Kill me. Shoot me in the head. Slit my throat and stitch me back up again like a voodoo doll. Hang me by my hair from the highest tree. Make Jaffa Cakes poisonous. Just somebody do something which will stop them from talking like this and forcing me to participate as well! Argh!
I was mentally screaming at myself and casting insults to every single person that I could think of. Why? Because at this stupid pizza/film night, we’d stopped taking interest in the film that was playing to instead converse about relationships. Lynn was engaged. Mia and Poppy were playing happy couples with PJ and Dan. Carrie apparently had potential suitors lining up around her, including both YouTube personalities and people from work. And that just left Lucy and me wanting to bang our heads against the wall in unison, hoping to knock ourselves out and avoid the whole conversation topic.
It wasn’t that I was humiliated or embarrassed by being single, it was just how I hated soppy relationships in real life. If they wanted to talk about how each other’s relationships were going, fair enough, but could they maybe just stop talking for now? It cannot be possible that three of the people in this room had each met their soul mate within the same few years! Relationships end. Relationships end in three ways: you split up, one of you dies, or you get married. There’s a two out of three chance that it won’t end well. It’s not exactly encouraging.
The main problem I had with this topic was that I could actually involve myself in it if I wanted to. I could find out more about Dan/Mia or Chris/Mia. I could learn and put my plans into action. Unfortunately, that would apparently give everyone else the right to ask about my past relationships as well. For the record, that past consisted of four guys who’d all dumped me. Coincidentally, they’d all dumped me when they’d each lost interest in me when someone new turned up. Yet another reason to why I hate new people.
Whilst I was still umming and ahhing over my potential participation, the buzzer for Carrie’s door went off again.
“Oh, that’ll be the pizzas, I suppose,” Poppy said quietly into her wine glass, which was still full.
“I’ll get it,” Lucy and I blurted at the same time. I glanced over to the floor where Lucy was seated. She was sat on a throne of cushions with various blankets spread across her lap, from which she was eyeing me challengingly. We both hastily scrambled up from our nests of blankets to dash to the door.
“I’ve got it!” Lucy giggled as she pressed the intercom button to speak to the delivery person and tell them which floor we were on.
I scowled at the back of her head as she chatted with him. She stole my excuse to leave the conversation!
Lucy let go of the intercom button and beamed at me coyly from over her shoulder. “Did you want to get that? Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
I tapped the button on the intercom which would buzz the delivery guy in, something which Lucy had overlooked as she’d been too busy gloating. “Thanks for letting me get the pizzas,” I said sweetly.
My short friend groaned. “Eugh, you bitch.”
“Talking about yourself in third person, are you?” I quipped. Lucy shook her head at me and giggled despite herself. “How are you surviving the relationship topic?” I asked her as we leant up against the walls of the hallway together whilst we waited for our food.
Lucy twitched her nose, consequently moving her glasses back up her nose. “It’s okay…a bit sickening and awkward for us singletons, but okay.”
“Finally someone agrees with me about the sickening part! It’s all so…fluffy.”
“Exactly. But, I do kind of want to add to the conversation,” she admitted. “I hate sitting on the edge of this.”
I mulled over her words for a moment, my brain concocting a plan like a specially brewed potion. “How about we make a deal.” Lucy looked over to me expectantly, her eyes sharp. “If I join the conversation by saying something about, I dunno, Chris and Mia, then you have to join the conversation and mention this breakup of yours at some point. Deal?”
“If you talk about your breakups as well, then we have a deal.”
I stuck my hand out to her, “Fine.” We shook hands formally.
“I’m only interested in this because I want to hear what everyone else is thinking about Chris.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you really?”
“Of course!” she persisted. “I want to find out more about this love triangle.”
“What?” I yelped in surprise just as the doorbell rang. Could they all be shipping Mia and Chris as well?
Lucy squinted at me slightly as she walked around me to answer the door. Once she’d paid for the pizzas, she hobbled back into the flat with the three pizzas balanced precautiously in her arms. “The love triangle?” she tried again as she made her way back to the others. “You, Chris and Mia?”
