Where We Belong

Chapter 3

~~~

Evan's POV—

"Fuuuck..." I groan as I slowly sit up in bed, stretching my back out as I try my best to wake up.

With my back stretched out, I get out of bed and stretch my arms and legs out, doing some morning stretches and a couple of push ups to get my body more awake.

Once I am no longer under the influence of sleep, I grab my phone from the nightstand next to my bed and check the time. It's roughly a quarter after nine. And it's a wednesday.

It should be 12 in Michigan now and Ashley should be on her lunch break—I'm assuming at least.

"Well, if she's busy she'll just not answer..." I mumble to myself, letting out a yawn as I push the call button and bring my phone up to my ear.

She picks up on the 3rd ring.

"Hey, Ev," Ashley says. I can't help but smile as I hear her voice, hearing the smile that's most likely on her face in her voice.

"Morning, Love," I say as I sit down on my bed. "Oops. I mean—afternoon, Love," I add once I realize that it's technically not morning in Michigan anymore.

Stupid time difference.

Ashley laughs a little nonetheless, though. "Morning, Evan. Did you just wake up?"

"A few minutes ago, yeah. And I wanted to hear your voice as soon as possible, so here I am," I say.

"Well. I would love to talk more, but I'm about to assist in a photo shooting. Talk later?" she suggests before she tells someone on her side that she'll be in in a minute.

"Ash, if you had something to do, why didn't you just text me you were busy? You didn't have to pick up the phone," I try telling her.

"Yeah well...I wanted to hear your voice, too," she mumbles under her breath. But I still heard it loud and clear. "We couldn't really talk last night because we were both busy. And when you eventually called me back, it was late and I fell asleep before we could really say anything to each other."

It's been roughly three weeks since I left Michigan to come back and sort things out in California. The past couple of weeks have been exhausting, to say the least. Because, as it turns out, publicly breaking up with someone and moving from point A to point B turned out to be a lot more than I originally thought.

Actually "breaking up" with Nia was easy...to a certain extent. Nia's manager wasn't too thrilled about us "breaking up." But after it was made clear that I had no intentions of not being with Ashley, she backed down.

And then our reps and social media teams developed a statement/announcement of our breakup for us to hopefully do some damage control. Because us announcing it before someone else finds out and announces it to the public themselves is always the best thing to do in these types of situations.

Or in any situation really.

Because then we can control the narrative and get our stories straight before someone goes and make assumptions about it and most likely get the story wrong.

Nia and me "breaking up" and the announcement of our breakup was all taken care of within less than a few days. Ever since then, Nia and I have both been cornered by people whenever we go out in public—but we already knew that that was likely going to happen.

Now it's the matter of moving states. Moving is turning out to be more than I expected. I have to get my house on the market, get my shit packed and ready to move, and other things.

I've had help with getting my things packed so I can move, but now I have to figure out where I'm going to put everything in Michigan. The place I'm currently renting in Michigan is too small. I don't really want to go and get another house right now—preferably speaking.