on?" My outburst was a clear whiplash.

I jutted out my head. "You insult me and you played these mind games with me for a year. You basically called me a slut and now I'm a posh bitch."

"I never said that." He was calm. It was infuriating.

"You just did!"

"No, I didn't!"

We were two school children fighting. Squabbling over something stupid and throwing petty insults.

"Whatever, Alex." I quickly dragged on my jeans and grabbed my bag. "Who's gonna drive you now?"

"Where you going?" He stood up and walked over to my side of the room.

I turned around and walked down the stairs. "To my million-dollar mansion!" It wasn't a good comeback. It just proved his point more. Now I was a posh slut hot-headed bitch.

The following morning, my mother met Alex for the first time. She had opened the door for him when he knocked and yelled up to me getting ready in my room to come downstairs. In the great impression I made to act bratty back to her, yelling back down to her that I was getting ready. After she insisted loudly, I came downstairs. Alex was standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets, and eyes on me.

I left the house to at least get us away from my mother. "Why are you here?" I asked him once we'd made it down the front steps.

"I'm giving you a ride."

I walked ahead of him, refusing to look for fear of overcoming emotion. I didn't want to calm down and his face with sorrowful innocence spread across it would have made me feel bad. "I don't need you to grovel."

"I'm not groveling." Alex has the aura of chill that washes over you. It's good in moments of panic, it's enraging in fights.

My feet stomped hard as I marched to my car. "Don't play the denying game. It's so fucking annoying."

"I called you posh and you're flipping out. That's pretty fucking annoying."

I slammed open my car door. "You're always undercutting me."

His brows furrowed. "No, I'm not. You take everything as some insult against you. It was a dumb joke."

He was right. I didn't want him to be right. "Whatever, Al. Good luck with everything."

I got into my car intending to drive off quickly until he hopped into the passenger seat. "I'm not driving you."

Alex ignored me and picked up the CD sitting on the car floor. "Did you listen to it?" He handed it over to me.

I snatched it out of his hand. "No," I shoved it back into his chest, "you can have it back too. Don't need to take pity on a rich girl."

"Come on, Janie—"

I interrupted, "Can you get out of my car please?"

He accepted my expression. The car fell silent and a moment later he nodded and got out of the car, CD in hand. I waited until he drove away to make sure we wouldn't run into one another in the parking lot. It was an overreaction on my part, I knew it even then, but doubling down made more sense to me than admitting any wrongdoing.

We didn't avoid each other. It was kind of hard to do since our whole friend groups became intertwined. Matt and Joanie breaking up reduced our likelihood of us hanging out but Matt was still one of my friends and we still shared a class together. Alex didn't tell Matt so I didn't either. We hung out in group circles on opposite sides. Not much had changed from before, no one really knew that anything more had been going on so we never had to explain ourselves.

We didn't hang out one-on-one anymore. College would be over in a month and after that, the chance of me ever seeing Alex again would diminish to a minimum. I would be in London and he would be stuck in Sheffield. It gave me pride even though I knew, deep down swallowed in my stomach, that I might not have gone to London if it weren't for Alex. I shook it off. I wasn't—and still won't—credit a guy for advancements I've made in my life through my own doing.

Matt invited me to their end-of-the-school-year gig at The Grapes but I didn't go. I, ashamedly so, hung out with Will instead. I felt kind of over that point in my life. All the blokes in Yorkshire felt old and I had an idea in my head that I'd meet my guy, the perfect guy, in London. Smoking a blunt with Will wouldn't change that. Having sex with him wouldn't change that either.

At night, in the moments before sleep fully swept me away, I had this thought that replayed in my head, despite my frustration with it. I had the vision that Alex would corner me in the parking lot again. He would shove the CD across the roof of my car, we'd hop in and drive around listening to it, even if he hated the sound of his voice. It never happened. Not even close.

I made no effort to talk to him and he made no effort to talk to me. I think people started to pick up on that. Claire asked me about it once when everyone was out for a night. I shrugged but didn't say anything.

It was weird for our whole relationship to be over abruptly over something that seemed stupid to me even then. I was mad at myself for not doing anything to change but I also didn't want to do anything to change it because Alex wasn't doing anything. I figured he didn't care much. Had his fill and went on to the next, which I know he did.

At the party where Claire asked me about Alex, he was in the corner doing his usual routine with a new move: kissing. I was mad but I knew I didn't have the right to be mad and that made me madder. Why was he willing to kiss this random girl after a night but didn't bother with me for months? I didn't think highly of Alex after that. I didn't think highly of myself either.

A week after graduation my family went to Monaco. My mother has always had an unhealthy obsession with Grace Kelly so much so that she had dyed her hair to look like her. My father liked gambling and the Grand Prix.

The vacation was more fun than I thought it would be. There's not much to do in Monaco so Stacey and I would sneak off into France. It wasn't my ideal vacation and there were plenty of somber tones throughout the month of June but I wouldn't trade anything for the days Stacey and I had. It was the first time we got along fully, with no fighting, bonded completely by necessity at first, and then, eventually, wanting to hang out with one another.

Much like the year prior, when I came back in July, Joanie invited me to her birthday party. The details of her and Matt were iffily given to me over emails. They had gotten back together sometime at the tail-end of June but decided on being friends, which probably looked more like when Alex and I were "friends" or whatever he was calling it.

Joanie's party was small because she only had one request: to get out of Yorkshire. The original plan was for us all to go down to London but AB had to work the next day and refused to wrangle a herd of sheep on a 3-hour train ride. Claire's dad lives in Manchester so Joanie decided she wanted a night of pubbing in Manchester.

Joanie, Claire, and I took the train over early that day and got ready in Claire's bedroom, which likely hadn't been slept in since before Y2K. We had our usual getting-ready conversation. Promises of "getting so fucked up tonight" and desire to get the best lay. We didn't address it but we knew it would likely be one of the last big nights we all had together.

The trio of us might have planned out staying best friends forever but we were all going in separate directions. Joanie would study at Leeds Trinity and Claire would go to Aston. While rough plans were promised to meet up at the halfway point of Birmingham, it was never fulfilled. Our time together after that summer was mostly reserved for holidays and then, as we got even more spread out across the globe, reunions at weddings, baby showers, and Joanie's divorce party last year, which might have been decently akin to this night.

