The week past really quickly, despite the fact that I missed my boyfriend a lot. But having myself constantly occupied with work, wedding planning with Eleanor, three gigs with Em and Aida and Christmas gifts shopping for the people at home.
It helped to have my schedule completely packed, this way I didn’t have any time left to think or worry about after everything that had happened.

And before I knew it, it was already Thursday, where I sat down in the kitchen with the girls to eat the dinner that I’d made for us, which was a spiced chicken wok without any rice or noodles, only lots of vegetables.

But I wasn’t able to eat much of it. I was nervous like hell. In about an hour I would have to leave for the first rehearsal with the folk band, since Eric had decided to jump on me outside Aunt Betty. I felt so grateful that I’d gotten Sophie’s phone number, so that I had been able to text her last Thursday to tell her that I had to do a gig instead, this way I had avoided speaking to Eric and he hadn’t attempted to contact me either, that asshole.
Of course I had considered multiple times to just quit the folk band in order not to have to face the horribly awkward air between the two of us, but at the same time I was really stubborn and I honestly found it rather childish for us to act like this, merely just avoiding each other instead of staying friends the way that I would like it to.

Now I just wished that I’d gone to that damn rehearsal and not to the dodgy bar in Camden. What a terrible mistake that had turned out to be…

Aida had to leave around the same time as me, she was going to take some pictures of some rock band that was doing a concert tonight.
I think she was a bit relieved that she wouldn’t have to go out in the dark all on her own, cause even though she got better each day, she still couldn’t help but getting scared of the dark. She always hurried home straight after work, but around this time of the year it would already have turned dark by then, so she would then call either Em or me, just to hear our voices speaking to her to reassure her that she wasn’t alone and that there was no reason to be scared.
As a new habit she now always slept with the lights on inside her room, even when Harry would spend the night. He would come straight from work after midnight and then leave extremely early the next morning, even earlier than me. They didn’t get to do much else than sleep for a few hours, but it was clear to everyone that she needed him. That just the fact that she could sense his presence was the biggest help of all. He knew that as well. And he was more than willing to help her out as much as absolutely possible.

I couldn’t help but feeling a slightly bit jealous that they got to spend time together despite their stressed situations, but mostly I just began to admire what the two of them had together. I sensed that Aida had started to give slowly in to Harry, situations like these were the ones that brought them closer and it really was both a pleasure but also a relief to witness.

It had taken me by surprise that I had only got woken up by their intimate and rather steamy sex sessions one single time and that was last night. Normally it was really bad for my sleep when Harry spent the night at our place and if it hadn’t been for my intense nerves about seeing Eric again, I would have probably been completely exhausted by now.

But my breath was fast, my pulse was racing and my hands were sweating, which all caused my entire body to tense up.

Sitting in the tube with my violin case standing in between my shaking knees wasn’t very fun either. But having Aida by my side actually helped a lot, cause the fact that she was dealing with much worse and harder stuff than me, made me concentrate about her and leaving not much time left to fill up my own mind.

She got off only a few stops later, leaving me alone for what felt like too many minutes since I had to continue for a few more stops.

“Call me if you need anything,” I assured her for maybe the tenth time before she went through the door with a nod and a vague smile.

I pulled out my headphones of my pocket to turn on a bit of comforting music just to keep my thoughts reasonably controlled, but I was interrupted by a voice coming from a few feet away from me.

“Maja?” It was a man.

I quickly looked up to stare straight in to Eric’s brown eyes. What?

What the fuck was he doing here?! I wasn’t prepared for this, I had prepared myself to not see him until at least fifteen more minutes! What the fuck was I going to fucking do?! Shit, shit, shit, fuck, shit.

But then I remembered that he didn’t live very far away from me, we’d met each other in the park when he was walking his dog, when the girls and I’d just moved here. Wow. It seemed like such a long time ago. How had we gotten here? Shit, shit, shit, fuck, shit.

“Eric…” I stuttered. “Hi.”

He walked slowly and hesitatingly closer to me from the door where he’d just entered. The phone in my hand buzzed and I glanced down to see a message from Aida on the screen:

“Red alert. Eric just got on the train.”

Oh hell yes, I know, dear Aida, I know.


