Hello again! Thank you for loving the story enough to read this sequel.
IF YOU HAVE NOT READ "THE BEST I EVER HAD" LEAVE, READ IT, AND THEN COME BACK.
This is gonna be kinda short-ish, and fluffy as fluffy can get. I hope when you read this, it makes you feel the things I felt when writing it. Always let me know what you think about everything because I require constant reassurance. And happy reading!
____________
THEN - Perrie
"Stop doing that," Jade mutters.
I do not stop doing that—that being splashing my galoshes into the little puddles that form as the February flurries of snowflakes hit the ground and melt. "Aww, don't be a killjoy. I'm singing in the rain!"
"It's not raining and you're not singing," she replies.
I stick my tongue out at her, but since we're both crammed under the umbrella, I accidentally wind up licking her cheek. "Why are you so grumpy?"
"I'm not grumpy," she says, grumpily. "I just want to get to the coffee shop. I'm freezing."
"You should have worn galoshes," I tell her.
"I don't like galoshes."
"Well, you're the one complaining about your wet pants."
"I'll give you wet pants," she retorts and then grins, the bad mood suddenly cleared. Nothing makes Jade happier than inadvertent innuendo.
When we get to the coffee shop, Chris and Leigh are already there, discussing the movie he and Andre saw the night before.
"So, you're telling me Death Squelch Part Six had more to offer than the first five?" Leigh asks, disbelieving.
Chris nods his head. "Yup, these movies are like wine."
"They get better with age?" I guess as I sit on the arm of Jade's chair.
"Nope. Some are good and some are terrible, but either way, who cares? You're definitely going to get drunk," he replies.
"Hey, I heard they might make another Die Hard," Jade tells Chris whose eyes widen in excitement.
"No fucking way, man! Really? That's awesome," he says as Jade nods.
"How many times can you die hard anyway?" Leigh jokes. "Dude just needs to go jack off, clearly."
I laugh, but the smile wipes right off Chris's face. "Do not insult John McClane," he growls.
"I'm just joki—"
"Do not. Insult. John McClane."
Leigh and I—and possibly everyone that has ever seen Die Hard—roll our eyes.
Chris's phone beeps and he picks it up. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he says, "Oh, so Jade, I um, really need some coffee." His words are way too deliberate and stilted and it sounds strange. It's even stranger because he has a full cup of coffee in front of him.
"Hey, Chris?" He turns to me. "That thing right in front of you, with the brown liquid? That's coffee."
"Um, yeah but it's cold and I—" Chris's fumbling is interrupted by the beeping of Jade's phone. She quickly reads it and her eyes widen.
"Cold coffee is terrible," Jade blurts, in a tone just as weird as Chris's was. Her eyes keep darting to me and then back to Chris.
"Terrible," Chris agrees, far too seriously.
"A crime upon humanity," Leigh intones, mimicking him.
"Come on, let's grab something," Jade says, and they both stand up.
Leigh and I exchange looks of bewilderment as they walk away. "Why are they being so weird?" I ask.
Leigh frowns and shrugs. "I have no idea. Like why couldn't Jade just get Chris's coffee for him?" She reaches down to grab his cup and pulls her hand away quickly. "That cup is hot. His coffee is still warm!"
"Really?" I twist around and see Jade and Chris are not in the short line to order their coffee. In fact, they're nowhere in sight. "What's going on? Where did they go? Do you think they're planning something for the wedding? And they don't want us to know so that we won't tell Jesy?"
"What could they be planning? The wedding is less than two weeks away," Leigh says. "And Jesy would flip if she didn't have utter and absolute control over every part of it. Jesy and Chris might be the ones getting married, but really it's Jan and Jesy's wedding."
I laugh, nodding in agreement. "I mean, I can only hope she gets this out of her system before Jade and I... you know. Whatever." I wave my hand.
