Post by Brody Finn on Jan 4, 2016 17:16:03 GMT
To say that the summer had been full of surprises would have been an understatement. Actually, nothing had gone the way he had expected it to since May - maybe even before. Brody Finn had never been the sort to plan ahead, and this past year had been no exception. He hadn’t even been able to make a decision about where he had wanted to attend college until after Morgan had gone away. For the longest time he had just assumed that he was going to school nearby, at least for one year while Morgan finished up high school. Even without the understanding of what exactly his feelings for her were, he had assumed that he could remain close to his best friend and his family, and that everything would be all right.
But then everything had started to change, and change quickly. It had started, he supposed, when he had kissed her - rather when he had kissed her back - at his back to school party the previous fall. At the time he hadn’t been sure what it had meant, but it had quickly become apparent that she didn’t have any intention of just going back to being friends.
In retrospect, he should have seen what was happening, or at the very least he should have started to identify his own feelings, but he hadn’t. It still hadn’t occurred to him with she surprised him by undressing on his bed. Their quest to cross firsts off of their lists had continued when he followed it up with what he had thought had been the best response to the sudden change in their relationship. He hadn’t been crossing his own first date off of his list, but she had been crossing off hers. Their first date had been the perfect, stereotypical first date with an awkward, wonderful date and clammy hand-holding during a movie, but he had also started to come to terms with how he felt about her. The truth was that they hadn’t even been able to make it out of the building, let alone the building’s elevator, without finding their hands all over each other. And though everything could have carried on this way, each of them tackling an ever-growing list of firsts, he had put an abrupt end to it.
Melanie Benson had been part of his past for as long as Morgan had. His parents even have photos of a kindergarten-aged Melanie trying to play with him as just a baby, but the night of her Halloween party they seemed to see each other as anything but children anymore. Brody had never even made it to say hello to Morgan by the time he found himself in Melanie’s bedroom. He wanted to say that she had to work hard to seduce him - but she hadn’t. And even though he knew that it was wrong, he thought that maybe it could be something that didn’t necessarily have to change anything.
He hadn’t been ready to be in a relationship with Morgan at the time. Being with her actually terrified him because he knew that the moment that he decided to commit to her, there was a possibility that he was never going to find himself in another relationship again. Morgan was kind of … perfect. For him at least. But at eighteen, he hadn’t been ready for that reality and so when Melanie had started flirting, he had been in no position to do the right thing. In fact, it was probably too easy for the brunette beauty to get her way. What was worse, however, was the moment that Morgan had showed up at Melanie’s bedroom door. Not only did it suddenly shatter the illusion that everything could stay the same, it brought reality crashing in around him. There was suddenly a strong possibility that even his friendship with Morgan was going to be fractured - at least judging from the look on her face alone. And so when she had stopped speaking to him, he couldn’t say that he was surprised. He had even accepted it and tried to give her space - at least until she had advanced on Will Blye in the school hall.
She couldn’t really be blamed for her defense of her sister, but all the same, Brody knew that she ran the risk of getting in a lot of trouble for hitting the poor guy. Without thinking he had stepped in, but it had been too late and he selfishly had begun to feel that her punishment had was a punishment for him too. Five months without her had seemed miserable, but he wondered if he should hold out hope for things to change again - particularly when she presented him with his Christmas present and found her way into his bed again.
But once she was gone he realized that he didn’t know what to do. His physical relationship with Melanie continued on and his attitude had slowly started to change, his temper becoming shorter and he quickly became prone to snapping at his parents. He would have liked to have blamed Melanie for those feelings, but the truth was that he thought he might have just been upset with himself.
In Morgan’s absence, Brody had also decided that he couldn’t carry on the way that he had been, and he couldn’t just sit around and wait for her either. It was that desire for a clean slate that had ultimately decide to go to Cornell, and to be okay with allowing his relationship with Melanie to fizzle out.
But again, his resolve shifted when Morgan had returned home - new French boyfriend in tow. Something about seeing her again, and seeing how badly the new boyfriend treated her made him very acutely aware if the fact that he didn’t want her to be with anyone else. Maybe that’s what this time away from her was meant to show him, he reflected. He very stubbornly tried to reassert himself into her life, even following up on a long-standing promise to dance with her at prom, but her own resolve seemed to be set. She had cheated on her boyfriend that night but it hadn’t made any difference, she was convinced that she needed to move on and so he had decided that he needed to do the same.
Until that Fourth of July he supposed that he had never even thought of Melanie as being relationship material. But something had changed with her too and she suddenly was trying to be a better person than she had been in the past. And though it hadn’t lasted long, Melanie had really been his first girlfriend. She was the one he routinely had gone out with and the one with whom he had engaged in a physical relationship. They went to dinner and movies, but they were also just content to spend time with each other at their homes. Despite the the fact that Brody knew his parents didn’t necessarily approve, they never said anything about her company to him.
