Post by Aidan Carlisle on Oct 5, 2016 2:37:33 GMT
[CD portion from my latest Boardwalk RP, with some implications for the on-going story.]
“Liam and I… we’re not what we seem. We’ve been… To put it bluntly, it’s a show. After the whole fucking thing in 4CW and how much attention it got, I knew how bad I looked coming out of it. Moving on to Boardwalk, I felt like I needed to look more stable.
“We were something once. Before I ever joined 4CW. After his mom died though he changed, and in the time he was gone so did I. We tried again, and it just wasn’t there. We’re friends, really good friends… …except we’ve had a lot of sex.
“Anyway. His dad is sick too, so he wanted his dad to think he was settling down so the old man could have some peace. I needed a better reputation and he’s a good guy. It was mutually beneficial. We love each other, but we’re not in love. We haven’t been for a very long time.”
It was one of those mornings. The sort where every last little mistake she had ever made was swirling around in her head. Each one was a bolt of lightning in the storm. It was a confession she regretted now, one she never should have made. It had been a moment of weakness, predictable now that she was looking back on it, because of where she was at the time.
That place she'd inevitably circled back to again and again over the past year.
But that was only one of many such regrets plaguing her in the mid-morning hours there in her empty Wilmington home. There was Derek, too. Derek had been a good guy. Drop dead gorgeous, tall and muscular, blonde and blue eyed. A firefighter on top of that.
She had let him go because he told her he was having a hard time with her traveling, with watching her in the ring. She shouldn't have given up so easily on that maybe. Then again… Derek didn't seem like the type that would have understood the needs in her life that lurked in the shadows. Still, she was left wondering what might have been.
She was regretting not going to England perhaps most of all. Liam had told her to stay, and she had. She might have have been in love with him, contrary to what the ring on her finger was telling the world, but she still cared deeply for him. The more days that went by without hearing from him, the more she felt the last threads on her already thin rope were beginning to fray.
Maybe she should just pack up and go. Forget everything, go to England, find out what was going on. That wouldn't screw anything up, right? Not showing up for a match, or possibly two, with no explanation at all? She shook the thought away and looked down into her cup of coffee that had gone cold forever ago.
She was just about to pick it up for a drink when the doorbell rang. Her heart jumped. She wasn't expecting anyone, so who the hell was on the front porch? Her mind went for the worst case scenarios, of course. Was it the police, coming to ask her about the whole mess in England? Was it… him?
With a deep breath she pushed up from the table. The walk through the sitting area in the foyer to the door was just enough time to steel herself. She didn't care what she looked like, still half asleep and drained from all the stress she was trying to hide from everyone. One more breath and she pulled open the door.
“Package for Miss… Aidan Carlisle?”
Aidan looked out at the rail-thin delivery boy. He was just out of the pimply devastation phase but before the actually able to grow real facial hair stage. Quiet, nervous looking. He wasn't with the postal service, FedEx, or UPS, but rather a local private delivery company. Interesting.
“Yeah, I'm Aidan.”
She offered him a tired smile, wondering just what sort of other customers he'd had to deal with that had him seeming so on edge. Maybe he'd been chased by a dog. That was a thing that actually happened and not a myth, right? Or maybe he was just one of those people that constantly seemed nervous, who knew?
He thrust the digital pad out at her clumsily, stammering an apology when the stylus almost dropped. She tried to continue smiling while resisting the urge to laugh. She almost wondered if he recognized her. Scrawling her name across the worn screen, she traded off the pad for the small package. He squeaked out a thank you before speed-walking purposefully back to the truck.
The whole thing was a little strange, but what could Aidan do but shrug? There was no return address on the package, which automatically peaked her interest. It was a plain, printed label but seemed like it had been done from a home printer instead of a professional one. Standard sans serif font, her name even spelled correctly.
She set the box down on the counter in the kitchen, searching the drawers for one of her or Liam's pocket knives to open it with. She certainly hadn't ordered anything, and to her knowledge Liam hadn't before he left either. But even if he had, why would it have her name on it?
It took forever to finally find something to open the box with—she wasn't about to use one of the new kitchen knives. They needed a designated junk drawer. The problem with getting settled in was that almost all of them seemed to be a junk drawer right now while she was still figuring out how she wanted to arrange the kitchen. All of that was on the back burner right now anyway.
She had just started to cut through the heavy duty packaging tape at one end when she heard a strange sound. In a split second she realized that it was her phone vibrating somewhere. Where the fuck had she put it down? If it stopped vibrating it was going to take forever to find because she had left the ringer off.
Not on any of the counters close by. Not on the piano. Not on the coffee table in the foyer sitting room or the dining table.
“Don't hang up, don't hang up!”
