Let Your Heart Lead...
[Well, my first semester of college is done, and I'm on winter break. So I decided, what better time to write than now? I've been soo busy I just haven't had time to write! With school, family, friends, looking for a job, all that. And I'm retaking my last math class over Spring-- so I guess I didn't put in ENOUGH time! I'm really mad because a few weeks ago I wrote more than half of a fic, I really liked the idea and all-- and when I went back to open it, there was just a few pages! I dunno if I'm gonna ever get around to rewriting that. :( I hope everyone had a great holiday! 2004 is coming our way very quickly-- can you believe it? I can't! Time to say goodbye to my graduation year. :'(. Wow, and I started writing here when I was a sophomore in hs! CRAZY! Anyway, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year 2004! This takes place, like, now, Season 10, I guess. And it's in Monica's POV, which I've never done before. I just got Season 5 on DVD for Christmas, so it refers to a lot of those episodes! ;)]
I never meant to fall in love. Okay, that doesn't sound too good, does it? But it's true. I didn't. And I'm pretty sure that's why it worked.
When I was sad and depressed in London and looking for a one night stand with Joey, I wasn't looking to fall in love. Easy in, easy out, right? Well, no, not really. Because Joey was nowhere to be found. But Chandler was there. And for some reason I didn't just sneak out like I had planned if Joey wasn't there. Something told me that was even better-- Chandler had been comforting me the whole night, hadn't he? And he would be just as good for a one night stand, some meaningless sex. I had originally chosen Joey because of his reputation with one night stands and meaningless sex. But anyone who wasn't Ross, since he was my brother, would work. And I kinda wanted it to be someone I at least knew. And I didn't know many other people in London.
So I wasn't looking to fall in love. I was just looking for the sex. And even after that night in London, I still wasn't looking to fall in love. I mean, that's why this worked. I did what my heart told me to do. I wasn't in it for the relationship when it started. I was just in it. I mean, you know, you meet a guy at a bar and talk, then go out on a date, already you're putting pressure on the relationship. Because why else would you try to get to know someone better than to end up falling in love? That's the whole point of dating.
But the catch was-- we weren't dating. We were just having sex at first. That night in London was supposed to be a one night thing. But then our hearts told us that it should be just a London thing... that we could keep on doing it as long as we were in London. Our brains were telling us we shouldn't. It was a situation that could easily get messy and complicated fast. But our hearts told us we weren't done with each other yet, and we extended our one night stand to a London fling. And when we never got to do it again in London, out brains told us that that should be it. We made a Not in New York rule, and we should stick to that. It was one thing to agree to doing it while in London...but it was much more serious to decided to break the Not in New York rule.
But yet, we did. Our hearts told us to do it, and we did. And even after that, we didn't know if that was just a one time deal or something...more. It was still just about the sex at that point. At least, on paper. But we both know that there was a reason why we wanted to break that rule so badly. What had started out as a one night stand was turning into a lot more, and fast. I didn't want to let him walk out of my living room that day we got back from London-- because I felt something. And obviously, so did he, or he wouldn't have come back in.
It didn't take long for the one night stand turned small fling to turn into a relationship. Long before anyone but Joey knew about us, we both knew we were in deep and falling fast. Though we would never say it out loud. It would freak him out too much to say anything like that, and I would freak him out if I had been the one that said it that early in the game.
I'm still not sure if we did any good keeping our affair a secret for all those months. No, I take it back. It did a lot of good. Without everyone knowing, no one was watching our every move, listening to our every conversation, and interpreting our every body movement or fight. With all the other guys I used to date, they'd make me mad, and I'd go to Rachel or one of the others and tell what happened. But with Chandler, it was different. He'd make me mad, and I couldn't go and tell anyone about it. I couldn't hide from the problem...because he was always around. And if he wasn't, everyone would question why. Those first six months we had a fight, and we'd have to resolve it ourselves. We had a problem, we had to talk about it ourselves. But on the other hand, once we made up and I was all happy, I couldn't go rub it in how sweet my boyfriend was.
Rachel always used to ask me when I knew I was in love with him. And I'm not really even sure myself. It was like one day I just realized I did...and I had for a while. It was the most mundane thing, too. He and I were at his boss's house for dinner, and he kept laughing obnoxiously and his jokes. I told him it bothered me, and then when his boss told another joke, I was waiting for an obnoxious laugh that didn't come. I didn't have time to think about it then, I had to do damage control by jumping in and pretending to explain the joke so he would laugh and his boss's icy glare would melt. But when we left that night, we were just outside the door, and we looked at each other, and I gave him a small, quick kiss, and at the same time we both said thank you. And then we both broke out into a shared smile, and I knew. Right then, with that smile, that somehow I had fallen in love with him, and I wasn't going to be going anywhere for a long, long time.
Once everyone found out about us, and he had decided that he was in love with me, too, everyone started joking about babies and marriage. Of course, he flipped. Another bonus to them not knowing about us for a long time. They would have started that teasing a lot earlier, and if they had, I'm not sure our relationship would have been strong enough to handle that when we were just starting out. He probably would have died on the spot if someone had told him that day the he would marry me-- and not because I was pregnant, but because he wanted to, and that one day he would actually want to have kids, and we'd try to have a baby-- it wouldn't be an accident that he grew to accept, and that we wouldn't be able to have kids, so we'd even go a step further and adopt. He would want kids THAT badly.
One Christmas he had to be away for work. He had fallen asleep in a meeting at work one day, not long after our niece Emma was born, and agreed to be transferred to Tulsa, Oklahoma, because he didn't know what was going on. He went out to Tulsa four days a week, while I stayed behind. The original plan had been for me to move with him, but then I got offered a job I really wanted to accept in New York, and we decided to try and make the long distance work. If I had known how hard it would be to be away from him four days a week, sometimes longer if he had to stay behind for a meeting or something work related over the weekend, I probably wouldn't have taken it. I hated it when he left for Tulsa, I hated the four days or so he was gone, and I even hated it when he got home. Because I knew in a few days he was going to leave again. I was always thankful for my friends and my brother, though, because they were always around and I was never completely alone. So when he told me he wasn't going to be home for Christmas that year, I almost died. It was bad enough not to see him during the week, but Christmas was almost unbearable. Then I found out that he was alone with a woman named Wendy, and of course, I flipped out. I really had no reason to, because I know he would never hurt me, and I trust him with all my heart, but I didn't like the fact that some other woman got to spend Christmas with him, when his own wife didn't.
So when he walked in the door Christmas Eve, I about died. I thought I was seeing things, but then I realized it really was him. He told us that he'd quit his job so that he could come home and be with me. No one had ever done that for me before. But HE did. Then I realized, of course he did. He's my husband. And most of all, he's my....Chandler.
He later told me that I had been right, that Wendy had been hitting on him. It didn't really surprise me, though. I'd had a feeling all along that something was up with that Wendy woman since I first heard about her. Which was probably why I flipped out and made him feel guilty on Christmas. What I didn't realize, though, was that it was Wendy I didn't feel good about... not Chandler. I should've known I had nothing to worry about.
Sometimes I can't believe that still, to this day, to this MOMENT, I love him just as much, if not a lot more, than I did when I first realized I was in love with him. After five years of seeing each other and two and a half years of being married, things were only getting married. Then again, I'm not really surprised. Because for one time in my life I let my heart lead the way, not my brain, and it took me right where I wanted to be.