Leigh grins and hugs me to her side. "Aww, look at you. Vaguely insinuating long-term commitment with hand gestures." She places both hands over her heart and pretends to tear up. "You've grown so much."
I shrug. Maybe I have. "I mean, yeah, I guess. It's pretty obvious that we're... yeah. I mean. Yeah. Yeah." Maybe I haven't grown that much. It's not that I don't have faith in Jade or our relationship. It's just that talking about things in sureties feels strange. Almost like we're jinxing it. "Yeah. Whatever."
"Whoa, there. Calm down with the declarations of everlasting love, Perrie," she says and I hurry to change the subject. Growing or not, I'm still me.
"Where have those two gone?" I ask, wondering again about Jade and Chris as I absently check my phone. No messages from Jade, though I do have two missed calls from my mother. Those can wait.
"Maybe they're—" Suddenly, her eyes grow wide. Well, wider than normal. "Oh my god. Oh my god! Oh my god!" she shrieks, and I'm halfway torn between running away in embarrassment and asking her if she's maybe having a seizure.
"What? What?"
"You and Jade—aren't you guys about to celebrate your one-year anniversary?"
"Oh... I guess." I think about it more carefully. "I mean, if we take it as the night before Valentine's Day then, yeah, in about two weeks," I say, not understanding.
"Do you think...? I mean, it totally makes sense. Don't you think she's planning something?"
"Jade?"
"Yeah! She's planning a surprise for your one-year anniversary," Leigh says.
"What surprise could she be planning that she needs Chris's help? I doubt Chris's thinking about Jade's and my anniversary. It's like three days after he gets married."
"It's two days. You're so bad at math."
"What?"
Leigh rolls her eyes. "Chris and Jesy get married on the Saturday before Valentines' Day, which is two, not three, days before Monday, which is your anniversary."
"Fine, whatever. The point still stands. What would Jade be bothering Chris about this close to his wedding?"
"Maybe..." Leigh's eyes widen. "Maybe she's getting advice on how to propose."
I nearly drop my coffee.
"She's not proposing," I tell Leigh, sounding surer than I am. She's not proposing. She's not. She's not.
Is she?
"How do you know she's not?" she asks.
"Because it's not even been a year. We just moved in together like, three months ago!"
"So?"
"What do you mean 'so'? So that's how I know she's not proposing!" I let out a little laugh, but it comes out more like I'm choking.
"But she's Jade!" she says, laughing a little. "And it's you two."
I roll my eyes. "Despite the way you guys have insisted on re-writing history, this is still all pretty new to us."
She looks at me closely, as if she's scrutinizing me and I almost feel like squirming. "I just... I don't get why you're so sure Jade's not proposing."
I'm not, but I'm not about to tell Leigh that. I shrug. "It's not even been a year."
"You keep saying that like it means something," she replies.
"Why do you think it doesn't? You don't propose after dating for less than a year."
She snorts and it's such a huge, ugly noise coming from such a tiny, pretty person.
"It's not a law, Perrie. It's not like not wearing white after labor day—"
"Because that's the best example of a law."
"Whatever. I mean, there's no set schedule. She'll propose when the time is right."
And suddenly, I'm almost sure Leigh is correct. Because with me and Jade, it's always right.
____________
Jade and Chris never return after their mysterious dash out of the coffee shop, so I text her to let her know we're leaving to meet Jesy at the lingerie store.
She responds, Buy me a gift.
I roll my eyes and write back, What size teddy do you wear? And do you like black lace or red?
I prefer something in a pastel, like a baby pink. And get the boy shorts kind because otherwise, I look pear-shaped.
I start laughing, so grateful to have a girlfriend that doesn't expect me to sleep in garments that seem to get more expensive the smaller they are.
Once again, I've found myself at a lingerie shop again with these two, but this time, that devious Chignon is not there, and I nurse my one glass of champagne slowly, making sure I just sit in a corner as Leigh and Jesy choose her bridal lingerie. It's sort of weird to me, honestly, that I'm doing this with them. I don't really want the visual of what Jesy is going to wear when she has sex with Chris.