She intoned her earnest plea to the empty house as she hurried from room to room, looking for the glow of a screen. She wouldn't have heard it if it were in the basement or upstairs, right? Another buzz, a thud. She dashed into the living room/trophy room, spying the glow where it had vibrated itself off of the end table and bounced on the area rug beneath the couch.
“Fuck.”
Sliding as far as she could on the hardwood and then belly-crawling across the rug, Aidan thrust her arm under the couch and felt around blindly until her fingers settled on her phone. She dragged it out and somehow managed to unlock it just before it would have gone to voicemail. She didn't even have time to look and see who was calling.
“Hey!”
Without bothering to get off of the floor, she sat up and turned to lean back against the couch.
“Hello, Miss Carlisle?”
Her heart sank because it wasn't Liam's voice. Or… anyone else's that she recognized at that.
“Yeah, this is Aidan…”
“This is Anita Harden-Sackrider from Boardwalk Marketing.”
Aidan almost hung up. No time for prank calls right now. But the the deadpan delivery, the mature tone of the voice. The fact that Boardwalk was mentioned…
“Pardon me?”
“Anita Harden-Sackrider, from the marketing department at Boardwalk.”
Oh god, she was serious. Poor woman. And really, of all the men she could have married, he had to be a Sackrider? And she had to hyphenate it? The dose of humor, tiny as it was, was something she really needed right now.
“What can I do for you, Anita?”
“A while ago we had contacted you about some new merchandise options…”
A while ago? It felt like ages at this point. Before she had been suspended, that was for sure.
“Oh, right. I remember now. I think I talked to Geraldine.”
“Yes, ah, Geraldine is out on leave for a bit. She self-diagnosed herself with Zika virus.”
“Sounds serious. Anyway, what about the merchandise now?”
“Well we were just about to put together some t-shirt designs to send over for your approval, but we were looking for your preferred color options.”
Aidan wasn't sure she had ever had this much involvement in the design phase of any merchandise. A few suggestions, a final approval, but never a conversation about colors. It felt strange. Then again, she had also had to choose from some really awful designs before.
“Well it's no secret how much I love black and pink, Anita. I think the entire world knows that by now. Black and red is a good combination too. If you need something super girly for the tweenage crowd, go with white and pink.”
“Thank you so much! Now, one last question if you don't mind. We were considering expanding beyond textile merchandise into other options. Given the choice between lunch boxes, keychain lanyards, or drink cozies, which would you most like to see added to your merchandise line?”
She stared at the floor for a few moments. How was she supposed to choose that? What were they going to do, throw “Alpha Bitch” on the front of lunch boxes to send kids off to school with? On top of that, with everything else going on at the moment, it felt so trivial.
“Uuuuhh… Lunch boxes I guess?”
“Great! Thank you so much. We'll get those designs sent over soon!”
Before she could try to ask some questions of her own, the woman had already hung up. Making a face at her phone, she pulled herself up off of the floor. She would just have to wait until she saw the designs to know what they were going to put on these things.
But for now… Her eyes narrowed on the package sitting on the kitchen counter and a smirk crossed her face. It was time to find out just what was in that bad boy. Feeling silly, because why not, she crept through the dining room and into the kitchen on her toes like she had to sneak up on it. She oh-so-lightly pressed the tip of the blade to the line of tape and was just about to slice through…
When the buzzer for the dryer went off.
Aidan gave an exasperated sigh. She could have let it sit for a few minutes, she could have just opened the box. There was no one there to care that she didn't act like a responsible adult and take care of the laundry right away. But some of her nicer clothes were in there and if she didn't get them out now it just meant that she was going to have to iron them later. Who even ironed anymore? Did she own an iron?
Trudging to the small laundry area, she snatched the most wrinkle-prone items out quickly and put them neatly on the hangers that she already had waiting. This wasn't her first laundry rodeo, oh no! The rest was all dumped into the basket, but rather than leave it there and go back to the box, she took it upstairs to put everything away like a goddamn adult.
Socks, shirts, jeans all made it to their homes either in the huge walk in closet that was just for her, or the closet attached to the master bedroom for Liam. It wasn't until now that she'd even been able to bring herself to touch the few things that had been in the laundry when he left. Despite the fact that there was no one there to see, she felt her cheeks get just a tiny bit red when she folded a few little lacy things and put them away in that drawer. Was it weird that it had more in it than her sock drawer? …Nah.
Finally, finally she headed back downstairs to the kitchen. She stalked right up to the box this time. No sneaking around, no wasting time. She didn't just want to know what was in the damn thing, she needed to know. At this point the anticipation was killing her. She needed to feel a sense of relief, no matter how small.