At least for a couple of weeks until Morgan showed up not long after his nineteenth birthday. He hadn’t been there at the time but his mother had relayed the details to him. And while it seemed like Morgan’s world was falling down around her, he wasn’t sure that there was anything that he could do. Telling a newly-single Morgan that he loved her didn’t seem fair, especially when he was still moving to Ithaca in just a matter of weeks. So he had said nothing to her, letting their already fractured relationship remain that way.
The relationship with Melanie carried on through the end of summer. The truth of the matter was that her companionship was actually helping in his attempt to get over Morgan. Melanie as a girlfriend was strange, he admitted, but he truly did care about her and she truly did seem to have turned a new leaf. But the one thing about Melanie that never changed was her need for attention and with Brody going away to Ithaca, it was an easy decision for them to go back to being each other’s friend. That, he had to admit, was something that seemed both strange and comforting - that Melanie, and not Morgan, was his friend. Maybe even his closest friend.
Newly single and living completely isolated for the first time in his life, Brody spend his first few weeks at Cornell falling into a comfortable rhythm. There was another young man in his apartment building, Toby, that easily became a close friend of his, and he still sent Melanie frequent text messages about how his “boring normal college life” was going. But the one thing from home that he hadn’t heard from, and honestly not thought of often, was a beautiful redheaded girl. It was the lack of Morgan in his life that had probably made him that much more aware of the attention of the other women at school. Growing up it had been something that he had only been aware of peripherally, he had always had Morgan within his sights. As his mother had informed him, his feelings for Morgan had become apparent when he was seven years old. Now, he had twelve years to make up for and he wasn’t going to be distracted now.
It was that attitude that had caused him to meet and flirt with more girls in that first month than he had in four years of high school. It was the same attitude that had driven him to attend a party at another one of the off-campus apartments, too. The girl who had invited him, a cute blonde he had flirted with outside of his Calculus class, had tried to restart their flirtation. He had untangled himself from her to grab a drink when he realized that not everyone at an Ivy League school necessarily had to be smart, or even interesting. After chatting with a few other acquaintances he had already formed, he finally made it to the kitchen. Helping himself to a drink, he barely noticed when he toppled over a small brunette trying to make her own way toward the drinks.
“Seriously?” Came her very annoyed response. “There are people down here, you giant.”
He laughed, mostly because her reaction reminded him so much of his former best friend that for a second he felt like he needed to look down and assure himself that it wasn’t Morgan. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t watching where I was going,” she certainly wasn’t Morgan, but she was cute and he truly did feel bad about nearly crashing into her. “I’m Brody, by the way.”
“Alex,” she told him, giving him a quick smile before pushing past him to get to the drinks she had originally be in pursuit of.
He had lingered while she had gotten herself a beverage, starting a casual conversation with her about school, their hometowns, classes, and other people they had met. At some point they had both realized that the amount of alcohol they had consumed had made it easier for them to move on to slightly deeper conversations, and on top of that it had allowed him to make an excuse for them to go back to his apartment to continue chatting. They both must have known what was going on because they had barely heard the front door close behind them before they had started kissing, clumsy hands moving over each other’s body as they started tugging clothes off.
At some point in the middle of the night, Alex had gotten up and redressed, kissing him goodbye and thanking him for keeping her company that night at the party. She made her excuse that by sneaking back into her dorm in the middle of the night she didn’t have to face the walk of shame back across campus, but she also could hopefully avoid immediate questioning from her very nosy roommate. Brody had thought that he would have left things there but from everything he had learned about her that night, and from what had followed, he had realized that he didn’t want that to be the last time that he saw her.
And so he had texted her. Not just the following day, but the entire week leading up to their first date. It had gone well enough, and it had ultimately led them back to his apartment to make out, but they had refrained from sleeping with each other a second time. By their fifth date, they had found themselves at a much smaller party than the first, and under the courage of alcohol, Brody had started telling Alex about his life in the city - and about Morgan. She didn’t say anything at first, she just listened and gave him a small smile, but by the time he finished telling her everything he could think of, she had started to nod.
“You know what you have to do, don’t you?” she had asked him, no trace of sadness or anger in her voice. He supposed that it had surprised him, he had expected that he maybe would have hurt her feelings in confession, but she just continued to smile at him. ‘You’re going to have to tell her some day.”