We arrived at the club, pre-gamed, and ready to wait in the queue. The Monkeys were there in full form, AB cozied up to Claire, Rosie and Will were in the throes again, and those other participants that aren't important to the story, even if dear Jenny let me use the bathroom before her.

I was in the back with Claire, in a skirt that felt too short and too tight. Alex stood at the front of the queue with Matt. He was swaddled in a black jumper and had a haircut since I had been gone. They had been playing basement gigs throughout the summer. I heard the crowds had been getting bigger and it felt weird not to be witness to that after seeing them play in empty rooms.

When the front of the queue had been reached, there had been some disagreement with the bouncers that caused Joanie to slide up next to Matt and pout, "Matty, come on." Either way, Alex looked scared out of his mind, Andy looked higher than a kite, Jamie was spitting some gibberish out at the bouncers, and Will attempted to slip the bouncers cash, which ended up pissing them off even more.

Now, at the time, I wasn't aware of the importance of this incident. To me, it was the usual behavior for a Saturday night in July, besides the fact that nearly everyone I knew had become involved in this row. To Claire and me in the back, we couldn't help but laugh at the whole scene as AB attempted to referee only for Rosie to unintentionally punch him in the face.

At the time, it was a simple, funny moment. The club also happened to be named The Ritz, which would later be progressed by "to the Rubble" famously.

After the whole ordeal, we landed at some other, much less notable club. Joanie seemed disappointed but celebrated herself nonetheless.

I ended up sitting next to Alex after a round of nonconsensual musical chairs. We didn't talk at all. It was just some awkward side-by-side thing like kids being forced to take a picture together. His knee rubbed up against mine and it felt illegal to feel anything for it, even if I was rattled by it.

I abruptly stood up and walked outside for a cigarette. He had been shy the whole night. He had always been shy. I don't know what made him get the courage to come out and talk to me but the second I took my first drag, he was standing beside me.

"Was Monaco fun?" He was being nice but it felt awkward and stiff and my back hurt from looking at him.

I nodded and stared at him intently.

He nodded and leaned beside me on the wall.

"Basement shows fun?"

He shrugged. "Yeah, suppose."

"Lot more people coming," I told him what I had heard.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't my idea to give the CDs away."

A chill went up my spine. I dared myself to remain cool. "You're doing that?"

He nodded as I looked on at him, but he stared forward and didn't say anything.

The silence ached around us. My body felt ill from shoving everything down inside. There wasn't much of a point anymore to try and faze him out. He had made the approach, now I had to make mine. The only thing that gave me enough courage was that if it all went bad I'd be out of here within a month and never have to face him again.

"I'm sorry about what happened in May." We had switched positions this time. I gazed onward as he looked over at me. I felt embarrassed to look him in the eye like a bucket of shame would fall on me as soon as I did.

Alex shook his head and looked down at his shoes giving me an excuse to look at him. He looked more timid than I had ever seen him with me. His hands shoved deep in his pockets and he was slouched over like he had worked a desk job for 40 years. "It's alright. Shouldn't've said anything about your family. Shouldn't have said any of it."

"It's fine," I mumbled.

It was quiet. Mutters from pub chaos spilled out onto the street but Alex and I were silent. He shifted at one point and I thought he was about to leave but he pulled out his own cigarette from his pack. I was shocked by the profound hurt I felt from it. That he didn't ask for a drag of mine first before stealing one from my pack, handing me his lighter, and having me do the honors.

"You got that Boardwalk gig coming up in August, right?" I wanted to go but almost felt I needed permission to go.

He nodded. "When are you leaving for London?"

"September 5. Getting settled down there before classes start and all." An anchor hung on my heart and I regretted, hated, and scathed myself for ignoring him all summer. I tried to reason that he did the same but my mind always replayed shoving him out of my car over and over again.

"You excited?"

I was short because I think pain would have overcome me if I had spoken about it more. "Mhmm."

I hadn't left the door open for him to say more and I didn't quite know what to say either. We had never lacked flow in our conversations before. I was then struck by how a little over a year ago, Alex and I spoke for the first time. I wanted the wit. I wanted the charm. I wanted him to stare me down and tell me everything about myself. I feel like I had discouraged that out of him and I was miserable at the thought he would never tell me how he knew me again.

And then he scuffed out his cigarette and turned to walk back into the pub and the only thought in my mind was that I would never see him again. Maybe off chances around town or through parties that Joanie would insist on throwing in the winter but I would never be stuck outside a pub smoking a cigarette with him again. I collapsed inward.

"Was I your girlfriend?" I shouted out to him. I wasn't sure what else to ask. In my quick thinking, it seemed like the most likely thing to make him stay.

Alex stilled and I felt like I was in a movie. It might as well have been raining and he was Spider-Man or something. He didn't move and he didn't say anything like he was convinced that I was a figment of his imagination.

After a period of no replies, I explained, "You said it before we had our fight and I never got to ask you if you really meant it or if it was a slip of the tongue."

He turned around and walked back over. He leaned his side against the wall and crossed his arms. Anyone who says suave Alex Turner didn't show up until a 2011 haircut wasn't acquainted with the behavior of Alex Turner outside a pub in the early aughts. "I don't know."

He was evasive, per usual. "Did you want me to be?"

Alex mulled something over, thought up and down about it before answering, "Yeah, I think so. I thought about it a lot. Did you?"

He flipped it on me and my back was both literally and figuratively up against the wall. "Yeah. I thought about it too much really. Practically writing Alexander David Turner and Jane Rebecca Turner in a heart on the back of my notebook."

"Rebecca?" He questioned.

I rolled my eyes. "Stop it." He chuckled and I wanted to swim around him in delight.

"Nothing wrong with Rebecca." He insisted. "Shall I start calling you Becky?"

"Stop, you're lucky I even let you call me Janie."

"What's wrong with Janie?"

I shrugged. "I've never liked it. My dad calls me Janie."

"I would've stopped if you told me you didn't like it."

I shook my head. "I didn't want you to. Truth be told."

"Okay, Janie," he enunciated.

I smiled and felt like everything—nearly everything—had snapped back into place. Then, he leaned in and kissed me. His lips were soft and felt light-headed, likely due more to dehydration but I'm sure Alex triggered it.