"What do you think of this?" Leigh asks, waving something tiny at me.
I take it from her and hold it up. "This is supposed to be underwear?" I ask her incredulously. "It's so small and frilly. I'm pretty sure these are the exact size of the curtains my Barbie dream house had."
Leigh laughs and tosses something else in my lap. "They also come in black and red, instead of cream and white."
"And these look like the curtains for a Barbie dream house if that house were a brothel." I make a face. "Anyway, isn't wedding lingerie supposed to be white? All virginal even if it's been like, a decade since Jesy was actually one?"
"Shut up, Perrie," Jesy calls from inside her dressing room.
Leigh shakes her head and turns back to me. "I meant for you. For... er, your big night."
Leigh is the human equivalent of hair clogged in a drain; it's only a little annoying at first, so you ignore it. But then it builds and builds till you have a big gunky mess on your hands. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
"No, I just mean, wouldn't it be a nice way to say thank you? And then there's engagement sex—that's just a gift for both of you," she continues.
"Who is having engagement sex?" Jesy asks, coming out of the changing room, thankfully dressed. She tells the saleslady she'll take the pair in her hand and sits down on the sofa next to me. "Seriously, who is having engagement sex? Other than me."
"Jade is going to propose!" Leigh blurts excitedly.
I take a deep breath. "Leigh thinks Jade is going to propose."
"And when have I ever been wrong about stuff like this?" she asks, indignantly.
"A lot of times," I say, even as Jesy begins rattling off a list. "The time you thought I'd marry Austin, but he was cheating on me. The time you thought I'd marry Sam, but he was gay. The time you thought I'd marry Niall, but I never called him back after our second date, the time—"
"Okay, okay, I get it," Leigh says, frowning. "But this is Jade and Perrie. We all know that she's totally nuts about you. If you called her up and said, 'hey, want to get married in an hour?', she would no questions asked."
I smile and feel incredibly warm inside because she's probably right.
Jesy sits back on the couch. "Would you be okay with this, Perrie?"
Something about the calm, rational way Jesy asks this makes me actually consider it. "I'm not freaking out... so... maybe? But it's also marriage. I'm not exactly carrying on some great legacy of it here."
Leigh nods. "Oh yeah. The Debbie curse. Three marriages for the price of one dysfunctional daughter."
I relax a little; it's so different talking about this with Leigh and Jesy than it is with Jade. As much as she gets why I'm wary of commitment, she wants it so much from me that it makes her biased. Leigh and Jesy take it in stride; they're not trying to battle my neuroses so much as just figure out how I can function with them.
"All I'll say is this: can you actually see yourself with anyone but Jade? Is there anyone out there better for you?" Jesy asks.
I smile. "Of course not. I don't think there is anyone out there that is better, period."
"Then why wouldn't you marry her?" she asks. "You'll both still be exactly the way you are right now. You'll still live in the same apartment. You'll still hang out with the same people. You'll still do the same things. You'll just happen to tick a different box in some forms. You don't even have to change your name."
And when she puts it in such simple terms, it seems like the most logical thing in the world, not some scary endeavor that I'm doomed to fail at. Still, I don't know if I'm ready to announce that I am marriage-ready. So instead, I smile at Jesy and say, "You're a really good friend."
She smiles back and offers a rare moment of sentimentality. "You've been a good friend."
"I helped too!" Leigh whines and I laugh.
"Yes, Leigh, you helped too. A lot. Thanks, guys," I say.
"If we were in a Kate Hudson movie, this is where we'd all start hugging and jumping and squealing around like idiots while some never-going-to-be-as-good-as-Little-Mix-bubblegum-girl-pop anthem plays in the background," Leigh notes.
Jesy tosses back the rest of her nearly-full champagne glass. "Well, we're not in a Kate Hudson movie."
