Distance

“And just where have you been?” Samantha greeted me with folded arms and a stern look.

I ignored her motherly stature. “I was out,” I said.

My roommate did not look appeased. Her dark eyes narrowed at me. “Breanne said that she tried to call you. We were worried about you, Maggie. You don’t know anyone here. What if something had happened?”

“I’m fine,” I assured her, hanging my sweater on a hook near the door. “I went out for a couple of pints with a new friend.”

“Who?” She pressed.

I didn’t particularly want to lie to her, so I opted to tell her a partial truth. “His name is Robert. I met him today. He’s really quite nice.”

At the mention of a boy, all frustration was wiped from Samantha’s features and replaced with a bright, intense interest. “A boy? Is he cute? Did he kiss you goodnight? Are you going to have his babies?”

I stepped back, caught off guard by her questions. “Yes, no, and not anytime soon”

Her lips slid down into a scowl. “What kind of boy doesn’t even kiss a girl goodnight? I think maybe you’re wasting your time with this one, Maggie. Maybe he’s gay.”

I paused. He didn’t seem gay to me, but I’d been proven wrong before. It wasn’t always such an obvious thing. After a moment, I shrugged. “If he calls me for a second date, I’ll be sure to find out for myself.”

He didn’t call. My initial excitement slowly withered, and after four full days without a word from Robert I was left feeling as down and deflated as a week-old helium balloon. I was torturing myself – though whether it was on purpose or not, I wasn’t totally certain – by watching Breanne’s box sets of Misfits. With each episode, I found myself liking the character of Nathan more and more. Of course, it probably had everything to do with the fact that he was played by Robert.

I had saved his number, and I could have bitten the bullet and called him myself, but I just couldn't do it. He had made it clear that he planned to call me, and it just didn't seem right for me to be the one to reach out. No, I wasn't going to be known as the girl who didn't understand when she was being rejected.

My class schedule for the semester was all over the place, so my roommates didn’t see me enough to notice that something was wrong. It was stupid for me to feel this way. I had been trying to find a way to stop focusing on the way that Kellan had left me, but I’d found that the one person I wanted around had done the same thing. I simply wasn’t cut out for the dating world. I took heartache far too personally.

I began to get horribly homesick in my misery. I had regular video chats with my parents and my younger sister, but that only made things worse. They were always so happy to see me, no matter what time I was online. But then, they were always together. It made sense that they were happy. I had severely underestimated how much strength I needed to be this far away from everyone that I loved. I wondered if Kellan was having the same problems.

He sent me messages on occasion, but he had opted out of getting a cheap cell phone for the year. He had always hated talking on the phone, anyways. But that didn’t make me any less desperate to hear his voice every now and then. And even his emails were getting shorter and less frequent. I knew, deep down, that he was having too much fun to worry about keeping in touch with me. He probably assumed that I was doing the same.

As I trudged home late after an evening class, I began to truly wonder if I had made a mistake in my rash decision to come here. It was too late to change it now, but I wished there was some way that I could escape my sorrows. I almost laughed aloud at the absurdity of my thoughts. That was exactly why I had come here in the first place.

I closed the front door behind me and slid the lock into place, dropping my keys onto the shelf I’d bought to keep our shoes on. With a sigh, I shrugged out of my jacket and hung it on the hook. Someone cleared their throat loudly behind me, making me jump. I spun around to see Breanne with a funny smirk on her face, as if she were accusing me of something. Something that made her obscenely happy, for whatever reason.

“Look who I found waiting for you outside of our door. You have some explaining to do, Maggie.”

I glanced past her, genuinely curious, and felt my breathing stop for several seconds. Robert was sitting at my kitchen table, looking as comfortable as if he had lived there himself. His chin was resting on the heel of his palm, his fingers drumming aimlessly against the skin of his cheek.

I frowned. “You didn’t call.”

Breanne hit me. I flinched away as she raised a hand to do it again. “That is not how we treat guests in this house. Be nice.”

