Never Just Friends

by Lily Craig

  "Thanks, Mads," said Georgie. She didn't feel thankful, though. Her guts were still twisted with anger and anguish. "But I wanted her to like you."

  "She will, don't worry about me. I think I just overwhelmed her with my questions. I know I can be a lot to handle at first, and we'll have so much time to get to know each other better while you keep dating. Unless... do you still want to date her?"

  Another pause while Georgie deliberated. "I don't know. She was rude to you, and that's not ok with me."

  "Maybe we just need to meet on more neutral ground. Without you to chaperone, we could really talk. Get past this initial hurdle."

  But Georgie could picture how that would make Quinn accuse her of throwing her to the wolves, of not caring enough to support her through getting to know Madelyn. She was damned the one way, and the other.

  "I don't think that's a good idea. And it's not your fault, Mads. Quinn's being unreasonable."

  "Ugh. I'm sorry to hear that."

  "Honestly, I'm surprised. We've been going out long enough I didn't think she'd be insecure. She was so jealous."

  "Jealous? Of me?"

  Shit. Georgie forgot what she'd been saying and accidentally let things slip that she'd worked excruciatingly hard to conceal.

  "You know, we're best friends, and she doesn't like that there's another woman in my life whose history with me outweighs hers. And always will."

  "Aw, that's kind of sweet except the part where she's being irrational and unfair."

  "Ha, exactly."

  "Well, I liked her. Even if she didn't like me all that much."

  "You're too sweet, but thanks." Georgie's gut surged with affection for Madelyn. No matter what happened, she could always count on her best friend to rise above petty drama. She was, as they said, a keeper.

  Too bad she was straight and therefore highly unlikely to want to be kept by Georgie. Let alone any other woman.

  Angst glimmered in Georgie's blood about this, her time-worn hobby horse. You could wait for someone to love you, sure, if there was a shot in hell. But short of a seriously invasive brainwashing session, Madelyn was completely unattainable.

  "Is Quinn always so insecure?" asked Madelyn. Her question arose from innocent curiosity; Georgie knew her well enough to understand that. But the way it skirted near Georgie’s deepest secrets brought her hackles up.

  She couldn't say what she really wanted to—couldn't spill every messy feeling into the phone and have Madelyn pick each one up. Not without breaking the trust they had and severing parts of the friendship forever. Not without confronting the fact Georgie was holding out for the impossible.

  If you never risked saying the truth, you could pretend. Could grasp the last shreds of your dignity and tell yourself they were still yours and not co-opted by emotions you couldn't control.

  "Not usually, no," said Georgie. She breathed steadily, counting for a few beats so that the answer wouldn't rush out of her and sound rehearsed. Still, she knew she wasn't being entirely honest. "Like I said, she seems especially insecure about things with you. I can't promise I did my best to quell those fears, but you know me. I can be stubborn."

  Especially about you, thought Georgie. Words she could never speak.

  "Fucking rights you can be!" laughed Madelyn. "Quinn's got another think coming if she's convinced you'll just let her blast insecurity everywhere without you fighting it."

  That voice on the phone with her was so accepting of what Georgie said when she needed support, so measured in thoughtful critique when she was being an ass. Madelyn had oceans more depth than Quinn.

  How could Georgie not have seen it until now?

  She had to have been kidding herself. Horny and desperate enough to jump at the first girlfriend opportunity that came her way, hoping it would erase the deeper feelings she concealed.

  Of course, it didn't.

  "The thing is, Mads, I don't know if I want to fight it. I shouldn't be having a fight like this at all. Girlfriends are supposed to accept who you are. And part of who I am is friends with you. A big part."

  "That's part of me, too, G. You don't think she'd come around?"

  Georgie wanted to believe Quinn could. But this conflict had revealed something more unsettling and difficult to digest. And that was that Georgie wasn't as over Madelyn as she'd thought she was. Maybe not at all.

  The moment Quinn had essentially forced her to choose sides, it hadn't even been a contest. Whoever did that automatically became the loser, in Georgie's view. And if they were up against Madelyn?

