AU: Written for Spariaaddict… who may have requested this in August of last year or something. Err… sorry? Heh... I'm garbage. I wrote and rewrote this literally ten times, and am finally satisfied, so here it is.
Contains mild contempt for Ezria but no bashing. Two-shot.
Hope you enjoy and please leave a review if you have thoughts to share—good or bad. :D
The ring. Such a dainty thing glistening on her finger. It was supposed to symbolize eternal love, a bond so pure and holy that nothing could break it.
But there was nothing pure about their relationship. It had started out as a thrilling love affair worthy of the silver screen, a forbidden romance to rival the likes of Romeo and Juliet, and she had eaten it up like the hardcore romantic she was. But that's all it ever turned out to be.
Ezra was sweet and caring and handsome and all the things a boyfriend—a husband—should be in her mind. He'd broken her heart and stitched it back together more times than she could count, and she let him, because the view through her rose-tinted glasses was so intoxicatingly perfect. Difficult at times, but what relationship wasn't? She was floating on cloud nine with him, in his little apartment, watching movies and feeding each other delicious bites of sweets. His arms were secure and strong and everything she just…didn't need.
She wanted it. She wanted the dangerous rendezvouses and passionate hours alone with him. That was everything she thought true love was; fighting for each other through all challenges and getting a blinding high—a coveted occurrence in this world—from the feel of his skin alone. She'd invested all her effort, time, and hope in a relationship with him, desperately wanting it to work, perhaps for nothing more than childish bragging rights, and she came out of the deep end with a feeling of emptiness.
When the water settled and she was left to spend life with her daring prince, she found nothing but boredom. She hung on his arm at galas, kissed him goodnight always, and took blissful walks with him like the perfect wife she wanted to be, but after awhile it started to feel like exactly what it was: picture perfect. Flat, void of the heart-wrenching thrill a moving picture had. It could stir something in her still, something she hoped was love, but all in all the only things that ever made her feel remotely alive were sweaty nights spent tangled in their bedsheets.
It was a strange feeling to fall out of love, a horrible feeling she hadn't ever wanted to experience. She hated what anyone else might consider a normal marriage, was loathe to accept the fact that most people assumed that love can run its course and drain from your body as easily as blood. Maybe it was growing up with over-the-top stories of undying romance and hearing her parents' lectures about what a lifelong and beautiful commitment marriage was that made her assume it would always be utter bliss. Maybe she was immature and naive, just what she wanted to prove she wasn't. But she couldn't help it, not now that those notions were so deeply rooted in her being that she was beginning to waste away without them.
The person that looked back at her in the mirror was unhappy, unfulfilled, with her under-eye bags and rigid line of a mouth. She could cover it all with makeup and plaster on a smile to match Ezra's constantly content expressions, but the ring on her finger had the weight of a ball and chain. It was always dragging along beside her, a reminder of the prison she'd walked so blindly into once upon a time. And she'd been in too many prisons already.
Frightening, it was, to feel almost as suffocated as she did in high school—trapped in one of -A's boxes like she was nothing more than a lifeless doll. With Ezra she was turning plastic again.
So it was a relief one day, when she felt at her most stiff, that Spencer's name appeared on her caller ID. The cutesy heart emoji by her best friend's nickname made a genuine grin tug at her lips, like it always had throughout the disasters of their lives.
Spencer had suggested coffee to catch up over, explained about her stress headaches from having to return to Rosewood, and how she needed a free crying shoulder and open ears. And Aria was happy to oblige, seeing as how they'd always seem to run to each other over problems in the past. While her best friend sipped at her steaming black coffee and spilled her guts, Aria soaked in the worries, secretly hoping she'd be allowed to lay bare her own burdens in return.
It seemed their hometown had managed to keep Spencer just as ensnared as Aria herself was, dragging her back at the behest of curiosity. A simple series of phone calls had lead Spencer to the realization that Alex wasn't in any sort of custody, and she said it felt as if all of their old problems came crashing back down just because she might've wanted to fix things with her long lost twin. Now she couldn't, and she didn't know if Alex was even alive or plotting a second act of vengeance or back to living her life in London. So there was a missing persons report filled out and now Spencer was stuck waiting for news.
Then Spencer had asked about her, and Aria had told her everything about how she was feeling. Naturally, Spencer was a voice of reason, telling her to file for a divorce, or to just tell Ezra about her feelings—or lack thereof. Though, when she parted ways with her friend, Aria was left just as unsure as before.