“Hi,” he said while sitting down on the empty seat next to me, where a friend that I would much rather spend time with had just been sitting seconds earlier. Now I felt myself flinch at the friction between the fabric of our coats on our shoulders lightly touching each other.

I had no intention of beginning the conversation, I was so angry with him that I could literally feel my hands roll in to two fists lying on my lap. I was angry that he’d been trying to get to me more than just one drunken time, even after we’d agreed not to be anything more than friends. He had selfishly destroyed our friendship and all we were left with now was one of the most awkward and uncomfortable things ever. And then he hadn’t as much as attempted to apologize for it.

Yeah, he would definitely be the one to start this conversation.

He soon realized that as well as I didn’t dare meeting his eyes but instead just stared on my warm and vibrating hands remaining completely silent.

“Uhm…” he began with a low and deep voice that I most certainly hadn’t been missing. Last time I heard it he was trying to convince me that I would rather be with him than Niall. Asshole.

“Maybe we should talk about what happened between us…” His voice was so quiet that I was the only able to hear the actual words that he said through the noise coming from the fast moving train.

“You think?” I asked sarcastically and a bit too quickly not able to stop the words stumbling out of my mouth. I could tell that he was trying to make eye contact with me, but I refused.

“Look…” he then tried now sounding a tad more desperate, which was my intention. “I’m sorry for what I did. It was stupid.”

“Yes, it was,” I agreed in a harsh tone. Even though I avoided looking at him I could still see out of my canthus how he ran his fingers through his hair, clearly frustrated with the whole situation, maybe even more frustrated than me.

Sitting in a tube full of people didn’t make it easier to be honest with each other and speak properly about everything that had happened, I really didn’t want to involve any more people than just the two of us in this, especially not strangers, so I was relieved when he mumbled:

“Let’s talk about it when we get off.”


The rest of the ten minute ride with the tube was uncomfortable, horrifying and incredibly awkward. I decided to put my earphones back in to my ears and desperately trying to let the sound of some Earth, Wind and Fire calm me down, but my entire body just kept tensing up every single time I got to think of the fact that it was actually Eric, that asshole, sitting right next to me.



“I didn’t expect to bump in to you,” he said just as we were walking in silence next to each other towards Adam’s place those ten long minutes later, “or else I would have given you the speech that I’d prepared for today.”

“Speech?” I asked a bit confused. Was he actually trying to convince me that he’d given any thought to this at all? “Are you serious?”

“Yes of course,” he frowned at me. “I’m sorry for what I did and I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.”

“You’re really expecting me to believe that?” I asked skeptically. After all this time when I’d thought he and I were just friends he’d turned out to have completely other intentions and the more I thought of it, the more pissed I got so I decided to push those thoughts aside and just listen to what could possibly have to say.

He looked a bit resigned with his eyes glued on to his black winter boots. He had stopped walking down the small street towards Adam’s house and was now taking his to what seemed as deciding on how to formulate his sentences.

“Is there… Is there any chance that you would… consider, you know… dating me?” he asked shocking me more than when I’d bumped in to him on the tube earlier. The pissed off part in me completely vanished as he stood there, suddenly looking so insecure and vulnerable, or at least as much as Eric’s huge ego would allow him to look.

“W-what?” I stuttered. “What are you saying?”

“It’s just that no matter how much I try to convince myself that you’re dating somebody else and that you won’t, I just can’t avoid the fact that you really seem… nice,” he simply and honestly said. My mouth was hanging open and I’m pretty sure my eyes was about to pop out of my head as I didn’t manage to do anything but stare at him for the next long seconds. It wasn’t until he coughed awkwardly saying:

“Well?”

I was snapped out of my endless stream of frantic and panicking thoughts running through my head, so many that I hadn’t been able to hold on to a single one of them, so by now I still didn’t have a clue of what to say. I blinked a few times and forced myself to get a few words across my lips for poor Eric’s sake at least.

“Uhm…” I began with a frown forming on my forehead. “You… I… I didn’t expect that.”

I knew it was the most horrible and obvious thing to say but I was clueless.

“I…” I then tried to express it a different way, “I don’t think you’re my type, Eric. And I honestly don’t think that I’m yours either. I’m not finding that way too confident behavior very appealing and attractive.” Even though I had considered not telling him it this way, it seemed as though he could handle it out of all people.