Wrong love triangle. Why can’t you all see that that love triangle doesn’t even exist?! There is nothing happening between Chris and I!
A blue wrapped sweet flew at my head as Lucy and I stepped back into the lounge. I scarcely managed to duck out of the way behind the safety of the sofa back, when what I identified as being a coconut Quality Street sweet landed with a crack on the hardwood floor where I’d previously been standing. Yelping and giggling assaulted my ears as I looked round the edge of the sofa to see Lynn, Carrie, Poppy and Mia engaging in some sort of sweets fight. Popcorn, Maltesers and Moams were flying across the room as each girl reached into those food bags and flung handfuls of the food at each other.
Lucy scurried to hide next to me, where she also crouched down. “Aw, I wanted to be the one to start a food fight,” she sulked to me as she hugged the pizza boxes to her chest.
I reached out to one of the three pizza boxes that Lucy was holding, taking the still warm box in my hands and smelling the enticing smell of melted cheese and tomatoes. It took great self-control not to rip the box open and devour its contents like a starved big cat just then. Instead, I lifted the box above my head like a shield and walked into the fray.
“Haha, it’s the white flag of surrender,” Carrie giggled as she threw an empty Jaffa Cake box at my shield.
I lifted my knee up to block the Jaffa Cake box, which fell pitifully to the floor at my block. “That wasn’t exactly what I’d been going for with a white flag, but okay,” I shrugged, waving the box around a little to illustrate my point.
The sweet-fire ceased a little at the sight of the pizza box, so I lowered my shield. I couldn’t help but smile triumphantly to Lucy as she popped up from behind the sofa.
“Can we eat now?” Lucy chirped. “I’m hungry!” Lucy’s voice was met to eager mumbles of agreement as I was practically pounced on and the pizza box ripped from my grasp. Soon enough, we were all crowded on the sweet littered floor whilst we ate our fill of the pizzas. Defrosted pizzas from the freezer are nothing compared to the fresh pizza from takeaways.
“So, what caused you all to start a sweets fight?” I asked nonchalantly as I tried to mop tomato sauce off my chin with the back of my hand.
Lynn snorted. “Mia was refusing to tell us about her old YouTube crushes from the pre-Dan period of her life.”
“Because we all know that Mia practically drooled over Dan before she’d even met him for the first time,” Carrie teased Mia. “She was such a little stalker!”
Mia was bright red in the face right now, and was trying to disguise this fact by stuffing a garlic dough ball into her mouth. “So was Lucy,” she mumbled through her food.
“Yeah, but I’m not going out with my idol now, am I?” Lucy mocked Mia.
I rolled my eyes and smirked at the girls as they all giggled at LuckyQuartz. “Which idol would you have gone out with, Lucy?” I said innocently.
Everyone seemed to turn unanimously to face Lucy, who was gaping at me like a landed fish, her eyes wide behind her glasses. “I don’t…” she stuttered, gradually turning a pink colour.
“I’d guess Jack Howard,” Lynn mumbled through her drink. “Lucy and he made a collab video the other month and there was so much eye fucking it was unreal.”
“Oh, really?” I smirked. I looked to Lucy with a raised eyebrow.
Lucy’s eyelids fluttered as if she were trying to blink away dust from her eye before she spoke again. “Just don’t say anything about it, okay?”
“Aww, you have a crush on Jack! That’s adorable!” Poppy cooed.
“I’ll have to set the two of you up,” Carrie added enthusiastically. “But what about you, Jamie? You and Lucy left the room at a crux moment in our conversation and we never got to ask you about your crushes.”
“She’s right,” Lucy added. She stared at me for a moment, as if she was trying to portray something with her eyes. Maybe she was trying to remind me of our little deal or something, just by giving me a death glare. “There’s our glorious love triangle to talk of, after all.”
“Oh gods, not this again,” Mia groaned. She tilted her head to the side and grimaced into her hair.
