Ian
I'd been waiting for this day for month. And then I couldn't even be there to pick her up from the train station.
When my boss called me and asked if I could cover a co-worker's shift that afternoon, I was tempted to say no. But I'd only been working at the bike shop for two month. I was still in the kiss-your-boss's-ass stage. So I said: of course I'd be able to fill in for my co-worker. I may have said it through gritted teeth, but I said it.
That only left me one option. I had to ask Darcy to pick up Al. It wasn't exactly the way I'd imagined their reunion to go, but there was nothing to be done about it now.
We'd talked about Allie's arrival beforehand, but only in the most general terms. The subject had been something we both avoided like the plague. In this whole year Allie and I had been dating, I'd only talked about her a handful of times with my best friend. It was strange. At times I felt like I was leading two different lives. Up until now, these two lives had been separated by a good few hundred miles, but now Al was here, and I wasn't quite sure how to deal with my two best friends being reunited.
A year ago, I had almost given up all hope of ever seeing Allie again. But then she just walked into the office on my first day volunteering for the wildlife trust, looking as beautiful as I remembered her.
I couldn't believe my eyes at first. After all these years, I'd long stopped seeing her face everywhere I went, but when she looked up and I saw those big, brown eyes, I knew without a doubt that it was her.
We both were a little shocked, I think. For a moment, we just stared at each other. And then I watched as she slowly turned and came towards me. Her steps were hesitant, slow, but she'd recognised me, too, and when I reached out to pull her into a hug, her arms closed around me with a desperate iron grip.
But that was the second time we met. I remembered the very first time I ever laid eyes on Allie just as vividly. Eleven years ago, I saw her, and I just knew there would never be a girl more beautiful than her. I also knew she would never be mine.
It was late August, shortly after my ninth birthday. School had just started again, and that meant a lot more studying and a lot less fun.
Darcy and I still spent every free second together, though. Not even homework could keep us from our daily adventures.
Until that one fateful day when I knocked on his door and he told me he didn't want to go out to the football field to kick the ball around.
“I want you to meet someone”, he said instead.
I knew a new family had moved into the house across the street from his, but I hadn't known that they had a daughter around our age. When Darcy told me, I was excited to meet her. I could always use a new friend.
When we reached her house, he didn't even stop to ring the doorbell, like normal people would. No, Darcy just invited himself in, walking through the gate into the back garden as if he lived there. He always did that. It could have been a stranger's house, and he would have done it. I told him over and over that it just wasn't polite to barge onto people's properties without permission, but he was Darcy, so of course he never listened.
We rounded the corner and there she was, hanging upside down from a tree, red as a tomato, crying for help. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and when I looked over at Darcy, I could tell he thought exactly the same.
We helped her down the tree and the colour of her face returned to normal.
“Come play football with us”, Darcy said to Al after making the necessary introductions.
Allie made a face. It looked so funny, it made me laugh. “I've never played football before”, she admitted.
“No way!” I exclaimed.
She just shrugged, a little self-consciously. “At my old school, the boys played football and the girls all played hockey”, she said.
“And you never just, like, kicked a ball around after school with your friends?” Darcy asked, just as surprised as I was.
Allie shook her head.
“Well, then you have to come”, I said. “It's fun, I promise.”
So Allie came with us to the muddy field we called our football pitch.
And there, that day on the field, the rivalry between Darcy and me started. Maybe we didn't realise it back then, but we were both trying to impress Al, both trying to be better than the other. When previously we had never bothered to keep score between the two of us, now every goal counted while Al watched. We showed her the right technique to control the ball while running, practised kicking and even showed her a few tricks. We had fun and from that day onwards, Allie was our friend. It just happened and there was nothing either of us could do about it.
Darcy and I were best friends, and I would literally walk through fire for him, but Al had always been the sore point in our friendship.
Now, as I lay in bed, listening to her soft, even breaths, I wondered if that had changed. It was the one thing I was scared of. It was the reason why I had been hesitant to let the two of them meet again. Because I knew that when it came down to it, if Darcy decided to fight me for her, I would lose. And that thought scared me more than anything in my life ever had.