Lines Crossed Chapter 1: Tell
I’m sorry if this hurts you
But I tried to keep what we had once, I was wrong
It wasn’t keeping me awake
You didn’t listen, you didn’t hear me
When I said I want more, I got no more
You weren’t stealing me away
It’s not enough, not enough
To give me what it is I want
It’s not enough, not enough
To get me everything I need
And I, I wish it was
I think it’s time to give this up
-Not Enough, Avril Lavigne
“Girls, I have something to tell you. I broke up with Charles.”
Larissa had just arrived at her barkada’s bi-weekly dinner dates—Thursdays, for the freaking win—with that kind of announcement. She had worked through several phrasings of the announcement before coming up with that one. Her long straight hair that usually just flowed over her shoulders and stopping above her waist was up in a tight ponytail, swishing and swaying as she moved. She was in a beige jumpsuit, wide-legged and silky soft, and she paired it with nude Louboutin pumps, making her taller than her five-foot-five frame. There wasn’t any trace of sadness in her sweet, heart-shaped face or in her sharp, piercing eyes as she announced the demise of her five-year-and-ten-month-old relationship with one of the country’s hottest athletes (and one of the most sought-after bachelors) ever, Charles Alec Reyes, the team captain of the now popular Azkals.
Larissa pulled a chair, gazed at the shocked looks on her girlfriend’s faces, and grinned. The shock didn’t fade even as Larissa was already settled on her seat, having ordered a banana walnut muffing along with a hot green tea latte.
“But what about the wedding?” Florence asked, recovering first. She rubbed some paint off her hands, having come directly to the Calm Times coffeeshop for their girls’ night out straight from her studio. She was the artist in their little gang of three, the one who can visualize sceneries, drawings, and images almost instantaneously. She works with charcoal best, but can also do acrylic on canvas, and she had already put up five exhibits at a tender age of twenty-five. She was almost always mistaken for the Filipina actress Kaye Abad, having an uncanny resemblance to the actress from the hair to the eyes to the nose, and even down to the stature. She could pass as Abad’s doppelganger, so much so that sometimes she has fun whenever fans of the actress mistake her for Abad, asking for her autograph and having their pictures taken with her.
“Charles hasn’t proposed. We just assumed he would but I knew he wouldn’t. Or if he would, I knew I wouldn’t accept,” Larissa pressed, waiting for Emma, one of Charles’s best (and probably the only) advocate in their group, to snap out of it.
If Larissa was good with putting clothes together (and making them, as she is starting her career as a fashion designer) and if Florence was excellent at making art imitate life, Emma was the wordsmith, able to tie words and make them into the best stories and poems ever. She is a yet-to-be published book author (she needs a push to finally submit a manuscript—or manuscripts for that matter, as she has finished three already), but she already making waves in the print and online blogging industries as having written some of the best and most entertaining pieces on basketball and football players. Her blog, EmmaEmmeEmma.com, also showcases her book reviews as she reads about a hundred books in a year (well, that is the goal, and she takes a week off quarterly from all her gigs to catch up on her book pile), as well as video blogs of her interviews with the said players.
“And what did Charles say?” was all Emma could come up with, lifting her hand to tug her hair, only to find it gone as she did this split decision of cutting her long, wavy hair into a pixie cut, making her look like a gorgeous tomboy. You can now see her face, her round brown eyes framed with the longest lashes ever, something that Charles loved to pick on whenever he sees her. She was now more open rather than her previous mysterious, more readable but still not quite, more… not Emma.
Larissa sighed heavily, once more and again. Her order arrived and she stared at the muffin wearily. It didn’t look delectable as it did the previous times she ordered it. “What did you think he said? Of course he told me not to do this, and that we can still make it work—” She looked up, cutting herself in midsentence when she saw Emma glaring at her.