"And I thank god every day for that," I say.
____________
But life is never as simple as deciding you're ready for marriage and then having it offered to you. It's almost as if in retribution for always waffling on commitment, now I can't wait for Jade to propose—the only minor detail being that I don't actually whether she is going to or not.
Things with us carry on as normal, though I wind up analyzing everything she says for little hints. I bother her a lot about her weird behavior with Chris at the coffee shop but she brushes it off and changes the subject, finding a way to distract me. In all the years I've known her, Jade has never not told me something, so my only conclusion is that she can't tell me because she is proposing and wants to surprise me, and I lay off bugging her about it.
And then one night, she says something so otherwise random that I'm positive it's not random.
"You know, if you'd married that moron Zayn Malik, you guys would probably have a kid by now," she says, flipping through the TV channels.
I narrow my eyes at her, all the while internally saying stay cool, Perrie. Jade would not be stupid enough to start my proposal by bringing up the only ex-boyfriend I've ever had.
Would she?
"Why are you talking about Zayn?" I ask. Playing dumb, I continue, "Why are you even talking about weddings?"
"Uh, our best friends' wedding is in ten days."
"Yeah, but why are you talking about my wedding? And to Zayn of all people?"
She shrugs. "No reason. Just saying. OH! Black Swan." She says, finally landing on something to watch, "I love that movie."
"Not again," I say, rolling my eyes.
"Hey, Black Swan is the best movie ever!"
I move her arm away from her body and snuggle into her side, pulling her arm down around me. "It's just a Natalie Portman movie. About ballet. That you watch every time it's on."
"So?"
"Did I mention it's about ballet?"
She snorts. "It's not. It's about crazy chicks, and lesbian sex, and Mila Kunis. Why wouldn't I watch it?"
"Well," I mutter. "We know how much you like all of those things."
She nods slowly like she's contemplating my words. "Lesbian sex... is good. Mila Kunis, I like. But crazy chicks," she says, leaning in to place her hand on the side of my face and kiss my cheek. "Crazy chicks, I love." She trails little pecks, just brushes of her lips along my cheek until she gets to my mouth, where she kisses me harder.
We stretch out along the couch, and she slips her hand into my underwear, slowly moving it in tiny little flicks until I can't stand it anymore and pounce on her. Unfortunately, I underestimate the width of the couch when I flip us and she winds up falling off it. And then I fall off it too, right on top of her.
She lets out this deflating "oof" noise when I land on her and coughs a couple of times.
"I'm sorry!" I say, running my hands all over her chest, in a meaningless gesture to check if she's okay. "You alright?"
She closes her eyes, and takes a few deep breaths, making her nostrils flare. Then she opens them and says, "Yup!" before pulling my head down to kiss her and rolling us over, making me squeal. She's so good at taking my pants off I barely notice when she does it, but I am only too aware when she dips down to kiss along my lower abdomen and then moves lower and lower.
We have sex half under the coffee table, and I have to grab onto the edge of it at one point, just to have something to hold on to, because I can't stop moving, not even when she pins one of my thighs down so she can have a better angle.
When she finally tries to sit up to move off me, she hits his head on the underside of the table. I'm so blissed out and boneless that I barely care when she just flops back down on me and falls asleep in her favorite place in the world—between my boobs.
Sometime, a few hours later, she wakes me up and we go to bed. The last thing my sleep-addled brain thinks is that she definitely showed me how much she loves crazy chicks—or rather, just this one in particular. But she still hasn't proposed.
____________
It's a weird few days. Things aren't tense between us, not really, but she insists on not telling me what she did when he ran off with Chris. I obviously can't tell her that I pretty much know that she was probably out choosing a ring or something, so for the first time, there is something between us. It's not huge and it doesn't really change anything, but I find myself getting almost frustrated at not being able to be completely free with Jade. I wish I could just tell her to forget about proposing, but now I've gotten used to the idea, and I really, really want her to. I want to see what she'll come up with, what sweet words she'll say. I want to see the smile on her face when I say yes and then, however long later, that same smile when I marry her.