Aria tried to tell him, tried to let the words spill out, but she never could, and soon she was calling Spencer again and again. Their meetups started out innocent enough; afternoon coffee, Spencer telling her about she and Toby's break, Aria complaining about Ezra. Then they started to feel like an escape for Aria, something to look forward to at the end of the day, and Spencer invited her to watch a movie or two at the apartment she'd just gotten set up in.
And her best friend became her saving grace, with the countless afternoons they spent on Spencer's rental couch eating takeout or popcorn. Sometimes alcohol would flow, sometimes they were both blubbering, heartbroken messes, and sometimes Aria would wake up in the wee hours of the morning with Spencer's head resting on her lap, fingers loosely tangled in her hair.
They were starting to sit closer and closer to each other on the couch each time Aria visited, until it became commonplace for Aria to curl against Spencer. Their relationship had always been one with reassuring touches and warm embraces, but this felt…different somehow. Spencer's fingers traced burning circles into Aria's arm as she held her, and Aria began to notice just how warm of a person Spencer was. It wasn't just her kindness or protective disposition, Spencer's skin literally radiated heat.
Ezra was never this warm, his touch had sent shivers down her spine but Spencer's nearly burned her alive. And Ezra's heartbeat was a slow, steady thumping, able to lull her to sleep like a lullaby, while the quick, anxious beat in Spencer's chest was hard to keep up with, kept her on her toes and made her want to follow. Where Ezra was solidly built, as much flesh as bone, Spencer was thin and lean in a way that wasn't exactly unpleasant, that allowed her to mold herself around Aria and cage her in bone. Ezra's embrace nearly suffocated her at times, but she could've breathed easily in Spencer's arms, if not for how swiftly the heat took her breath away.
Aria noticed eventually just how much she was comparing Spencer to Ezra, like they were anything more than friends. Frankly, it startled her when she came to the realization that she might, in fact, want more of Spencer. So she tried to decide one night, watching the other girl when she wasn't looking, and she found herself admiring Spencer's profile, being caught up in her contagious smile as she chuckled at a witty joke in a movie, likening the color of her irises to coffee, wanting to ghost gentle fingers through her wavy locks. She wanted to kiss Spencer's lips, the dimple in her chin, trail them along her jaw and down the fragile column of her throat. And the more she looked, the more Spencer glanced at her, until finally Aria was caught.
"What are you looking at?"
But she waved it off, telling Spencer she was just tired and spacey, and turning sheepishly to her phone, where she typed out a text to let Ezra know she was crashing at Spencer's again. In the morning, she woke with a smile to the apartment's small living room, only to realize she wasn't on the couch alone, but wrapped around Spencer in a way that was too intimate for friends, their legs tangled together and bodies pressed close. And Spencer was holding on—miraculously—just as tightly.
She made the coffee that morning, and stood in the kitchen doorway watching Spencer sleep as it brewed. Spencer's face had tightened since Aria had gotten up, breathy murmurs slipping from her lips and her arms seemingly searching for someone that Aria assumed was Toby. Upon pouring the coffee, Aria brought it to the living room and shook Spencer awake, heart fluttering as her half-asleep best friend called her "babe".
It was a mistake, she knew, a term of endearment that had to be meant for the blue eyed boy in her dreams, and Spencer didn't seem to realize she'd even said anything as she fully awoke and sipped at her coffee.
But Aria wasn't a stranger to being wrong, and she got another taste of it when it was time to leave and Spencer's fingers latched around her wrist like she was about to abandon the girl on a deserted island. Aria watched as her friend struggled to speak—struggled to tell her something—ears growing red and a familiar panic settling in her eyes, one that Aria had felt in herself the night before. And she realized her feelings might just be reciprocated.
It was almost painful to watch Spencer's difficulty, like they were back in ninth grade and every awkward aspect of the girl was shining through. Aria felt like she could've had pink streaks in her hair, like she had to look through Spencer's thick glasses to see her eyes, and it was then she knew that this was a long time coming.
As Aria stood on tiptoe and stopped Spencer's nervous stuttering with a kiss, she found that it was the most natural thing in the world, like they had always been meant to fit together like that but neither had realized it. And Spencer smiled against her mouth as their noses brushed, as their eyes fluttered closed, as an explosion rattled them to their cores. There had been a fuse lit the moment they'd first met, and it had been burning ever since, the flame twisting around obstacles and traveling miles only to finally reach this moment.