“Em, please don’t make me the bad guy here,” she said in frustration. “I am not asking you to take sides because I know you’d take Charles, but… it isn’t working for me anymore. Our relationship has run its course, and I am not into forcing it for another five years or so before I put an end to it.”
“But Charles—” Emma began to say, but Florence cut her off.
“But Charles is a mature man, who can pretty much cope with the harsh realities of a failed relationship,” Florence interjected, getting tired of the Emma-loves-Charles-but-Charles-loves-Larissa drama. She shook her head at one of her best girl buds, who seem to be putting the welfare of the guy she loves over her best friend whom she has known for her entire life. “Give Larissa a break, Em—you knew she hasn’t been happy in a very long time but she’s been hanging around just coz Charles is a great guy—”
“A great guy that she’s letting go.”
Florence groaned—she knew Emma was a lost and hopeless cause when it concerns Charles.
Larissa, on the other hand, reached out and touched Emma’s hand, her finger grazing Emma’s scrabble tile ring. Larissa couldn’t blame Emma for being smitten over her (ex)boyfriend—Emma met Charles first, but the spark wasn’t there—or at least it wasn’t in Charles’s case. But Charles has always been sweet and thoughtful with Emma, even considering Emma his best friend. Emma settled for that—she would settle for anything Charles would give her. The ring, bronze with a scrabble tile ‘E,’ was from Charles, who had it custom-made for her on her birthday.
“Em, he’ll get over it. He’s smart, handsome, attractive, and he’s got you to get him through this,” Larissa said, trying to be patient. Emma scoffed. Did she just break up with him because she knew Charles would run to her for comfort? “I just don’t want to be in this anymore. It’s not fun anymore. I’m not happy. I don’t see it lasting much longer. The fire’s gone. The love is snuffed out.”
Emma lowered her head and started to tinker with her phone, reading her tweets, blocking out Larissa and her words. She scrolled through her Twitter timeline—Twitter handle @EmmaEmme—finally spotting a couple of Charles’s tweets (Twitter handle @charliereyes11). One tweet—an uncharacteristic, un-Charles, very emo tweet—was sent a couple of hours ago: Sometimes, love just ain’t enough to make someone stay. And she saw Charles sent her a direct message with only one word: Emmie.
Only Charles calls her that, and she felt coldness run through her body, urgency flowing along with it.
“Em,” Larissa called her, and she repeated Emma’s name thrice before her best friend finally looked up again. She saw the worried look on Emma’s face, and some sort of intuition—the years of knowing Emma ever since they were babies—flooded inside Larissa’s being. She knew just by looking at Emma’s face.
“Charles?” she guessed quietly, and Emma nodded, still not speaking, stashing her phone inside her bag.
Charles could wait, Emma decided, a bit uncertain.
Emma tried to keep a poker face when she faced Larissa. “Em, Charles is a great guy, and I can see that. I know that—otherwise, I wouldn’t be with him for that long,” she added, rolling her eyes, having her fair share of bad boys. “But I don’t love him anymore. And I don’t want to trap him in this nonsense when he can be with someone better. Someone who sees him. Someone who knows him better than I do. Someone who loves him.”
Emma stopped herself from lashing out at Larissa. She knew her best friend was talking about her, but did she breakup with Charles because she knew Charles can find comfort—and possibly a rebound—in Emma? She didn’t want to think of Larissa that way, but her phrasing just sucks. She couldn’t tell her she didn’t want to play second fiddle to Larissa, who had always been the most beautiful of the three. Larissa, whom Charles had loved more than anyone and anything.
She didn’t want to pick up the pieces that Larissa was throwing away—not that this was the first time it would happen—but this was Charles.
Emma wanted to be with Charles but not in this way.
Emma took a deep breath, shaking those angry, evil thoughts away from her head, trying to find another course of action, to divert the topic away from Charles. Larissa looks okay—someone always leaves a breakup unscathed—so Emma knew it was Charles who needed saving.
