Truth Be Told

one

"Who is she?"

"No one."

"Oh, no. She didn't cheat on you, did she?"

She didn't.

Colin's relationship with Sadie Reynolds is actually a lot less exciting than whatever Perry thinks it is.

Colin and Sadie go way back. For one, his parents are friends with the Reynolds (though, technically, his family pretty much everyone back home, what with them owning the only major grocery store in town), which meant that Colin has been seeing Sadie before they'd even started school.

School was where things between them began to sour though. Colin made the mistake of befriending Jackass Sean (the nickname, of course, came a lot later, when they all got into high school and Sean's assholery further intensified), and this jackass made the mistake of messing with Aanya Patel.

Getting gum in her hair. Splashing puddles at her feet. Pushing her off the swing.

What Jackass Sean didn't know was that Aanya happened to be friends with Sadie, and Sadie, even as a child, was a feisty little shit.

Whatever Sean did to Aanya, Sadie did better to Sean and, by extension, his friends. Colin should have jumped ship and abandoned that sinking boat when he had the chance, but he stayed and Sadie hated him all through grade school.

Colin, thank god, outgrew Jackass Sean come middle school, but whatever animosity he and Sadie brewed over the years stuck. It wasn't too bad until they got into high school, when Colin's best friend (not a jackass this time) got together with one of Sadie's friends, putting them in the same circle for pretty much all of high school.

To be fair, Sadie didn't really seem to hate Colin anymore by that time. It was just that she enjoyed making fun of him, annoying him for nothing but the joy of annoying him.

Which only annoyed him even more.

The point is, Colin hates Sadie.

He knows that seems juvenile, placed against the backdrop of college and all the complicated issues that came with it, but old habits die hard and old grudges never do, so Colin has been doing his best to avoid her in the past two years.

They move in different circles now, with different friends and different priorities, and they hardly ever speak, to be perfectly honest, save for the occasional run-in back in the halls of their home college.

Those run-ins are every bit as unpleasant as all their other interactions in the past, usually ending with Sadie laughing her ass off and Colin spending the rest of his day in a bad mood.

Unlike their other housemate Drew, who's also taking up Business Administration, Perry has never seen Sadie until tonight, and he's certainly never seen them interact. If he had, he'd never for one second think of them as an ex-couple.

"She's just some girl I knew from high school," Colin tells him now, if only to shut him up. "I just don't want to do the whole hi, hello, how are you thing."

"Oh." Perry's face falls for a moment. Then, "Are you sure she's not an ex-girlfriend?"

"Trust me," Colin tells him, "she's really not."

"Then do you think you can get me her number and—"

"Please do me a favor and put your dick in a blender and die."

Perry frowns. "Now that's not very nice."

"Your face is not very nice."

"What—did you just—are we back in middle school or something?"