She hadn’t really been expecting a response.

Particularly not one so quickly after she’d done the unblocking.

When people had been angry at her in the past, even an apology would usually sit for a while before getting a response, but instead, her half-admission of Jess’s earlier talk had been met with… If not support exactly, then a willingness to reestablish what they’d had up to her own comfort level. Even her own mom had made her wait three days, once. Instead, she’d gotten a response in under two hours.

But that also forced her to think about what Jess would say that would be likely to be a problem.

There wasn’t much, if she were being honest with herself. For at least the past two years, Jess had been absolutely nothing if not unreasonably kind to just about everyone she met.

Maybe that had changed in the past few months, but Emma didn’t think it would have.

Well, hoped, at least.

It certainly had at least one reason to have changed; she had, after all, been cut off from her best friend abruptly after an argument.

And going there made Emma cringe again. She hadn’t really wanted to cut Jess off like that, even after they’d had the argument where Doug had… not outed her, exactly, but given Jessica enough information to put together the crush Emma had developed on her.

Thinking back on how that conversation had gone was still mortifying, of course. Jess had tried, unsuccessfully, to redirect the conversation back to whatever she’d been complaining to Doug about, while he insisted that she have the discussion with Emma, first.

When Jess had completely refused to do that, Doug had kicked her from the session, then asked Emma to block her, so that he could protect her from anything Jess decided to lash out with.

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At the time, she’d been too overwhelmed to do anything much more than nod, do what he said, and hide out for a few days, not answering any calls or messages and doing the bare minimum to stay on top of her coursework.

Mark had dragged her out of that, though, pulling her into one of his shopping trips for his cosplay blog, always a truly enormous affair. She wasn’t sure exactly how he managed to have the income to keep building the elaborate costumes or why he’d decided that she, a shut-in nearly single-interest nerd, would be useful for that, but she wasn’t about to complain about being pulled from the downward spiral that was attempting to figure herself out on her own.

He wasn’t really a replacement for Jess, but she’d thought that friendship so thoroughly poisoned that the other girl would have wanted nothing to do with her.

She was, apparently, wrong about that.

‘I don’t really want to hear anything about Doug, cause we’ll just get in an argument. I think everything else is okay though.’

That should be enough. Doug was kind of a jerk sometimes, but he was smart, hardworking, and obviously cared about her, maybe even more than he did his other friends on the team.

‘Even your crush on me?’

It felt like her heart stopped for a second. It wasn’t really an intellectual position but she’d been hoping that Jess wouldn’t be so willing to respond to her. It made it harder when she knew that she was actively talking to someone.

But at the same time, Jess kind of deserved any answers she wanted on that front in particular. So she wasn’t going to be the one standing in the way of that, no matter how embarrassing it was.

‘Even that, if you want.’

There. That was suitably noncommittal. It wasn’t something that she really wanted to talk about, but the willingness was there. It had caused the whole mess with Jess leaving the team, so she probably had at least a few questions.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t notice earlier. Honestly, I thought you were into somebody else and dismissed the possibility that it could be me. It doesn’t change the fact that I am tragically straight, but if I’d known I at least could’ve, idunno, reacted? Talked to you about it? Might not have helped, but at least then this whole mess could have gone down differently.’

Emma stared at that for almost a minute, reading and rereading the text what must have been over ten times before her brain finally restarted.

She locked her phone, tossing it on her bed and nearly running out her front door.

She needed to think about that somewhere else.