The Night We Met

Chapter 33

Riley's POV:

I've been trying to not let this whole thing get to me but it's been all I could think about and I was beginning to struggle getting it out of my head. James will be leaving me in two weeks' time, meaning I'd be left here with Aiden and he's be touring with Madelyn joint to his hip. He'd be spending time with his ex and part of me can't shake the feeling that they might rekindle some feelings or he might remember his love for her. Who's to say he won't forget about me and push Madelyn aside? They could end up sharing the same bed when they're gone and just the thought makes me shiver.

"Ri," Giselle's voice suddenly awakens me. I look up at her and around the group, sharing glances with her, Jess and Oliver as I try to bring myself back to this current moment where we were supposed to be working on our presentations. "We're, um, doing mental health for the presentation. That's okay with you, right?" she asks. I look around the table, biting my lip.

"Uh, yeah. That's fine."

"You sure? You seem a little distracted?" she asks but I shake my head.

"I'm fine. Maybe we should start discussing who's doing what? I don't mind making the PowerPoint slides?" I suggest and Giselle and Jess both nod their heads in approval. Smiling a little, I open up my laptop above the table and open up a blank document to start typing up a few notes on it.

"So I was thinking," Oliver says whilst scribbling down his own notes on paper. His glasses rested on the tip of his nose as he leant over the table to write. "Why don't we look at mental health in our age group? We could create a survey and get a few classmates to complete it. Or maybe we could even get family members to complete it and then make a comparison about the differences and similarities across age groups?" he says.

"Uh, yeah, that's good," I say in response, smiling. "What sort of questions would we include?"

"I was thinking maybe like stuff to do with anxiety?" Jess speaks up, making my breathing hitch a little. "We could add questions which say something like, how high are your stress levels right now due to schoolwork? Then they choose a number between one and ten, ten being extremely high, one being not at all. We could maybe talk about different kinds of anxiety too? We could maybe mention panic attacks, relationships, schoolwork, family, illness," she recites, looking around at each of us. Once her eyes land on mine and she takes in how I was biting my lip, she raises an eyebrow. "Um, is that okay with you, Ri?"

"It's . . . good, yeah," I mutter. Giselle looks at me, clearly sensing how uncomfortable I was. She's one of my closest friends, she knows about my panic attacks and she may not know as much as Michelle does about the things Aiden has done but she definitely has an idea.

"We can be a bit more concise and less detailed if you want?" she suggests, placing her hand on my arm but I shake my head. If I wanted a good grade in this, I had to face the facts. I have to put on a brave face in order to not risk bringing myself and this group down.

"No, no. It's okay. I'm fine, it's fine," I say. She looks at me one more time hesitantly and unsure, but then nods anyway.

"Okay. Let's create this survey then."

. . .

James's POV:

"James, it's your turn now," Madelyn says with a smirk on her face. She held a clipboard in her hand, a tape measure draped around her neck and a pen slid through her hair which was tied up in a messy bun. 

She puts out a index finger to point at me and then gestures for me to head on over so I begrudgingly do so, standing up from where I was sat by the drums to head with her into her own small little costume room they'd arranged for her. It was filled with aisles of clothes, fabrics in boxes, drawings plastered on the walls and a sewing machine on a side table. Taking a look around, my eyes finally land on her once again to find that her smirk had vanished and she was now merely just smiling at me.

"So . . . I know you've always loved a tie-dye," she tells me, searching the clothing rack for the sample she already had. Eventually, she pulls out a dirty green, black and white tie-dye jumper with black drawstrings. "It's got matching joggers to go with it. I was thinking maybe you could wear that, then John can wear a similar one but a blue version. Theo can wear a sleeveless top with shorts but it's the same colour as the outfit you're wearing and then Luke can have the same style as Theo but the same colour as John?" she inquires, and I don't know why, but I liked it. It wasn't a bad style at all.

"Yeah, that's cool. I like it," I tell her with a brief smile. 

"Really?"

"Yeah." She stares at me for a moment, biting her lower lip the same way Riley tends to and it's when Riley pops into my mind that I decide to break eye-contact and so I look to the ground again.

"So, uh, Riley, huh?" she asks as if she could read my mind. She walks over towards me, unravelling the tape measure from around her neck and then when she reaches me, she lifts my arm up a little. "She's a pretty girl," she says, smiling. I nod my head.

"Pretty is an understatement," I chuckle as she measures the width of my arm before doing the length. I look down at her as she focuses on getting the right number before jotting it down on the piece of paper on the clipboard. "The girl's fricking beautiful," I murmur, making her look up at me and smile a little, but I couldn't tell if it was real or fake.

"How long have the two of you been together?"

"It's complicated," I state, putting my left arm down and then waiting for her next instruction.

"Complicated?" she inquires, looking up at me. "You want your outfit baggy, right?" she asks and I nod my head. 

"We sort of started dating by accident. As in friends and family think we've supposedly been together for around six months now but in reality, it's about three."

"Of course you'd be the one to get yourself into a situation like that," she laughs, making me chuckle a little too. She lifts both of my arms up next and then takes a step forward to wrap the tape measure around my upper chest. Whilst doing it, I look down at her as she looks up at me and while she adjusts the measuring tape, she clears her throat a little. "Do you love her?" she asks, taking note of the number and then unwrapping the measure from around my chest to write it down.

"I do," I whisper. She nods her head. "Do you . . ." I begin to say before stopping myself and then restarting my sentence. "Have you met anyone since we . . . broke up ?"

"Nope," she answers a tad bit too-quickly. "I've, um, not really had time for guys," she chuckles lightly. Taking a step towards me again, I put my arms back up for her to do my lower abdomen now. Whilst she does it, she leans down a little bit and goes through the same process of adjusting, reading and then getting up and writing the results down. "You know I . . . I didn't break up with you to hurt you, James," she tells me, kneeling down to measure the width of my thigh then leg. "I broke up with you because I needed to move on in life. I couldn't tag you along with me-"

"You told me we were headed in different directions-"

"We were," she says, standing back up again and writing down her notes on the piece of paper attached to the clipboard. "I had to dump you for you to move on in life. I couldn't move forward with you right beside me. Our relationship would have only brought both of us down," she whispers.

"Madelyn," I whisper in response but she shakes her head, using her hand to dab at her eyes.

"Look, you can go now. I'm not going to hold you back. Tell John I need to see him next," she whispers. I nod my head and turn to leave but just before I do, she quickly pulls me back by the shoulder and when I turn around to face her, she hands me my phone. "You have a missed call from Riley," she tells me and I nod my head again, taking the phone from her. "You better go running back to her," she says, her tone changing back to its snarky sneer. I bite my lip, raising an eyebrow at her but I don't respond and so exit the room instead to call Riley back.