Procrastinators on Stage (Chris Kendall/crabstickz fanfic) *unedited*

Part 18- I Don't Like Feeling Conflicted

“I’ve told you all this before,” Mia protested, sounding desperate now, “Chris doesn’t fancy me! He never has and he doesn’t now.”

The glass had condensation building up on the inside of it as the cold water met the warm of my palms through the glass. Tiny beads of water were trailing down the glass in drips which tumbled over my fingers, as if they were racing with each other in the hopes of finding out which water droplet could reach the base of the glass first.

“I thought that Mia and Chris were together at first,” I said quietly as I watched the glass. I turned the glass in my palms and let the water finely coat my fingers. I was only met by silence. I looked up from the glass to see five sets of awed and confused facial expressions. Is it that much of a shock that I’d thought that?

“W-what made you think that, Jamie?” Mia stammered. She’d drawn her knees to her chest and was looking at me as if I were the most important person in the room. In fact, they were all looking at me like that.

“If you think that I’ve got some new insight into what Chris thinks, then you’d be wrong,” I told them firmly. “He’s just as much of a mystery to me as he is to the rest of you.”

Carrie shuffled in her seat of cushions next to me so that her hand was resting on my forearm. “But what made you think that? There must have been some indication…”

“That would be the collage of photos and fanart on his wall,” I explained. “There were ‘Summer in the City’ photos on there, and he kept looking at the pictures of Mia in an odd way; in a different way to how he looked at the rest of you in the photos…That’s what made me think that you two were together, until Chris corrected me.” I wanted to add that Chris’ actions that day were the reason that I was determined that RandomStickz was meant to be, but a small part of me nagged at me, reminding me that I couldn’t say that; couldn’t openly go against Mia and Dan’s relationship. Not to mention how I couldn’t tell them that Chris had openly admitted to me that he still loved Mia, even after a year. Maddie had said that I should be sneaky, after all.

“Oh,” Mia exhaled, looking close to being petrified. “Excuse me,” she mumbled as she got up and left the room.

I watched her go in surprise until I heard a door slam and the sound of water running. “What’s she doing?”

“Mia hates showing her tears or negative emotions to people,” Lucy said simply, her voice laced with a tender concern. “She’ll leave the room if she feels too upset, and she doesn’t like being confronted about it. Only Dan and Chris have ever calmed her down properly.”

“The running water covers up the sounds of her crying,” Lynn added glumly. “It’s sort of a mutual thing between Mia and the rest of us that we should leave her to her emotions at times like this, which is harsh, but she’s stated before that she feels better because of it if we didn’t see her upset.”

“That’s…odd,” I mused, tapping my fingers against the side of the glass which was still cupped in my hands. “So you just, continue without her? As if she never left?”

“Don’t accuse us of leaving her, Jamie, please,” Lucy whined. “Mia wants to fix things herself, says that she doesn’t want to worry us…It’s our fault for bringing up the love triangle, isn’t it?”

“It kind of is,” Poppy said. She was carefully shredding up the pizza crust in her hands and popping each chunk into her mouth as she chewed methodically. “I feel bad about it, now.”

The others mumbled an agreement as I watched them in confusion. This was their friendship? If Mia was upset, they actually listened to her when she said that she didn’t want to worry them?