Cheaters = Losers

I wish I could tell you that I was okay. That after a few tears into my ice cream and crappy movies with Chris that I moved on and married Edmund, had little snobby babies and lived a rich and lavish London life, forgetting all about my distant fling with a rock star.

I didn't.

I bawled like a baby.

Stood in the hallway, with my chin on my chest and my arms heavy and numb by my sides I sobbed my soul out.

Everything descended into an unrecognisable chaos around me as my vision blurred and my knees buckled. I vaguely registered Chris and my parents rushing to catch me and then everything dissipated. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't stop howling to allow myself to breathe and the more I tried the more I was stuck dry heaving. I thought I was having a panic attack, but I quickly realised that I wasn't when the tightening bands weren't there and although I couldn't breathe it was literally just because I was crying so hard. There was nothing here for me to panic about, just a wild, throbbing sadness.

The next thing I knew I was being tucked into bed and Chris was quietly placing a glass of water beside me and retreating out of the room. I had come to enough for my hopeless weeping to cease into small sniffles as I was engulfed in a new type of pain. I'd never felt anything like it, and the sudden excruciating force of it made me moan pathetically as I curled into myself in attempt to stop it. I felt as if a land mine had just gone off in my chest, blowing it to pieces and there was a sharp, acute feeling as if I was being stabbed on repeat controlling my upper body. Despite all the tossing and turning I couldn't shake the pain enough to sleep and every time I began to drift Billie's face, filled with hurt as he turned me away, swam into my vision and increased everything to a point where I felt like I was about to pass out.

The next morning came with equal agony, to the point where I simply couldn't get out of bed. Chris and Mum came in to try and convince me to come downstairs but the pain was so strong that I just rolled over and stared at my wall. Billie must have meant more to me than I knew, as if we were tethered to each other in some way and now I was only able to function when he was in my life. Imagine having all your vital organs suddenly and brutally ripped out. That's how I felt, as if I was on the brink of death without him, barely alive.

I drifted through the next week with little to no attempt in functioning. At some point I'd managed to crawl into the shower and I sat there for two hours, contemplating everything, before crawling back into bed. I hadn't spoken a word, aside from waking up screaming at night or being hit by overwhelming waves of sadness where I would burst into ugly sobs.

It had been two weeks and I was still in bed, there was a plate of something on my desk but the smell was making me feel sick and my phone was currently opposite me on my bed. Taking Chris' advice I picked up the device and let my thumb hover over the contacts before taking a deep breath and hitting the call button. The pause was filled with tension before the call tone began, repeating the irritating breep breep in a taunt. I counted the loops, the nerves in my chest and something else building as the fifth loop hit and the phone crackled with static.
"Yo it's Jimmy, I-"
"She don't wanna talk to you!" Tré's voice screeched over her's before dissolving into cackles.
"Yeah and-" the flat beeeeep cut her off and I hung up, unable to think of anything to say in a message. I didn't want to be talking to her answerphone.

Calling was a bad idea, because now I just felt lonelier than ever, especially in the knowledge that Jimmy always answered her phone so it was a clear 'fuck you' to me. I couldn't think of anything to say anyway, and I was pretty sure that Mike and Tré would want nothing to do with me having hurt Billie like that. Or would they? I began to panic, what if Billie wasn't hurting? What if he was okay and I was here acting like it was the end of the world? Swallowing my nausea I came to the gruesome acceptance that Billie was in fact a rockstar and had most likely gotten over me and fucked a good few others since then. In some bizarre way that seemed to give me the motivation I needed to get out of bed. There was no way in hell I'd let myself be caught moping about someone who had already moved on.

I had another shower, but this time I was actually stood up and washing my hair, before putting on clean clothes and making my wobbly way downstairs.
"Lily," Chris greeted me from across the living room. "Hey," I returned her tentative smile.
"Hi," my voice didn't sound like mine, it was so hoarse and croaky and there was a clear strain where I had struggled to force the syllable out after so long in silence. "Don't you have a university to go to or something?" I meekly joked.
"Very funny, it's the holidays, Dumbass,"
"Fifty pence," I reminded her, but she shrugged and padded over engulfing me in a hug, which felt tight and desperately relieved.
"You look like a zombie, c'mon," she said and we embarked on a kitchen raid before settling back in the lounge with a variety of unhealthy snacks that Chris had been secretly stocking up on and a Netflix marathon was soon underway.

Mum and Dad came home from work, I could instantly sense how carefully they were treading around me and I couldn't blame them. If I looked as fragile as I was feeling then it was bad, and judging by my recent behaviour I was like an unexploded bomb. Nobody dared mention his name, or anything that had happened in the last month and I was grateful because I couldn't bring myself to think about it. It was nice to have something to eat, however, and Mum was making a big deal about making sure I was still eating. Apparently I had lost a lot of weight in my misery.

