Marceline eyed Jake from across the chopping block, her mouth dry and her eyes scrupulous as she used her mortar and pestle to finely grind a large amount of coffee beans.
“So,” she began, her voice a little more even and steady than Marceline usually afforded to her tone. “Something’s bugging you.” Despite her stable tone, her chest felt like it was walking on a tight wire. “Tell me.”
“It’s just been a bad day,” he told her as he looked over his shoulder and flashed her a half smile. Technically, that wasn’t a complete lie, though it wasn’t the complete truth either. “Just that stupid book being released on top of people apparently being unable to find out information themselves. You know. The usual.”
She looked up from her mess of coffee beans, peering up at him from underneath the shelf of her brow. She considered his words carefully, her tongue darting across her lips as she debated whether or not to push the issue.
She never would have thought twice about shrugging it off if they weren’t dating-- but now? Maybe people were right. Maybe it was a little different.
“You could tell me if it was something else,” she eventually settled on, dropping her gaze to the coffee beans again.
Jake shook his head. Since she had told him about Eddie, he had been thinking about it nonstop, though it didn’t take that much thinking to know nothing good could come from discussing it. Absolutely nothing.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.”
Funny, how those words always seemed to have the opposite effect desired.
“‘Course it is. If it’s got you in a funk. I’m-- your girlfriend.” It still felt heavy coming off of her tongue, the newness and significance of it fresh.
Jake shook his head as his chopping came to a halt. “Believe me, Marce. It’s not worth talking about.”
Likewise, she stopped pounding at the coffee grounds, her mouth pursed tightly and stubbornly.
“Well-- fine.” Sharply, her tone betraying her effort to seem like she didn’t care, or it didn’t bother her. “I just… Wanted to make it better,” a novel concept, “if I could.”
His shoulders tensed for a moment, but eventually Jake began chopping once again. As he thought over Marceline’s words, he confession about Eddie once again crossed his mind, which made him chop even harder. “Eddie fucking Spencer,” he eventually mumbled as the knife beat against the cutting board.
The bones of her fingers strained hard against her flesh as her grip tightened on her mortar and pestle, her jaw clenching to keep hold of the scoff that nearly came out on an exhale.
She didn’t look up at him, her words terse. “Go on, then.”
“Nope,” he answered quickly. “I’m not even going to go there.”
“You already have,” she replied just as quickly, trying to keep the hiss that was building in the back of her throat restrained. “So let’s get this over with.”
Shaking his head, Jake let the knife drop from his hand before turning to face his girlfriend. “Literally nothing I say will make me not look like an asshole.”
She carried on with grinding the coffee beans for a moment longer before she, too, dropping the pretense of trying to look busy, her arms now folding over her chest defensively.
“I don’t know what you want me to say. I was sixteen. It was very clearly a mistake. I’m twenty-two now, and--” What? He was all she’d ever wanted? She was dating him? She’d always been rotten at comforting people, “-- it doesn’t matter.”
“I know it doesn’t matter,” he retorted. “But at the same time I still have douchebag thoughts about how all I could think about was you and you slept with Eddie Fucking Spencer and why were you fucking him and not me.”
Marceline wasn’t sure how to process what he was saying, though her facial expression read, much to her chagrin, that she was hurt.
Her face twitched for a second, something sadder softening the deer-in-the-headlights look she felt. In the next couple of seconds, her brow creased with anger before she dropped to apathy.
“At least you know it’s a shitty thing to think.”
“Yeah. Well...” Knowing there was nothing he could really say to that, Jake turned his attention back to the cutting board and picked up the knife. He once again began cutting the remainder of the onions.
“And it’s not like I knew,” she rambled on as if she were primarily talking to herself. “I didn’t know you wanted to fuck me. I didn’t even know you liked me like that.” If he even did, or if it was something more teenagery and hormonal and shitty than that. She didn’t know if she wanted to know.
The knife thumped against the cutting board. “Yeah, Marce. I just followed you around like some puppy all the time because I didn’t like you.” In Jake’s mind, his affections had been crystal clear. “I just spent every possible moment with you because I had nothing better to do. I just -- crap, I’m sounding like one of those whiney Nice Guy jerks.”
Her face twisted into something ugly. Rather than look like the dog that was wounded, she looked like the wound itself, her emotions raw and ugly and ready to rot.
“Well. You’ve fucked me. Is it everything you thought it would be? Is it everything you’d hoped for, you fucking ass?” Her breaths came in short, and fuck him for cutting onions. Her eyes stung, and her throat felt too slimey and too tight.
Even though he felt he deserved her harsh words, they still cut deep and brought up feelings of inadequacy that were always constantly in the back of his mind. His own throat tightened as he tried to swallow the saliva that was rapidly forming in his mouth, but it only served to make him lightly cough and sputter. Jake knew the mature way, the adult way, to handle the situation would have been to admit his wrongdoings and apologize, though that was easier said than done considering he felt roughly two inches tall standing there in front of Marceline.
