Come Back To Me

Garrett and I grabbed a couple of newspapers and began browsing through them as we sat in Barnes and Noble. We each had two newspapers and a snack from the café which was a bit redundant since we had just had snacks at Starbucks. Oh well, I was more worried about finding someplace to live. Knowing Garrett, he would offer to let me stay at his house if I couldn’t find somewhere to live today. That was the last thing that I wanted to do because it would just make things awkward for me. Even after five years Garrett was the only person who could make me smile when I felt like absolute crap. He put up with all of my bullshit and was always ready to defend me. They were the reasons I had fallen in love with him. Well, those and his bright blue eyes and charming smile. That damn smile was infectious and the proof was sitting across from me. He looked up at and smiled before taking a bite of his cookie. I felt myself smiling before I could stop it and I grinned.

“So, have you found anything interesting?”

“Yeah. Affordable is a different story though.”

“Hmm, well I’ve found two or three things for us to go check out.”

“Oh really? Where are they?”

“Well, one of them is a small two bedroom house by Brian over in Scottsdale. The other two are both by Ratboy and are in town.”

“Mmkay. And what about the prices of them?”

“All of them are relatively cheap. They’re all about $1200 a month, which you can easily make. You’re talented, Merry, and I don’t want you to let anybody tell you otherwise. There is so much that you can do with your life, you just need to decide exactly how you want to live your life.”

I smiled and leaned over to kiss his cheek. Garrett still knew how to read me and even though that scared me, it also thrilled me. It was nice to know that nothing had really changed between us since I moved away after our senior year was over. A clip of that last day in Tempe ran through my mind and I smiled, albeit a bittersweet smile. He looked down at the newspaper again before looking back up at me.

“You okay, Merry?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just remembering the last day we all spent together. It was fun, although I felt bad for not telling the guys I was leaving. How did they react?”

“They were a bit upset that neither of us mentioned it to them, but they understood why we didn’t. I think Pat took it the hardest out of all of them though. He felt really betrayed before going all Ratboy for a while. He was better after that.”

“Of course. Who would have thought Ratboy could save the day?”

Garrett laughed quietly and we both went back to looking through our newspapers. After a few minutes I sighed and pushed my second one to the side. We had been here for nearly an hour looking through the newspapers and we’d only found three different houses. They were all about $1200 a month and all within a fifteen minute driving range, which was really good considering I hadn’t looked at housing until today. Bad planning on my part, not buying a house or somewhere to live ahead of time, buy hey, everybody makes mistakes. I guess I had been trying too hard to multi-task that I completely forgot about the most important part of moving down here to Tempe. Mister Blue-Eyes looked at me from across the table and closed his newspaper as he sat and watched me. It was a bit unnerving actually. Finally, I looked at him and frowned.

“What the hell are you looking at, Nickelsen?”

“The most amazing girl I’ve ever met.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re beautiful, intelligent, funny and nice. You have a real talent for art, writing and business. You also happen to be really good at keeping secrets and are a wonderful friend to everybody, even if they wrong you. It seems like you aren’t real because of how perfect you are.”

“Perfect? You of all people know how imperfect I am Garrett Daniel Nickelsen! I’m insecure, I bitch and moan about everything that doesn’t go my way, I can’t keep track of anything and my brain is always working on overdrive because I over analyze everything. I lie to people to keep myself safe and I’ve only ever let myself become close to one person; you. How on earth am I perfect?!”

“Because you let yourself admit that you’re wrong and you are able to actually tell people that you have faults. You can admit to that fact that you’ve done wrong, which is more than some people can say.”

“Okay… that doesn’t make me perfect. If anything, that makes me modest, not perfect.”

“Humble, perfect… whichever. Let me rephrase what I was trying to saw. You’re perfect to me, Merry. I don’t want to see you change for anybody because if you changed you wouldn’t be my Merry anymore.”

Blushing, I looked away so that those bright blue eyes weren’t staring at my face. My eyes closed as I realized that Garrett had pretty much just said everything I had wanted him to say five years ago. It was weird hearing him say those things now though because I hadn’t seen him in a while. Hell, we hadn’t talked in a while either. My mind played the words over a few times, trying to make sense of them. They didn’t settle right with me, but I was trying to over analyze something that was really simple. Maybe that was why it was starting to give me a headache. I finally looked back at Garrett and smiled before standing.

“Well… thanks for the compliment. I suppose we should head back to your house so that I can change and so that we can check out these houses.”

“Fine by me. Do you want me to drive?”

“That would be awesome if you would. I’m so tired of driving right now that I would probably end up crashing into something.”

We walked back to Garrett’s place and he let me go inside, shower and change. I walked out of the bathroom in a pair of blue-green shorts with a zombie t-shirt over that. It wasn’t anything special, but it had caught my eye when I was shopping for clothes and it reminded me of Garrett. So I got it, simple as that. A pair of baby blue converse kept my feet safe from the burning sun and then there were the few pieces of jewelry that I pretty much always wore. The ring that I had on my right ring finger was silver with triquetra on either side of a purple stone. I still haven’t figured out whether the stone is amethyst or not. The necklace I wore was in the shape of a crescent moon with a pink crystal and a star hanging in the middle. It had been a gift from Garrett on one of my birthdays some time ago and I still wore it, though it was usually hidden under the collar of my shirt. A simple rubber bracelet saying “I <3 zombies completed the outfit. Garrett looked at me with shock written all over his face before the look turned to one of jealousy.

“Let me guess, you want a shirt like this one, huh?”