She ran the blade of the knife over the tape a few times to make sure she had sliced all the way through the heavy duty packaging before folding the pocket knife back up and putting it in the drawer where she had found it. Biting the inside of her lip, she folded back the first set of flaps. It felt a little childish the way her heart fluttered and she hesitated before pulling just one of the inner flaps back and peeking inside…
“Liam and I… we’re not what we seem. We’ve been… To put it bluntly, it’s a show. After the whole fucking thing in 4CW and how much attention it got, I knew how bad I looked coming out of it. Moving on to Boardwalk, I felt like I needed to look more stable.
“We were something once. Before I ever joined 4CW. After his mom died though he changed, and in the time he was gone so did I. We tried again, and it just wasn’t there. We’re friends, really good friends… …except we’ve had a lot of sex.
“Anyway. His dad is sick too, so he wanted his dad to think he was settling down so the old man could have some peace. I needed a better reputation and he’s a good guy. It was mutually beneficial. We love each other, but we’re not in love. We haven’t been for a very long time.”
It was one of those mornings. The sort where every last little mistake she had ever made was swirling around in her head. Each one was a bolt of lightning in the storm. It was a confession she regretted now, one she never should have made. It had been a moment of weakness, predictable now that she was looking back on it, because of where she was at the time.
That place she'd inevitably circled back to again and again over the past year.
But that was only one of many such regrets plaguing her in the mid-morning hours there in her empty Wilmington home. There was Derek, too. Derek had been a good guy. Drop dead gorgeous, tall and muscular, blonde and blue eyed. A firefighter on top of that.
She had let him go because he told her he was having a hard time with her traveling, with watching her in the ring. She shouldn't have given up so easily on that maybe. Then again… Derek didn't seem like the type that would have understood the needs in her life that lurked in the shadows. Still, she was left wondering what might have been.
She was regretting not going to England perhaps most of all. Liam had told her to stay, and she had. She might have have been in love with him, contrary to what the ring on her finger was telling the world, but she still cared deeply for him. The more days that went by without hearing from him, the more she felt the last threads on her already thin rope were beginning to fray.
Maybe she should just pack up and go. Forget everything, go to England, find out what was going on. That wouldn't screw anything up, right? Not showing up for a match, or possibly two, with no explanation at all? She shook the thought away and looked down into her cup of coffee that had gone cold forever ago.
She was just about to pick it up for a drink when the doorbell rang. Her heart jumped. She wasn't expecting anyone, so who the hell was on the front porch? Her mind went for the worst case scenarios, of course. Was it the police, coming to ask her about the whole mess in England? Was it… him?
With a deep breath she pushed up from the table. The walk through the sitting area in the foyer to the door was just enough time to steel herself. She didn't care what she looked like, still half asleep and drained from all the stress she was trying to hide from everyone. One more breath and she pulled open the door.
“Package for Miss… Aidan Carlisle?”
Aidan looked out at the rail-thin delivery boy. He was just out of the pimply devastation phase but before the actually able to grow real facial hair stage. Quiet, nervous looking. He wasn't with the postal service, FedEx, or UPS, but rather a local private delivery company. Interesting.
“Yeah, I'm Aidan.”
She offered him a tired smile, wondering just what sort of other customers he'd had to deal with that had him seeming so on edge. Maybe he'd been chased by a dog. That was a thing that actually happened and not a myth, right? Or maybe he was just one of those people that constantly seemed nervous, who knew?
He thrust the digital pad out at her clumsily, stammering an apology when the stylus almost dropped. She tried to continue smiling while resisting the urge to laugh. She almost wondered if he recognized her. Scrawling her name across the worn screen, she traded off the pad for the small package. He squeaked out a thank you before speed-walking purposefully back to the truck.
The whole thing was a little strange, but what could Aidan do but shrug? There was no return address on the package, which automatically peaked her interest. It was a plain, printed label but seemed like it had been done from a home printer instead of a professional one. Standard sans serif font, her name even spelled correctly.
She set the box down on the counter in the kitchen, searching the drawers for one of her or Liam's pocket knives to open it with. She certainly hadn't ordered anything, and to her knowledge Liam hadn't before he left either. But even if he had, why would it have her name on it?
It took forever to finally find something to open the box with—she wasn't about to use one of the new kitchen knives. They needed a designated junk drawer. The problem with getting settled in was that almost all of them seemed to be a junk drawer right now while she was still figuring out how she wanted to arrange the kitchen. All of that was on the back burner right now anyway.
She had just started to cut through the heavy duty packaging tape at one end when she heard a strange sound. In a split second she realized that it was her phone vibrating somewhere. Where the fuck had she put it down? If it stopped vibrating it was going to take forever to find because she had left the ringer off.
Not on any of the counters close by. Not on the piano. Not on the coffee table in the foyer sitting room or the dining table.
“Don't hang up, don't hang up!”
She intoned her earnest plea to the empty house as she hurried from room to room, looking for the glow of a screen. She wouldn't have heard it if it were in the basement or upstairs, right? Another buzz, a thud. She dashed into the living room/trophy room, spying the glow where it had vibrated itself off of the end table and bounced on the area rug beneath the couch.