But I pushed him back with an insistent shake of my head. "I'm sorry."

He looked solemn but he nodded and said, "It's fine."

I wanted to. I wanted him all over me, twisting about inside me, and creeping through every corner. "No. I just—in a month, I'll be too far away for you to even remember my face. I'd rather we at least be friends."

Alex nodded. There was something hidden beneath him but I was never able to place my finger on quite what he was thinking then. Although, he smiled and said, "You'll always be my friend, Janie."

I don't quite remember the rest of the night. It was a drink-covered night and a headache-filled morning. I tried not to dwell and for the most part, I didn't, until the train ride home when I thought how nice it would have been to rest my head on Alex's shoulder.

Their Boardwalk gig, stuck in the basement of The Boardwalk, took place about 3 weeks before I was due to leave and like most people when change is about to happen, I became nostalgic for everything. Everything felt like a last time and I wanted to grip at everything while I had the chance.

Since Alex and I reconnected, not much had changed. I hadn't seen or spoken to him since we were outside the pub but when Matt told me how cool it would be if I came to The Boardwalk gig, I considered it to be an invite approved by Alex.

I wore jeans and my first University of Greenwich t-shirt, which I know I still have because, despite the wear and tear from the years, I still wear it.

The gig felt more electric and rambunctious than any of their other gigs from the moment you walked in. It was the first time I couldn't see the stage at one of their gigs. People were all piled up in the front. Now, it still was nowhere near the level that they would become, not even near the level it was just a couple of months later, but it felt as though I had gone away and they returned with an army.

When they entered the stage, you would have thought people had been set on fire. It felt bizarre. Alex seemed so meek, yet so commanding. They stood, said nothing, before banging into "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor."

I had never heard the song before but people writhed along to the beat in an intense fashion. I was situated in the back and mostly uninterrupted by any knocking about. I sometimes enjoyed a good crashing into one another but alone in that hot basement, I was focused on Alex. More importantly, what Alex was saying.

Moreso, just one line he was singing, "Dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984." I threw my head back in laughter because my perception of it was Alex giving me a nod in one of his songs. I didn't read into it. He's a writer. He's an observer.

When the gig ended, in a rushed sweaty manner, I was quick to leave, not wanting to be squashed in the crowd. I went outside for fresh air and enjoyed a smoke. It hit me after a breeze that he wrote a song about me. Now, I'm one easy to fall for flattery when it isn't there but come on! He wrote that song about me!

I smiled to myself as their equipment van, also known as Matt's mum's van, pulled up. I stayed positioned on the wall and finished my smoke as I watched them load up the vehicle.

Matt was the first to notice me. "How long you been watching us?

"Only a few minutes!" I yelled back. I noticed the way Alex's head turned and can still picture the look on his face to this day. You'd feel dimwitted for every decision you made prior that didn't result in that look on his face.

Alex excused himself from the group and made his way over to me. "I'm not gonna give you one of my cigarettes, Turner."

He chuckled. "Shush. Matt's mum can't know I smoke."

My head leaned back against the wall and his frame was right before me. "You were pretty great tonight."

"That your review?" Alex has often said and written about girls having him twisted around their fingers, but he must be acting humble because he had me twisted about his. He was leaning over me in some screwy blue tee with definite pit stains. It was the most charming thing I had seen at 18. 20 years later, it's still in my top 5.

"I haven't put it in writing yet."

"Ah, so I'll get a formal review from Ms. Cavendish. Shall it be printed up in The Star?" He teased me.

"Pft," I uttered, "you aren't big enough for The Star. Maybe the Barnsley College Chronicle."

He shrugged. "Well, you're a good writer. It'll be good no matter where it's printed."

"You've never read anything I've written," I pointed out.

"On the contrary, I read your emails all the time—"

I jabbed his upper arm. "Your eloquence is paralyzing. What about your song tonight?"

Man was cheeky. "Which one?"

"Oh, I don't know, there was the one about the train, the one about the shoes, the one about the schoolgirl, and the one about me."

"Oh, okay," he tilted his head and nodded in understanding before deadpanning, "Yeah, that doesn't narrow it down for me. You're a schoolgirl with shoes who I've seen take the train before."

"I think you've got your next big hit there, Al, 'You're A Schoolgirl With Shoes Who I've Seen Take the Train Before' sounds like a Top 40 tune."

Then, he looked serious, completely twisted. "Do you want to go back to my house?"

I joked, "I'm not a hooker, Al."

He laughed then grabbed my arm and dragged me behind him like a ragdoll. "I've got something to give ya."

30 minutes later, on the edge of his bed, I watched Alex dig around in his dresser drawers. "Are you looking for a gun or something?"

"Well, I might as well be playing Russian roulette with this."

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Alex kept scouring through his drawers. He stopped, pulled something out and held it behind his back. It was exactly like what preempted our fight. Exactly. He handed the CD to me for the second time. "Still free," Alex promised.

I smiled and grabbed it off him. "I won't throw a bitch fit this time, I swear."

"Nah, you're alright. A little bossy but..."

I didn't fight him. I examined the CD once again, noticing "Dancefloor" on the tracklist. "Did you really write a song for me?"

"Well, it was more for the band but if you want to sing it you can."

I stuck my tongue out at him. "So much for being sweet." He sat beside me, not touching, but close enough.

For the first time ever, I opened the CD's jewel case. The CD had "Jane C." written on it in Al's handwriting. A piece of paper was wedged in the corner of the case. I pulled the paper free. It was a note, a short one, but Alex's pen had scrawled across it. It read: Don't make fun of me, Jane, I can't help that you've twisted me around you.

I looked up at him, voice caught in my throat and heart pounding, but he was coyly looking off to the side. "Was this in here when you first gave it to me?"

He nodded. "Figured you never—hoped you never opened it. It was some soppy note but I figure you should have it. I don't need any more CDs."

I looked back down at the CD. Everything was plain-looking but, to me, it was crafted just for me. The way the J swung up in my name and the note had sat perfectly in the clip. "Am I a jerk?" I certainly felt like one.

Alex was quick to shake his head. "No."

I heavily blew air out, trying to contain something inside me. "I feel like one."

He insisted, "You're not a jerk or a dickhead or a bitch or whatever you want to beat yourself up with." His arm curled around me but didn't touch me. I felt like I was Medusa, scaring him off.