“Or maybe you’re just saying that, because you’re dating someone else right now,” he said with a slight smirk forming at the corner of his mouth. Oh God, here we go again.

“See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about!” I exclaimed before I could stop myself. “You’re just so… cheeky and… and selfish and… obnoxious that it literally makes want to flinch! You don’t care for my opinion at all, you don’t care if I tell you that I’m only going to be friends with you, and it’s exhausting!”

“Oh,” he just said as the smirk on his mouth had quickly faded away. As Eric’s friend I didn’t like seeing him this serious, it didn’t suit him very much, but whenever his flirtatious attitude would turn towards me, I would get annoyed and even… a bit disgusted. “But I…” he then started and I looked at him curious to hear what he had to add. “I think that if you hadn’t been with that other guy, you would definitely have been with me.” The confident, but now yet a bit nervous smile returned slowly.

“His name is Niall,” was the first thing that popped in to my head.

“So you’re not objecting against it?”

“Of course I am. That’s not true.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I don’t find you attractive.”

True, he really was a good looking man, with his light brown skin, dark hair and warm eyes and it was clear that he could get almost any girl he wanted, they all seemed to love his white perfect set of teeth and wide shoulders and arms.

“Come on, you’re insane!” he said and now I noticed how his voice had risen a bit. “Every girl does.”


But there it was. The exact reason why I would never date this guy. It didn’t have anything to do with Niall, even though that boy meant the world to me, but I just simply and utterly didn’t find his attitude attractive, more like… hilarious. Or at least if we could be friends, then I would do nothing but laugh at his cheeky and care free personality, I honestly think that it would probably be really entertaining to go out with him one night and just watch him hunting other girls and picking the exact one that he found being the hottest in the room.


“There you have it,” I just said. I didn’t need to express myself any further, and I was really sick of doing so as well, as some kind of realization flashed through his dark brown eyes at that point. It looked like he was taking in my words – and his own for that matter – so I decided to continue:

“Look Eric. I would really like to be your friend. Cause I think you’re funny and entertaining. But I will never date you. Sorry to say, but that’s just not going to happen. And so what would be most sad, would be if you weren’t capable of being just my friend. Cause then we couldn’t hang out like friends do. Or play in the same band. As friends do. And that would be really sad, since I actually really enjoy your company.”

He nodded very slowly still looking like he was letting my words sink in, so I gave him a few moments before he spoke up:

“How do you know that you’re not my type?” Once again, what he said took me by surprise and I was just about to get pissed off again but then I realized something different; He wasn’t smiling at all this time, it was an honest and sincere question that he probably just needed me to answer. So I managed to keep my patient and calm person as I explained:

“Because you need a girl who will fall for those tricks, Eric. And find them charming and attractive. I just… don’t. I’m just way too much of a prude for your taste, so to say.”

I felt like a stone was lifted from my poor stomach when he laughed lightly at my little joke.

Thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God. This was why I didn’t just cut him off in the first place, I actually liked his kind of care free and sassy persona, it lightened up every mood, just like Niall did, but Niall was just also perfect in any other matter, he was understanding, respectful and loyal. And that was just a few among the thousands of reasons why I had chosen him and not a type of guy like Eric.

Imagine dating Eric. Ugh. God no. Hell no. He was just... too much. Too much Eric. No thank you.

“Let’s go to that rehearsal,” he then suddenly said and started walking with a smile on his lips. That was it? As I just kept staring in his direction down the street and not follow he ended up turning around.

“Are you coming or what?” he asked still smiling and I eventually get my feet moving, still feeling incredibly stunned with how easy this suddenly was.


“Eric, did you really like me? Like really?” I couldn’t help but ask when I’d caught up with him.

“Maybe just a little,” he answered casually while making a turn to the right in to the small path that led up to Adam’s tiny house. “I like girls.”

Now it was my turn to laugh.

He hadn’t changed. And he never would. I could only hope that he would knock off his uncomfortable attempts to get to me by now.

I followed him inside the house where I finally got to see the nice people that immediately made me forget everything that had happened minutes earlier.

Notes

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