And it all started with this meet & greet - Ondreaz Lopez

Chapter 24. "This is complicated."

Tony POV:

Angry and really angry, I got on the elevator and went up. What was wrong with Ondre? How could you be such an idiot? I could have strangled him the second I saw Soph.

He cared about Soph and then he couldn't bring himself to tell her. And Ondreaz always had a way with words.

The bang of the elevator woke me up from my loud thoughts and I opened the door to the stairwell. There I climbed up the ladder and crawled through the flap. I was pretty sure to find Soph there.

In fact she was standing at the railing and looking over the city. I tried to follow her gaze but it got lost on the horizon. She looked into the void. Her mind was somewhere else, not in New York anymore. Although she was not crying, there was so much pain in her empty expression that my knees went soft. I think I could count Mel as one of the best friends I ever had. And after such a short time.

When she noticed me, she turned her head. I looked at her with pity, but she just shook her head. Gently, I walked up to her and held her in my arms. "He just doesn't know what to do," I murmured and she began to tremble.

Soothingly, I stroked her over the shoulder and pressed her even closer to me. "He loves you. He was just... confused." That wasn't very convincing, Tony. I didn't want to make any false promises to Soph, but it was the truth. He loved her. He loved her so much he didn't want to say the wrong thing under any circumstances.

"Oh, yeah?" she snorted. That was just like her. I gently grabbed her by the shoulders and held her at a distance. "He thinks this can't work with you because he's on tour and can't see you."

She shrugged her shoulders. "So what? I don't care." I nodded. "You know, if I care about someone, I don't care what happens between us. Apparently not with him."

I shook my head at once. "You're right. He's thinking a step ahead. "Soph, you don't know what it's like to have a relationship like that. When he was with his Ex, he always overheard her crying on the phone, they had a Long distance relationship. It hurt him so much, it messed him up. And what he's feeling now is even stronger. He doesn't want to do this to you or to himself."

She looked up at me. "He could have told me, Tony. "And I understand that, but honestly... ...he was just scared."

Yeah, that was one way of putting it. "Maybe that too," I laughed and felt that she was better. "Give him a bit more time to get his thoughts in order, OK? Then he'll definitely dare."

She nodded. "Thank you, Tony. You are a really good friend." I smiled. That's the kind of thing you always like to hear. "Come on," I said and pulled her behind me because I was fucking cold. How could she stand it up here?

Ondreaz was nowhere to be seen in our suite and Soph seemed more than happy to do that. She booted up my laptop and logged on to Sykpe. As soon as the online sound was heard she received a chat request. It was a group.

She knocked smiling on the seat next to her and I sat down next to her. On the screen five people were logged in. One girl, the rest was male. They were introduced to me as Jess - Jessamyn - , Chris - Christian - , Mark, Dan - Daniel - and Ben - Benjamin -.

They were all really nice, but terrible messes and Ben confused me the most. When he started to talk about some portions, I was completely lost. "Did you like it?" he asked, and Soph's eyes darkened instantly.

"Not yet. But what isn't yet can still come," she said somewhat more confidently. After an hour we finished the conversation, as Soph had become very hungry from all the talk about food, and then I noticed that she hadn't eaten anything yet.

So together we went back into the dining room. It was relatively full, but we had no problems finding a free seat. Soph loaded her plate full to the brim, I took a smaller portion, because I had already started to eat.

"Say, what was Ben babbling about portions all the time," I asked her and she choked on the piece of pineapple she had in her mouth. "That's complicated," she laughed, holding her hand over her mouth.

that doesn't really help me clear up my confusion," I kept trying and she rolled her eyes. "It's a code word," she said, and I knew I couldn't get any more out of her.

"Where did you two meet?" I asked, since this subject was closed for both her and me. "At primary school," she replied, smiling. "We were all in the same class together. Later we were together in all the other levels too, and we did so much shit that we had a lot of parent-teacher letters together after our school days. I got a 4.0 GPA, but there were 164 letters in my file."

I dropped my fork. "That many? Tell me, what kind of shit have you done?", I asked her in amazement. "Quite a lot, apparently. They were so picky. You'd get an entry if you accidentally kicked in a cupboard door."

I raised an eyebrow. "How do you accidentally kick in a closet door?" She sighed. "Whatever, I kicked it in on purpose. These things make pretty good sledges and snowboards. It's just winter."

I shook my head, laughing. "What's the hardest thing you've ever done?" Because it interested me a lot, if kicking in a closet door wasn't too hard. She had to smile.

"It was Mardi Gras with colourful hair. Everyone had hair chalk or spray or tint in their hair, which dissolved in water. We thought that was a very nice basis for a prank. However, we never went so far that it could have bad consequences for outsiders, so we cut off the signal that is sent to the fire department when the fire alarm is triggered.

When everyone was in the lounge during the break, I smashed the window and pressed this nice red button. The alarm went off and everyone panicked when the water came out of the sprinklers. Everywhere students with colourful faces were running around and screaming.

We have classroom buildings around our schoolyard and there are such huge balconies. We stood on them. Jess, Marc and Dan dumped honey on everyone and that in large quantities and Ben, Annie, Chris and I let feathers fly. And the math exams we stole from the teachers' lounge.

We also gave the teachers a good whack. You have to know that this was our last year and that the oral exams were over and the written ones were done, so we didn't care about the teachers.

Anyway, we just walked in the hustle and bustle, locked the door and shot at all the walls with paintball guns and painted them that way, spread glitter and confetti over them and then brushed paint over them. On the cupboard of every teacher we wrote a saying on it, which he said again and again and from the chairs we took out all the screws, just like from the tables.

We threw the papers and sheets that were in the drawers across the room. I took the keys from the office. We sprayed the floor and one wall, which we had spared, with graphite and put the empty cans on the shelves in the kitchen, the glasses and all the dishes went into the sink.

In the end we came out of the teachers' room as the only clean students, where everybody looked at us. The teachers actually wanted to shit us down, but they all knew us and knew that there was no point, because they just meant that our parents would be informed. But in the end, that didn't happen, because I intercepted the letters that all went out on the school computers, just like the 163 before that."

She paused briefly. "Sure, we had to pay for the damage, but our families are all such big shots that it was worth it. By the way, they left the teachers' lounge as it was, with the walls and everything. "You have to know that we tried really hard, and in the end it looked really great."

She looked at me waiting. "Sophia Taylor, you're fucking dangerous," I brought out, and she laughed, shaking her head before she sat down. Oh, yes, she was dangerous. She sure was.