There’s radio silence for almost three weeks. Three whole weeks, where I haven’t gone two whole weeks without speaking to people I care about not once in the history of my life.
But here I am, two weeks completely Ayden free and absolutely miserable.
Miserable.
I commute to work, I do my work, and commute back home all while looking down at my phone approximately a thousand times wishing, hoping, wanting a message from Ayden to pop up on my notifications, wanting a missed phone call, something. But he had to listen to me and let me have my space, let me keep my distance.
How long is he going to wait? How long is Ayden Stone going to wait for me?
I know it’s not fair, I know it’s not, but I have to get my head on straight.
“Yo, Aria!” Maddie pops up on my screen in a video call from my personal laptop, looking a tiny bit grainy, but I think that has more to do with what’s going on on her side of the Atlantic rather than on mine. She waves enthusiastically, grinning wide, wearing her custom Maddie wear, some sort of loungewear soccer jersey for a team I don’t recognize the name of (but when do I ever), knees hiked up to her chest, hugging them close, long hair in a Lara Croft braid and snaking over her shoulder.
She looks exactly the same.
“I thought Raleigh was supposed to get on here, too?” Maddie asks, and I nod, afraid to actually start talking because I know I’m seconds away from having a meltdown. “Huh. She says she’s punctual, but she’s always late whenever we do one of these. I didn’t know time zones would suck so bad. So? How you’ve been? ’Cause, buddy, you don’t look too hot.”
I nod again, letting out a watery-sounding chuckle, and close my hand over my mouth, like it’s going to keep it all stopped up until Raleigh gets here.
A notification on my laptop pops up, and I can finally see Raleigh’s face, mirroring the morning brightness in contrast to the closed curtains in Maddie’s apartment. With a click of a button, I’m connected to London, England and Seoul, South Korea and it took a few minutes of mental math to get here, once and for all.
“Hey guys!” Raleigh crows, waving both of her hands excitedly, reminding me of a little kid. “No, what time is it there? Am I late?”
“Yeah, you’re late.” Maddie presses down a finger on her wrist, tapping an invisible watch. “Aria doesn’t look so good, right, it’s not just my noty connection?”
“Maddie, come on, we talked about this. Stop blurting out everything that goes on in your head.”
Maddie grins, a flash of white teeth, and puts a hand under her face, as if presenting an award. “Yeah, but this is who I am as a person, and I’ve been a riot during practice. All of my teammates love me to pieces.”
Raleigh laughs, but sobers when she leans closer to her laptop, getting closer to the camera. “Hey, Aria? What’s wrong? Aria?! No, no, she’s crying. Jesus, Maddie, what the hell did you say to her before I got here?!”
Maddie makes a wheezing noise, like she got the ball in the gut while she’s on her period and has world-ending period cramps, and leans closer to the camera, too, while I struggle to catch a hold of the tissue box and swipe at them until I’ve got a handful to mop up my soaking wet face and leaking nose. Jesus Christ, I didn’t want this to happen, but I miss them so freaking much, and it’s hard being back here, working in corporate Toronto when I miss everything about Montreal and living with these girls. I miss Maddie hating the mornings while Raleigh zoomed through them, crashing early in the night. I miss learning how to juggle a soccer ball from Maddie and learning all the bad words in Korean from Raleigh that I don’t have a hope of remembering right now.
I missed them so much, it’s like they left behind Maddie- and Raleigh-shaped holes in my heart, and there’s nothing that I can do to fill them back up, to make something fit in their places. Maybe that’s just the way it goes.
“I’m okay,” I gurgle, laughing wetly, and gulp down audibly. I swipe at my face, trying to get rid of the tears but more just keep on coming and coming. “I missed you guys.”
Maddie leans close to the camera and points at it sternly, lip curling. “Those are not ‘I missed you’ tears. Tell us what’s wrong, and we can help fix it.” Maddie’s eyes skitter to the side. “I don’t really know how we’re gonna help being on three different continents and all, but there’s gotta be something.”
I wave them off and pull in a couple of deep breaths. “I…I met someone, and I’d like some advice.”