But she couldn’t talk about Charles. Not now, when her best friend has just broken up with him. Not now, when she found someone who wouldn’t stick her in the dreaded ‘friends zone’ for so long.
“Gideon asked me out,” was the first thing that came out of Emma’s mouth.
Both of her best friend’s reactions were priceless—Larissa’s mouth dropped open while Florence squealed.
“Oh my frigging gorgeousness,” Florence said in awe, and Emma’s face finally brightened, successfully casting off thoughts about Charles away from her head. She was armed with this news before coming to dinner, knowing her girlfriends will totally flip upon hearing this as she hasn’t dated in a long while, but it appears Larissa took the headline with the bomb she dropped a few minutes earlier.
“Gideon? As in the Gideon Pascual?” Larissa asked, finally freaking out with Florence. She has to hush both of her best friends as the people in the café are already looking at their table—the name Gideon Pascual could do that.
“One of the hottest and best actors around, Cosmo’s Most Wanted Bachelor of 2011, the man everybody wants to bed, just asked you out, Emma Carline Angeles? My best friend, Emma?” Florence said, lowering her voice a bit, her eyes wide, amusement and excitement still in her voice. Emma felt her cheeks burn—she couldn’t believe it the first time around either, plus, knowing Florence, she could think of all the possibilities that were running through the artist’s mind.
Florence forgot to mention that Gideon, twenty-two years young, already has two Best Actor trophies tucked under his belt, and that he has spawned three blockbuster movies and two high-rating, long-running teleseryes. She forgot to mention that the five-foot-eleven hunk with boyish looks (if he didn’t Emma that he’s already 22, she would have thought he’s just sixteen), soft features, very round hazelnut eyes (his mother’s German), thin pink lips, milky white skin, and a smile that can make you want to strip off your clothes is a great dancer.
Yup. That Gideon. She didn’t just snag any other guy—she got a date with Gideon Pascual.
“You do know I’m at Showbiz Live for a couple of weeks now, because of the weird interest in some of the athletes,” Emma explained, mentioning the top entertainment and gossip show in the country aired in one of the major networks, the one where Gideon is signed. “So I was there, submitting one of my stories, and Gideon was around. Peter, one of the segment producers, said Gideon had been checking in the past few weeks. Apparently Mr. Pascual saw one of my interviews and wanted to meet me.”
That was enough to make Florence squeal again. “So when’s the date?” she asked, and Emma sighed.
“The first official?” she teased, and she caught Larissa’s impatient look, so she said, “Wizards Ball.”
That made both Larissa and Florence stop, and Emma caught the quick look that passed between them. When Gideon asked her, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go either.
“Right away?” Larissa asked, hesitation on her face. “Gee, Em. I don’t know about that.” Emma felt her own uncertainty bubble beneath the surface—if Larissa, someone who has been exposed to the showbiz industry, wasn’t sure if she should go to the ball, how could she have had accepted Gideon’s offer?
“My gown will be made by Tyler Simmons?” Emma proffered, as if that would change Larissa’s mind, and she knew by the glint in her best friend’s eyes that the name-dropping worked. Tyler Simmons is one of Larissa’s favorite designers, and the man is making waves in the international scene.
“Holy shit, Em.”
Emma grinned, as if the gown was enough for her to say yes to the grandest of all balls that combines the stars of the top three major networks in the country. Everyone wants to know which star is bringing whom, in a night that is filled with revelations and surprises. In the past three years, Gideon has brought his leading lady in his teleseryes and movies, Maharlika Odulio, to the ball.
Word is going around that the on-screen and off-screen couple’s flame has grown cold, and when Gideon asked her to the ball, she took it as a confirmation.
“Apparently Gideon knew Tyler from back then—during his earlier years in the States. At least he explained that part to me when he went to the house the other day. He told me—”
“Wait,” Larissa butt in, “did you just say Gideon was over at your house the other day?”
