You're My Addiction

"Come here, I want to show you something!" Brian said excitedly as he tugged on Ellie's arm. "It's really important, my dad got it for me for Christmas."

"I'm following you, Brian. You don't need to pull my arm out of the socket." He pulled her out of the door and guided her onto the sidewalk, going in the direction of his house. "Couldn't you have just brought what you wanted to show me here? I'm sure Matt would like to see whatever it is, too."

"He probably would," Brian agreed, walking as fast as his ten-year-old legs would carry him. "But I wanted to show you first."

Ellie smiled. She always liked it when the boys treated her like she was special, especially Brian and Matt, since they had always ignored her when they were younger. He was still tugging on her arm, even though she was following him as fast as she could. It didn't help any that he was almost five inches taller than Ellie, making him able to cover more distance in less strides.

They rounded the corner where Brian's house sat with two big oak trees in the front yard. They walked up the stone pathway and passed the wooden swing that sat under one of the trees in the grass. In his excitement, Brian opened the door with too much force, causing it to slam into the wall in the house. He cringed and mouthed 'sorry' even though no one could hear him, or had even yelled at him in the first place.

Brian further led Ellie up the stairs and into his room, stopping in the doorway and beaming brightly at what was sitting in the middle of the floor. The usually dirty clothes and random toys that covered the floor so the carpet wasn't visible were pushed to the corners of his room, and one clear space of carpet was left in the center, with a shiny new guitar sitting on a stand.

"What do you think?" he asked curiously, hoping she would love it as much as he did. "My dad says he'll start teaching me how to play once school starts again."

Ellie knelt down beside it and ran a finger down the smooth wood of the guitar, afraid to touch it anywhere else. "It's wonderful, Brian," she said with a smile. "I hope you learn to play quickly, then you can play me songs, and I won't need a CD player anymore."

He laughed as he picked it up off of the stand. He sat down on the edge of his bed and carefully placed his fingers on a few of the strings, making up a chord. "I bugged my dad so much that he taught me a couple of things. Do you want to hear?"

Ellie nodded her head and listened eagerly, devoting all of her attention on the thing that made him so excited. At that moment, she grasped that she was actually important to Brian, and she knew because she was the first one he showed the thing that would come to be the most precious to him in life. Many times after that she had wondered why he had shown her first, and she realized that Brian knew she would understand how important and special this present was to him.

She listened on to the few notes he plucked out from the strings, and although they were a little shaky, Ellie had complete faith in him that he would be able to play just fine in a couple of months. "That's pretty good for just learning," she said with a smile.

"I'm going to be famous one day," Brian said, his eyes sparkling with the thought of the big dreams that children always had when they were so young, before they found out that the world was a very cruel place.. "I'm going to play in front of thousands of people who buy tickets to hear me play, just like a rock star."

Ellie closed her eyes and wished so hard for his dream to come true, because she knew from that moment on, Brian would not stop until he achieved this goal. "I know you will," she whispered to him. "If you try hard enough, you can make anything happen."

Ellie turned away from the line of guitars that were leaning against the wall in a spare room of the house. They looked expensive, but being in a successful band meant that you had to have the best that you could get. She frowned for a second, thinking that there were a few too many guitars for just Zacky to own. Ellie figured that Brian might have kept some of his here, too. Her stomach twisted in knots at the thought of seeing him again after all of these years. It was probably what she feared the most because she didn’t know how her emotions were going to react. Ellie figured that as long as she had enough notice she would be able to handle things fine. After all, everything happened four years ago, which was more than enough time to get over everything, right?

She sighed and walked down the hallway and into what was now going to be her room. It needed a huge makeover and a little paint, but Ellie could tell that she was going to love it. On one side of the room there was a neat little window seat in front of three large windows, which was the part she loved most about the room. She knew she was going to love sitting there and reading on sunny days, or even rainy ones, and just be able to take everything in. There was also a large walk-in closet, which Matt proudly stated he knew she would like when they were showing her the house. He probably thought that because he had to carry so much luggage in the airport.

Overall, she was happy. It was true that a few things she found almost made a yell come out of her mouth, like an odd color mold growing in the shower, but that was to be expected from boys. She would have to fumigate that bathroom herself, because there was no way she was going to take a shower with something fuzzy growing on the walls.

Ellie smiled and closed her eyes, taking in everything about her new home. Things like mold growing on showers and brothers and best friends for roommates were what made life so interesting. It was the first time since she had sent her boxes from Pennsylvania to California that she felt good about this decision. She also thought with a certain fondness that Matt and Zacky needed her in a way, as a house always needed a certain kind of person to make it just right. Ellie was hoping she was just that person for the two of them.

Brian opened the front door to the house that he owned along with Zacky and Matt and dropped his keys on the table that stood next to the door. He was just coming home from the house of a girl he had been with a few times. He had met her at a bar about a month ago, but he thought it was getting to the point where he had to end whatever it was they had. They weren’t in an actual relationship, and she was starting to act too clingy for their casual fling.