“Fuck.”
Sliding as far as she could on the hardwood and then belly-crawling across the rug, Aidan thrust her arm under the couch and felt around blindly until her fingers settled on her phone. She dragged it out and somehow managed to unlock it just before it would have gone to voicemail. She didn't even have time to look and see who was calling.
“Hey!”
Without bothering to get off of the floor, she sat up and turned to lean back against the couch.
“Hello, Miss Carlisle?”
Her heart sank because it wasn't Liam's voice. Or… anyone else's that she recognized at that.
“Yeah, this is Aidan…”
“This is Anita Harden-Sackrider from Boardwalk Marketing.”
Aidan almost hung up. No time for prank calls right now. But the the deadpan delivery, the mature tone of the voice. The fact that Boardwalk was mentioned…
“Pardon me?”
“Anita Harden-Sackrider, from the marketing department at Boardwalk.”
Oh god, she was serious. Poor woman. And really, of all the men she could have married, he had to be a Sackrider? And she had to hyphenate it? The dose of humor, tiny as it was, was something she really needed right now.
“What can I do for you, Anita?”
“A while ago we had contacted you about some new merchandise options…”
A while ago? It felt like ages at this point. Before she had been suspended, that was for sure.
“Oh, right. I remember now. I think I talked to Geraldine.”
“Yes, ah, Geraldine is out on leave for a bit. She self-diagnosed herself with Zika virus.”
“Sounds serious. Anyway, what about the merchandise now?”
“Well we were just about to put together some t-shirt designs to send over for your approval, but we were looking for your preferred color options.”
Aidan wasn't sure she had ever had this much involvement in the design phase of any merchandise. A few suggestions, a final approval, but never a conversation about colors. It felt strange. Then again, she had also had to choose from some really awful designs before.
“Well it's no secret how much I love black and pink, Anita. I think the entire world knows that by now. Black and red is a good combination too. If you need something super girly for the tweenage crowd, go with white and pink.”
“Thank you so much! Now, one last question if you don't mind. We were considering expanding beyond textile merchandise into other options. Given the choice between lunch boxes, keychain lanyards, or drink cozies, which would you most like to see added to your merchandise line?”
She stared at the floor for a few moments. How was she supposed to choose that? What were they going to do, throw “Alpha Bitch” on the front of lunch boxes to send kids off to school with? On top of that, with everything else going on at the moment, it felt so trivial.
“Uuuuhh… Lunch boxes I guess?”
“Great! Thank you so much. We'll get those designs sent over soon!”
Before she could try to ask some questions of her own, the woman had already hung up. Making a face at her phone, she pulled herself up off of the floor. She would just have to wait until she saw the designs to know what they were going to put on these things.
But for now… Her eyes narrowed on the package sitting on the kitchen counter and a smirk crossed her face. It was time to find out just what was in that bad boy. Feeling silly, because why not, she crept through the dining room and into the kitchen on her toes like she had to sneak up on it. She oh-so-lightly pressed the tip of the blade to the line of tape and was just about to slice through…
When the buzzer for the dryer went off.
Aidan gave an exasperated sigh. She could have let it sit for a few minutes, she could have just opened the box. There was no one there to care that she didn't act like a responsible adult and take care of the laundry right away. But some of her nicer clothes were in there and if she didn't get them out now it just meant that she was going to have to iron them later. Who even ironed anymore? Did she own an iron?
Trudging to the small laundry area, she snatched the most wrinkle-prone items out quickly and put them neatly on the hangers that she already had waiting. This wasn't her first laundry rodeo, oh no! The rest was all dumped into the basket, but rather than leave it there and go back to the box, she took it upstairs to put everything away like a goddamn adult.
Socks, shirts, jeans all made it to their homes either in the huge walk in closet that was just for her, or the closet attached to the master bedroom for Liam. It wasn't until now that she'd even been able to bring herself to touch the few things that had been in the laundry when he left. Despite the fact that there was no one there to see, she felt her cheeks get just a tiny bit red when she folded a few little lacy things and put them away in that drawer. Was it weird that it had more in it than her sock drawer? …Nah.
Finally, finally she headed back downstairs to the kitchen. She stalked right up to the box this time. No sneaking around, no wasting time. She didn't just want to know what was in the damn thing, she needed to know. At this point the anticipation was killing her. She needed to feel a sense of relief, no matter how small.
She ran the blade of the knife over the tape a few times to make sure she had sliced all the way through the heavy duty packaging before folding the pocket knife back up and putting it in the drawer where she had found it. Biting the inside of her lip, she folded back the first set of flaps. It felt a little childish the way her heart fluttered and she hesitated before pulling just one of the inner flaps back and peeking inside…
