“What are you doing?”
“Helping you of course!”
Bridget walked over to Hailey’s bluetooth speaker, a cheap little blue one shaped like a boom box, but it got the job done.
Then, “Since You Been Gone” started blaring from the speaker and Bridget yanked Hailey off the couch, shouting the lyrics until she joined in.
When the song ended, the music just kept going and she was listening to “Bye Bye Bye” from *NSync. They went on jumping around and singing to breakup songsfor the next half hour before both of them were close to losing their voices.
Falling back onto the sofa and retrieving their bowls of heaven from the coffee table, Hailey realized that she actually did feel better. The music filled her soul with the promise of moving on, and suddenly that possibility felt easy.
After some more bites of ice cream, they had a short debate about which of the songs they played was the best one of all time. Bridget was an adamant T-Swift fan and chose “Never Getting Back Together,” but Hailey argued “I Will Survive” was a classic for a reason.
Once the dust cleared from their debate, Hailey figured now was as good a time as any to tell Bridget what she didaftershe left Gage’s.
She started with the text he sent earlier that day, then his reaction to the news and finally sweating out the frustration playing soccer until the sun went down.
Bridget just listened the whole time with her hands over her mouth, making squeaking noises every time she got excited, but she was considerate enough to wait until the end before she offered her opinion on the matter.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about anything in my life, and I’m getting married next month,” she said, and Hailey really hoped she was exaggerating. “When are you going to see him again?”
“Well, we have a soccer game a couple nights fromnow so I guess I’ll see him there.”
“No, not with the team. I’m talking about alone?”
“Bridge, three days ago I had probably the worst experience of my life, I can’t just jump right into something new. I’m not ready. Shit, I could have an STD or a fucking child growing in me that I don’t even know about yet.”
“Okay, you’re right. Fuck, that’s a lot. When do you get all those test results back?”
“No more than two weeks, some results take longer than others.”
“Geez, why is science so far behind? Speed it up, rocket scientists!”
Hailey felt it unnecessary to point out that rocket scientists were probably busy working on rockets because they didn’t study diseases.
“I’ll email NASA and ask them if they can speed up the testing. I’m sure they’ll get right to work on that.”
“Good, you do that. In the meantime, what’s going through your head? Are you okay? Are you going to go after this asshole?”
“I don’t think it’s worth it. He already left the state. I just want to not think about it.”
“Alright, but if you change your mind, I am ready to attack. Oh my gosh, you know what I just thought?” Bridget’s eyes were wide and her smile was mischievous.
“I’m honestly very nervous to know. Is it something violent?”
“Of course not. I would neveracton my rage. Prison doesn’t seem fun. No, I was thinking that maybe you should ask Avery to go to the wedding with you.” She waggled her eyebrows and her smile grew wider.
“I—Maybe. I’ll have to think about it. This all just happened in the last three days, it’s still a little raw.”
“Fiiiiiiiiine. Now be quiet, I love this scene with Michael and Dwight.”
The rest of the night went by with more ice cream, cookies and talking about anything but what happened this week.
Bridget left the comfort food leftovers behind for Hailey when it started to get late. There was way less left than was probably healthy.
She drew a bath and threw in some epsom salts to get rid of any toxins left behind from this week, if that was how this stuff worked anyway. But, a bath couldn’t hurt.
Laying back against a towel she was using for a pillow, Hailey went over everything that happened in the past few days.