Brian kept his sunglasses on, which hid his puffy eyes and shielded his eyes from bright lights, both side effects from his hangover. He crinkled his nose as a smell reached it; a smell that was foreign to the house. It was not unusual to come in contact with an unpleasant smell every now and then in the house, but this smell was not disgusting. It smelled like some kind of flowers, though he would never be able to name which ones. He thought it smelled vaguely of a familiar perfume, like someone he once knew had worn it. The only problem was he couldn’t place who it belonged to.

Brian wondered if one of the guys had someone over at the moment, but he knew it couldn’t be Val because she had gone away on a trip just a few days ago. He climbed the stairs, intending to take a long nap to relieve his headache when he saw something very odd. A short girl with wavy brown hair stood quietly in the spare room of the house, the room that Matt and Zacky had spontaneously decided to clean all their boxes of junk and miscellaneous crap out of a week ago. He could only see the girl's profile, but he couldn’t help but think she looked oddly familiar, and he couldn't bring himself to ask her what she was doing lurking around in the house. He also assumed the foreign smell belonged to her.

At that moment, the girl turned and looked Brian right in the eyes. Her mouth dropped in a silent 'o' and her eyes grew big. The glass of water she had been holding in fell from her hand and smashed into hundreds of tiny pieces on the wooden floor.

"Brian?" the girl asked quietly. He noticed her voice was a little shaky. "What are you doing here?"

And then it hit him like a million tons of bricks. Standing in front of him was Ellie. Ellie, who had left so many years ago without even saying goodbye. "I live here," he replied. He couldn't seem to move his feet from the spot they were on the floor. "Are you visiting Matt?"

Ellie was silent for a few moments before answering, almost as if she were trying to find what words would be best to use. "No," she replied slowly. "As of today, I live here too.”

Brian noticed that her fists were clenched tightly shut. He wanted to smile at how much she had changed since she was eighteen, but he knew now was not the time. He ached inside at the fact that she had not given him a warmer greeting, but he knew he should not have expected anything more from the way they had left things before she went away.

"If you will excuse me," Ellie said with an edge to her voice. "I have to go and get something to clean that up with.”

He watched her leave, and he noticed she stayed as close to the other side of the other side of the hallway as possible, almost as if avoiding having to touch him. Brian sighed deeply as he rubbed a hand on his forehead. He remembered the last time they had spoken, and it was one of the few incidents he wished that he could go back in time to change. He remembered her painful silence, and the few tears that had fallen onto her hands, tears that she had tried to hide from him.

He had felt regret when Ellie had first left, but eventually it had ebbed away, and now he only occasionally thought of her, but only the happy times. He remembered the little girl with tiny brown pig tails who was always so happy. Today, he felt guilty that he had not thought more about her in the past four years.

Ellie had always been such a large part of his life, one of his best friends and one of the only people who would have always been there and done anything for him, and now he could not even come up with the right thing to say to her.

She was lying on the sand with her eyes closed, feeling the warmth underneath her body. Although the sun was starting to go down as it painted the sky a hundred different colors, the sand on the beach still retained the warmth from all day. The waves crashed soothingly and they carried Ellie’s mind off to a pleasant place.

School had just ended, and she viewed this as a good way to start off her summer. All the stress and worry flowed from her body as she lay there, thinking of nothing in particular. This spot on the beach had been her favorite place to come since she was allowed to leave the house on her own. It was only a ten minute walk from her house, and she went there any time she needed to escape from reality. It was such a carefree place that it almost made the world seem like it was a good place. The beach was deceiving, obviously.

Ellie liked to view this place as her own, although she didn’t mind sharing it with one person in particular. She smiled gently as she thought of his face, of his smile, and…

“I thought I might find you here,” Brian said as she could feel him lay down next to her. It was almost as if her thoughts had made him appear out of thin air. “What were you thinking about? You were smiling when I first got here.”

She opened her eyes and turned her head to face him, her smile growing wider. “I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular,” she replied and she turned her face back up towards the sky. “Well, maybe I was thinking about how I’m glad school is over for awhile. I have less to worry about until next September again.”

“You’re always worrying about something, even if you aren’t in school,” Brian said with a laugh. “Sometimes you have to just let everything happen on its own. You can’t go throughout life trying to get everything under control, it takes the fun out of everything.”

“I know,” she whispered while the clouds moved slowly overhead. “But if you never try to control anything, the things you want will just slip through your fingers.”

“And those are the things that you have to worry about, not everything else, not the little things,” he said. “You won’t care how you did in some of your classes in a few years.”

“Right now it’s important though,” Ellie said as she sat up. She looked back at him over her shoulder and smiled. “Remember you’re the one who told me I wasn’t allowed to think about those kinds of things here? You’re breaking your own rules.”

Brian laughed as he looked back at her. “Are you planning on going anywhere?” he asked.

“No,” Ellie replied.

“Well, then I think that you should watch the rest of this sunset with me. After all, I did have to ditch your brother to come and find you.”

“Alright,” she said as she lay on the warm sand once more. They weren’t touching, but Ellie could feel that her hand was just a fraction away from his, and the heat coming off of him felt a hundred times warmer and more comforting than the sand was. She sighed as she thought there was no other place she would rather be.