Quick Recap (since it's been so long):

The lone waitress arrived and brought Samantha her fries and went to go get the coffee pot to give them a refill before taking Nick's order. Once she left to get the pot Nick's stomach growled and Samantha giggled.

"Here, don't worry about ordering anything," she said, pushing the fries towards him so it was in the middle of the table.

"No, I'm fine. I can get my own food." He pushed it back towards her and she pushed it back. They did this for a while until Nick finally relented and waved away the waitress. They shared the fries before leaving the diner and going their separate ways.

It wasn't much but it was something.

Now the new chapter:

"Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it." -Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last

After their time in the diner, Nick and Samantha were back to normal. Well, mostly normal. They got along fairly well but there would be these bubbles of tension, just every once in a while, where they would lose their temper with each other.

Such as, whenever Luke was mentioned. Luke and Samantha were still hot and heavy but Nick made sure he didn't know that. He stayed far away from anywhere they could be and never talked to anyone about them.

All their friends were very distressed at the situation. None of them knew how to talk to either Nick or Samantha so sometimes they didn't know how to talk to them at all.

Lorie, for example. She had been informed of the uncomfortable situation by Meredith and quickly began dodging Samantha's calls. This, of course, made Samantha very unhappy and she began calling Lorie in between every single one of her classes and at lunch and when she got home from school and even late at night.

Eventually, she had to pick up.

"Hello?" Lorie said, waiting for the blow up.

"OH SO YOU ARE ALIVE."

"Uh, yeah..."

"BECAUSE I WASN'T SURE SINCE YOU'VE BEEN IGNORING ME FOR DAYS."

"I'm sorry, Samantha. It's just-"

"WHAT? WHAT IS IT? WHAT COULD IT BE SINCE YOU LIVE IN ANOTHER STATE SO I COULDN'T HAVE MADE YOU MAD. SO WHAT WAS SO IMPORTANT THAT YOU WOULD IGNORE ONE OF YOUR CLOSEST FRIENDS."

"Meredith just told be about-"

"OH SO THAT'S WHAT THIS IS ABOUT. YOU DON'T WANT TO TALK TO ME BECAUSE OF WHAT HAPPENED WITH NICK? SERIOUSLY DUDE?"

"Samantha it's an uncomfortable situation! What do you expect me to-"

"I EXPECT YOU TO TAKE MY SIDE, GODDAMMIT. YOU'RE MY BEST FRIEND NOW THAT NICK AND I ARE ALL WEIRD AND I NEED YOUR SUPPORT." Lorie sighed.

"I'm sorry. I should have just supported you and I was wrong."

"DAMN STRAIGHT."

"Please forgive me?" Lorie heard Samantha take a deep breath and felt a little relieved.

"I suppose."

"Thank you."

"But only because you're far away so we can't fight like normal people because we can't just see each other in class and get over it," Samantha said.

"That's very true."

"Basically."

"So you're sure you and Nick won't figure it out?" Lorie asked.

"It's not that we're not figuring it out, it's that there's no normal to go back to. It's just void."

"Well I'm sorry, hun. I'm just sad that it has to be this way. We've all been friends for like forever."

"First grade," Samantha replied.

"That's a lot of time to go to waste."

"I know."

The way Nick and Samantha met went like this. They were in the first grade and it was during recess. Earlier that morning Samantha had made a friend named Lorie, who was new and hadn't been at the first day of school a few months before. They hit it off and went to play on the swings.

Nick was not on the swings but instead playing kickball with some of the other kids in their class. They had reluctantly let him play because Nick was small for his age and no one wanted him on their team.

So of course the way the game ended was that Nick missed the ball and caused his team to lose. Their was enough time left in recess for another game of kickball but he was not invited back. Sullen and grumpy, Nick stomped over to the swings, his second favorite recess activity. He was shocked and displeased to see that both swings were taken by two random girls.

Six-year-old Nick hated girls. They had cooties.

So he told them to get off. One, Lorie, offered to give him a turn but her friend, Samantha, told him that he would have to wait because he didn't get to tell them what to do. He then told her that he got to because the swings were his territory. She told him that was too bad.

Nick, using his six-year-old boy brain, decided that enough was enough. So he reached over into the grass that was still wet and slightly muddy, came back up with a fistful of said mud, and threw it at the mean girl.

Samantha did not cry or scream or even protest. She simply wiped most of the mud off her face in one motion, looked at him with cold, determined eyes, and said:

"You're going to pay for that."

Their teacher found them five minutes later, covered from head to toe in mud. She wrenched them apart and began dragging them to the principal's office while the rest of the students watched, silently thanking the universe for not making them Samantha Lawson or Nicholas Kincaid.

They were sat together in surprisingly comfortable wooden chairs outside the principal's office while their teacher went into the office to discuss their punishment. Nick was pulling on the collar of his shirt, sweating terribly, while Samantha sat beside him picking at a hangnail.

"Do you think they're going to call our parents?" Nick asked.

"Probably."

"They're going to kill me," he groaned.

"I doubt it."

"Will your parents be mad?"

"It depends on their mood."

"I can't stand this waiting."

"God, just grow up," she said. "It'll all be fine. What could they do to us?" She sighed and rolled her eyes when this question caused the boy to turn pale and become even more anxious.

Looking at Nick, Samantha realized how small he was and how tough the other boys tried to be, specifically how competitive they were at kickball. She had been kicked out of the game herself after lobbying to have them let her play and then messing up. Suddenly Samantha had a bigger understanding of what had transpired and felt almost ashamed.

"I'm sorry about today." She wasn't sure if she was talking about the kickball game or the mud but it didn't seem to matter.

"It's all right," Nick said in a small voice.

"You should appreciate my apology because I hate to apologize."

"I'll have to remember that."

"You should. It will be important if we're going to be friends."

"We're going to be friends?" he asked.

"Yeah," Samantha said. "We are."

She offered him a hand and they shook, smiling at each other for the first time but definitely not the last.

"You and Nick are closer than anyone could have ever imagined," Lorie said, still on the phone with Samantha. "It just seems like a waste."

"I know," Samantha said. "It's just that it's more complicated than you think."

"How complicated could it be?"

"You'd be surprised. I have to go. Talk soon?"

"All right."

Samantha hung up and sat back in her chair in defeat, fiddling with the men's shirt she had on as pajamas. She wished that it was as simple as Lorie thought it was but as she turned and glanced at Luke's sleeping form back on the bed, she knew that even she didn't know how things would turn out.

~~~

IT'S AN UPDATE IT'S AN UPDATE. I'm so sorry that it has taken me over two months to get this to you guys. I just haven't been inspired and I have no idea why. But I'm back and I hope it's for good.

I actually really like this chapter. I had no idea what I was going to do but then I was helping backstage at the ballet for the dance school I used to dance at (before I quit) and I was like "OMG I just broke up the best friendship ever, I should show them how it started!" cause I already had how they met planned but had never figured out when I would put it in. It was perfect!

I hope I'll have another chapter up Saturday but don't get too excited. But definitely by a week from Saturday. After that updates might be iffy for a little while cause I'll be in Europe for two weeks but I'll do my best!

P.S. If you have a Tumblr, check out valiantlycrookedtimemachine.tumblr.com cause I'll be posting about this story and others. I'll love you forever if you do :)

P.P.S. The photo on the right is who I have cast as Gwendolyn, Mackenzie Foy