by Laney Castro
The beep sounded and he leapt into the water.
Chapter Eighteen
Madison was drumming her fingers over the steering wheel as she sped down the freeway. Her stomach had been in knots ever since leaving the meet and for the nth time in the past half-hour, she doubted if this was the right thing to do. But Zoe had assured her that it was no big deal. “There’s still tomorrow,” she had reasoned out, giving her a thumbs-up. “You’ll be here then. If it’s important, then it’s important.”
That was just it, Madison thought as she stilled her drumming and gripped the wheel. Was it important?
Her phone rang and when she saw the name on the screen her heart started pounding wildly. With her phone plugged in, she answered it on hands free but she was already looking for the nearest exit to take. She couldn’t talk to him like this. “You missed the final,” was the first thing he said.
“I’m sorry but something came up… did you win?” she asked, trying to keep her tone light.
“Are you with him?” His voice was tight, as if that strong jaw of his couldn’t unclench enough to let the words out.
She hesitated. Oh shit, what should she say? “No, I’m just... on my way to Hollywood. For a go-see of sorts.”
“With him.” It was not a question, but a statement.
Madison’s mouth went dry. No matter how hard she tried to swallow and lick her lips, every word seemed to scrape inside her throat. She spotted an interchange and exited, then pulled up as soon as she could. Every breath seemed painful but she tried to calm herself. “Yes. But Aaron, it’s not what you think. It was just too good to pass up—”
“Too good that you’d rather be there than be with me.”
“You’re twisting my words,” she began but he cut her off.
“This was important to me, Madison!” Aaron sounded so pissed. Pissed and disappointed, and he had every right to be.
“I know! It’s important to me, too. I would have stayed if I could. But Zoe said you were going to win anyway—everyone said it—I just couldn’t stay a second longer or I’d miss this job. This is important to me, too. I thought you’d understand,” she said. “You’re chasing your dreams everyday. Why can’t I chase mine?”
“I love you, Madison, and I support you, but not like this. Not when your dreams mean sleeping with some other guy to get them, no.”
Madison recoiled. Hot tears appeared in her eyes. “Aaron, I love you, too. But I’m done seeing Sean. I was on my way to tell him that, too. It’s not even like that anymore.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better about you leaving me to be with your ex?” Aaron said with a sharp laugh.
“It’s not like that! Look,” she said, rapidly brushing her tears away with the back of her hand, trying hard not to keep her voice from quivering. “I’ll head back there so we can talk—”
“Don’t bother, Madison.” Aaron was quiet for a second. “In fact, don’t even bother coming back tomorrow either.”
“Aaron?” His name came out like a choked sob, and the tears in her eyes finally started streaming down her face. Her voice was a pitch higher. “We just need to talk about this. I’m sorry that I left. I shouldn’t have done that. I swear, things are over between Sean and me.”
“We’re over, Madison.” His voice sounded so tired. “I’m done with your crazy. I’m sorry if I ever held you back.”
“Aaron, wait!” she cried out but the line was dead. She tried calling him back but there was no reply. She cursed herself and tried to head back. But she knew it was too late. When she arrived at the aquatic center, the meet was already over. There were only a few cars in the parking lot. Her phone had begun ringing nonstop, and she could just imagine Sean getting angrier and angrier by the minute. But there was only one man whose voice she wanted to hear, and unfortunately for her, he didn’t seem to have anything left to say.
Chapter Nineteen
It was late when Madison got to her apartment. She had just closed the door when she broke down on the floor. She curled up into a ball, holding her knees up to her face. She cried her eyes out as she felt her heart being crushed inside her.
The phone in her bag rang again, the shrill tone taunting her. She had the good sense not to take it out or she could’ve thrown a good working phone, so she simply pushed the bag aside. She buried her head between her knees and tried to drown the sound out.
Sean had been livid when she answered his call earlier. He had reprimanded her, asking where the fuck she’d been. That she just lost the opportunity of a lifetime. That she wouldn’t be getting that chance again.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she had told him.
“What the fuck are you on about?!”
“This. With you. I can’t. I won’t.” She could hardly muster full sentences anymore; she was just so tired.
It took him a while to answer. “Is that it?” she had heard him scoff. “You won’t get any better deals than this, Madison.”
“Goodbye, Sean,” she had said definitively, even if there was a crack in her voice.
Yesterday, she had been justifying why she needed to be at Sean’s dinner. She had just forgotten how easily it was for her to hurt Aaron.
Madison hugged her knees tighter. Maybe Sean was right, maybe she wouldn’t be able to get an opportunity like that again. But at what expense? She could land any job she wanted, book any gig she could get her hands on, get the lead to any featured film. None of those mattered. Not when the one person that kept her breathing wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her anymore.
Now she was flailing, drowning in her own sea of misery. And there was no one to pull her out of it.
She desperately wanted to talk to Aaron but she didn’t dare press the call button. The last thing he needed right now was someone calling him in the middle of the night. But Madison hadn’t slept much herself. It felt like all of her energy had been sapped out of her. She tried to sit up, her whole body numb from sleeping on the floor. She felt nothing, except for the tightening in her chest.
