THANK YOU to jjackieeex for the wonderful cover!!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was walking down Bleeker Street in Manhattan. I would have rather been walking down Oxford Street in London, but that couldn’t be helped now. My parents had decided that the Thanksgiving holidays were best spent in New York, as it wasn’t as far away as London. As tempted as I had been to throw a fit in protest, as I had been counting down the days until we got to go back to London, the main point was that I got out of Sheffield. I sighed, waiting for the streetlight to change.
I noticed a group of four guys looking at me, but tried to ignore them. They looked like they were in their early twenties. I pulled my trench coat closer around me.
Suddenly one of them tried to get my attention. “Gemma?” he asked, walking towards me. Talk about small world: it was Nick’s brother, Chris.
I floundered a bit at first, but then flashed smile. I didn’t necessarily want to see anything or anyone that reminded me of Nick, but Chris had been nice when we met. “Chris? Hi.”
“What are you doing in New York?” Chris asked.
“Oh, my family is here on holiday. Do you study here?”
“Yeah, I go to NYU. How have you been?”
“Fine, I suppose. Nothing really new. But then again, does anything ever happen in Sheffield? How are you?”
“I’m great. Here, let me introduce you to some friends of mine. This is Tom, Andrew, and Craig. Guys, this is Gemma.”
I shook everyone’s hand and smiled. “So where are you headed?” Chris asked her.
“Oh, no where in particular. I’ve been wandering around, soaking up the real world,” I said, smiling at my own insult to Sheffield.
“We’re on our way to get some coffee, want to come?”
“Sounds great,” I answered after a moment’s hesitation, and the five of us took off to a café.
“So, where do you know Chris from?” Craig asked me.
“Oh, I live in the town where Chris grew up.”
“You look a bit younger than us, and you’re British, does that make any sense?”
“I moved to Sheffield this past year from London. And you’re right, I’m seventeen. I suppose the more honest answer of how I know Chris is that I used to date his younger brother.”
“Oh. Used to?”
“Let’s not talk about this.” Chris interjected.
“Is that your real eye colour?” Tom asked me.
“Yes,” I asked, shifting in my seat uncomfortably.
“Are you serious? That’s amazing. Are you a model?”
I frowned slightly. “No, I’m not. I’m a photographer though.”
“You should be a model. You’re a real photographer, or is it just a hobby?”
“I got paid to photograph in London, and every summer in Paris I work at a photographer’s studio.”
“That’s so cool.”
I laughed lightly. “So, what do you all study?”
“We all study architecture.”
“How’s Nick?” Chris asked.
“He’s just as he ever was. Which you can either take to be fantastic or rather sad. He’s just– not willing to give up. Give in.”
“Still? What’s he been doing?”
“Oh, his head is still over-inflated. Not surprising, I suppose, but still.”
“This is Chris’s little brother, your ex-boyfriend?” Tom asked for clarification.
“Yes. And he doesn’t like the ‘ex’ in front of the ‘boyfriend’.”
“Well, that’s understandable. I mean– you’re stunning, he’d obviously want to stay together with you.”
“Just because of my looks? I don’t find that very comforting. And if he wanted that so much, he shouldn’t have cheated on me in the first place.”
“He cheated on you! He on you?”
“Yeah, I know,” Chris told his friends, as the three of them looked at me incredulously. “That’s how the two of us met, I was trying to convince her to go back to him.”
“And it didn’t work?”
I smiled wryly. “No, it didn’t work. And you know what the git said to me the other day?” I directed at Chris, “He said, ‘stop playing hard to get, Gemma, I’ll stop trying one day, and then you’ll have wasted your chance to be with me.’ I quote him.”
Chris raised his eyebrows. “Wow, my brother’s a fucking jerk.”
“He still lives in a fantasy world! It’s incredible! He thinks I’m being coy and really do want him back! His bloody group of fans makes his head inflate even more and he won’t give up with me. I could murder him sometimes.”
“Well maybe he changed, he’s just embarrassed about everything he did,” Craig ventured.
I picked my coffee up. “I don’t think so. After cheating on someone, you don’t convince them to get back together with you while blatantly screwing every girl willing every weekend. Especially after everything else that happened.”
“What else happened?”
I laughed. “You Americans really are quite open, aren’t you? I’m still getting used to it, it’s quite a shock. I’ve already told you more than I would ever have told anyone I just met in England.
“The story is long and actually quite uninteresting. The gist of it is that Nick wants a second chance and I don’t want to give him one. It’s not that I want things to go back to what they once were, that I want Nick to change everything. I just don’t want to be together with him. Not even if he had never cheated on me. But you can’t say that straight to the face of the local teenage god. I might get lynched by all his fans. I’ve already been completely ostracised by the community for breaking up with him, stoning is just the next step,” I laughed.
Chris sat back and watched me with a small frown on his face while his friends chatted away and I tried to keep up with them. After an hour or so, we all got up to leave, and Chris offered to walk me back to my hotel. I didn’t really need his help in getting back, but he was most insistent, and so I agreed. We waved goodbye to his friends and started walking in the direction of uptown, easily chatting on the way about small town life in Sheffield versus New York or London.
As we got to the hotel and were about to say goodbye, Chris quickly said, “If you’re not doing anything tomorrow night, you want to come out with us? Craig wants to check out a new club. See some real night-life for a change? You can bring your brother along.”
I smiled at him. “Sure, that’s sounds good. I’ll give you my number and you can tell me where to meet you guys.” Might as well really enjoy my brief holiday away from Nick and Sheffield.
----------------------------------------
Please vote and comment! I actually have material for the next chapter, so the next upload won't be THAT far off