Heat flooded Aria's entire being and she grabbed onto the hair at the back of Spencer's head to prolong the feeling, while Spencer's fingers rested gingerly on Aria's hips. Their lips moved together, tongues curiously exploring, until both had to come up for air.
Spencer was laughing as they pulled apart, and Aria offered her own hesitant smile, unsure until her best friend confessed she'd been waiting to do that for years. Thoughts of settling, of Ezra, of everything had flooded Aria's mind, and it was almost humorous how much she'd been fooling herself. How blindly she had lusted after that unattainable storybook romance, when what she'd needed was beside her all along. She'd gotten what she thought she wanted and settled for it, but the past few moments had smacked her upside the head.
Spencer was… well, Spencer was perfect. Not quite a cliche love interest from one of Aria's books. Not a has-everything-and-gets-everything stud with an inflated ego and muscles to match. Not a victim of circumstance complete with sharp edges and a leather jacket. Not a sweet romantic with a throbbing heart on his sleeve and red roses to boot. Not just one of the characters that she loved to fall in love with.
Spencer was complex and alive. Soft in the middle but a little rough around the edges, with eyes that could melt or harden to extremes, fingers with callouses from long nights clacking at a keyboard to perfect term papers but palms that knew what moisturizer was, a tongue that could lash out the most painful of words but could also charm like nobody's business. She was made up of layers of flesh under rigged bone that poked out of smooth skin. Perfection masking impenetrable walls that sheltered vulnerability. The guts of a hopeless romantic oozing from the rubble of cynicism. A disastrous mess of a person that somehow managed to be absolutely perfect in her own right.
She was something Aria had no right to covet, but Spencer seemed to want her just as much.
Had they both settled, then? Were Toby and Ezra just their second choices in a contest they hadn't even been aware of? No, she didn't think so. Aria had loved Ezra—still loved him, really—and Spencer had seemed happy with Toby. Those boys had been their worlds, their utter destruction or blissful salvation. They'd taken all they could've taken and had loved as truly as was possible. But it had faded out, the best of times were over with, and it seemed nothing was left, at least for Aria and Ezra. Roll credits.
But Spencer had always been there and always would be. She'd offered a consistent, loving hand in her darkest times, when even Ezra wasn't enough. She fully filled a hole in Aria's heart that others could never quite manage to fill, and it had always hurt her most when Spencer was mad at her. Aria could picture a happy future with Spencer that she couldn't anymore with Ezra.
From then on, she was reminded of that every time she went home to Ezra, every time she kissed him, and nearly every moment in between. He began to notice her distance eventually, after months had passed since her first coffee with Spencer, and by then she was almost completely out of love with him.
Every day she was growing more in love with Spencer, and she visited her as much as possible. They kissed and laughed and cuddled, and Aria was finally happy again, despite the guilt of going home to Ezra's confused looks and suspicious hums.
One night she finally slid off her wedding ring and discarded it on the coffee table, Spencer's fingers slipping up under her shirt all the while. She didn't look back at it when they stumbled to the bedroom, and she didn't think about Ezra once as clothes were shed and ecstasy overwhelmed her.
Only in the morning did she feel any guilt, waking up so satisfied. It was painful, yes, knowing she'd crossed a sacred line, but the smells of sex and brewing coffee distracted her, replaced soon by the tastes of Spencer's lips and the caffeinated drink she'd brought with her.
Distractions weren't such a bad thing, she thought, especially when they took the form of such pleasure. Understanding came with it—of adultery, of sin. Her father's motives became startlingly clear, and she knew now how he could ever have been swayed to cheat on her mother. Of course, she didn't have children to worry about hurting and he had, but she still couldn't really fault him without hypocrisy breathing down her neck.
It happened again and again, until she was certain she was worse than her father, cheating on Ezra like he didn't even matter. She felt guilty, but everything about Spencer was too irresistible: every touch, every moan, every inch of skin. And Aria was certain she'd go insane without her.
Ezra would study her intently sometimes, like he knew her dirty secret, but he never broached the subject and never stopped her on her way out the door to meet Spencer. She supposed he was trying to figure out what had changed in her, why she was suddenly so cheerful but still so impossibly distant when he touched her. It hurt her when she saw flashes of pain in his eyes at her rejection, and that just made her more reluctant to come clean.
But he had to find out eventually, if she was ever going to have a life with Spencer.
And it was only a matter of time.