Eventually she took out her phone to check the time. What struck her was not the dozens of missed calls from Sean or the lack of them from Aaron. Instead it was a text message from Zoe that she had not seen last night, in all her frantic scrambling: Hi, how did your work thing go? You missed a really tight set of finals. Aaron barely made third. Coach D ripped him a new one for his shitty reaction time.
After all his hard work and that impressive preliminary heat, he almost didn’t place.
And she knew who to blame.
With what little strength Madison had left, she quickly stood up. She washed up and got dressed, and as crazy as it sounded, decided to drive back to Irvine.
This time, she didn’t stay in the VIP section with Frank. She chose to blend with the rest of the crowd. She stayed as far away as she could, but still close enough to see him clearly. Madison wasn’t there to plead with him. Almost losing last night’s race had made it clear that he didn’t need the confusion nor the distraction. But she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t see him race, if she didn’t see him do what he had been chasing for.
She didn’t move from her spot, except for a short lunch break, and she stayed until the very end, way after his finals were over. He raced in the 100-m that day. She held her breath every time he dove in, but there wasn’t any need to worry. Aaron placed first in the preliminaries and then later in the finals, swimming and sprinting like a man possessed.
Watching him, she realized that all this time, he hadn’t needed her. Aaron was already his own person before they had met. He had his own goals. He knew who he was. For a short time, they had fooled themselves into thinking that she gave him something to swim for but now it was time to accept that she was the one who needed him.
God, she loved him. That was undeniable now. As she walked back to her car, letting the exiting crowd flow around her, she still rejoiced for him. Her heart felt like it had been squeezed out of any em
otion but pain, but all she wanted to do now was to congratulate him for his hard work.
Tell him how proud she was.
Tell him she was only his.
When she got to her car, she saw the cap with his name on it. The one she had left there last night. The one she wore yesterday. The one he owned. She traced the letters of his surname with a trembling finger. The now familiar tightening in her chest made her grip the steering wheel, lean over, and let the tears fall.
“These shots are amazing, Red,” Elliott said proudly as they went over the photos from the Stroke campaign. He had called her over to check the photos before the upcoming launch, and he was more than impressed. “I think we have a lot of good new tear sheets for your book.”
Madison wasn’t even listening. She tried to put up an animated front, but could only muster mild disinterest. It has been days since Irvine but she still felt dejected. She tried not to let it show when she was working. She used her emotions to projecting seriousness in shoots and mustered enough energy to still be affable with her co-workers. Her sister Mackenzie knew something was up, but thankfully she didn’t ask.
But her mask would slip every now and then. And now, at this one table in the agency, her self-control was weakening. It didn’t help that most of the photos before her were of her with Aaron, rapidly transporting her back in time. That handsome smirk of his caught and frozen on these photographs. The same smile he had when he teased her or when he would talk about all the things he loved doing. And those clear gray eyes that stared back at her, that made her felt she was the only one worth looking at. It now seemed like ages ago.
She only realized that her tears had started to fall when Elliott reached out to hold her hand across the table. She looked back up at him and saw the concerned look in his eyes. She had told him about the break-up when he confronted her after a botched shoot that almost cost her the project. He hadn’t said anything then, dropped being a booker for the moment, and just became a friend.
The same way he was now, standing across the table and holding her hand. He never said I told you so over Sean; he didn’t have to. He knew he didn’t have to scold her since she did a bang-up job doing it herself.
“You look like you’re in desperate need of your wheatgrass fix. How are you holding up?” Elliott asked with a soft voice he didn’t use often.
Madison wiped the tears from her eyes with her hands, grateful she didn’t put any makeup on that day. “Miserable,” she mumbled.
“Have you tried calling him?”
“Almost every day. I leave messages. I'm getting pretty close to becoming the stalker ex. I expect a restraining order soon,” she replied cheekily, summoning her old self back.
But Elliott could definitely see the sadness in her eyes. This was the same person who was there during her rough start. And she recognized that look on his face. “I really liked you together, Madison,” he said. “You were good for each other. Maybe it doesn't have to end like this.”
She cast her eyes back down on the photos in front of her, and the one that stood out was with the both of them in it, looking off to one side and away from each other. “Maybe it already has.”
Elliott tightened his hold on her hand for a few more minutes before letting go. Then he pulled out and opened his planner on top of the photos. “Next is your schedule,” he stated, now back in booker-mode. “You have a go-see tomorrow at 10:30 down at La Cienega. Think you can handle it?”
Madison looked back up at Elliott, and she knew she had to stop pitying herself. “I’ve got this,” she acknowledged.
She soon threw herself in her work. After the Stroke campaign was finally launched, she got another job as a fit model for an up-and-coming fashion design house, which gave her a steadier paycheck. She took on an evening shift at Common Grounds to keep herself busy. But every night, before she stumbled onto bed, she would check the internet for news of him. She read every new interview, browsed through every new gallery. The second leg of the Splash Circuit Nationals had taken him to Colorado. She wondered, as she closed her eyes, if he ever thought about her at all.