I rubbed a hand against my bicep, where she had made contact. “Says the girl who just abused me in front of said guest,” I grumbled. Regardless, as I stepped away from her and into safety, I faced Robert again. “What are you doing here? How did you even know which room I live in?”

He dropped his hand from his face and sat up straight. “Your security in this building is in shambles. I would complain if I were you. All I had to do was go up to the front desk, put on my best American accent, and say I was your brother who had gotten a few vacation days and decided to surprise his little sister with a visit. They told me your room number straight away.”

I felt a small smile tug at the right corner of my mouth. “It would have been easier to just call.”

“Well,” Robert got to his feet and stretched his hands over his head. “I went and visited my parents for a few days, and when I got back and realized that I hadn’t called, I figured you would be pissed. So, naturally, I knew that you would be less upset if you got an apology face to face. Am I right? It’s harder to be angry when you can see how cute I am standing right in front of you.”

I fought back a smile with everything I had. He was right, of course. “Maybe,” I conceded. In truth, I felt like my world had been flipped around once more. There was a light shining through the clouds of my depression now. Even if he didn’t stick around for my entire year here, I now knew that I wasn’t completely hopeless when it came to boys. I was likeable, after all.

“Let me take you out tonight to make it up to you?” he offered.

Breanne was waiting impatiently, fully prepared to hit me again if I turned him down. I gave an exaggerated sigh. “If you must.” My genuine smile broke through my façade. He had successfully taken away every bit of sadness and frustration that had enveloped me only moments before.

“Well, I mean, if you don’t want to…” he let his sentence hang in the air like a threat. The smirk on his face told me that he knew I was kidding. Breanne, however, didn’t seem to notice any subtleties about the situation at all.

“She wants to!” she yelled, pushing me roughly toward my bedroom. “Just let her get some proper clothes on!”

“Ow!” I yelped as she dug her thumbs painfully into my shoulders. She shoved me down the tiled hallway and steered me quickly into my room. She followed me in, slamming the door behind her. Immediately, she set to work digging through the clothes hanging in my closet.

“God, Maggie, why would you even joke about not going out with him? You’re living so many girls’ dreams right now! You’re living my dream! And all because you hit him with a door? How lucky can you be?”

I watched calmly as she tore through my belongings. “So you’ve been chatting with him, I take it? It’s not like I meant to hit him. I offered to buy him lunch just to replace what I made him drop. I never expected anything to come out of it. And when he didn’t call, I assumed that he wasn’t interested. It’s as simple as that.”

“But he’s a celebrity,” she pressed. Then, a sudden thought made her stand up straight and give me a horrified, wide-eyed stare. “This is why you wanted to borrow my Misfits, isn’t it? You’d already met him! You were just playing dumb!”

I shrugged off her accusations. “What was the point in getting you this worked up if nothing came of it?”

“I am not worked up!” But the shrill, shrieking tone her voice had adopted proved otherwise. I raised my eyebrows but said nothing, and she returned to scouring my closet.

“If you don’t hurry, he’ll get tired of waiting,” I said after a full five minutes.

“It’s not my fault that you have nothing cute to wear,” she snapped. “Don’t you own a single pair of tights?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I just didn’t bring every piece of clothing I own when I, you know, moved halfway across the world.”

“Excuses, excuses,” she grumbled. “This will have to do, I suppose.” She threw an outfit at me, and I caught the flying articles of clothing. “Your shoes are all by the door, right? I’ll go find you some.”

I grimaced. I hadn’t expected Breanne to act so very much like my little sister always had: criticising my attire and trying to dress me up like a life-sized Barbie doll. I pulled on the tight-fitting grey sweater and wrapped the dressy scarf around my neck. I paused to fix my eyeliner and pin back my unruly hair. If I hadn’t gone to the gym this afternoon and had to shower so late in the day, I would have had the time to straighten the curly mess that I saw in the mirror. As it was, I did all that I could with a few bobby pins and a clip-in flower.

