love like fools ➙ glee

thirty-five ; don't you want me.

Tick. Alicia twirled the mechanical pencil between her fingers.

Tick. Tick. There was faded scrawls from two different hands across her page.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Theoretically, she was supposed to add to it. Complete the song. Bleed the shattered pieces of her soul across the page, half-blank and desperate for additional verses.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

She threw the songbook at her wall.

Frustration getting the better of her. This wasn't the first time, but it was past two in the morning, proving that perhaps she was not thinking things through. She didn't want to wake her mother up. She'd overheard Arabella bickering with Mariana on the phone earlier. 

Mariana. Not Mari. 

That was how she'd known something was wrong. Then again, they were usually experiencing problems these days. Two best friends, caught in a whirlwind of complicated feelings neither was willing to admit aloud.

She huffed out a humor laugh. Her clock shifted from 2:04 a.m. to 2:05. Only her breath was audible in the timid silence of her bedroom. That should have been reassuring. While it was uncomfortable to tuck a pink Hello Kitty flashlight between her neck and shoulder to avoid drawing attention to herself, things were otherwise calm.

However, the silence was unnerving. She felt meticulously balanced on the edge of a tightrope, familiar voices filling her ears regardless of how hard she tried to block them out.

Finn's voice stood out the most prominently. It always did.

You're my best friend.

Best friend.

Kissing sessions and nasty rumors about Jesse aside, that was all they were by all technical means, wasn't it? Rachel had been his girlfriend, Quinn was his latest obsession and former girlfriend, but Alicia had been firmly implanted in the friendzone since their first meeting. She always knew how this story was going to write itself.

That shouldn't cause such a pained ache in her chest, but she found that her heart rarely listened to her head.

And then there was Jesse.

Jesse was complex; the wild card. He acted as though he liked her, for some inconceivable reason, but did he? He had claimed to be in love Rachel within a short period of time, and evidently that was insincere.

How could she possibly be any different?

With a sigh, she leaned back on her bed, tracing nonsensical shapes across the ceiling with the yellow glow of her flashlight. She was lost enough in her musings, flickers of musical notes and complementary lyrics drifting in and out of her thoughts, that she didn't notice she'd traced a J thrice until the fourth time. Scowling, she shut off the flashlight, shrouding herself in preferable darkness.

She was putting too much thought into this. All of it. At the end of the day, there was one simple rule to being Alicia Hastings: no matter what, under any conceivable circumstances, would she risk a romantic relationship. 

She wouldn't allow herself to repeat her father's mistakes.

Setting her flashlight on her nightstand with a troubling clatter, she kicked her duvet out from underneath her, startling her cats, who gave simultaneous hisses from their fuzzy beds on the floor. She needed to sleep, well-aware that she had glee rehearsal and stumbling her way around Jesse's increasingly intense watchfulness, but she'd never felt more awake.

Maybe those three cups of coffee with dinner weren't such a wise idea.

She was halfway through another twenty consecutive minutes of futile sleeping attempts when she heard the first pebble strike her window.