Status: In progress!
Had Me From Hello
quatre.
Annie was freaking out.
Well, no. She was certainly past that point. Last minute it had been decided that she would play more songs than she originally thought.
There were so many songs. How did she choose only three more?
It was thirty minutes until she was due to be at least on side stage to prepare for her set, but she was still sitting in her dressing room, frantically running through songs, lyrics and chords. All of it was becoming a big blur to the girl.
Suddenly, a loud knock on the door caused the twenty-one year old to jump what seemed like 5 feet in the air. “What?” Annie shouted angrily towards the door.
“It’s, uh… Alex,” Alex said awkwardly from the other side of the door.
“Oh, come in,” Annie said, sighing heavily. She placed her guitar next to her, propping it on the leather couch she was sitting in. “This whole concert thing is too stressful. I don’t know if I’m cut out for it, Gaskarth.”
“Stop that right now, Annie Madison,” Alex said in a jokingly demanding tone. “You can do this. If you couldn’t, Matt wouldn’t have brought you out here. You’d still be in coffee shops, but you’re not. You’re on a nationwide tour with one of the best bands ever! I mean, I’m a little biased on the best band part, but you’re because you deserve to be.”
Annie ran a hand through her already tousled hair. “Alex, I- I don’t know… Maybe I should just do this show and give up. I can’t handle all this pressure and stress.”
“Annie Madison,” Alex said the girl’s full name, startling her a little. “You know where All Time Low would be if we stopped at our first show because we were freaked out? We’d be nowhere. You have to be out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you give up on this, Annie.”
Annie couldn’t help but smile at someone who was being so nice to someone he had met less than a week ago and someone he had heard sing twice. “Why are you being so nice to me about this, Alex?”
“Because you have a phenomenal voice and I know you can make it, Annie. Just believe in yourself and you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks,” Annie smiled a small smile at Alex before standing up and engulfing him in a large hug.
“Now get your ass out there and perform, Madison,” Alex winked at her, causing the heat to rush to her cheeks for what seemed like the millionth time.
----
“Hey, everyone,” Annie smiled into the microphone. “I’m Annie Madison and this is my first real tour… so please be nice to me. You can boo me off the stage if I do a second tour.”
The arena erupted with laughter causing the petite girl to smile. Out of the corner of her green eyes, Annie noticed a smiling Alex standing side stage. Annie shot a quick smile back to him before speaking again. “So, I’m going to sing only about 8 songs and then I’ll hand the stage over to my friends in All Time Low!”
Annie talked for a few more minutes about things like where to purchase merch, her Twitter, her official Facebook page, her YouTube page and other miscellaneous subjects.
Alex couldn’t help but hang on to every word the girl was saying. It was as if he were in some kind of trance before Jack snapped him out of it. “You’re drooling, lover boy.”
“Shut up. I’m not into her,” Alex rolled his eyes. “We’re just friends.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“This first song is called ‘Tim McGraw’. This song is one of those cliché first love songs. I wrote it about this guy back home, Sam. He and I started dating my freshman year, which was his sophomore year. So, of course, my junior year of high school was his senior. He graduated and went to university in Rhode Island – almost 7 hours away from little old me in Maryland," Annie's small voice echoed off the walls of the arena.
At Annie’s monologue of the song, the entire crowd “aw”-ed, knowing where the story was headed.
“You know, we were kids in love, right? We were all ‘yeah, it’s gonna work! Totally!’ And so, August came around. I was getting ready to start my senior year and he had moved to Rhode Island. I mean, we tried to talk as much as we could, but we just didn’t have time, so we broke up at beginning of September. My first love and my first serious relationship, right? Three years, dudes. But, we’re still on good terms. It’s been four-ish years and we’re still friends. We talk every now and then; life is good. It just didn’t work out and that’s okay,” Annie grinned as if to reassure the audience.
“So, anyway, I wrote this song as sort of a memoir of our relationship. I hope you like it!”
Alex felt just the slightest hint of jealously at the seemingly epic love story that Annie had just told the audience. What happened if this Sam guy showed back up in her life after tour and beat Alex out?
“You said the way my green* eyes shined put those gorgeous stars to shame that night… I said, ‘That’s a lie.’ You were just a boy in a Chevy truck that had a tendency of getting stuck on back roads at night.”
“I was there beside him all summer long and then the time we woke up to find that summer gone…” Annie smiled, remembering the memories of her three year relationship with Sam.
“Come on, Annie, don’t be scared!” Sam shouted from the other end of the short road.