Smiling back at her, he had leaned toward her and kissed her, grateful for the fact that he had met someone like Alex upon coming to school. “Some day,” he echoed. “But not today.” And without another word about Morgan, they had resumed their relationship where they had left off, with dates, parties, and kisses. In some sort of wordless agreement, they had opted to hold off on resuming their sexual relationship, maybe because they weren’t ready or willing to make their relationship more serious than it was.
He was appreciative of that when Morgan showed up at his door just a few days later.
But then everything had started to change, and change quickly. It had started, he supposed, when he had kissed her - rather when he had kissed her back - at his back to school party the previous fall. At the time he hadn’t been sure what it had meant, but it had quickly become apparent that she didn’t have any intention of just going back to being friends.
In retrospect, he should have seen what was happening, or at the very least he should have started to identify his own feelings, but he hadn’t. It still hadn’t occurred to him with she surprised him by undressing on his bed. Their quest to cross firsts off of their lists had continued when he followed it up with what he had thought had been the best response to the sudden change in their relationship. He hadn’t been crossing his own first date off of his list, but she had been crossing off hers. Their first date had been the perfect, stereotypical first date with an awkward, wonderful date and clammy hand-holding during a movie, but he had also started to come to terms with how he felt about her. The truth was that they hadn’t even been able to make it out of the building, let alone the building’s elevator, without finding their hands all over each other. And though everything could have carried on this way, each of them tackling an ever-growing list of firsts, he had put an abrupt end to it.
Melanie Benson had been part of his past for as long as Morgan had. His parents even have photos of a kindergarten-aged Melanie trying to play with him as just a baby, but the night of her Halloween party they seemed to see each other as anything but children anymore. Brody had never even made it to say hello to Morgan by the time he found himself in Melanie’s bedroom. He wanted to say that she had to work hard to seduce him - but she hadn’t. And even though he knew that it was wrong, he thought that maybe it could be something that didn’t necessarily have to change anything.
He hadn’t been ready to be in a relationship with Morgan at the time. Being with her actually terrified him because he knew that the moment that he decided to commit to her, there was a possibility that he was never going to find himself in another relationship again. Morgan was kind of … perfect. For him at least. But at eighteen, he hadn’t been ready for that reality and so when Melanie had started flirting, he had been in no position to do the right thing. In fact, it was probably too easy for the brunette beauty to get her way. What was worse, however, was the moment that Morgan had showed up at Melanie’s bedroom door. Not only did it suddenly shatter the illusion that everything could stay the same, it brought reality crashing in around him. There was suddenly a strong possibility that even his friendship with Morgan was going to be fractured - at least judging from the look on her face alone. And so when she had stopped speaking to him, he couldn’t say that he was surprised. He had even accepted it and tried to give her space - at least until she had advanced on Will Blye in the school hall.
She couldn’t really be blamed for her defense of her sister, but all the same, Brody knew that she ran the risk of getting in a lot of trouble for hitting the poor guy. Without thinking he had stepped in, but it had been too late and he selfishly had begun to feel that her punishment had was a punishment for him too. Five months without her had seemed miserable, but he wondered if he should hold out hope for things to change again - particularly when she presented him with his Christmas present and found her way into his bed again.
But once she was gone he realized that he didn’t know what to do. His physical relationship with Melanie continued on and his attitude had slowly started to change, his temper becoming shorter and he quickly became prone to snapping at his parents. He would have liked to have blamed Melanie for those feelings, but the truth was that he thought he might have just been upset with himself.
In Morgan’s absence, Brody had also decided that he couldn’t carry on the way that he had been, and he couldn’t just sit around and wait for her either. It was that desire for a clean slate that had ultimately decide to go to Cornell, and to be okay with allowing his relationship with Melanie to fizzle out.
But again, his resolve shifted when Morgan had returned home - new French boyfriend in tow. Something about seeing her again, and seeing how badly the new boyfriend treated her made him very acutely aware if the fact that he didn’t want her to be with anyone else. Maybe that’s what this time away from her was meant to show him, he reflected. He very stubbornly tried to reassert himself into her life, even following up on a long-standing promise to dance with her at prom, but her own resolve seemed to be set. She had cheated on her boyfriend that night but it hadn’t made any difference, she was convinced that she needed to move on and so he had decided that he needed to do the same.
Until that Fourth of July he supposed that he had never even thought of Melanie as being relationship material. But something had changed with her too and she suddenly was trying to be a better person than she had been in the past. And though it hadn’t lasted long, Melanie had really been his first girlfriend. She was the one he routinely had gone out with and the one with whom he had engaged in a physical relationship. They went to dinner and movies, but they were also just content to spend time with each other at their homes. Despite the the fact that Brody knew his parents didn’t necessarily approve, they never said anything about her company to him.