  They'd always, always come second.

  15

  Present Day

  Madelyn left the cabin early, having talked her heart out with Nadia and Hannah. She'd longed to have time to do the same with Georgie, but since Georgie left and texts wouldn’t send in this service deadzone, Madelyn would have to wait.

  And just like that, Madelyn's best chance at happiness seemed to have evaporated as quickly as the steam above the spa hot tubs in the town of Banff. She watched the droves of tourists snapping mountain pictures and posing in front of Canadian stores like Roots, but the green light changed and the person behind her honked.

  Time to go home.

  It would have been easier if Madelyn knew what she was doing. Instead of certainty, instead of airing her feelings and maybe sparking the start of something truly life-changing, everything had gone wrong. She'd told Georgie about her feelings in the stupidest way possible.

  That was already catastrophic.

  Then she'd hurt herself, necessitating a visit to the Mediclinic when she got home so she could make sure there wasn't a fracture somewhere in her swollen ankle. A tensor bandage might help fix her injury, but there wasn't a surface fix available for her deeply bruised ego.

  In a cabin with no other distractions, with the power out and the snowstorm raging, Georgie still hadn't given Madelyn her full attention. And the only explanation Madelyn could find for that was that Georgie didn't feel the same way as her.

  Sometimes friendship was just that, and nothing more.

  But what about the fact their closest friends saw something? Nadia and Hannah had thought Georgie carried a torch for Madelyn. When Georgie moved away, had the torch gone out?

  Madelyn didn’t know what to think. She cranked her saddest-sack music on the drive back to Calgary, watching the mountains roll down into foothills, become undulating prairie, morph into grassy plains dotted with suburban homes and strip malls.

  When the landscape had lulled her into a sense of peaceful return, Madelyn's eye was caught by a blur of brown motion to her right. A deer ran alongside the highway, its white hindquarters the only thing that stood out from the brushy ditch. Madelyn wondered, for a split second, where it was going.

  And then she remembered that where one deer can be found, there are often others. Too late, she slammed the brakes on her car. The momentum carried her forwards so quickly that she could do nothing but pray when another deer, larger than the first, hopped onto the pavement directly in front of her.

  A sickening shuddering feeling rocked the car as Madelyn braked. Traffic wasn't bad, so no one was behind her.

  Just in time, she stopped.

  She tried to calm her racing heart while she stared out the windshield at the deer. It blinked placidly and sauntered across the rest of the pavement over to the ditch on the other side. Meanwhile, Madelyn’s pulse pounded and her hands shook on the steering wheel.

  Pull over. Calm down.

  Underneath the whispers of logic, Madelyn saw flashes of the snow-covered fawn in the woods. She drove to the shoulder and put her car in park before bursting into tears.

  With her heart still racing, she took out her phone and texted Georgie.

  "Almost hit a deer. I’m so scared. What do you do if you hit one, again?"

  Just before she pressed send, she remembered the last week. It had completely slipped her mind in the urgency of a crisis. Her first instinct had been that Georgie cou
ld fix everything.

  Georgie would fix everything. That was who she was—strong, capable, giving.

  Rather than crying at the side of the road like Madelyn, Georgie would stay calm. At that thought, Madelyn sobbed even harder. Here she was, miserable over nearly killing an innocent animal, and the most upsetting part was that her friend wasn't there to help her. She'd ruined that, too.

  She deleted the text. It felt wrong, but not much felt right in Madelyn's life right then, anyway.

  What was one more close call along the way?

  Finally, she calmed down enough to wipe the tears from her face and get back onto the highway. Without turning her music back on, she drove home. It took less time than she thought it would, since her mind was preoccupied.

  At home, Madelyn emerged from her car into the city air, listening to the surprising volume of tires on pavement. The honking, beeping, bustling city noise was so obvious compared to the silence at the cabin. Her apartment wasn't much, but it was supposed to be home.