Raleigh nods at me, all serious and ready to get down to business while Maddie screeches at the top of her lungs, throwing pillows around on her couch. “Are you kidding me?!” Maddie shouts, getting up close to the camera so all I can see are her eyeballs. “Are you freaking kidding me?! ARIA! Why didn’t you lead with that? Who do I have to kill to make you stop crying, tell me, tell me!”
“Holy no, I forgot how loud you were, shut it, Maddie and let her talk,” Raleigh rubs at her temples, wincing from all the noise. “It’s super early here, keep your voice down, would you?”
“Why? Should I speak louder so you can hear me across two oceans by way of Toronto? Hmmm?” Maddie snickers, but backs off the camera so she’s sitting down on her couch like a normal person, elbows planted on her thighs, huddled down close to look at the both of us. “Okay, spill it. What happened?”
I tell them everything, as much as I can tell in a way that doesn’t necessarily implicate Ayden as the person I was seeing/dating—whatever—but there’s a strong insinuation once Maddie figures out what my favourite show is, the one I started watching last year, our schedules never really meeting up to spend our Wednesday nights together.
“Hold on, hold on,” Maddie says, doing something on her phone, thumbs flying across the screen, biting at her bottom lip. “Oh, oh, he’s super hot,” Maddie says, nodding, giving me two thumbs up after she drops her phone in her lap. “Good job, Aria, wow.”
Raleigh coughs and clears her throat. “Nope, that’s a hot guy. Are his eyes actually that colour or are they contacts?”
“No,” I croak. “They’re real.”
Maddie pretends to faint damsel-in-distress style, back of her hand on her forehead, tipping to the back and side of her couch pseudo-gracefully ’cause this is Maddie we’re talking about; the only time I’ve seen her being elegant and graceful is when she has a soccer ball between her feet, aiming for the opposing net, there’s just no in between. She straightens up, like she never went through all of the theatrics in the first place. “So? What gives?”
I run it through, the whole stalker online bull, the whole toxic part of the fandom that feels entitled to say what they want to say about whomever Ayden chooses to spend his time with outside of the studio, outside of filming.
“I can send some mean comments on those fan sites if you want me to,” Maddie suggests, raising her hand, volunteering for the job when I haven’t said anything.
“No, no, I don’t want that, honestly.” I sigh, blowing my nose into a tissue. “I just don’t know what to do now.”
“Simple,” Maddie says.
Raleigh rolls her eyes. “Oh, here we go.”
“I heard you, but I’m choosing to ignore you, Raleigh. Just like, flip a coin. Heads for yes, tails for no. Come on, do it right now, and we’ll be here for it!” Maddie claps her hands together, but I think she’s applauding herself rather than being excited for what’s to come.
“That’s actually…that’s not a bad idea. Huh. Madelyn Chase, who knew you’d be giving Aria advice on relationships?”
“I know, right?!” Maddie laughs, clapping excitedly, looking like a seal. “I can think of other things beside football. Like, maybe only sometimes. Okay, like five percent of the time.”
Raleigh grins. “Look at our Madelyn,” she says, pretending to squish Maddie’s cheeks halfway across the world. “Our little baby’s all grown up.”
“Oh my God, stop it, there’s more to life outside of getting dicked down, you know?”
Raleigh groans, clutching her forehead. “Yeah, we know. But it’s fun nevertheless if you have a trusting partner who listens to you and you listen to them.”
“Yeah, Mom, I get you.”
I gasp, pointing at Maddie’s image on my laptop screen. “You’re blushing right now?! Why are you blushing right now?! Maddie? Maddie?”
Maddie freezes. She’s so still in fact that I wonder if her connection froze and we’re getting nothing but a still image, but then of course she goes and blinks and it’s just her trying to pull a fast one on Raleigh and me. “I have zero comment, and I think we should get back to Aria’s little problem.”
“He’s not little,” I huff, and Maddie groans in embarrassment and Raleigh laughs and asks for details. “Just tell me what to do!”
Raleigh nods her head. “Flip a coin. Do it right now, in front of us.”
I slump. “Do I have to? It sounds so dumb.”
“It’s not actually, so just do it, but really think about the question you’re gonna ask,” Raleigh says, leaning in close, while Maddie yells out that she needs a bathroom break and makes a bolt for it, leaving behind just an empty couch for both Raleigh and me to look at.