The next day I was awoken with a surprise as Chris pounced on me, announcing that Hattie was coming round. That got me moving and I was up and scrambling round to desperately find some clean clothes. I literally ran down the stairs and leapt onto the sofa as I heard her car pull up and she strolled in.
"Lily!" She instantly ran over and pulled me into a tight hug, her big hair bouncing like a halo following her. She paused, frowning and looked around.
"Where's your boyfriend?"
"Who?" I stared at her blankly.
"Don't play dumb, Billie, the rockstar from America?" She was staring at me with that wide expression, as I she was waiting for me to burst into giggles with another one of my jokes. His name felt like a knife twisting in my chest and I had to work hard to keep my expression neutral, there wasn't a joke this time.
"Billie is in America," Hattie's face fell
"Oh, are you going back out later or is he coming back?" Clearly she'd missed the memo.
"We broke up, Hats, I'm staying in my home and he's gone to his," I was strongly fighting the lump in my throat and the urge to crawl into bed and try to claw my heart out, it would probably hurt less than this conversation. I managed to brush off her condolences and pretend that I was okay, which surprisingly she bought. Jimmy would have seen straight through me, and judging by the skeptical look Chris was giving me, I think she was too.
"It's okay, Hun, I know just what you need!" Oh god, my mind was screaming, Hattie's plans never ended well.
"Retail therapy!"

And in a whirlwind she dragged me out to her flash car and we were hitting Oxford Street. I was blatantly uninterested in shopping in the upscale designer stores, but judging by the Ray-Bans perched in Hattie's hair and the Burberry jacket, she was. Hattie most definitely seemed in her element, strutting down the high street, chatting on about everything from her high-end job to David, her new partner in an even more high-end job, into shops and sampling £400 perfumes as if they were nothing. I couldn't help but compare it to when Jimmy and I went to the mall, much less high end and one hell of a lot more fun. I quickly buried the thought, refusing to acknowledge that part of my life and even let Hattie spoil me with some new jeans from Hollister, "Honestly, Lily, of all the places?" Because apparently Hollister were poor in Hattie's eyes, but I didn't care because they were the nicest jeans I'd ever had.

When we got back home, which was shortly after me accidentally throwing up my three course gourmet meal, apparently my body wasn't ready for so much food, and after more false goodbyes I threw myself onto the settee beside Chris with a noise akin to a dying whale.
"Not good?" I could hear the smirk in my sister's voice and I wriggled myself into a sitting position and launched into a lengthy rant about Hattie.
"I don't know what happened, Chris, but that's not my best friend," I finished with a heavy heart, I missed old England, where I had a loving boyfriend who wasn't a complete twat and  best friends who knew me inside out and cared for me. Hattie was different, Edmund was different, everything was different and I hated it.
"Nothing's changed," Chris said softly, I sent her a scathing look that told her exactly what I thought of her statement. "It's you, Lils, you've changed,"

And it was then that it hit me. I had changed, I left university a sheltered middle class brat and since I moved out to California I met the other side of life. So maybe Billie and Josh weren't poor, but Billie was real and down to Earth. For the first time I had mixed with people who had their own minds and their own views, who didn't live with their heads up their arses and didn't care if they were in a minority. People who did what they loved because they loved it and money came second. People who weren't afraid to be theirselves and enjoy themselves, people who didn't care about classes and judgement. And I realised that I had found home in them, and it was me who changed because for the first time I was seeing the people I used to know as what they really were - fakes.

Chris pulled me into a bone crushing hug that said she knew what I was feeling.
"I should have gone with him," I whispered as I felt the pain begin to blossom in my chest to the point where black spots were swimming in my vision again. Fighting it I tried to calm the ache of loss and longing enough to let me talk.
"I miss them," I managed as I broke down into uncontrollable sobs, and there was somewhere in the back of my mind that registered that perhaps it was Jimmy that I was missing the most, on par with Billie. I took myself off to bed shortly afterwards, apologising to Chris meekly.

I laid in bed for god knows how long. My chest hurt, my whole body ached. I didn't know what to do with myself. I wasn't sure how, but at 3am I ended up sobbing down the phone to Jimmy's answerphone. I don't even know how many times I called her, every time the call timed out I just pressed call again. Over and over again as if the few words she spoke would bring me any kind of comfort, instead I felt as if my chest was being clawed open from the inside. I switched the screen and I was staring at Billie's face beside his number. If it had been hard calling Jimmy, I couldn't describe what it felt like say staring at his number. There was a cold fear gripping me, what if he didn't want to talk to me? I wouldn't want to talk to me. He'd probably be furious at me, or that resigned kind of exhaustion that he does when he's giving up. What if he's over me and he was having sex right then, with another more beautiful blonde? Someone better and more punk than me? Someone he really deserved. In a fit of rage and agony at my last thought I launched my phone across the dark room, not caring to retrieve it as I rolled over and curled into myself.

I wasn't sure if I had really slept. Everything was a fitful blur of tossing and turning, unable to properly settle without being plagued by awful images that I had created. I wished that I could try to move on, but it was proving much more difficult than I had ever imagined. Everything reminded me of them, and I despised anything different.

I must have fallen asleep at some point because I was woken up by a very familiar voice.
"I'm the son of rage and love,
The Jesus of Suburbia," at first I began to panic, about to jump up and scream at Chris for playing that song, but then I realised it was coming from a corner of my room. Diving around I retrieved my phone and without thinking to look at the Caller ID, pressed accept.

"Hi?"
"Hey, Lily," I felt my heart stop at the very unique voice and several waves of emotion, good and bad flooded through me and made me want to curl up in a corner and forget my own existence. This was too complicated for my own good.

"Tré?"