  Today, though, it felt like a holding cell. Her punishment for messing things up badly with Georgie and ruining her future.

  Hold up, Madelyn. Who's to say she'd have wanted to be with you even if you did have a chance?

  Madelyn had been presumptuous from the start. Her elation at discovering she loved Georgie had assumed that it would be matched with something similar. That telling Georgie her feelings would be a form of catharsis, of healing.

  She hadn't considered how Georgie might feel to be trapped with that confession. How maybe Georgie had had a crush a long time ago and worked hard to get past it.

  God, she'd been stupid.

  It took an astonishing amount of effort to close the flimsy Wal-Mart blinds to Madelyn's bedroom window. She rolled into bed exhausted and melted into tears, letting them fall without even trying to keep them in.

  Finally, she could wallow. A good, deep crying session left her spent and shaky, but by the time the darkness of the night sank her apartment into shadows, Madelyn felt she'd exorcised something all-consuming.

  What would be left was still to be determined. She checked her phone, hoping against logic that Georgie would have reached out and confessed her own feelings, apologized for leaving suddenly, and offered to make new plans to live in Calgary again. Though Madelyn knew these wishes were fantastical, she felt them anyway.

  It would be up to her to fix things, that was clear. And leaving them broken was not an option, not after twenty years of knowing each other. If Madelyn didn't know Georgie, she wasn't sure that being alive was even worth it. The thought was unbearable.

  She called Georgie, letting the phone ring as long as it needed to get to the voicemail. She hadn't expected Georgie to answer but sadness surged in her all the same when the robotic voice welcomed her to the voicemail inbox.

  "Georgie," said Madelyn. "We've known each other for so long, and have so much history together, that I don't really know where to start. Just know that I realize I messed things up this week. And I want to make it up to you, if I can. Losing your friendship would be the only thing I can't stand right now, even if the sun started making its way to destroy the planet, I'd still want to choose you. Not that I could fix the apocalypse, but you know what I mean. Or maybe you don't. Anyway, please take as much time as you need, if that's what you need. I'll be here, I promise. No expectations."

  She'd gotten so hung up on wanting a romantic relationship that she'd forgotten that risking their friendship was a dumb, dumb move. It would be better to have platonic Georgie, a thousand times over, than no Georgie in her life at all.

  So Madelyn set herself to the task of sifting through her belongings, one by one, and finding all the evidence she could of her lifelong friendship with Georgie. She needed to remind herself of the depth and value of that bond, and maybe Georgie could use it too. Madelyn suspected so, and that was a risk she could manage. The Mediclinic could wait until tomorrow.

  "Look at this kindergarten class photo, G. Your hair was so cute back then. Think you'll get back into doing your own haircuts? :)" She texted Georgie a picture of the photograph, affection tightening her chest.

  Madelyn found a box of handwritten notes to one another from elementary school underneath her stack of grade-school photos. In each note, Madelyn had signed a fancy faux-script M as if she were a princess in training, while Georgie had just written her initials in block letters. They talked about Pokémon, television shows, what other kids in the room were doing that they found annoying. The smile on Madelyn's face overshadowed her urge to cry.

  "Look how much we used to talk. I can't believe I used to be this pretentious about my signature!" she captioned the next photo she sent Georgie, of a note where Madelyn complained about not getting 100% on a recent spelling test and then signed her full name in the 'font' she'd been using in all her other notes.

  It didn't matter to Madelyn that Georgie wasn't responding to her texts yet. The receipts still showed that the messages were delivered and not yet read. What was important was that she was rediscovering, intentionally, what had bound them together in the first place. Reminding herself of their value as a team. Maybe, just maybe, helping Georgie feel less alone.

  If that was what it took, she would comb through every last scrap of paper from their childhood and adolescence.

  Next, Madelyn found the dog-eared and worn copy of a pulpy noir detective novel, Silent Gamine, Georgie had bought in a garage sale during middle school. That book had quickly become one of their favorites. They had taken turns reading it out loud to each other and trying to parse the meaning of certain euphemistic turns of phrase that didn't outlast the 1940s.