I grumble but get up and go to where I’ve hung up my purse, getting a quarter out of my wallet and looking down at it—Queen Elizabeth II on one side and an image of a caribou on the other side for tails. I sit back down at my couch, looking into the camera, waiting for Maddie to get back.
“I know this is hard,” Raleigh says. “I’m kinda going through the same thing myself.”
“Oh?”
Raleigh nods, throat bobbing. “Yeah. He’s, uh, well, he’s the kid I knew back in high school, the one I was practically inseparable from back then. He was my best friend, like, just completely got me, you know? And I know we were young, I know, but it doesn’t feel any different now that so much time has passed.” Raleigh looks to the side and twirls her hair around the tips of her fingers, playing with the ends. “It feels right, and it’s scary, to have this kind of conviction when there’s no real basis for it, you know? I just…I know I really, really like him, even if I don’t know if I can be with him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s complicated, and this call was meant to be about you.”
I roll my eyes. “We can talk about a multitude of things, but right now we’re talking about guy problems ’cause they’re a pain in the ass and it’s okay to want an outsider’s point of view. So tell me, tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m just getting some snacks!” Maddie yells all the way from London, still not sitting on the couch, but probably puttering away in her kitchen.
“You know how she is, we’ve got twenty minutes before she comes back, so tell me, tell me what you need to,” I prompt, nodding along like it’s going to convince Raleigh to talk to me more easily.
“If I have the choice between him and his lifestyle, his job really, I’d like to think I’d choose him, but I don’t know, I haven’t been put in your situation and I understand why you need to think about it. It’s a lot to ask of someone, to be in the spotlight when they don’t want to be,” Raleigh says on a sigh.
“Sounds to me like you’ve kind of made your decision, too.”
Raleigh shrugs, and Maddie comes back in frame, bouncing on her couch, a bag of carrots in one hand, still wet by the way she’s shaking it, and a bowl of what looks to be hummus being scooped up and stuffed in her mouth. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing, I’m gonna toss the coin now.”
Raleigh leans in closer, and Maddie shakes a carrot at me, like a cheerleader with a baton.
I think about the question I want to ask, about my comfort zone, about my high (unattainable) expectations and how they’ve led me here, to this very moment, the one where I’ve felt miserable and lonely for the past two weeks, hardly eating or sleeping, having Ayden Stone on the brain when he shouldn’t be.
I think about all the fictional characters I have ever fallen in love with because they’re safe, they don’t exist, and none of this ache in my chest would exist either if I kept my fangirl crush on Chrisander Gage instead of on Ayden.
I think about all the dates we’ve been on, the respect and trust he’s shown in me time and time again, in the way he waits for permission, in the way he lets me talk about the show I love, the characters I love, even if it’s not his favourite thing in the world; I think about the way he looks at me when I talk to him about it, and he’s not turned off by how invested I am in people that don’t exist, that only exist in my imagination.
I think about his gentleness around me, so unusual from all my ex-boyfriends who now feel more entitled in their brashness, in their demand for attention. Ayden’s different, I know this, I know he’s different even than the character he portrays. I think about all of him and all of me, and how we can make that work in this lifestyle he’s chosen for himself, in what capacity I can be by his side, be his girlfriend in a fandom that feels entitled to know every little single thing about him.
I think about shielding him from some of that chaos and uncertainty, from some of those harsh comments, and knowing, knowing that he’ll do the same for me, on those days when I’m weak and have to look up what people might be saying about me, about him, about us.
I flip the coin in the air—heads for going back to Ayden, tails for telling Ayden that I can’t do this, I can’t be the person he needs.
I hold my breath as the coin spins in the air, end over end over end, and then I finally catch it, flipping it down to the top of my hand, covering its surface, letting out my breath in a heavy gust of air.
Maddie and Raleigh look at me, blinking slowly, waiting, patient as always.
I keep my hand on the coin, and Maddie, the most impatient out of all of us, looks like she wants to come through the screen and shake me, make the coin drop and take a look for herself.
But my friends are an ocean away on either side of me and I have to do this for myself.
I have to do this for me, and for Ayden, too.
“I think…I think I have some explaining to do,” I say to both Maddie and Raleigh’s grinning faces.
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