Y'know when you have no guy experience and accidentally fall in unrequited love with your first-ever guy friend who just so happens to be a celebrity and also has a girlfriend he can't break up with?
No? Well, that's reality for one college student...
Wow, a new fic, how unheard of (note: that was sarcasm). Read the description and note the rating; if you're wondering, "am I too young for this one?" then the answer is a big fat yes. Chapter title is from Treacherous by Taylor Swift.
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I throw my head back, heart under attack. Straight through the chest, like a thunderclap... You can burn too bright to see. With all the lights out, the shadow of a doubt; it's funny what you find when you go without. So keep the lights down low, keep the lights down low to see. I see... a glimmer of us.- Marianas Trench, Glimmer
You would've thought Lea would never get into a relationship, let alone such a precarious one.
Well, okay, what she and Timothée had wasn't exactly a "relationship", per se. It was a friendship.
But Lea had never been friends with a boy before, and Tim wasn't just a boy. He was a man, and there were times when he made that fact blatantly obvious.
He was also a miracle.
He'd come crashing into her life in September, all smiles and laughter and color and light, and flipped everything she'd ever known upside down.
With a domestic abuse survivor for a mother, Lea had gone to all-girls schools all her life. She was also smack dab between her older sister, Angeline, aka Lina, and her younger sister, Ariana, or Ari. Her dad had been MIA since she was three, and Lina was the only one old enough to remember him, albeit vaguely. All her friends had always been girls, too; her best friend-slash-roommate, Sam, being perhaps the most noteworthy.
Until Timothée, that is. Tim, as she'd taken to calling him, was the first guy she'd ever spoken to for an extended period of time.
He'd made a huge impact in her life. Her comfort levels changed because he'd expanded her comfort zone without making her feel unsafe. Her perception of the world changed because he'd taken her grayscale idea of reality and given it color.
They'd become friends. Close friends. Best friends, even.
And she was in love with him.
She loved his smile, his laugh, the way he spoke, the inflections in his words; she loved the way his hair stuck up sometimes, how kind he was, how sweet. He was giving and genuine and just... just wonderful.
What she loved most, though, was the way he was with her.
He'd hold her hand regularly. He'd cuddle up with her every chance he got. And god, but the way he looked at her? It was unreal, the way he looked at her.
Lea loved him all the more for the way he acted with her, but she hated him, too.
It was wrong. It was wrong of her to look at him that way, for her gaze to zero in on his face and a blush to rise in her cheeks. It was wrong of her to wonder if he'd ever thought about kissing her, touching her, moving inside of her.
It was wrong of her to love him, but she did anyway. She couldn't help it. She couldn't have stopped herself from falling for him if her life had depended on it.
He was strange with her, her friends had said, looking at her with sympathy in their eyes and pity in their voices.
As a soon-to-be twenty-year-old who had absolutely zero guy experience, she didn't have much of a reference, but she knew some level of affection was normal with one's friends, and tended to assume that his so-called odd behavior towards her was one (or perhaps a combination) of three of the following: 1) Tim things; 2) famous/rich person things; or 3) guy things.
He bought her freakishly expensive gifts at random times, and when she'd question it, he'd just smile and say he saw it and thought of her. He took her to the most expensive restaurants in New York. He was forever telling her that she was beautiful, and he seemed to have made it a hobby to get drunk and drape himself over her.
These things, her friends insisted, were weird for someone who had a girlfriend. And he did. Have a girlfriend, that is.
He wasn't happy with Roxie. Lea knew he wasn't. That didn't make things any easier, though.
However, breaking up with her, Tim had explained, wasn't something he was able to do. The girl was a very popular singer who had a habit of writing songs about her exes, and while she wouldn't advertise it, if she was asked who specifically a song was about, she wasn't afraid to name drop them. Normally Lea wouldn't have minded the whole 'writing songs about your exes' thing (Taylor Swift supremacy, 100%), but when the guy in question was someone she cared for, someone she loved, it was different.
Roxie was everything Lea wasn't: 5'7", skin that tanned rather than burned, manageable hair, and she was shaped more like Keira Knightley rather than Lea's Billie Eilish-esque form.
But girlfriend or no girlfriend, he spent most of his time in New York with Lea.
On April 23rd, exactly one week before her birthday, he'd presented her with plane tickets.
To Tahiti.
Tahiti!
Everything changed on that trip.
He'd brought her to a treehouse by the ocean. She loved the ocean; the crash of waves, the smell of saltwater, the feel of sand between her toes, but it was kind of an odd thing to pull, even for Tim.
She'd never left the country before, and her friend—her best friend... who she just so happened to be in love with—brought her to freakin' Tahiti as a birthday present. And it wasn't even the only present he'd bought her, just the biggest one!
It was only their first night there, the night before her birthday, and they hadn't slept yet, but she was fairly certain they were just gonna both end up sleeping in the actual bed rather than have one of them in the pull out couch. It wouldn't be the first time she fell asleep next to him, curled up in his arms.
She wondered if he knew.
She hoped he didn't. She didn't think she could bear it if he knew.