So after letting go of the knife, he pushed himself away from the counter with enough force that cause him to almost trip. Jake managed to catch himself just as he shuffled past his girlfriend and swiped his keys up from the far counter. Right now, he needed to get out of the house.
Baba Yaga would never have let someone walk away when she felt so slighted and wounded. She would have devoured them whole as a courtesy, but Jake? Jake, right now she would have sliced him up thinly and put him into a stew.
But Marceline was an echo of the powerful Witch she used to be, and as enraged and resentful and dejected as she felt, her muddy-coloured eyes watching him slink towards her door. She wasn’t Baba Yaga, and she wasn’t-- couldn’t-- didn’t want to force him to stay so that she could scare some sense into him.
So instead she ghosted him, trailing too close behind him, silently, as he went through the actions of bolting for the door.
While he was well aware she was behind him, Jake didn’t say anything. It wasn’t until he reached the door that he finally stopped, his hand grasped tightly around the doorknob he couldn’t quite yet make himself turn, though she was right at his back, staring and expectant and poised to attack. “Yes.”
She didn’t know what she had wanted to hear. A part of her felt that him just leaving would have been easier. She could stay mad. She could brew in her own resentment. It was only one word, but she didn’t know how to receive it.
“I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what you mean.” She didn’t step back or offer him any personal space, but with him not looking at her, it harder to keep up any kind of mask of indifference, or anger. “I thought you-- liked me for me. Not because you wanted--”
It sounded so stupid, coming out of her mouth.
“You asked the questions? And I answered?” As his hand began to turn the doorknob, it dawned on him the questions were more rhetorical than anything else.
He needed to leave faster. Why wasn’t he leaving faster? They were away from the counter now, and she couldn’t blame the onions for the way her eyes stung, or the way she had to make it hard to breathe, lest she give it away that she was a second away from crying.
“You’re-- such a fucking asshole,” she managed, but her words lacked the bite she wanted.
Shrugging, he pulled on the door and it cracked open as the summer humidity began to spill into the living room. “I know,” he answered as the door opened further. Marceline grabbed the edge of the door, pushing it open wider, faster, trying to steel her chest from the amount of hurt it felt as his hand was jerked away from the doorknob.
Why? Why did it hurt so much?
“And you didn’t even have to get me drunk,” she spat, cold and hard as she tried to process the information he had given her in the way she saw it: he only spent so much time with her because he wanted a fuck. Had everything he had ever done with her been with that motivation?
Or had he been like her? Had he always just hoped, but--
She started to squeak, her eyes closing hard as she winced, looking resolutely to the side.
“You really think I would be that much of an asshole to try and get you drunk?”
No. In her gut, she knew he would never. “You were that much of an asshole just to spend time with me because you wanted to fuck me. You just said it.”
“I did not just say that,” he answered with a hint of offense in his voice. “You asked if it was everything I hoped it would be and I said yes and I realize now that wasn’t exactly the type of question I was supposed to answer.”
“And before that,” she quickly tacked on, desperate for reasoning, “you asked me why else I thought you followed me around. Because you wanted to--” she waited for him to finish her sentence expectantly.
His shoulders slumped in defeat. “Be with you."
She exhaled, long and hard, suddenly feeling like quite the ass herself. One of her hands tentatively reached for his hand so that she could try to tug him back inside.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he let Marceline take his hand. She pulled him in, her hand going to close the door behind him “I made this about me and my own insecurities and...”
“... Don’t mention him. Don’t do it,” she snapped, though not unkindly, her hand reaching for his keys so that she could throw them onto the coffee table, or couch. “Just make it up to me, because I’m still-- really steamed, but.” She went to put her head on his shoulder, rubbing her eyes against his shirt so that she could get rid of ALL the evidence that there had ever been tears there.
“I’m so sorry, Marceline,” he insisted as his free hand snaked around her waist. Right now, Jake wasn’t sure if she even believed him when he said those words, which he supposed was fair. “I’m so, so sorry. I was being a jerk.”
“I could never even hate him as much as I bare-minimum like you, you know? And the fact that you would-- That was bullshit, and I…” The most obvious of realizations were always the hardest. “Maybe that’s why things haven’t changed between us. Because I’ve always-- And for a second? When you made it seem like--” She growled, frustrated with herself. She was good at using words as a weapon; she was less good at using them to soothe and delight. She curled her arms around him, drawing herself as close as she could to him.
He gave her a small squeeze. “Yeah. I know what you mean. And once again, I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, taking a small step backwards, her hand going to reach for his again. She pulled him, luring him further back into her house. “How about,” she started, wanting badly to divert the topic away from the more emotional aspects of it that she wasn’t quite equipped to deal with, the shame of her outbursts still lingering, “you come to my room,” she stopped pulling him at this point, turning to walk and assuming he would follow, “and show me how fucking sorry you are.”