Emma nodded slowly, sensing another squeal coming. “He saw my tweet—the one about craving for Lay’s and some milk tea—and he BBM-ed me, asking for my address,” she explained brightly. “And then there was a doorbell and… he was there, Lay’s and milk tea in hand. He had a sweet smile on his face too.”
Larissa stood up and hugged Emma, a huge smile plastered on her face too. It was high time for Emma to get some semblance of a love life, but it comes so badly timed as Larissa had hoped Emma to be there for Charles as he recuperates from his broken heart.
Larissa chastised herself—selfish much?
“And then…?” Florence prompted, and Emma shrugged.
“He just dropped the food off. He has shooting—for a movie with Laarni Salamat—and he said he just wanted to make me smile.”
Emma thought Gideon and Maharlika’s network knew of their breakup already as they had started to pair off the actors in other love teams. She sighed, wondering when she wouldn’t be some sort of a rebound or panakip-butas.
“Tyler’s coming here,” she said, turning to Larissa, “to get my measurements. You wanna come with?” she asked, and Larissa’s smile became wider. Emma took that as an affirmation, saying, “Just no dissing my waistline and cup size.”
Larissa laughed, nodding. Emma passed to her a piece of paper with the date and address of her meeting with the Tyler Simmons.
“Gideon’s going all out on you, huh?” Florence said, a hint of sadness in her voice. She was happy for her friend but she is jealous—jealous that the man she is with right now couldn’t do the same for her. Emma nodded, turning to Florence. “Am pretty sure there’s a diabolical reason behind it, and I’m guessing it has something to do with avoiding the press and sending a message that he’s over Maharlika,” Emma said bluntly.
A spell of silence fell over their group, and it was momentarily interrupted by Florence’s ringing phone. Noah and the Whale’s voice floated over the coffeeshop’s bosa nova music, singing: And though it kills me to know that when we are through / You go to your real lover who’ll put real kisses on you.
Florence flushed, standing up and excusing herself to take the call.
A knowing look passed between Emma and Larissa, and only one of them had the courage to say whom they knew was calling Florence—who had the dark humor of selecting that song as the ringtone for that specific person.
Emma whispered: “Harry.”
Larissa nodded quietly, taking her cup, sipping slowly, a dark, awkward silence passing between them.
When Florence returned, she grabbed her bag, obviously harried. “Sorry, girls, I have go,” was all she said, and she was off without any other explanations. Emma and Larissa shook their heads, sighing in unison. They haven’t agreed with Florence at the kind of relationship she chose, and there are days when they wanted to pull her out of it, just before she sinks to the rock bottom.
Larissa was about to ask Emma if she wanted to catch the last screening of the latest Justin Timberlake flick when it was Emma’s phone this time that started to ring. Her own ringtone was equally telling—Jason Mraz’s If It Kills Me—so Larissa knew who was calling Emma. She saw Emma’s hesitation, and then she nodded, as if giving her the go signal to pick up the phone.
“Yup,” Emma said without any greetings, her voice low, almost a murmur. Larissa feigned as if her banana walnut muffin is more interesting that Emma’s conversation with her now ex-boyfriend. She heard Emma sigh heavily, “I can’t. I’m with—”
Larissa looked up at Emma, shaking her head sharply. “Don’t,” she mouthed. “Just go.”
Emma caught herself in time. “Fine. I’ll meet you.”
When Emma put down the phone, she eyed Larissa warily. “I can not meet him you know. I’m not under any obligation, especially since you guys—”
“Em, he needs you. More than I do right now,” Larissa cut in with a tired smile. “I’ll see you when we’ll meet Tyler.”
Emma stood up, gave Larissa a buss on the cheek, whispering, “Thanks,” and was off to meet Charles.
Larissa took her fork and played with the remainder of her muffin, stranded as her two best friends left her in lieu of the men they love or favor.
“Hey muffin. It’s just you and me now,” she mumbled, feeling downcast all of a sudden.