It was the summer before Annie’s sophomore year and Sam had vowed to teach the younger girl how to drive before school started.
To say the brunette was terrified would be a large understatement.
“Sam, this doesn’t seem safe!” Annie yelled from her spot in the front seat of Sam’s blue Chevrolet truck.
“You can do it, Madison!” Sam shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “I believe in you!” he joked, smiling brightly at his girlfriend.
“If I run you over, it’s your fault, Young!” Annie yelled back, laughing.
Annie felt a small tear roll down her cheek, but she kept smiling. These were happy memories. Sam and she had ended so well; there was no backlash whatsoever.
“September saw a month of tears. I was thanking God that you weren’t here to see me like that…” Annie forced a small smile to keep the tears from coming down as the rest of the memories filled her head.
“Sam, I can’t do this anymore,” Annie’s voice strained from the pain she was about to put herself through.
Sam was back for a week and a half before he left for Rhode Island again. Annie hated herself for ruining this trip for him, but she was already hurting herself too much.
“Do what?” Sam ran a hand through his messy dirty blonde hair. “Please don’t tell me you mean ‘us’. Annie, we can work it out. The school year hasn’t even started yet.”
“Sam, if it’s already this hard now, imagine how hard it’s going to be when school does start!” Annie pushed a stray piece of brown hair out of her face. “Neither of us deserves to go through that.”
“When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long… the moon like a spotlight on the lake,” Annie smiled tightly, finishing out the rest of the song.
“I take it you guys liked that,” the young girl laughed, wiping the stray tears off of her cheeks, hoping no one noticed.
Little did she know, though, it caught the attention of a certain front man, who certainly wasn’t going to let it slide.
“Okay, this next song is called ‘Mannequin’ and it goes a little like this.”
“You know,” the voice of Rian made Alex jump almost 100 feet in the air. “It’s going to be hard for you to make a move on her when she’s still into her ex…”
Alex shook his head vigorously. “I’m not into her and she’s not into her ex.”
Sighing heavily, Rian put his hand on Alex’s shoulder comfortingly. “Whatever you say, man, but those tears during that song kinda say otherwise.”
Alex didn’t say anything. Alex couldn’t say anything. He knew Rian was right, but Alex was going to get this girl to get over his ex.
----
“We’re All Time Low; thank you so much for having us. We’ll see you next time!” Alex shouted after Jack, Rian and Zack played the last few notes of “Dear Maria”.
Alex ran off the stage, only to be tackled by a petite girl. “You guys did great!” Annie shouted into Alex’s sweaty shirt.
“Thanks; you did amazing!” Alex grinned, wrapping his arms tightly around the girl.
“Thank you,” Annie smiled up at the man who towered over her. “Oh, also-,” before she could finish her thought she was tackled by three other men.
“You did fucking amazing out there, Annie!” Jack yelled in the middle of the huge group hug that was going on between him, Annie, Rian and Zack.
“Thank you so much!”
The three guys let go of the girl, after her pleads of being suffocated, and went to go get ready to go out and meet a few fans.
“I guess you’re going out there, too?” Annie raised her plucked-to-perfection eyebrows at Alex.
“Yeah, in a second, because first, I want to ask you about something…” Alex said awkwardly,
trailing off on his sentence, not sure how to ask about the crying on stage.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“You crying on stage…?” Alex began, not sure how to continue now. “You still love that guy from back home?”
“I… No. Just flashback thing, you know? You’ll probably see a lot of that,” Annie joked, forcing another smile at her new friend. “A lot of my songs are about Sam. It’s not that I still love him. It’s just the memories that I miss, I guess. It was a hard breakup, but music helped me get through it, so it’s okay,” the small girl reassured the front man.
“Okay, I just had to make sure…”
“Why did it matter to you, though? I mean, not being rude… Just… that’s kind of a random question?” Annie cocked an eyebrow suspiciously.
“I was curious. Also, I wanted to make sure you weren’t hurting or whatever. Looking out for the youngens on the tour,” Alex winked before bidding goodbyes to Annie.
----
Alex was finally showered and smelling a lot better than before and he was ready to go out and meet some fans.
Grabbing his phone off of the counter, he began scrolling through his Twitter timeline as he walked down the hallway.
A lot of the tweets seemed to be his friends posting random pictures on their Instagram or other friends tweeting about their lives, but one in particular caught his eye.
“Fuck,” Alex muttered under his breath after reading the tweet. Being with Annie was going to be a lot harder than he expected.
@AnnieMadison: I’m running out of ways to poetically admit that I hate myself for still loving you.