"I'm an idiot. I had to throw some hissy fit over you calling me posh. How stupid is that?"

Alex failed to hide his laughter but told me, "You're not stupid."

"Just emotionally inept." He didn't protest to that. Back then I wanted to grow up and be mature so quickly that I struggled with the fact that at 18 I wasn't supposed to know how to handle these situations, especially with adult emotionally inept role models.

Alex brought a more somber tone to the conversation. "Consider it my parting gift for London. You can play it and think of me if you want to do that."

I felt constrained. "I'd want to do that."

He gave me a small smile but the room had fallen low and melancholic. There was nothing more to say and everything to say. I had bit back things for so long in my life that it felt natural when a dream died. The ache it usually caused had grown numb but this time I was dealing with a pounding on my chest that threatened to crack my ribs.

"You can kiss me if you want," I uttered.

"What?" He questioned. His look was buggy-eyed and furrowed.

"Come on, that line has got to work at some point," I joked.

He shook his head back and forth in short movements. His confusion was palpable. "Do you want that? I mean, after the Manchester thing."

I felt confident in myself. Boosted up and sitting up straight. "Yeah. But I don't want to go to London and listen to your CD and think of how I could've been thinking of the summer I spent with my boyfriend instead of a guy who became a sudden stranger."

"What do you want to go to London with?"

I looked over at him and fractions of seconds passed like minutes. "It feels ridiculous to settle things down now."

Alex must have started feeling bold. A grin wedged on his face and he knocked his knee with mine. "You want me to be your boyfriend, Janie?"

I groaned. "When you say it that way it becomes all dorky. Like, 'Do you want to hold hands and skip down the prairie?'"

He chuckled. "Then, what do you want me to say? 'Get down and suck my cock.'"

I rolled my eyes. "Your vulgarity is too alarming for me."

"Yeah, well, we've beaten around it enough." Alex took me off guard and pulled me around the waist and landed us with our backs on his bed.

I put my hand on his chest to keep my distance. "I don't want this to be it. I'm sick of all this bon voyage shite. So, if this is some goodbye fuck to you—"

He interrupted and tugged me to him. We were both on our sides, chest-to-chest. "We've got a whole month of fucks before a goodbye one."

It lit fires on both ends of my coil and they both engulfed the ends of me before forcing themselves inward to my heart. "What if I don't want the goodbye one?"

Alex pulled me closer, desperate but letting me talk. "Then, I'll take the train down to London whenever you need it. Don't act like you're going off to war, Janie. I'll make my way to you."

That fulfilled me to no end. I can still feel the burst of that comment pushing in on me. I can think of the way he said every word and how halfway through he pushed my hair behind my ear so tenderly that I think it left a brush burn on me forever.

"So, if I call you at 3 in the morning and beg you to come take care of me you will?" I quipped.

He smirked. "Well, I'd like to see you beg."

I rolled my eyes. "Dirty, dirty, dirty."

"I'm likely only a kiss away from fucking you if you'll ever let me." His nose almost knocked with mine. The room would have felt on fire if the window wasn't open letting the night air suppress the sweat.

"Sounds like you are begging."

We kissed and then we had sex. It was quick and sloppy, limbs flying and desperation influencing every move. It wasn't about want or desire anymore, it was about filling a need. I didn't stay at his house for long. I snuck out to avoid his parents catching on and texted him when I got home. The height of 2000s romance.

Finally, I listened to the CD. I'm not sure when I went to sleep that night but when I woke up it felt like I had never slept. I was buzzed in every way and he was parasitic. My every thought.

Later that day, I told Claire and Joanie what had happened while we shopped. Joanie, who had recently decided to never speak to Matt again, told me, "Pft, good luck with those rockstars."

Claire's brows furrowed. "They play shows in club basements. I hardly think they're rockstars."

"All I'm saying is don't put your heart into him too heavy, especially moving away. Jane, what were you thinking?" Joanie questioned.

I shrugged. "I don't want to question it for the rest of my life. If it doesn't work out, I'll never have to see him again. If it does, which I'm not fooling myself that we're going to get married, but if it does work out then what a great story it'll make."

"Joanie's gotten jaded," Claire said. "I think it's romantic. Who made the first move?"

I squinted. "That's debatable. I made a move about a year ago and he turned me down."

"What?!" Joanie yelled out. "How come we didn't hear about it?"

I shrugged. "I was a little embarrassed, I think. That's all."

Claire prodded me for more. "Who kissed who?"

"He did back in March," I said it all nonchalantly and I knew what kind of reaction I was trying to provoke in them.

Both their sets of hands stopped moving through the clothing racks and both heads turned in a snap toward me, their jaws dropped down. "What?!"

We didn't hide it from that point on. There wasn't much sense in keeping it under wraps, especially since we both knew what it meant. Matt insisted he knew all along, which he didn't.

That period in August was hot and muddy but it was a time I looked at fondly even in the moment. I had a feeling in me of remembrance. Desperate for every detail to be implanted and forcing myself to not forget one single thing. I suppose some had slipped away but the rest I've held on tightly to.

There was one evening, a rare hangout with the Monkeys, AB, Claire, and me, where we sat around watching movies at Andy's house because his parents were out of town. There wasn't much nefarious activity besides blunts being passed. I don't even think anybody drank a beer or anything.

Al and I shared one between us while we watched 2 Fast 2 Furious and I chanted things into his ear like "The cars. They are just so fast." The spliff injected rare public affection in me. (Christ, Alex and I didn't even hold hands in public until we were 22). He was laid down in the corner of the settee and I placed my back onto his chest. My head wedged into the crook of his neck and he sat his chin on top of my head. His arms were around me and I played with his hands more than I paid attention to the movie. It was a comfort I had never felt and I'm not sure, even after many more years with Alex, I ever felt again.

I like Alex's sternum. Alex says it's one of the weirdest things about me. Once in an interview, I was asked what my favourite body part of his was and when I answered with sternum it wasn't the expected response. Yes, he's got a lovely head of hair. Yes, those arms are nice. Yes, the ass, I've seen it, I've squeezed it. Yes, his dick, which is just a weird way of people wanting to know the specific enlargement or shrink of a certain body point. Aren't all those questions weird roundabout ways of asking dick length?