“No, I think it should be a ‘yes’ to this again,” Lucy beamed. She shuffled forward and rested her chin in her hands, completely forgetting about the half ingested pizza bone that she’d left in the pizza box.
“How about starting with how Chris has had this huge crush on you ever since you met this time last year, Mia? But now his heart is torn between Jamie and you?” Poppy gushed.
It was my turn to start at this. I could almost feel my ears prick up as I took another bite of my mozzarella pizza. I almost choked. “What?!” I managed to cough after Carrie had liberally pounded me between the shoulder blades. Poppy even got up to go and pour me a glass of water from the tap to help me.
“It’s that ‘there’s a thin line between love and hate’ thing,” Lucy pointed out to me. “You and Chris absolutely hated each other for the first few days that you knew each other, but over the past day or two, you’re so sweet around each other!”
“I can only think of the two of you curled up sleeping together on the sofa when we came to your house on Monday,” Carrie chuckled, her eyes going glassy as she leant her hand on her cheek and smiled dimly at the ceiling. “You were just so cute I wanted to smush your little faces together!”
Poppy handed me the glass of water as she reappeared from the kitchen units. “You and Chris may have not known each other for long, but we’re all shipping you like crazy. You might be able to help Chris get over Mia.”
I accepted the glass from her and took a long drink in the hope of relieving the sand papery sores that my choking had caused in my throat. I then frowned into the glass as my mind processed what Poppy had said.
“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?
On the TV before us, ‘The Holiday’ was ending with the credits looping over the screen like a skipping film reel. I wasn’t sure if it was the sombre mood in the room, my plan for Mia and Chris, or my stupid wish for happiness in others, but I found myself standing up and walking towards the sound of running water.
The door I came to was plain wood with a decorative sign on it which read ‘Bathroom’ in spirally blue writing on a seaside themed plaque. My eyes darted over this sign for a moment as I gathered my bearings. Why should I help her? I could miss Lucy revealing what had happened in this horrible break up of hers…What made me any more prepared than Mia’s other friends for this talk? Am I even her friend?
I kind of think she was my friend by that point. I wanted what was best for her, in a way. I wanted her to be happy, just like I did with everyone else, but there was something odd about Mia. Not only was I on this challenge to get her and my flatmate together so that I could see them happy, but Mia was actually nice to me. Okay, all of those girls were nice to me, but Mia had been the one to correct me about Chris, to make sure that I was accepted by everyone else. Carrie may be one of my greatest friends, but she’d simply told me to be myself in that assured and lovely way of hers. Mia actually led me by the hand to be included. And besides, this counted as me talking to her when she felt overwhelmed by a situation, which is what we’d promised to do to help each other earlier on in the evening.
So I knocked on the door. “Mia? It’s Jamie. Let me in.”
Even through the sound of running water, I could hear a gentle sobbing. Why is she actually crying? Is it guilt for Chris? Is it just the build-up of people going on about RandomStickz? Or is it because she wished RandomStickz was real? I didn’t know, how could I?
“Please?” I added cautiously, pressing myself against the door so that I wouldn’t have to speak very loudly.
The lock clicked as the door opened for me, allowing me to dart through the slim gap between doorframe and door, in order to see Mia.
She was crying. She’d managed to shuffle over to the door to unlock it for me, but she was now sitting with her back up against the bath, in which the water was flowing softly down the drain. A small plastic case was balancing on her knees and she now had a pair of glasses perched in her hair like a headband as she covered her face with her mascara tipped fingers. I presumed that the case was for her contact lenses. The snuffling sounds she was making were almost pitiful.
I locked the door behind me before slowly moving to slump down next to her on the floor. I even reached out to my left to unroll some toilet roll from the holder and pass the little clump of tissue to her.
“Thanks,” she sniffed.
“It’s fine,” I replied with a shrug. We sat in silence for a small moment before I spoke up again. “You know, when you said that we could talk to each other if large groups of people got too much, I didn’t really think that it would have happened tonight.”