He nodded with a small frown on his face. This was the beginning stage of Gare’s pouting. When he pouted, he tended to whine about things that were even related to why he was pouting and nothing ever got done.

“I’ll buy you one later today if you stop pouting and grab your car keys so we can go look at houses.”

“Okay!”

I followed Garrett out of his house again and we got into his yellow Camaro. It wasn’t the same as taking trips in the Gremlin he used to have, but hey, at least it was a nice car. I wouldn’t have picked yellow but that’s only because it looks terrible on me and it hurts my eyes. If I was color-blind I’d be okay... well, only if I was color-blind to just yellow. At least that way I wouldn’t have to see it, but I’d still be able to see all of my favorite colors like purple and emerald. Sitting in the driver’s seat, Gare looked over at me and grinned. He still hadn’t said a whole lot since I got out of the shower or since our argument earlier. I knew he had something to say though; it was in the way he stared blankly at the steering wheel and it was in the way his mouth would open for a moment only to shut again.

“Where do you want to go first?” he finally asked.

“Uhm… let’s check out the places by Ratboy first.”

Pat was at his parents’ house when we got to the first house. Thank god for small favors because as much as I love Pat, he tends to get on my nerves with his bipolar self. I really didn’t want to live next door to him and the house didn’t feel right, so Gare and I moved on to the next one. It was a block away from Pat and looked beautiful, but it still didn’t feel right to me. After living in Chicago, I’ve learned to trust my instincts more than I used to. So we headed towards our final idea for the day. When we pulled up, I was taken aback by how simple the house looked on the outside. It wasn’t too fancy, wasn’t too expensive, and Brian lived next door.

“I want it!”

“Okay, okay, you can have it. Just call the number on the bottom of the sign and we’ll get the house ready for you and what not.”

“Yay! I yelled as I dialed the number Garrett had pointed to.

Brian came out of his house when he heard the yell and smiled at the two of us. I grinned at the curly-haired blonde boy as somebody picked up the phone on the other end of the line. The lady sounded really nice and said she could be at the house in about ten minutes. After I signed some paperwork, the house was all mine. I was stoked to see what it looked like on the inside, but I was more stoked about the fact that I had already found my house. Brian walked over and gave me a big hug with a smile on his face.

“I was wondering when I was going to get some new neighbors. Well, I guess neighbor, huh?”

“Yup! I finally moved back, and I’m looking forward to spending time with all of you.”

“You should have a party. Invite The Maine and I’ll invite the rest of The Summer Set over and we can all chill. Jess will be so happy she’s not the only girl anymore!”

“Alright! I just need to get some furniture into the house first.”

“I’ll take care of that. You just worry about signing the papers that lady has,” Garrett said as he nodded towards a car that had just pulled up.

I pranced over to the car with a huge grin on my face, not bothering to read into what Garrett had just said. He’d take care of getting the furniture and he knew what I liked, so everything was going to be okay. The lady introduced herself as Kathryn Davis and we hit it off immediately. She was so much like my mom that it made me realize how much I was going to miss her since we now lived 1500 miles away from each other. We sat and talked as I read through the paperwork she handed me, before I signed my name on the line. With that, I now had a place to live!

Brian laughed at me as I ran to the front door and unlocked it. The inside was just as simple as the outside, which was fine by me. I didn’t like living in flashy places because they just seemed to scream snob to me. A person’s house can actually tell you a lot about their personality. Running through the house, I was glad to see that it had all of the appliances I would need, with the exception of a coffeepot. I dashed up the stairs and into one of the two bedrooms before stopping. The walls were the exact same color of purple as my room back home had been and all of the trim was done in a shiny silver color. Needless to say, I loved it. Garrett and Brian both walked into the room and watched me looking around in awe. I looked at both of them and grinned.

“This is so gonna be my bedroom. I don’t care which one is bigger. “

“This was their teenage son’s room, believe it or not. You would have gotten along with him so well, Merry. His walls were covered with all kinds of band posters. He was a cool kid.”

“Was?”

“Yeah… he committed suicide about a year ago. His parents tried staying but the kid’s mom couldn’t even walk past his door without breaking down so they moved.”

“Oh…” That made me feel horrible, the whole suicide thing. I wondered what drove the kid to it, though I knew it didn’t matter to me. I didn’t even know the kid at the time.

“You’re gonna have a bunch of furniture dropped off here in about half an hour. The guys will all be here in like an hour. That gives you roughly a half hour to decide how you want your furniture arranged,” Garrett said.

I raised an eyebrow before it dawned on me that he had basically just bought all of my house furniture. Normally, I’d pissed that he had spent a bunch of money on me and that I’d probably spend a lot of time paying it back to him, but the look on his face made me refrain from arguing with him. One look in his eyes said that he needed this. He wanted to spoil me to show me how happy he was to have me back in his life, so I let him.

“Thank you, Garrett.”

“You’re welcome, Merry.”

“I feel like I’m intruding on one of those really personal moments… I’m gonna go call Jess and the guys and tell them to come over in like an hour,” Brian said before he left the room and I heard him going down the stairs. I looked at Garrett and chuckled a bit nervously before looking down at my feet. Personal moment? Between Garrett and I? Nahh, those hardly ever happened… right? He took the few steps towards me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, hugging me to him. I clasped my arms around his waist and the two of us just stood there enjoying the silence. It made me think of the day I left, but I pushed all thoughts of that day away and just enjoyed the now. Right now, I was here with my best friend and the friends I hadn’t talked to in forever. Right now, I was finally branching out on my own and becoming my own person. Right now… right now was the beginning of a new life for me. And strangely enough, I was looking forward to it.