His sternum is hard as most bones are but there's a soft layer of skin that covers it and the way his chest dips makes me convinced that it was molded inward for me. Somewhere around our last week together, when it was the two of us, I got into the habit of placing my head there. It turned into instinct. We didn't talk much in those moments. Faded in between a deep sleep and deep lust. I had never wanted him more and I never wanted to do him less. I wanted to eat him alive and then I wanted to cuddle him in my arms. It felt natural to just be with him. No muss, no fuss, no expectations, or preconceived notions. I had never felt that before.

"What if I meet this super hot guy in London and he hits on me and I tell him I have a boyfriend and he's all like 'Your boyfriend doesn't need to know' and I'm all like 'I don't want to lie to him' and he's also like Jude Law or something." It was September 1. I was rambling. His chest moved rhythmically up...down...up...down.

"Jude Law is your type?" He questioned.

"He's just the first person I thought of."

Alex hummed. "I would've thought you were more of a Hugh Grant."

I sat up with a gasp and laid my hands on top of his chest. "I totally am more a Hugh Grant."

Alex tapped his temple. "I've got you down, Cavendish. You're all memorized."

"So, what if I told you I was running off with Hugh Grant?" I asked him.

"Didn't he get caught with a prostitute?"

I stared at him. "This is all besides the point. Hot Guy tries to steal me away. What do you do?"

Alex sighed. "Do you want the realistic version or the fantasy version?"

"The fantasy version, of course." The real version was obvious. We'd break up. I didn't want that and I didn't want Hugh Grant.

"Alright," he said. I laid back down beside him and his arm curled its way around me. "I would fly to London, this is an urgent matter."

"Precisely. You only have a set amount of time before Evil Hot Guy takes me away."

"I would track you down and kick his ass."

My grin fell. "Oh, that's it. That wasn't very fantastical."

Alex caught my drift and chuckled. "Okay, why not this? I find you guys on a desert island—"

I interrupted, "In London?"

He let out a loud sigh. "Janie, do you want me to save you or not?"

I nodded. "Okay, okay, continue."

"I would shoot him down—"

"You'd kill a man for me!"

"I don't like this game, Janie."

We never said "I love you" but we were both on opposites of the same wire and I think we both knew how the other felt solely by their actions. Alex has this grin. He does a little quiver trying to fight it, yank it down before it's uncontrollable. His efforts to hide it just make it cuter like he's an ashamed little boy. Alex has told me my tell-tale sign was the hug I gave him when I left for London. I don't think we'd ever simply hugged before.

It was the night before I left. He stopped by my house and we hid in my room for hours just talking. We felt the need to accumulate every social need for one another in those last few hours. Alex would visit but there was no date and despite his reassurances, in my paranoid mind, I thought that he was appeasing until I went away to be forgotten about.

We would both be busy. I had school to worry about and Alex and the band were having their first round of gigs outside Sheffield. They were all about north and I wouldn't go to any of them but Alex told me over the phone what they were like, never going into too much detail other than the excitement of them.

"Maybe I'll hate London," I told him during our goodbye.

He squeezed my shoulder. "You'll love every minute of it." He was (almost) right. And that sucked.

I had thought about all the words I could tell him and said none. I felt like crying but didn't. It didn't seem deserved when I was choosing to move away. It was a light goodbye. A deep hug where he held me close to his chest and I could feel the rivets of his ribs. At the time it was solemn but seldom. In a year's time, it was the average behavior to always be saying goodbye.

He kissed me and pulled back. His hands rested on my shoulders and he gave me a half-grin. "You have a good time, Jane C."

I gave a wistful smile and touched his elbow. "See ya."

The air in London was heavy for me or maybe that was just the weight that crushed down on my ribs in constant swelling of pain. London was half the reason I felt cool, even nowadays. My first month there was spent walking down bustling streets painted with rain and my boots sweeping the ground.

I called Alex every night telling him, "You have to come down here. Sheffield is nothing." I loved London but all the people I loved were back up north. On the days when I was in class, Alex was working. On the nights when I was a lone soul in my room, he was playing shows.

It was never out of the expectation. We went in with the understanding that it might be the end but every time when it seemed we would part ways, we didn't. I thought about the idea of being single because it feels like the proper thing your first year at university but I could never accept it.

In my Poetry & Prose class, I met Georgia, a dark-headed girl from Sussex who dressed like Patti Smith and acted like she was in a Tarantino film. Before class, we'd grab a coffee together, and give each other a rundown of the reading material to make sure we weren't going to make fools of ourselves.

I would read her work over a tea and she would suffer reading mine with a coffee. She had high standards but was too polite to ever insult you for what you'd written. I never had Alex read any of my poetry because I've never been good at it but in my first year, it was more akin to Kim Kardashian's "Jam (Turn it Up)" than Emily Dickinson. Georgia wrote with the sorrow of Sylvia Plath and the horniness of Leonard Cohen's Buddhist poems. There wasn't much competition.

Georgia introduced me to a group of her friends that were in line with my Barnsley friends but stoned wayyyy more often and enjoyed dressing like beatniks and sometimes acting like them. I felt adjacent to the group other than my connection with Georgia but they were good fun and always had things going on. Whether it was classy slam poetry or getting high in Hyde Park. Everyone was nice although very evasive.

Robert—who talked like Jack Kerouac had stuck his hand up his ass and spoke out of his mouth for him—was the only group member I hung out with solo besides Georgia. We would go record shopping but never buy anything because neither of us had players. Every 2 weeks he would give me a supply of Adderall that he had been prescribed since he was 10 but not taken since 15.

I told Alex about them but all my stories were hard to explain over the phone and in the midst of whatever he was up to. That's when I e-mailed him my first piece. It was written about a night out, in which we slept over at Robert's flat and a high Robert attempted to cook us dinner but nearly burned his apartment down instead when he put the dinner in a plastic Tupperware and stuck it in the oven.

It wasn't as movie-worthy as passing your notebook across the hood of a girl's car but it's hard to say I'd be writing this book if Alex had been unable to stay on the phone for longer than 10 minutes. My writing before that has been a mish-mosh of things but had always been fiction. I began to write autobiographical and sometimes when I would say, "The craziest thing happened last night." Alex would shush me and tell me to write him a piece about it.

