CHERRY. [JESS MARIANO]

You Called Me a Bitch?

"How?" I questioned Zayna as I poked my chopsticks through a bag of egg rolls. "How can you possibly stand it?"

She looked up at me from across the coffee table with the Chinese takeaway box in her hand. "Poetry is a beautiful work of art," she explains to me before stuffing her face with some sweet and sour chicken.

I snorted at her words and shook my head at her. "But it's so boring, it's like just say it already. We're dying over here." I express my dislike for poetry. I wasn't the kind of person who had enough patience for that.

"This is coming from the person who enjoys Austen and Dickens," Zayna retorts as she sips on her glass of water. One thing that I found out about her after a few hours of talking was that she did not like coffee. At all. She despised its bitter taste and wasn't afraid to voice it out to me.

"I wouldn't be the person I am today without them," I commented as I put the takeaway box in my hand on the table and crossed my legs on the couch. "You should give it a try," I encouraged her.

She held her arm wide open as she looked around our living room. "It's a shame we don't have a library here," she mocked as I sent her a mischievous grin.

"You poor girl," I tutted as I pointed in the direction of my room. "Take a look from the shelf, I swear you won't regret it."

Zayna puts on a thinking face as she twirls a few strands of long brown hair between her fingers. "If I do this, can I choose dinner tomorrow?"

"You can order food straight from Mexico if you'd like," I agree to her terms as she begins to get up from the armchair she was sitting in.

She stops halfway toward my room and turns to face me. "Can I choose the music too?" I sigh and nod my head at her, knowing that we had pretty similar music taste if you ignored her countless Jazz albums.

"Do you have any suggestions?" I heard her call out from inside my room as I continued to pick on whatever food was left on the table.

"Take my Princess Bride copy!" I yell back at her as I consume yet another egg roll. I heard some shuffling come from the room when I realised what a big mistake I made. My eyes widened and I dropped my chopsticks to the table and dashed toward my room.

I would've fallen face first on the floor if it weren't for my hand grabbing onto the doorknob. I look up to see Zayna flipping through the copy of The Princess Bride that Jess had given me.

She eyed the pages with a frown on her face as she took in all the notes in the margins and the highlighted lines. My head was saying some things but my mouth just wouldn't move. It felt so weird to see someone else besides me look through that book. It was as if someone was looking through all my memories.

Wanting nothing more than to snatch the book out of her hands, I knew I couldn't do that. It would be rude, especially since I suggested that book to her. It was simply an innocent mistake.

Zayna opened her mouth to say something but stopped when she saw the expression on my face. No doubt it was some kind of look that portrayed everything I was feeling in some kind of messed up way.

"I'm sorry," she quickly said once she noticed how intensely I was staring at the book. She thrusted it back into my hands and sent me an apologetic look. "It's just, you told me to take this book and-"

I quickly shake my head at her, cutting her off. "It's fine, really." I assure her. "I just forgot that I brought this copy. My other one is back home." I knew I should've told her that she could still take the book but I just couldn't bring myself to give it to her.

"Someone gave it to you?" Zayna guessed as I merely nodded in response. "Someone special?" Damn, she was good at this.

"You could say that," I downplayed how special Jess was to me. I played with the frayed pages of the book as she continued to speak.