At least for a couple of weeks until Morgan showed up not long after his nineteenth birthday. He hadn’t been there at the time but his mother had relayed the details to him. And while it seemed like Morgan’s world was falling down around her, he wasn’t sure that there was anything that he could do. Telling a newly-single Morgan that he loved her didn’t seem fair, especially when he was still moving to Ithaca in just a matter of weeks. So he had said nothing to her, letting their already fractured relationship remain that way.
The relationship with Melanie carried on through the end of summer. The truth of the matter was that her companionship was actually helping in his attempt to get over Morgan. Melanie as a girlfriend was strange, he admitted, but he truly did care about her and she truly did seem to have turned a new leaf. But the one thing about Melanie that never changed was her need for attention and with Brody going away to Ithaca, it was an easy decision for them to go back to being each other’s friend. That, he had to admit, was something that seemed both strange and comforting - that Melanie, and not Morgan, was his friend. Maybe even his closest friend.
Newly single and living completely isolated for the first time in his life, Brody spend his first few weeks at Cornell falling into a comfortable rhythm. There was another young man in his apartment building, Toby, that easily became a close friend of his, and he still sent Melanie frequent text messages about how his “boring normal college life” was going. But the one thing from home that he hadn’t heard from, and honestly not thought of often, was a beautiful redheaded girl. It was the lack of Morgan in his life that had probably made him that much more aware of the attention of the other women at school. Growing up it had been something that he had only been aware of peripherally, he had always had Morgan within his sights. As his mother had informed him, his feelings for Morgan had become apparent when he was seven years old. Now, he had twelve years to make up for and he wasn’t going to be distracted now.
It was that attitude that had caused him to meet and flirt with more girls in that first month than he had in four years of high school. It was the same attitude that had driven him to attend a party at another one of the off-campus apartments, too. The girl who had invited him, a cute blonde he had flirted with outside of his Calculus class, had tried to restart their flirtation. He had untangled himself from her to grab a drink when he realized that not everyone at an Ivy League school necessarily had to be smart, or even interesting. After chatting with a few other acquaintances he had already formed, he finally made it to the kitchen. Helping himself to a drink, he barely noticed when he toppled over a small brunette trying to make her own way toward the drinks.
“Seriously?” Came her very annoyed response. “There are people down here, you giant.”
He laughed, mostly because her reaction reminded him so much of his former best friend that for a second he felt like he needed to look down and assure himself that it wasn’t Morgan. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t watching where I was going,” she certainly wasn’t Morgan, but she was cute and he truly did feel bad about nearly crashing into her. “I’m Brody, by the way.”
“Alex,” she told him, giving him a quick smile before pushing past him to get to the drinks she had originally be in pursuit of.
He had lingered while she had gotten herself a beverage, starting a casual conversation with her about school, their hometowns, classes, and other people they had met. At some point they had both realized that the amount of alcohol they had consumed had made it easier for them to move on to slightly deeper conversations, and on top of that it had allowed him to make an excuse for them to go back to his apartment to continue chatting. They both must have known what was going on because they had barely heard the front door close behind them before they had started kissing, clumsy hands moving over each other’s body as they started tugging clothes off.
At some point in the middle of the night, Alex had gotten up and redressed, kissing him goodbye and thanking him for keeping her company that night at the party. She made her excuse that by sneaking back into her dorm in the middle of the night she didn’t have to face the walk of shame back across campus, but she also could hopefully avoid immediate questioning from her very nosy roommate. Brody had thought that he would have left things there but from everything he had learned about her that night, and from what had followed, he had realized that he didn’t want that to be the last time that he saw her.
And so he had texted her. Not just the following day, but the entire week leading up to their first date. It had gone well enough, and it had ultimately led them back to his apartment to make out, but they had refrained from sleeping with each other a second time. By their fifth date, they had found themselves at a much smaller party than the first, and under the courage of alcohol, Brody had started telling Alex about his life in the city - and about Morgan. She didn’t say anything at first, she just listened and gave him a small smile, but by the time he finished telling her everything he could think of, she had started to nod.
“You know what you have to do, don’t you?” she had asked him, no trace of sadness or anger in her voice. He supposed that it had surprised him, he had expected that he maybe would have hurt her feelings in confession, but she just continued to smile at him. ‘You’re going to have to tell her some day.”
Smiling back at her, he had leaned toward her and kissed her, grateful for the fact that he had met someone like Alex upon coming to school. “Some day,” he echoed. “But not today.” And without another word about Morgan, they had resumed their relationship where they had left off, with dates, parties, and kisses. In some sort of wordless agreement, they had opted to hold off on resuming their sexual relationship, maybe because they weren’t ready or willing to make their relationship more serious than it was.
He was appreciative of that when Morgan showed up at his door just a few days later.