My brother got married at Cornwell Manor at the end of October. Alex reluctantly accompanied me after a gig in Sheffield the night before. The only reason he came was because we hadn't seen one another since my London move. The wedding was likely to be no fun but with Alex, part of the ache would be soothed. Plus, I would achieve my tux fantasy.

I had been there for 2 days before his arrival fulfilling familial and bridesmaid duties. I wasn't close to the bride-to-be, Cecilia. I wasn't close with Greg either but it seemed traditional to have all members of the family in the wedding. Stacey got a thrill out of being old enough to be a bridesmaid since she was the flower girl at Harper's wedding.

Alex and I didn't have much of an opportunity to catch up before we had to race off to the rehearsal dinner. He arrived, in his mum's car, wearing scrapped jeans and a polo shirt looking too nice for someone who probably didn't go to bed until 5 AM and drove for 3 hours. Too nice for someone who was begrudgingly here.

I had planned the smoking of a cigarette in time for his arrival. Stood on the kerb of the parking lot, flicking away at one. I was already dressed for the rehearsal dinner and if my mother had caught me stinking it up with a smoke, she'd have skinned me alive, even though my father was definitely doing the same thing with a smelly cigar. The dress was a green satin midi dress, on theme with Cecilia's selected theme colors. I had a white cardigan thrown over the top, which my mother made me take off as soon as we entered the venue because it "clashed." The weather was near freezing but god be damned if I messed with the theme. Alex threw his jacket over me halfway through the dinner and my mother didn't say anything. In the back of my mind, I thought she might have found the gesture too sweet to criticize. She was probably too drunk by that point.

"I heard the entertainment has to arrive 'round the back!" I yelled out to him as he was still getting out of the car.

His head snapped to meet my eyes. That smile spread across his face and he has always looked good to me over the roof of a car. "Pretty sure I'm not getting paid to be here."

I pouted and swayed my hips. "How unfortunate! Is there some other way I can pay you, sir?"

He eyed me—up, down—and I wondered how tempting that emerald shade was to him. "Get yer ass over here."

I tossed my cigarette down, not even bothering to scuff it out, and skipped over to Alex. I threw my arms around his neck like he did to my waist. It felt bizarre to care this much about the presence of one person but I had counted down the days to Greg's wedding for the sole reason of Alex. I had been trapped with my family for 2 days with little escape other than the hotel swimming pool. It felt like convalescence.

I pulled back and pecked his lips. "Hi."

"Aw, what you doing with that?" He teased before kissing me full-on. I felt necessary even if I was eager to just look at him. His hair looked freshly cut for the occasion, likely through his mother's insistence. His face looked tired, if sprawled with an adrenaline rush that might have been due to me if I should pleasure myself enough to say.

"How was the drive?" I asked, pulling away from him so he could get his things from the car. No matter how much I wanted him to be there, I did feel like I was taking him away from something. Likely tired from the night before but also in the thick of gigs and taking 2 nights off of work at The Boardwalk. Guilty for forcing him to come to an event that was likely to either be the most boring thing we ever attended or the most explosive thing in Cavendish family history, which would be saying something.

Alex was polite. He wouldn't tell me, even if the drive sucked. "Fine. No traffic. How have things been here?"

"Fine. No traffic." I repeated, crossing my arms to warm myself up a bit. He gave me a look to prompt me for more. "It's been fine. Mainly hung out with Stacey and Harper hasn't been so bad. My parents are a different story. This dinner will likely be the test of things with the two of them."

"Why? What's going on?"

I grabbed his backpack, despite his urging otherwise, while he handled his suit. We made our way to my hotel room that I was sharing with Stacey, which had and would be interesting. "Their usual B.S. mainly. They got in some fight last night that won't be a good recipe for today when they are forced to sit next to each other for 5 hours."

Alex's eyes bulged. "5 hours?" Yeah, I hadn't exactly briefed him on that part.

"Okay, we don't have to stay the full time. After the toasts, we can leave whenever we want. Or you can leave whenever you want. You're more my date to the wedding anyway."

He shook his head. "No, I'll leave when you leave. Won't be any fun without you anyway. In case it isn't obvious, I missed you."

I felt a wave of unexpected shyness fall over me. His voice was so quiet and sincere that I felt like I wasn't supposed to hear it. I was overhearing Alex's thoughts. I dared to look back at him, a smile bright across his face, forcing me to reciprocate. "I missed you too, Al."

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. It was quick and brief, the amount of intimacy we limited ourselves to in those days. "You look very pretty too, Jane C."

"You look sweaty." It ripped laughter from him, something I so desperately desired even more than wanting to bed him. Alex was never something to do. I found my most desirable moments were squared away within the sentences we had for one another. A joke, a fragmented note, an email.

Despite the size of my parents' wallets and their often habit of indifference, the room was 2 queen-sized beds with orders of one being for Alex and one for Stacey & me. Somehow through Alex's stays at my house, Stacey and Alex had never met.

She was lounging on the bed closest to the window when we walked in. Dressed in a-line dress in the same shade of green as mine. She looked darling as my mother would say.

"Mum's gonna kill you for lying on the bed and wrinkling your dress," I told her when Alex and I walked in.

She was playing Snake on her Nokia. Something she ended up doing for nearly the whole rehearsal dinner. "She'll be too busy making fun of Cece anyway."

Stacey had yet to look up from her phone as I threw Alex's bag down on the other bed. "If Cecilia hears you calling her Cece she'll rip your head off."

"So pretentious," Stacey mocked.

Alex chuckled at Stacey's tone. The noise made Stacey lift her head, noticing Alex for the first time. "Oh, Alex is here," she emphatically said. She sat up on her knees. "Or should I say Alexander? How formal am I meant to get here to avoid death threats?"

I rolled my eyes. "Just get off the bed so I don't have to deal with mum's wrath?"

On the elevator down to the dinner, Stacey found the perfect chance for her cross-examining of Alex. "You're in a band, right?"

He nodded. Smart, don't say anything that can be printed on the record.

"Does that mean you have a lot of groupies?" Oh, brother.

Alex laughed at the idea. "I don't think so."

Ever the instigating interrogator, she continued, "I'm sure you have plenty girls throwing themselves at you."

"Stacey," I warned.

