'Cause Love Is A Selfish Thing

Hadley didn't speak the entire ride to my apartment. I couldn't really say I blamed her for being a bit indifferent with me. I didn't even know what to think of myself using my best characteristic as an escape mechanism. I was simply glad I was making a decision for myself though. It had been a while since I had done that, not really thinking of Alex while I looked at pros and cons. Even though he had caused me to consider it, he wasn't part of the planning. I thought of only me, hovering on the border of selfish just so I could be sure I wouldn't do something completely stupid. It was worth it to me. Things would all work themselves out after this. I was determined to be a firm believer in that, trying to be the type of person who looked at the glass as half-full instead of forever empty.

I had almost forgotten what my apartment building looked like, let alone what the inside held. I had spent the week before tour staying with Alex and Rian to make leaving together easier. So it had been over a month since I'd seen it and all that surrounded it. It didn't bother me one bit that it had been so long. I didn't hesitate to get out of the car though. I may have hated this place and everything it stood for, but I was excited to venture into it now to start a new chapter, no matter how short and poorly thought out the chapter may turn out. I didn't know what speed my best friend was going to keep, but I swiftly made my way in through the front door. I did want her to understand that what I was doing was going to be the right decision for me. And when I noticed she wasn't too far behind me, I knew she at least wanted to understand, too.

My apartment was on the second floor of the building and I usually took the stairs since it wasn't even worth it to wait for the ancient elevator to rumble down from where it usually got stuck on the third, and top, floor. This time wasn't any different since I was in no mood to get stuck in the elevator and relive a memory that wasn't my own. I glided past the mailboxes on my right and the elevator doors with the peeling paint on my left and started up the chipped wooden stairs. The layout was mapped out in my brain just like any other of my homes, and I had had every intention of moving along right to my door. Halfway down the hall though, a door behind us opened and Hadley and I stopped to turn.

"Clarke, dear," my elderly neighbor greeted as she stepped over the threshold to see that it was, in fact, me. I had already known whom it was going to be. She was not only one of the only other people occupying the old building, but also the friendliest. She stepped out into the corridor, an ever present grin on her wrinkled but caring face. "I knew you were coming back today. Larry insisted it was tomorrow," she rambled some with a hearty chuckle. She liked to shove it in our landlord's face -so to speak- that she could remember much more than him though he was a few years younger.

I nodded some, pushing my dark hair behind my ear. "Yep, it was today. How have you been, Celia?" I asked her, attempting to get her on a subject that wasn't me being away with the boys. I had completely forgotten today was supposed to be the date of my arrival. That meant they were home now. In the few months I had lived here, I had gotten to know Celia quite well. She would have gone on for ages about what she liked to call "my trip" and asked me a ton of questions about what I had done while I was away if I didn't stop her. She still didn't really get the concept of going on tour and not staying in one place the entire time I was gone.

"Oh, I've been the same as usual. My bridge club was canceled this week, so I'm left with nothing to do today. I find myself increasingly bored," she chuckled again. Hadley snorted behind me, amused by the answer. I, though, was damning whoever had canceled bridge club. Celia was a fantastic neighbor but, as I had already observed, she talked too much about subjects that were painful to me. She could tell I was getting ready to give departing words, because she opened her mouth quickly to get something else out. "You've been getting visitors the past couple of days, dear. Delivery men," she corrected. "I've been signing for you. I didn't want any of the arrangements to go to waste. They're all in front of your door. They still appear to be fresh."

I felt my eyebrows scrunch together to meet in the middle of my eyes. I certainly hadn't ordered anything, having been away and then staying with my best friend. And her words just didn't make sense to me without putting much thought into it, which I was trying not to. "Thank you," I told her anyway. "I really appreciate it." I smiled as genuinely as I could at her which she easily threw back. With that, my best friend began down the hall again and I followed when my neighbor began to retreat back into her own apartment. I was still dwelling on our short conversation and looking down at my feet so I didn't see my best friend stop yet again, causing me to run into her. My head snapped up to see why she wasn't moving and I automatically froze.

"Guess he really does care," she muttered, almost as if she was hoping I wouldn't hear her. "Can we stop this now? You can go over there and you can both apologize. It's obvious that neither of you want it to end." All my hoping that she had finally begun to realize that I wasn't being stupid dissipated faster than it had come. She apparently caught my air of anger because she appeared a bit shaken. My looks were becoming more powerful without me even trying.