Mia chuckled dully into her tissues. “You didn’t?”
“Nope, I wouldn’t be saying it otherwise.”
“True.” Mia blew her nose loudly.
“I’m sorry for bringing up Chris and fuelling them.”
She dabbed at her eyes and took a long breath. “It’s not your fault. They wanted to know…But it all just- just makes me think.”
“And that’s such a difficult thing for you to do, we know,” I smirked to her.
Mia laughed again, this time nudging me in the side with her elbow. “Shut up.”
I giggled a little before hiding myself behind a mask of seriousness again. “What does it make you think?” I dared to ask.
“About what would have happened if I’d dated Chris. If he did like me at all in that way, that is. I mean, I love Dan, but it’s difficult sometimes.”
“Difficult?”
“Yeah…do you know how popular he is online?”
“So much so that ‘very’ is an understatement?”
“Exactly. He’s busy a lot, and I get that. He’s got YouTube gatherings to go to, an awesome radio job too, but I have to stay behind almost every time because I’ve got university to complete with a shit-tonne of coursework as well. It hurts to think that he’s moving on and achieving so much when I’m left behind here.” She took a long breath, as if saying this had taken a great deal of energy from her. “It’s happened before, me feeling like this, but it was different then. I didn’t have many ties and could just run around with Dan like a loyal pet.”
I put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her as she sniffled into my jumper.
“It’s not his fault, but even the Phandom have turned on me a little,” she revealed, as if a dam inside of her had split open to open all of this to me. “Some of them are sending me intense hate and death threats. I shouldn’t take notice of them, but they sting.”
“I’m sorry, Mia,” I whispered, resting my head against hers. “Have you told him?”
She shifted away from me to look me in the eye, her blue eyes still watering as she coughed up her words. “I can’t. It’s like my voice simply refuses to provide reasons to make him worry. I hate it of myself, but it’s like a barrier which separates me from everyone else; I can’t overcome it. It’s just that, when even my friends talk about Chris like that, it makes me think that I might not be struggling so much if I were with Chris, you know?”
I nodded slightly. “You’re questioning what would have happened if things had happened differently...” I knew all about questioning the ‘what ifs’. “Maybe you love him too much?”
“Too much? I dunno, maybe…Nic accused me of as much once, but is there a level or meter for love?”
I shrugged helplessly.
“I just wish it were that little bit simpler for us, that’s all.”
With this talk with Mia, I was given a new determination to make her happier. Even she was questioning her relationship with Dan, and I hadn’t done much to cause that. She was even lingering on the idea of being with Chris.
After using up at least a third of the toilet paper roll to wipe her tears and clean her face up, Mia was vaguely ready to leave the bathroom. With that, the two of us sat together on the floor in the lounge, like an unspoken bond had formed between us as we watched ‘Letters to Juliet’ with the others. Everyone else was watching the two of us with wide eyes, but Mia and I only tried to concentrate on the film and eat as much food as possible. Food is definitely a prime aid in cheering yourself up after a good cry.
For the second time that evening, I watched as the credits rolled over the TV screen, followed by the movement of Lucy swapping the DVDs around so that ‘Enchanted’ was playing. My eyelids began to droop, my head nodding as the comforting film began to play. With the height of emotion from this evening, and the stress I was feeling, I felt worn out. Before I knew it, I was gently snoring against Mia’s shoulder as Giselle tumbled down the well into the human world, like Alice into Wonderland and like me into my dreams.
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Hello peoples *waves*
Eugh, why does it have to be set out so that this A/N is on the next page? Why?! *scowls*
Anyway... I have a feeling that this update is going to be very long...hm...That might be because if the dialogue. Does this update surprise anyone? I mean, are you surprised by Mia's actions or everyone else's actions towards the love triangle? And of course, what do you think of Jamie's actions? (that's the big money question right there!).
(I'll just point out Dan's face in the gif on the side if anyone hasn't noticed that before...)
Please comment and vote :)
*salutes*
Em >^-^<