the 1 | chaennie

15. If This Was A Movie

Cocking her head to the side, Nayeon gave her a questioning look. "Coming out?"

Nodding, Rosie gave her a grave look in return. "I won't say it was cowardice - that's not what it was - but I wasn't ready. I didn't think that things had become that bad between us that it warranted her breaking up with me over the phone, but I knew it was getting hard. Of course it was; we were in different states, working non-stop on our own projects, going weeks without seeing each other, and it was far less than ideal. So I said that I didn't see it coming, and I didn't, truly, but I could see what she meant when she said it was getting hard. And if I'd cared less about my career, I could've come out then. I could've gone to Seattle, written a few songs there and been at her apartment to cook us dinner at two o'clock in the morning when she got home from set. We wouldn't have had to sneak around, we would've been able to be together and stepped right over all those barriers we placed between us. But instead, I built a wall."

"Did she try and call you again?"

"Yes."

"How did that go?"

Letting out a laugh, Rosie gave her a wry smile. "I never answered."

-

Weeks slipped by and Rosie finished recording the last song on her album, feeling so completely drained and relieved that she holed herself up in her apartment for days afterwards. It had been a long few weeks, and they'd been hard. It was hard because she was endlessly working on her album, it was hard because things were stilted with her parents, hard because she was lonely and hardest most of all because she didn't have Jennie. After that night, Jennie called her three times over the next couple of days, but Rosie was angry and upset, and she ignored them, unable to bring herself to listen to Jennie try and explain why. After that, there weren't any more, and that hurt almost as much as Jennie breaking her heart to begin with. A part of her had been expecting a call, a text, anything, but there had been nothing until she'd gotten so angry that she was glad that Jennie didn't call. It made it easier in a way, forcing a distance between them that hurt, but forced Rosie to confront her new reality. Jennie had broken her heart, and she had more important things to pour her attention into.

It didn't make it easy though. She'd wake up in the grey pre-dawn light, reaching out for the cold side of the bed, even though she knew Jennie wasn't there. There was a box of Jennie's favourite peppermint tea that gathered dust at the back of a kitchen cupboard. In a bad spell, she wore Jennie's shirt three days in a row, feeling the soft fabric caressing her skin and thinking about how Jennie would touch her. How they'd dance in the kitchen, even though Rosie would laugh and her cheeks would turn pink as she insisted that she couldn't dance. For the longest time, it had felt like time had stood still with the two of them. Too often, Rosie felt like time stopped at night, just for them, and it was like she'd been shocked back to reality, where time slipped by at an alarming rate, and everything blurred into one monotonous block of time.

At the start of August, she released the lead single of Speak Now two weeks ahead of schedule when the song leaked online. Mine left a bitter taste in her mouth by that point. A song that she'd written about herself running away from love, only to find the exception, was nothing more than a fanciful dream. The music video was hard for her to look at, to see the young girl they'd found to play her watch her parents fight, to meeting a brunette guy and falling in love with him, through the ups and downs of their relationship, and to the scene where Rosie had worn a wedding dress and worn a fake baby bump, to the two brunette kids at the beach with her. It was a sharp reminder that Jennie hadn't want that with her, and if Rosie was being honest, she'd never saw that as a reality either. It had taken her a few weeks to face that fact, and while she still felt incredibly sad and bitterly angry, she knew deep down that it would never have lasted.