forever fades away

chapter 49

Rachel hung up her work phone, sighing as she reached across the desk for the fabric samples she was in the middle of fiddling with when the phone rang. For the better part of the morning, Rachel had been working on a rough sketch of the livingroom she envisioned for her latest client. She would have been done hours ago, if her phone hadn’t kept ringing. It seemed that suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to her. 

She picked up her stapler, stapling the fabric samples to the corner of the piece of poster board she was using. 

Rachel groaned as the phone began ringing again. She squelched the urge to pick the phone up off her desk and hurl it across the room. She was never going to get any work done. 

“Castle Interior Designs, Rachel speaking.” Rachel professionally announced into the phone. 

“Hey girlfriend.” Maria replied. “How’s everything going?” 

Rachel almost groaned again when she heard Maria on the other end of the line. Rachel had been avoiding calls from anyone from Roswell since Finn had shown up on her doorstep two weeks ago. She was so happy that her and Finn were back together, half of the time she felt like calling every single person she had ever come into contact with to tell them the great news. The other half of the time, she wanted to keep everything that was going on between her and Finn a secret, too scared that letting the outside world know about it would somehow ruin it. The latter had won out, and everyone from back home was practically itching to talk to either Finn or Rachel, desperate to know what was going on. 

“Hey Maria,” Rachel started. “I can’t really talk right now, ok? I’m in the middle of putting together something for a client, and my phone has been ringing all day, and I haven’t gotten anything done. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to call you back.” 

Maria laughed into the phone. “Yeah, I’m not hanging up until you talk to me.” 

Rachel rolled her eyes. “What are you going to do if I hang up on you?” She asked. 

“I’ll keep calling until you finally talk to me.” Maria replied. “Now, just put down whatever it is that you were working on and give me five minutes. After I know what I need to know, I’ll let you get back to work.” 
“You don’t NEED to know anything, Maria.” Rachel couldn’t help laughing. “You’re just nosey and you want to know.” 

Maria gasped. “I am not nosey!” She declared. 

“Yes, you are!” Rachel heard Michael yell in the background. 

“Shut up, mind your business.” Maria threw back, tossing a pillow at Michael, who was wandering through the livingroom. “Pay no mind to him, he’s PMSing.” Maria said into the phone. 

“Don’t castrate the man for speaking the truth.” Rachel smiled at two of them. 

“I would never do that!” Maria shook her head. “Not only is he pretty fond of that particular piece of his anatomy, but I am too.” 

Rachel grimaced. “Over share of information, Thank you.” 

“Sorry.” Maria shrugged, not really sounding too sincere. “Now, down to business. What the hell is going on with you and Finn? All any of us know is that he’s there.” 

Rachel finally set aside her poster board, sighing. She was never going to get Maria off the phone until she started talking, so she might as well just get it over with. She leaned back in her chair, cradling the phone between her ear and her shoulder. “And how do you know that?” Rachel asked. 

“Few reasons. One being that Finn isn’t at home. Michael and Isabel have been calling his house for, like, two weeks, and he’s never there. Another reason being that you’ve been avoiding phone calls from all of us for about the same amount of time. However, the main reason we know that is because his housekeeper answered the phone one time when Michael called over there, and she told Michael that Finn had her that he was going to Atlanta, and wasn’t sure when he would be back.” Maria rambled. “So, as soon as she said Atlanta, we knew that he’d finally grown a pair and gone after you.”