I came back out into the dining area, where Robert was once again seated at the table. He was playing on his phone now, ignoring the fuss Breanne was making over the fact that my flats just didn’t look nice enough. He had a funny smile on his face, as if he were thoroughly enjoying the spectacle he had witnessed since I’d arrived home. Upon my entrance, he looked up and tucked his phone back into the pocket of his jeans.

“You clean up nice,” he commented.

“Thanks. I think. That was supposed to be a compliment, right? As opposed to a dig at how I looked ten minutes ago?”

He laughed. “Yes, it is a compliment. Let’s go.” Robbie got to his feet and reached out to me, indicating that I should take his hand.

I slipped my feet into the flats that Breanne had begrudgingly set out for me. “Tell Samantha and Zoey that I went out, okay?” Then, thinking it over, I shot her a dark look. “Don’t tell them anything else.”

She held up her hands and feigned innocence, though her green eyes were dancing with delight. “Me? Never.”

Rob slid his fingers smoothly into mine, and gently pulled me toward the door. He was so much easier to follow than Breanne had been. Once again, I marvelled at the way his hand seemed to cover mine so perfectly. Then again, he was rather tall. Kellan had only been a couple of inches taller than me, and his fingers were barely longer than my own. Some people might have preferred being so even with someone, but I thoroughly enjoyed being so strangely, almost beautifully, mismatched.

“I like your hair this way,” Robert commented as we headed down the hallway and toward the stairwell.

“Really?” I nearly snorted. “This is what it looks like when I’m too lazy to do anything with it.”

He gestured up toward his own hair, which curled in tight rings upon his scalp. “We kind of match.”

I smiled. It was true, though my hair fell into natural, loose curls and his were small and springy. “I guess we do,” I said.

We descended the wide staircase, and I shivered at the cool air that wafted off of the cement. Robbie gave me a mildly concerned look.

“I’m really sorry that I didn’t call. I figured that since I wasn’t in the area, there was no point. You aren’t really mad at me, are you?”

I gawked at him, taken aback. “I was never mad at you. I was just a little sad, that’s all. I thought maybe you didn’t have as much fun as I did the other night. It’s not like it would be the first time that’s happened. I was really happy to see you today. You didn’t have to apologize.”

He hesitated, chewing on his bottom lip. “Not yet, anyways.”

I arched a sceptical eyebrow as we reached the lobby. Robert held the door open for me, and I could see his car parked just outside. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d come home, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything at all.

“What do you mean?” I asked slowly.

He put on the widest grin he could manage, and though it was impossibly forced, I found myself smiling back at him. “I’m not exactly taking you to dinner tonight. I thought that maybe I could do something more extravagant to win you over.”

I stopped walking, still a few feet from the passenger door of his car. “How extravagant?”

He grinned. “I used the word ‘extravagant,’ isn’t that a big enough clue?”

Robert opened the passenger door and waved for me to get in. Reluctantly, I slid into the leather seat. I watched him as he walked around the car and got behind the wheel. I tugged nervously at the sleeve of my sweater, loosing a thread accidentally.

“What am I getting myself into here, exactly?”

“Well,” he breathed in deeply, pulling into the street. “You can’t judge me based on tonight. It won’t always be like this.”

“Be like what?” I could hear my own impatience reflected in my voice.

He smiled warmly at me as he shifted gears, but he didn’t verbalize a response. I was left to stew in my anxiety for the duration of the drive. The thread in my sweater was being unravelled more and more, and I couldn’t stop my fingers from pulling at it. Robbie drove into an underground parkade, pausing only to hit a button on his visor and open the door to let us inside. When he pulled in between some painted lines and put the car in park, I couldn’t handle it anymore.

“Where are we?”

“Oh, we’re at my building. But we aren’t staying.”

“So why are we here, then?”

His grin widened. “They’re sending a limo.”