Chance Encounters

one

Dedicated to MelanieS73 for being the first commenter on the Author's Note (which makes her the first person to have checked this out). Thank youuu :)

Chapter 1

Looking back, I think it's safe to blame Serendipity for everything that happened that Saturday night.

I'm not saying I had whirlwind of romance revolving around a series of accidental almost-encounters that led me to finding love, no, I wasn't talking about personal experience involving serendipity at all. What I really meant was that it all began the moment Tori showed up at my doorstep with a DVD of the movie Serendipity.

I almost slammed the door on her face.

I wouldn't have hesitated to do just that if she didn't happen to be my best friend.

"I don't understand," she said when we were in the kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards to look for something to eat while watching. "How can you hate that movie?"

"I never said I hate it." I shut the microwave close and set the correct time and temperature for the pack of microwavable cheese popcorn I placed inside.

"Like your scowl isn't enough to tell me that you obviously don't like it." She was pouring some cereal on a bowl. This had always been one of the quirky things about her. She loved eating cereal without milk while watching a particularly sappy Rom-Com.

I took a deep breath and tried to come up with a simple answer for her question.

I've learned from experience (after telling her my opinion on Titanic) that it was best not to say too much; otherwise we'd end up having a debate about it all afternoon. It would have been fine if her arguments were actually valid, but I could only hear her say "but it's true love!" one too many times before I could feel a headache threatening to set in.

"I just don't see the point of their actions." I grabbed the largest bowl we had and set it on the counter, examining it for any signs of moisture. I didn't want to ruin perfectly good popcorn because I was too busy explaining the pointlessness of a movie I didn't even like. "If you really like some guy, why on earth would you not give him your phone number?"

"But Reed, that's the point! You leave it to chance and fate to bring you back together to see if you really are meant to be. It's true love."

Ah, there it was. If my life was a comical cartoon, this was the moment my right eye would have started to twitch. Every word she said literally made me want to question how, exactly, I ended up being best friends with her. I would have argued more, but I knew it was impossible to deal with Tori when it came to her "true love" argument, so I decided to shut up.

I didn't even know why she liked forcing me to watch these movies with her. It wasn't like I offered good company. Watching with me meant that she always had to shoot me sharp looks and withering stares whenever I snorted during "the best parts." I simply couldn't help it. I'd never been big fan of grand romantic gestures and passionate displays of affection—not in real life and definitely not in fiction. They just seemed funny to me.

When I asked her why she was willing to put us both through this kind of torture, she told me it was because "One day, you're going to change your mind about love."

I didn't tell her that she was asking for the impossible, because I knew, yet again, that it would only lead to another debate filled with her invalid arguments. So every once in a while, she'd come over at my house to force me to watch another (horrible) romantic movie with her while having another round of our snort-glare routine.