She played the dumb act. "What?"

Alex shrugged. "I don't know. Your sister maybe."

He was already laughing by the time I punched him in the arm. The elevator doors opening saved him from any further wrath.

Upon entering dinner, Alex finally formally met my parents. My mother was dressed in a too-tight dress with poorly done make-up to make her look like Tammy Faye. She was only 1 glass of wine in. My dad towered over Alex, puffed out his chest like he had something to prove, something to protect. "Now, Janie, what do we have here?" He asked as we entered.

Stacey was smart to use the distraction and her size to her advantage as she quickly ducked off to her seat. Alex stood up straight, even if he looked awkward in his suit. Throughout the night, he would complain that he looked like a complete dork and despite my reassuring that he looked handsome, he insisted he would never wear a suit again. Sounds like a mighty lie now.

"Alex, my dad, Richard." I introduced. My father offered up his hand, giving a tough and rough handshake with Alex.

My mother slushed her glass around in her hand and introduced herself. "Polina, honey, but everyone calls me Lina."

"Why are you talking like that?" I questioned my mother's sweetness and talking in a near-country accent.

That sugar evaporated quickly as she ordered me, "Don't criticize me, Jane. You go take a seat."

I didn't fight. I walked to my seat next to Stacey, and Alex followed silently.

"Well, that's a good idea of what she's like. Alcohol will either make her more or less bearable," I whispered to Alex.

He was too consumed with fiddling with his suit jacket to care much about how my mother or father acted.

That night, after a dinner that lasted too long with extended toasts and delayed meals due to catering issues, Alex and I slept in the same bed with Stacey making kissing noises from the other bed.

Once the noises had died down and she seemingly went to sleep, Alex and I slipped out of the room, dressed in our pajama pants and our winter coats. There was a little bench around the back of the hotel, tucked away on the edge of the parking lot. We sat there. I hugged my knees to my chest and Alex leaned back and rested his arm behind me on the back of the bench. We thought about smoking a cigarette but didn't.

I told him, "Dasha is doing this weird art project right now. Like a totally bizarro nudist Dali fever dream and she's trying to recruit all of us to do it."

"Wait, who's Dasha?" It was hard not to feel like our lives were becoming separated. Sometimes it didn't bug me. Other times it felt like we weren't listening to one another.

"Dasha is the one who works with Henry."

"And Henry is...?"

"Georgia's boyfriend. Do you know who Georgia is?" I was snapping, being bitter, and still to this day I have a habit of ruining moments over little things. I didn't know half of Alex's friends' names, all those band idiots. Alex never talked about them though. They were all referred to as a collective, never giving specific names.

He took in stride as always. "Yeah, yeah. Who is Jane though?"

I let go of my knees to slap his chest. "Shut up, Matthew."

"Come here, you." Alex wrapped his arms around me and tugged me roughly into him. A squeal came from my lips and forgot about the rest, focusing on his lips instead. We kissed slowly. Kisses that would never be forgotten behind that hotel.

We returned to our talks of nothingness that to anyone other than the two of us wouldn't have been very important but the words we whispered to one another were so pure I couldn't imagine even placing them in writing for someone else to read.

In November, I sprained my ankle. I fell backward onto my foot and pop! After walking on it for a full day I eventually got it checked out to confirm the sprain. The ache from the sprain only lasted about a weekend where I stayed holed up in my bed writing emails to Alex that he didn't respond to until the following week. I didn't complain much, even if I was mildly annoyed that I was in pain and he was oblivious to it.

There was a dull ache surrounding the whole thing. When the news finally did reach him, he offered to come down for the weekend. By that point, it was 2 weeks after the injury and my sprain had fully healed, minus some soreness. I nearly texted this to him, Don't bother. What's the point if it will only soothe your guilt and not my pain? Then, I missed him. I would love that, I sent.

nov 27, 11:22, he wrote back.

As much as I missed his company conversationally, we hadn't had sex since September 4th and I had cleared out space to make exactly that happen. Clean room, no visitors. I did have other plans for when he arrived. Have brunch since I knew he would be hungry after the train ride, show him around my neighborhood, room tour that would lead into heavy weekend-long lovemaking. Or whatever we were calling it at that point.

That day I got a text around 9:30: missed train, catching next one.

when is it?

hour, be there at 1

It didn't set the weekend off in a good mood. Leading to me being stuck in a pit of anger that I couldn't communicate through text messages. There would be no point in it. So, in those 2 hours I was supposed to be spending with him, I experienced an increased level of annoyance. The slightest touch pissed me off and by the time 1 rolled around the boiling inside me had only rolled louder.

I stood with my arms crossed when I opened the door, pursed lips, foot tapping, and an agenda to chew him out. The delighted look on his face, wearing a hoodie, backpack on one shoulder—it all pissed me off.

Alex tried to quail, walking through the door, telling me, "Am I in trouble?"

I rolled my eyes and set off to my room, forcing Alex to catch up to me. "Whatever, Alex."

"Hey, I'm sorry. You know I'm late to everything."

I snapped, turned around with fury. "Yeah, but you're late to class not to a train and I'm pretty sure the trains from Sheffield come every hour, which means if you missed your train and got the next one you'd be here at noon, not 1, which means you missed 2 trains. Probably because you slept through your alarm clock and then packed your bag because you didn't do it the night before like I told you to do."

His eyes were wide and I felt like his mother the way I was calling him out. He looked staggered. A word away from taking a step back from me. "Alright, you're right, but I'm here now so let's have a good time. How's your ankle?"

His attempts to be kind ended up stepping into territory that just pissed me off more. "My ankle is fine because it healed 2 weeks ago before you even bothered to respond to the news. You just don't give a shit about these things, Alex, but they're important to me. Being on time, responding to me, it's not much to ask for."

"You're right but this past month has been crazy and I just saw you in October—"

"Just saw me in October! Look I'm not desperate, you don't need to spend every waking minute with me, in fact, I think I would kill you if I had to spend a whole week with you" (not true, I desperately wanted that) "but over a month! I expected some eagerness to see me but you'd rather lie around for an extra hour. No one told you to come, you offered. So if it was so much work, you could have just stayed home."