"Just help me carry these all in," I demanded, pushing passed her and crouching down to pick up two vases full of flowers to stuff into the crook of my arm. There were three more setting in front of my front door, all without cards but obviously from Alex. He knew I didn't particularly care for flowers because none of them looked or smelled that great to me. But he knew my love for tulips. I loved the vibrant colors and the odd shape and how the little scent they did have didn't give me a splitting headache by being too sweet. Now I had a dozen for each day I had been back home, mostly oranges and reds and yellows. They were beautiful, but I couldn't say they had the ability to fix everything. I idly wondered if there were people out there who believed flowers solved problems as I entered my apartment and paced to the coffee table. Hadley set the vases in her hands down right after I had, but I was too busy looking around me to notice much.

The small amount of furniture in my living room all had a fine layer of dust on it. The cushions and pillows on the new couch were still in perfect order, having not been disturbed in a month. I shed my coat and threw it over one of the sofa's arms before heading into the kitchen. Automatically, I plugged in the coffeemaker and set to looking for coffee in the cupboard. I could hear my best friend shuffle into the room when she could smell the coffee beginning to brew but she didn't say anything. The two of us sat at the table we both were well acquainted with and watched the liquid drip into the glass container. Silence seemed to work best right now. I was sure she had a lot of questions to ask me. She was well equipped with new inquiries for each bad thing that happened here. But for the moment, she kept them to herself. We had all day for anything she wanted to know to be brought up.

I still didn't have much in the tiny apartment. I pulled the only two mugs I owned from the same cupboard I stored the coffee and poured us each a cup. Apparently knowing where I would be headed, she turned for the bedroom as soon as she'd dumped some sugar into her coffee. I followed right behind, but not without complete dread flowing through my veins. The bedroom was where basically everything I owned was. That was what I was here for. For it to be packed up once more to sit in a corner of Marshall and Hadley's basement while I was on the road on my own.

The floor was clean for the most part, only a couple of last minute discarded pairs of jeans on the carpet. The bed was a mess, but only because I never made the time to make it let alone before I had left. I tried not to look at the dresser. But I knew it was going to happen either way. I had to pack up his things, too. All the things he had left here so they could be given back. While glancing over small products he used all the time that were now mixed with whatever I hadn't taken on tour with me, I spotted myself in the mirror. I looked terrible, which wasn't a surprise. I had to wonder though if I had appeared this way all day or if it was mostly because I was now thinking of him here. Promptly, I looked away, toward the closet of which my best friend had pulled the door open and was partially standing in now.

When I stepped closer, I noticed she was already pulling shirts off their hangers and folding them before throwing them in a neat pile beside her feet. "That's not mine," I chimed in when she went to toss the one in her hands with the others. I reached in passed her. "Or this, this, this… That doesn't even look like something I would own. It was just comfortable," I ranted some, thumbing through all the dangling garments. A fourth of my closet was clothes that weren't even actually mine but I had taken to wearing all the time when I wasn't at work because it was easy.

"Whose…" my best friend began, but then seemed to realize. "Oh, right. Well, we can just put them in a box, pile everything else of his in on top of it all," she deduced in the span of only a few seconds. Looking around at all of what belonged to him, she was confident that it would all fit into one box. I wasn't quite sure, but I didn't say anything. She would find a way to make it so. "Are you sure you definitely want to do this?" she questioned hesitantly, pausing everything to sound supporting yet logical. "I know you've had time to think about it, but there's so much there to think about. If you really want to stay out of the relationship, that's fine. But you really don't have to travel the east coast until the holidays."

I didn't sigh, didn't get angry. She wasn't really trying to talk me out of it, I could tell. She didn't want me to go though when I didn't have to. "I'm sure. I need some fresh air, fresh faces. It'll be the easiest way to…" I didn't want to say forget. I knew by now that nothing could ever really be forgotten. "To evaluate. Hopefully, I'll come back with a clear head," I attempted to assure her firmly. Proud of myself, I thought it sounded airtight. With another glance around what I thought was such a dismal room, I promised that I would be back for Christmas as long as they'd have me. She gave me a hug that let me know she would always be glad to give me a place to stay.

