Post by jennifer on Dec 21, 2010 13:18:58 GMT -8
Saturday, July 23, 2011
[ 2:00 p.m. ]
It had taken two entire hours of thinking and one pesky little fourteen-year-old wanting French toast to even get Jennifer out of bed this morning. While she usually was an early riser, up and at it by six or seven these days, she had been in bed until ten, and the teen was worried she was sick or something--not that that worry came before French toast, of course. In Jenn's defense, she hadn't slept very much last night. More wandering through the Alley after her departure from Mel's had left her missing the past, and while she had promised herself then and there she wouldn't bug Charlie--err, "Charles" now, as she'd decided--that resolution had somehow been lost somewhere around midnight when she was halfway to dreamland but still had a foot firmly in the land of the waking.
Why should she avoid him? It wasn't like it had been an absolutely terrible break-up, right? It wasn't as though she'd told him she hated every fiber of his being, just that she didn't want him tied down while she was off flying and living her dreams. She'd known he would have shown up at every game and held a torch for her, if she'd have let him, but she hadn't wanted that for him. Quidditch, she had determined at that point, was going to be the air she breathed, the food she ate, and the thought that brought a smile to her lips as she woke and as she went to sleep. She simply wouldn't be able to give him the time he'd need to be happy in the relationship, she'd told him, and she thought he deserved better than what she could offer him.
Still, she knew this was going to be awkward, terribly awkward, and Jenn never used superlatives or italics even as a teen, but this somehow seemed to be able to drive enough anxiety into her to get her to over dramatize how horrible it might be. Sorting through whether or not it was worth the embarrassment had occupied her two and three 'o clock hours and then again her 11 through noon hours. Sleep had occupied her four through nine o' clock hours and Nikki's chatter had occupied her 10 o' clock hour. Now, it occupied the last few seconds ticking on her one o' clock hour as she stood before his door, dressed in what she thought was probably too dressed down for the occasion.
What if he slammed the door in her face? What if he took one look through the peep hole or the blinds and never even came to the door? What if some girl came to the door in his place, dressed in nothing but his t-shirt? What if she had gleaned the wrong address in her asking around?
But she had to do it. She couldn't turn back. If there was one thing she wasn't, it was a coward. So, pulling down her black t-shirt and straightening her red skirt and black, fingerless "gloves," she rose her fist to the door and gingerly knocked--yes, Jenn could actually knock gingerly--on her ex-boyfriend's door.