  "Remember 'gams' and our obsession with this book?" Madelyn wrote, the tears now fully dried on her face and replaced by a warm smile. She was grateful she never threw anything out, now, because it was providing her with exactly the kind of solace she needed.

  Pictures of Halloween costumes, digital files with recordings of them pretending to host news talk shows, badly written essays on the virtues of actresses they loved that had since languished in obscurity—the whole lot of Madelyn's friendship with Georgie shone with their closeness. It had barely been possible to spend a day without seeing each other or at least calling, texting, or sending instant messages over MSN.

  Madelyn had known she was upset over Georgie's move to Edmonton, had since felt shame for how she'd treated it like a crushing blow when she should have showed Georgie excitement and support. But she had failed to understand where that anguish had come from.

  Of course, part of it was her unacknowledged feelings. A larger portion, yet to be explained to Georgie, was how they'd gone from 0 to 100, in reverse. Constant contact, support, and laughter had been replaced with infrequent texts and monthly Skype calls.

  And during those calls, Georgie often said little. She was normally reserved even around Madelyn, but the distance altered that silence from bearable to stony. All the warmth had drained from their interactions.

  She had sent screenshots of a few threads from when Georgie and Madelyn binge-watched Orange is the New Black together while texting reaction GIFs back and forth. In this light, she saw how even then, she’d been flirting with Georgie—without realizing it. One message read “Ruby Rose is STUNNING” and had a cartoon with heart-eyes in it. A few hours later, she’d written that Ruby reminded her of Georgie.

  "I miss us," texted Madelyn. She'd sent photos of so many memories, she was worried Georgie might think she'd gone insane. But this last message, she knew she had to send. It was the crux of all her sadness, the pain that she couldn't dislodge, no matter how much she reviewed their lives so far. Once it left her phone and sped through the ether to Georgie, Madelyn was able to breathe again.

  No matter what came of this, she'd done what she needed to do.

  Shortly afterwards, like her body had been running on fumes for the last few hours, Madelyn fell into a deep, surprisingly restful sleep. Though she dreamed of nothing, it wa
s the good kind of nothing. A soothing darkness completely enveloped her, leaving no space for the pain and sorrows of her wakeful day.

  In the morning, she would try calling Georgie again.

  16

  Age 24

  Georgie hadn't expected Madelyn's call, but it hadn't been unwelcome, either. The late-night hour wasn't unusual; the two talked so frequently that it was an unspoken understanding that no matter the time, you could send a message. It might not be seen until later, but communication was always an option.

  Even so, there was an odd structure to Madelyn's speech that made Georgie anxious.

  Was she having a breakdown?

  Typically, Madelyn wasn't terse. Far from it. Thoughts poured from her like a waterfall, sometimes splashing around all over before Georgie could form a single sentence. Tonight, though, Madelyn's breath had been strained and her words mumbled.

  "Come over," Georgie had said. Crisis took precedence over sleep. Madelyn was a priority, and if she needed help, Georgie was more than willing to give it. In whatever shape it took.

  She cleared empty energy drink bottles from the desk, stuck a few dirty dishes into the dishwasher that had been lying around. Just as the buzzer rang, Georgie shoved a vibrator under the bed.

  She let Madelyn in and sat at the small table in her kitchen waiting for her to make her way up the flights of stairs. No elevator for this cheap building, not that Georgie minded. Helped keep her humble and in shape. She enjoyed the flexing feeling that came from her quads after making the trip up. The exhaustion in her arms from carrying groceries, piled several bags deep on each side.

  When Madelyn knocked, the sound was so quiet that Georgie almost missed it.

  "Hey," she said, opening the door. "What's up?"

  One glance at Madelyn's red eyes and Georgie knew this wasn't a trip she'd taken lightly. Madelyn had been crying for a long time. Without asking more, Georgie went to her fridge and got a beer for Madelyn, cracking it with the magnetic opener shaped like a longhorn bull.