Twenty-One Night Stand ✓

18 / hopelessly devoted

Everything was changing and Maddie wasn't sure she could keep up with the way the world seemed to be spinning a little faster. Her life had fallen out of balance in the space of a few days, throwing pieces far and wide, and she didn't know which she should pick up and glue back together and which would be better off as a hole. Yesterday had seemed surreal, passing in slow motion as she and her father had muddled along in discordant harmony. Nine o'clock had come as a relief, finally an accetable time to go to bed. She had tucked up with a glass of water and a classical playlist. After an hour of tossing and turning, she had eventually drifted off.

Now, refreshed and showered, she sat cross-legged on her bed with a glass of blackcurrant squash on her side table and her laptop in front of her, patiently waiting as it read the disc of Friends episodes she had just put in. The show had been her comfort blanket ever since she was ten, tucking up to watch it on E4 while her father cooked supper. When she was young, no matter how bad a day she'd had, the show could always cheer her up. She felt a kinship with each of the characters, somehow relating her own life to their situations even before she had started high school.

An hour and a half ago, she had decided to restart the season from the very start and now, hovering over play for 'The One with the East German Laundry Detergent," she had yet to move position. Her father was in the shower, still a shadow of the man she was used to, and it pained her to be around him when there was nothing she could possibly say to lift his spirits. It had hit too close to home for him, not ready to say goodbye to someone else who wished for something other than life.

Maddie wrapped her favourite blanket around her shoulders and snuggled back against her headboard, nestling between the pillows and cushions that littered her bed. A few stuffed animals sat at crooked angles beside her, the few that had survived the years and fought off the competition for a place on the bed. One had belonged to her mother. She couldn't remember being given it, but her father had told her that her mother had wanted her to have it. Never before had she thought much about it, the worn bear with faded glassy eyes, but now everything had a different tilt to its definition.

Nothing else had been passed down to Maddie. A note and a bear, and a striking resemblance that sometimes made her father look twice. She curled a hand around the teddy, pulling it onto her lap as she settled in for her fifth episode. The TV show whisked her away to nineties New York, and for just a second she felt invincible.

*

Halfway through the sixth episode, her phone buzzed beneath her thigh and she caught her breath, slowly reaching for it and scalding herself for the hope that it might be Peter. Of course it wasn't. For two days now, she hadn't heard a word from him. Any other time it would mean nothing but now, it meant the world.

The text that popped onto her screen was from Posy, words swallowed by punctuation.

Maddie's thumbs worked on automatic to type out the response that she didn't want to have to think about, words appearing that she wasn't telling herself to type, and she hit send.