"I didn't want to stay home. I went to your stupid brother's wedding because I wanted to see you. Do you think I get pleasure from driving 3 hours to go to that fucking wedding where your dad breathed down my neck the whole time like I was some hoodlum and your mum hit on me more times than I can count? I went to see you. You're buggering me down because I missed a train, meanwhile, you have made no effort to come visit me. I had a lot of things I wanted you to come to but when you said no and went and hung out with your weirdo fucking friends I was fine with it because you're happy and you write me these beautiful fucking essays, even if I was upset that you weren't there."

"At least, I tell you what I'm up to. You're so evasive about everything. 'How was the gig?' 'Oh, uh, good.' It's like you don't want me to care about these things or you have some secret you're hiding. How about those groupies, huh?"

"Oh, shut up, Jane!" It was the first time he was harsh with me. Flippant and distressing. "You create problems where they aren't. Posh, much?"

"Fuck off with that. You talk all this shit about my family—"

"Because you do!"

"That doesn't mean you can. I want you to care and it doesn't seem like you could give less of a shit. You complain about everything I want to do with you."

"I do not complain. You force this shit out of me. I'd sit through another awful wedding if that meant I could hang out with you. Meanwhile, any inconvenience for you cancels out anything I'd want you to do."

"I sat through all those shitty gigs that no one showed up to for you."

"Back when you were pining after me. Who gives a shit once you've moved on?"

"I'm in university, unlike you. You can come down whenever you want because you work at some shitty bar and play 1 gig a week, if even. And for fuck's sake if you want me to go to the fucking gig. I'll go to the fucking gig."

"I want you to want to go to the gig. Don't make me do anything you don't want to do, Jane, I know how hard that is for you."

"I just want you to give a shit."

"What are you talking about? Of course, I give a shit. See this, this is what I'm talking about. The fabricating problems out of nothing. When have I ever shown that I don't give a shit?"

"When you missed the trains!"

"I'm still taking the fucking trains! You're the one sitting on your ass here."

"I'm getting a degree!"

"I know! Will you fuck off with that?"

"Why? Scared you're going to work at a bar for the rest of your life."

"Hey, at least I've worked a job, unlike you fucking around with your dad's money."

"Fuck you!" I left the building then. He might have called after me but I don't remember. I felt badly suffocated for the first time with Alex. I walked around for a while. Aimlessly. I don't know what he did during this time. Maybe he walked around too. Paced the apartment. Pulled his hair out. Played Snake on his Nokia. I don't know but I cared too much during that time. Desperate to know what he was getting away at. I fantasized about it my whole walk. Best case. Worst case. Okay case. Most of it was nightmares. The rest was delusions.

I came back around 5 and he was lying on his back on my bed. I thought he might have been asleep at first. He didn't make any movement when I walked in until I called out, "Hey."

He sat up like he had been zapped. His gaze was on me intensely and he took a while before he said anything, eventually, "Hey."

A thought rushed through my mind, the one that had echoed through my head on the walk, in class, when writing emails, on the car ride down to London. I had forced it away for so long but the hotbox situation we were in prompted me to finally let it out. "Do you think we should break up?"

His eyes fell to his shoes, dangling off the side of the bed. He avoided my eyeline at all costs. "Is that what you want?"

No, but I didn't feel I could tell him that. "I want to know what you want."

He played his people-pleaser card. I wouldn't label Alex as that but he had a fashion, mainly with women, of not letting his opinion know. "I don't want to make you be with me if you don't want to."

To me, when it was to my advantage it was the greatest thing ever. Other times, it angered me beyond belief. "For god's sake, Alex, do you want to break up with me or not? Yes or no?"

"No," he said firmly.

It had ended our breaking-up conversation but it didn't exactly fix our problem. "I don't want to ruin our friendship by dragging out something that isn't going to work."

Alex met my eyes. "It'll work."

I sighed. "Shouldn't we be mature about this?"

"You're 18, you don't have to be mature about anything, Janie." And suddenly I felt like he was talking to 6-year-old me. By that point, he'd already memorized my childhood stories of foolish escapades. I forced myself to be an adult so young that I'd spent away my years of forgiven recklessness in return for the punishable kind. Not many people in my life realized that. The ones that did, didn't care, they preferred me tagging along to drunken nights. Alex preferred hiding away in my bedroom. And, sure, maybe a drink or two.

He'd cracked my heart open in so many ways that I don't think he ever understood what he was the first to do.

He reached a hand out to me urging me to join him on the bed. I sat beside him, not touching, I muttered, "I don't want to hurt you."

Then, he wrapped his arm around me, pulled me into him, kissed my temple, and said, "You worry too much about me."

Later that night when Alex and I were still out of breath, we curled into one another. For the first time, we made no move to get dressed. Just laid with one another. I dug my face into his collarbone and thought about suffocating myself.

"What are you doing?" He questioned, always questioning me.

My stomach grew heavy and I felt like crying, comforted by the idea that he would hold me while I did. "I wish you were here all the time." It wasn't just him. Everything in my life, the past one spent in that Wakefield house felt like it was slipping away from me. He felt like the only thing I could hold onto. So, I held tightly. Sometimes too tightly but he accepted any fingernail-induced bleeding from me.

His arm tightened around my back. He kissed my ear. Softly, for just my left ear to hear, he whispered, "Me too."

I started crying then. It was quiet just the shaking of my shoulders and the breaths I attempted to get and take in. Alex made no effort to stop me, his hand rubbed up and down my back. He knew what I needed and he held me. We didn't talk for the rest of the night. His hands did the work, up & down. His lips kissed my temple. I'm not sure if I dreamt it or not, but somewhere before I fully fell asleep, he whispered, "I love you." Even if he didn't say it, I knew. He held me all night. I gripped him and rubbed my back. I sometimes wish I never left that spot, stayed in the corner of him like the embracing Pompeii couple. Buried in volcanic ash together being each other's last comfort. Alex's shoulder must have ached after that night. Everything just ached after.

a/n: i sorta got carried away there with that word count, i don't know what i was on because i'll probably never write a part this long again until the next part where i accidentally end up writing 50k. ah, well, hope you enjoy as much as i did writing it. jane & alex 4 eva.

#alex turner fic #alex turner x fem!reader #alex turner x oc #alex turner x reader #alex turner x y/n #alex turner x you #alex turner smut #alex turner #junedenim #beneath the boardwalk

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