Well, no. She was certainly past that point. Last minute it had been decided that she would play more songs than she originally thought.
There were so many songs. How did she choose only three more?
It was thirty minutes until she was due to be at least on side stage to prepare for her set, but she was still sitting in her dressing room, frantically running through songs, lyrics and chords. All of it was becoming a big blur to the girl.
Suddenly, a loud knock on the door caused the twenty-one year old to jump what seemed like 5 feet in the air. “What?” Annie shouted angrily towards the door.
“It’s, uh… Alex,” Alex said awkwardly from the other side of the door.
“Oh, come in,” Annie said, sighing heavily. She placed her guitar next to her, propping it on the leather couch she was sitting in. “This whole concert thing is too stressful. I don’t know if I’m cut out for it, Gaskarth.”
“Stop that right now, Annie Madison,” Alex said in a jokingly demanding tone. “You can do this. If you couldn’t, Matt wouldn’t have brought you out here. You’d still be in coffee shops, but you’re not. You’re on a nationwide tour with one of the best bands ever! I mean, I’m a little biased on the best band part, but you’re because you deserve to be.”
Annie ran a hand through her already tousled hair. “Alex, I- I don’t know… Maybe I should just do this show and give up. I can’t handle all this pressure and stress.”
“Annie Madison,” Alex said the girl’s full name, startling her a little. “You know where All Time Low would be if we stopped at our first show because we were freaked out? We’d be nowhere. You have to be out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you give up on this, Annie.”
Annie couldn’t help but smile at someone who was being so nice to someone he had met less than a week ago and someone he had heard sing twice. “Why are you being so nice to me about this, Alex?”
“Because you have a phenomenal voice and I know you can make it, Annie. Just believe in yourself and you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks,” Annie smiled a small smile at Alex before standing up and engulfing him in a large hug.
“Now get your ass out there and perform, Madison,” Alex winked at her, causing the heat to rush to her cheeks for what seemed like the millionth time.
----
“Hey, everyone,” Annie smiled into the microphone. “I’m Annie Madison and this is my first real tour… so please be nice to me. You can boo me off the stage if I do a second tour.”
The arena erupted with laughter causing the petite girl to smile. Out of the corner of her green eyes, Annie noticed a smiling Alex standing side stage. Annie shot a quick smile back to him before speaking again. “So, I’m going to sing only about 8 songs and then I’ll hand the stage over to my friends in All Time Low!”
Annie talked for a few more minutes about things like where to purchase merch, her Twitter, her official Facebook page, her YouTube page and other miscellaneous subjects.
Alex couldn’t help but hang on to every word the girl was saying. It was as if he were in some kind of trance before Jack snapped him out of it. “You’re drooling, lover boy.”
“Shut up. I’m not into her,” Alex rolled his eyes. “We’re just friends.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“This first song is called ‘Tim McGraw’. This song is one of those cliché first love songs. I wrote it about this guy back home, Sam. He and I started dating my freshman year, which was his sophomore year. So, of course, my junior year of high school was his senior. He graduated and went to university in Rhode Island – almost 7 hours away from little old me in Maryland," Annie's small voice echoed off the walls of the arena.
At Annie’s monologue of the song, the entire crowd “aw”-ed, knowing where the story was headed.
“You know, we were kids in love, right? We were all ‘yeah, it’s gonna work! Totally!’ And so, August came around. I was getting ready to start my senior year and he had moved to Rhode Island. I mean, we tried to talk as much as we could, but we just didn’t have time, so we broke up at beginning of September. My first love and my first serious relationship, right? Three years, dudes. But, we’re still on good terms. It’s been four-ish years and we’re still friends. We talk every now and then; life is good. It just didn’t work out and that’s okay,” Annie grinned as if to reassure the audience.
“So, anyway, I wrote this song as sort of a memoir of our relationship. I hope you like it!”
Alex felt just the slightest hint of jealously at the seemingly epic love story that Annie had just told the audience. What happened if this Sam guy showed back up in her life after tour and beat Alex out?
“You said the way my green* eyes shined put those gorgeous stars to shame that night… I said, ‘That’s a lie.’ You were just a boy in a Chevy truck that had a tendency of getting stuck on back roads at night.”
“I was there beside him all summer long and then the time we woke up to find that summer gone…” Annie smiled, remembering the memories of her three year relationship with Sam.
“Come on, Annie, don’t be scared!” Sam shouted from the other end of the short road.
It was the summer before Annie’s sophomore year and Sam had vowed to teach the younger girl how to drive before school started.