Chapter Twenty
"You've done the work, Aaron," Coach Didion reminded him. "From here on out, it's all mental. Good job."
"Thanks, Coach," Aaron said, right before a camera flashed in front of him and local reporters pulled him away for interviews. Coach Didion just laughed and turned to his own set of reporters. The Colorado leg of the Splash Circuit Nationals had just ended, with Aaron taking first in the 50-m and second in the 100-m. The whole team had done really well so far, their best showing in seven years.
He supposed he had Madison to thank for it. Without the distraction, he could only concentrate. One stroke at a time. One heat at a time. One event at a time. He even managed to beat his personal best. It hadn’t been the case back at Irvine when he almost missed out finishing, but he was grateful that Coach Didion didn’t go into a lecture about personal stuff getting in the way of the performance like he had expected. It was like Coach knew he needed his space. He repaid his coach by showing up at every practice ready to swim.
But that didn’t mean he didn’t think of her outside of the pool. He felt his heart had been yanked out. He saw her in every street corner. He smelled her on his sheets, in his shower. He liked his routine and his routine had included her. She was as essential to him as training, as conditioning, as water. There was even one weekend when he hadn’t felt like sleeping at his apartment and headed back home. His dad was surprised he had shown up. Aaron hadn’t felt like talking but when he told him that he and Madison had split, his dad had told him to take it easy. It was the first time he had said those words in years.
Madison had tried calling immediately after the Irvine meet. She left him so many messages, at first wanting to ask if they could meet, then later on resorting to drunk-dialed messages and apologetic texts. With all the training and the bitter Irvine incident still hounding him, Aaron avoided answering any of them. Eventually, they had tapered off, making him think that she had given up.
There were so many damn times that he had wanted to pick up the phone and ask her what had gone wrong between them. Why he wasn’t what she wanted. When his anger had abated, his pride was left in its stead. It took him a while before he could mold it into something he could use. The renewed training resolve did wonders for his swim times but did nothing for the emptiness in his life.
He loved Madison, that much was true. Still did. He shouldn’t have let her go without a fight. On nights when he would torture himself, he replayed their last argument over and over again. He had so many what ifs. What if he hadn’t lost his temper. What if he had let her go. What if he could fix things with her first before he swam. What if he could give this all up… But none of that mattered now. After this meet was over, Aaron knew that he still had a long way to go before he could win her back.
“Good portfolio,” murmured the designer Stephanie Lee, flipping through her book. Though the woman’s expression didn’t change, Madison was thrilled by her words.
They were seated at Lee and Leigh, a young fashion house, discussing what could be another project. “Thank you,” Madison replied sincerely.
“We’re looking for a different kind of model for our spring and summer lookbook. When we set out a call, we weren’t sure what we would get. But with your body of work and your recent work with Stroke Swimwear, I can tell that you’re a great fit. According to your agent, you’re fine with doing underwater shoots?” Stephanie asked.
This time, Madison confidently said, “Yes.”
It wasn’t a lie. She had begun swimming every weekend. At first she thought it was a way to stay connected to Aaron, but the truth was she couldn’t even bring herself to visit the aquatic center downtown. She drove to Irvine instead and found a weird sense of peace here where her relationship fell apart. But she had to remind herself that she wasn’t training for anything; she couldn’t afford developing new muscles. She just let herself swim.
There was something so relaxing and therapeutic about it. Maybe she didn’t love it quite the same way that Aaron did, but it had become an important part of her routine and it looked like it was going to come in handy.
Twenty minutes later, Madison was walking out with another contract. Her career was really picking up. She felt more confident about herself and her abilities now. Sean was just an ugly memory. She knew that each job she booked, she got because of her hard work and not for any other reason. She couldn’t wait to tell someone.
She already had her phone out, but as her thumb moved on auto-pilot, she realized that she was about to click on Aaron’s name.
Her heart felt heavy in her chest. Even with everything happening around her, something was still missing. It was still hard to not have him around to share in her good news. Sure, she had Mac and Elliott, but not even their best efforts could help fill the ache that Aaron’s absence had left.
Was she contented to just leave the way things were now? She wanted him back. She wanted to at least talk to him face to face, and tell him all the words she wanted to say. All the things she wanted to apologize for. And even if—worst-case scenario—he wouldn’t take her back, at least she knew she tried to win him back. At least he would know she tried. And maybe then she would have a sense of closure. Certainty.
Madison had stopped trying to call him too much, since he wouldn’t pick up or answer anyway. She was only half-kidding about that restraining order. In the end, she called Zoe instead. It had been almost a month since the Splash meet, when they had last spoken to each other.
Zoe’s voice sounded thrilled when she answered the phone, and their greetings felt like there was no gap in their conversations. But it soon turned awkward when the younger girl asked about her and if she’d seen Aaron. Madison told her.
Zoe was confused about what went wrong between them. “Aaron doesn’t talk about it.”