Exactly one week before Jesy's wedding, I'm thinking all these things for the millionth time in a jumbled rush of thoughts as I enter our apartment, returning from my final bridesmaid dress fitting. I can hear the shower going, so I know Jade's home. I'm just about to join her when my phone buzzes. My mother is calling me but I'm not really in the mood to talk to her so I just let the phone ring and place it on the table.
And that's when I see it.
A bright blue bag with a white ribbon. Tiffany's. And it's sitting on our dining room table, next to Jade's keys.
Oh my god.
Jade is going to propose tonight.
____________
NOW - Jade
The minute you close to the door of our apartment, I grab you around the waist and sling you over my shoulder.
"Jadey!" you shriek, laughing. "I still have my purse on." I stop walking as you slip your purse off your shoulder and hand it to me. Balancing your weight on my shoulder by placing my hand on your ass, I walk over to the kitchen table and place it on there. "Alright, now you may proceed."
I sprint to the bedroom and toss you on the bed, practically jumping on you. You're laughing and giddy and it's one of my favorite sounds, but right now, I'm really interested in hearing another type of favorite noise you make. I start to slide up your shirt and you slip off my pants.
"Wait," you say.
I don't really wait. Instead, I just mumble "What?" against your skin as I continue to kiss it. You don't seem to understand that there are very few reasons good enough to make me stop touching you.
"Is there some sort of special position we should be doing this in?"
I pull away from kissing your neck to look at you. "Why would there be a special position?"
"I don't know," you say, shrugging. "We just got engaged. Shouldn't there be some sort of..."
"Engagement-style sex?" I ask, laughing.
"Yeah!"
"Is there wedding-style sex?"
"Duh." You roll your eyes at me. "Missionary. It's like a rule; you have to do missionary on your wedding night."
"I don't think that's a rule."
"I think it is."
"Well, because of this conversation, I'm going to make sure we don't do it missionary," I retort.
You pretend to shiver and bite your lip in what is meant to be a comical way, but it turns me on anyway. "Oh, I'm marrying such a rebel."
I laugh. "If that's what gets you going."
"You get me going," you tell me as you remove my shirt. I like the sound of that. "But still... I feel like we should be doing something special. Something different."
"Like what?"
"I don't know... maybe we should do it outside? We haven't ever really done that."
"It's February."
"Good point. Maybe dirty talk? We don't really—"
I cover your mouth with my lips to get you to stop. "How about no talk?" I say, kissing your breast on top of your bra before nudging it away with my nose and then kissing the same spot again. When you moan, I can feel the vibrations against my hand. I like to make you shake.
And after that, there's no talk for a while because there are no words that can adequately describe this. We touch and move, rub and taste, and it's amazing like it always is. But you asked me for something and I have to at least try to give it to you.
"I don't know about dirty talk," I say, barely understanding how I form words as I move in and out, which makes you move in a way that blows my mind. "But how about I tell you that I want you like this, always, with me and on me."
"Jade," you moan quietly and move your hips faster. I think that means you like it and that only spurs me on more.
"And I'll tell you that whatever you ask me to do, I'll do it. If you tell me to touch you here"—I slide my hand to a place that makes you writhe. "Then I'll touch you here. And if you tell me to lean back slightly and go a little faster, then that's what I'll do. And some things you won't even have to tell me to do." I grab your foot and place it on my shoulder, and the angle is unbelievable, maximum contact, unbelievable impact. I turn my head to suck lightly on your ankle and the result is almost immediate; you still for a moment and then quake, arching your back as you cry out. I really like to make you shake. If I wasn't so busy losing my mind myself, I'd realize I've found a brand new way to turn you inside out.
____________