To say the brunette was terrified would be a large understatement.
“Sam, this doesn’t seem safe!” Annie yelled from her spot in the front seat of Sam’s blue Chevrolet truck.
“You can do it, Madison!” Sam shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “I believe in you!” he joked, smiling brightly at his girlfriend.
“If I run you over, it’s your fault, Young!” Annie yelled back, laughing.
Annie felt a small tear roll down her cheek, but she kept smiling. These were happy memories. Sam and she had ended so well; there was no backlash whatsoever.
“September saw a month of tears. I was thanking God that you weren’t here to see me like that…” Annie forced a small smile to keep the tears from coming down as the rest of the memories filled her head.
“Sam, I can’t do this anymore,” Annie’s voice strained from the pain she was about to put herself through.
Sam was back for a week and a half before he left for Rhode Island again. Annie hated herself for ruining this trip for him, but she was already hurting herself too much.
“Do what?” Sam ran a hand through his messy dirty blonde hair. “Please don’t tell me you mean ‘us’. Annie, we can work it out. The school year hasn’t even started yet.”
“Sam, if it’s already this hard now, imagine how hard it’s going to be when school does start!” Annie pushed a stray piece of brown hair out of her face. “Neither of us deserves to go through that.”
“When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think my favorite song, the one we danced to all night long… the moon like a spotlight on the lake,” Annie smiled tightly, finishing out the rest of the song.
“I take it you guys liked that,” the young girl laughed, wiping the stray tears off of her cheeks, hoping no one noticed.
Little did she know, though, it caught the attention of a certain front man, who certainly wasn’t going to let it slide.
“Okay, this next song is called ‘Mannequin’ and it goes a little like this.”
“You know,” the voice of Rian made Alex jump almost 100 feet in the air. “It’s going to be hard for you to make a move on her when she’s still into her ex…”
Alex shook his head vigorously. “I’m not into her and she’s not into her ex.”
Sighing heavily, Rian put his hand on Alex’s shoulder comfortingly. “Whatever you say, man, but those tears during that song kinda say otherwise.”
Alex didn’t say anything. Alex couldn’t say anything. He knew Rian was right, but Alex was going to get this girl to get over his ex.
----
“We’re All Time Low; thank you so much for having us. We’ll see you next time!” Alex shouted after Jack, Rian and Zack played the last few notes of “Dear Maria”.
Alex ran off the stage, only to be tackled by a petite girl. “You guys did great!” Annie shouted into Alex’s sweaty shirt.
“Thanks; you did amazing!” Alex grinned, wrapping his arms tightly around the girl.
“Thank you,” Annie smiled up at the man who towered over her. “Oh, also-,” before she could finish her thought she was tackled by three other men.
“You did fucking amazing out there, Annie!” Jack yelled in the middle of the huge group hug that was going on between him, Annie, Rian and Zack.
“Thank you so much!”
The three guys let go of the girl, after her pleads of being suffocated, and went to go get ready to go out and meet a few fans.
“I guess you’re going out there, too?” Annie raised her plucked-to-perfection eyebrows at Alex.
“Yeah, in a second, because first, I want to ask you about something…” Alex said awkwardly,
trailing off on his sentence, not sure how to ask about the crying on stage.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“You crying on stage…?” Alex began, not sure how to continue now. “You still love that guy from back home?”
“I… No. Just flashback thing, you know? You’ll probably see a lot of that,” Annie joked, forcing another smile at her new friend. “A lot of my songs are about Sam. It’s not that I still love him. It’s just the memories that I miss, I guess. It was a hard breakup, but music helped me get through it, so it’s okay,” the small girl reassured the front man.
“Okay, I just had to make sure…”
“Why did it matter to you, though? I mean, not being rude… Just… that’s kind of a random question?” Annie cocked an eyebrow suspiciously.
“I was curious. Also, I wanted to make sure you weren’t hurting or whatever. Looking out for the youngens on the tour,” Alex winked before bidding goodbyes to Annie.
----
Alex was finally showered and smelling a lot better than before and he was ready to go out and meet some fans.
Grabbing his phone off of the counter, he began scrolling through his Twitter timeline as he walked down the hallway.
A lot of the tweets seemed to be his friends posting random pictures on their Instagram or other friends tweeting about their lives, but one in particular caught his eye.
“Fuck,” Alex muttered under his breath after reading the tweet. Being with Annie was going to be a lot harder than he expected.
@AnnieMadison: I’m running out of ways to poetically admit that I hate myself for still loving you.