A Watty Award winner and a featured Wattpad novel.
Five years ago, Maddie Hyun and her best friend Peter made a pact. Now it's time to follow through.
21.04.16 → 20.10.16
There was no easy way to do what Maddie knew she needed to do. After sleeping on it for a night, and sleeping off her lack of sleep the night before, she absent mindedly scrolled through her text history with Peter while she constructed a message in her head. She stared at the exclamation points and smiley faces that had descended into curt replies or one-worded acknowledgments, the anticipation of a text that had become a curl of dread that wrapped a noose around her heart.
The moment had been put off long enough. She scrolled down to the end to compose a new message, but three grey dots popped up along the bottom of her screen. Either her phone was glitching, or Peter was writing a message. Panic seized her chest and her fingers froze in apprehension as she watched the dots undulate after his last message to her. Eventually, the words appeared.
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He had taken the words from under her reluctant fingers, relieving her of the pressure of asking but instilling her instead with the apprehension at what had pushed him to ask. Persuading her hands out of their paralysis, she managed a response.
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Maddie had to fight to control the rate at which her heart seemed to speed away from her, racing beyond her grasp. Her plan had been to meet Peter but now that the ball was in his court, she didn't know how to feel. Responding with a simple acknowledgement that she would be there, she locked her phone and sat pinned to the sofa for a minute before managing to move. She would need to change into something more appropriate than the pyjamas she had outgrown a few years ago, the shorts covering less skin than her underwear while the hem of the t-shirt hardly reached her bellybutton.
Peter had seen her in those pyjamas on plenty of occasions. Now, she struggled to imagine that.
Today, she would need coffee. Flicking the kettle on, she jogged upstairs to root through her cupboards in search of a demure pair of shorts and came upon a pair of capri trousers. Perfect. Paired with a t-shirt and her favourite flip-flops that needed replacing, and armed with a coffee that she pointlessly blew on to cool it down, she was ready. Except she wasn't. Everything she had planned to say in her head had fallen out, each point lying in a scrambled mess on the floor as she analysed her arguments and came up empty handed. Posy, ever the devil's advocate, was certainly right on one front. Maddie owed Peter the chance to talk, and now he was demanding it from her. It wasn't often that he took the reigns, something peeking out from behind layer upon layer of submissive complacency, a colour she wished he had shown her more of before. Now was too late.