Finally, Hadley shed her coat since she was certain we would be going through with this. She left it on the bed before she went back out into the hall. There was a closet between here and the bathroom that had a few plastic totes full of things from before I'd moved to New York as well as broken down cardboard boxes from when I'd moved in here. As she went to fetch the latter, I resumed what she had been doing. By the time she came back with a hefty stack, I already had my shirts separated from Alex's considerably. She set up one of the boxes and grabbed the pile that was his before I was even finished. It was nice to keep a goal in mind to fill it though. And when I was done with that, we easily moved on to what actually belonged to me. Time passed with no problem and it wasn't all that long before half the room was packed up.

She proposed that we order a pizza since there was no food in the apartment, and pulled me out to the living room to wait for it. I couldn't really see why she would rather sit around than continue to work, but I didn't feel like putting up a fight. After she was sure I wasn't going to get up from the couch, she slipped back into the short hall and I heard her dragging something my way after a moment. She emerged again hauling the two plastic totes from the storage closet behind her, one stacked atop the other. She pried the lid off the top once when she had gotten close enough to the couch. "There's so much in here. What is it all?" she questioned, sifting through it.

"Mostly notebooks from high school or stuff I saved from classes," I answered as I stood up to join her. I had kept most of the notes I had taken in each class during high school just in case I would need them for college. It turned out that I really didn't, but I found it was a bit tough to throw them away and couldn't say why. My best friend had four or five notebooks in one hand and the other was digging through what was left in the box. I plucked the paper from her grip and opened the cover of the first to see if it could be tossed out. One glance at the back of the cover and a chuckle bubbled from my lips. "Oh, yeah. I forgot about that," I said mostly to myself.

"What?" she wondered. She didn't wait for an answer though, snatching the notebook back. I didn't even have time to think about hiding it from her. It was old anyway and I found no reason to be ashamed. "Aw, how cute. You wrote Alex's name all over it," she cooed, keeping all the joking from her voice.

I snorted and took it from her. It was from the first semester of sociology during senior year -a time I knew I was infatuated- and something I definitely didn't need to keep. I threw it on the coffee table to start a designated garbage pile. "Puppy love drawings," I claimed effortlessly. I knew the love Alex and I had had since then was far from new and it was considered serious and experienced. It didn't exactly matter what we had now since I was convinced we wouldn't have it again.

I glanced at the other notebooks before adding them to the stack. While Hadley continued to search through my old things, I threw myself on the couch. With the pillows now in disarray behind me, I grabbed my coat to extract my phone from the pocket. After one look at the screen, I announced that Jack had called and left a voicemail. It was a bit odd to me, but my best friend seated herself beside me and told me to put it on speaker so we could both listen.

Setting the phone between us, I tapped the button to play the message. "Hey, Clarke. I know you're probably still pissed off at me. I don't blame you because I was being a total jackass the last time we talked. But I have someone here that you might actually want to talk to," he stated somewhat mysteriously. There was some shuffling on the line as he passed the phone to the other person and they got it situated.

The person cleared their throat. "Hi…" Alex greeted morosely, and then hesitated before saying anything else. There was a rather long silence and I almost believed he had hung up. "I can't do this," he finally voiced, and I heard the phone drop on a hard surface.

There was a yell from Jack about throwing his phone and then he hurriedly picked it back up. The tears that had sprung to my eyes when Alex first spoke were now running down my cheeks and making it hard to focus on what Jack was saying. "He loves you, Clarke. Just come home. Even if he can't admit it, he wants you here," he begged, and then the line was dead.

I grabbed my phone from its resting place and quickly directed it back to the home screen. I held it tightly in my hand, my knuckles turning white. It was all I could do to keep myself from throwing it against the wall. I couldn't afford to buy another one. That was the only thing I was holding back on. My crying was slowly turning to sobs, shaking my entire body as I sat there. I was sure it was supposed to feel good to finally get the emotion out so heavily. But it only made it all worse.

Hadley clearly didn't know what to do or say. She had been shocked into silence by Alex's lack of words and simply couldn't find any comforting words of her own to stop my breakdown. To her luck, there was a knock on the door, and she jumped up to answer it. The delivery guy was none the wiser to what was going on behind the door and exchanged the pizza for money with a smile on his face. My best friend insisted that eating would calm me down. I had lost every bit of my appetite though and wondered if I would ever get it back. I was more than ready to get out of Maryland now.