Forever with you | ashtray

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

italics is narrated
Bold is messages
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maddy's preview;

maddy knew who she was from a very early age.

for as long as maddy could remember, everyone loved her.

she never knew exactly what it was. she just knew that she had something special, something intangible, something immeasurable.

And it gave her confidence.

that's why she loved pageantry, because you didn't have to be the prettiest or the tallest or the blondest or the whitest.

you just had to have fucking confidence.

And she probably would have gone on to win Miss universe, if it weren't for a beauty pageant coach, Marcus cutler was arrested for 18 counts of child molestation.

then her mom told her she was quote on quote 'done with sick pageants'

Her dreams were dashed by some random 50-year-old creep who didn't molest her, let alone even meet her.

she refused to eat for a week out of protest. but then she realized how much she liked not doing anything.

Maddy would never say it out loud, especially not today, because everybody's so political, but she never really had any desire to have a career... or job.

she was just interested in doing what she did, just without school and the other bullshit.

her mother was an esthetician. which is a fancy way of saying she gave pedicures to rich people. and her dad was a drunk, who was always pretending to hold jobs longer than he did.

she quickly realized that there are two kinds of people in the world: people who sit in the chairs with their feet in the foot bath, and the people who kneel in front of the foot bath.

she used to sit and study the women who came in. she'd pay attention to what they wore, what they'd talk about, and what she realized was that none of them actually did anything.

i mean, they may have like, children to raise or homes to decorate but at the end of the day, they literally did nothing. they literally did...nothing.

and strangely, none of them had confidence.

she had had a thing for nate for a while, before he finally asked her out. at first he was a gentleman, like flowers everyday kid of gentleman.

And he was smarter than most guys. plus, Nate, like, really loved her.

And she did love nate. she loved her relationship with nate. she was also a really good girlfriend. granted, she didn't always tell the truth.

because the truth-truth is that when she was 14, on vacation in Panama city beach, she met a guy who was, like, 40, and she lost her virginity to him as well.

which in retrospect seems kind of rape-y and weird, but honestly she was the one in control.

she can tell in nate's eyes how much it meant to him. plus it's not like anyone can feel the fucking difference.

that's the thing with guys like nate. they don't actually want a person. they want something they can own and possess.

she also watched a lot of porn. not because it turned her on or anything, it didn't. but if you analyzed it really closely, there were a ton of really good secrets.