AN: Thank you all so much for reading my first chapter! Special thank you to dottyberry, Ezriafreak and Divatard for their reviews! Hope you enjoy this one!
2.
Aria stays in bed for the next few days. She watches trashy daytime TV, like a bored housewife. She tries to write a few pages of her new book, a modern riff on '30s gangster pulp fiction. She eats ramen noodles, wears sweatpants, forgets to shower. Her phone rings a few times, chimes with texts, but she lets it go to voice mail, doesn't answer, preferring to spend her days unencumbered by the outside world.
On her 5th day of hibernation, as she calls it, she gets a message from some girl in her editor's office, asking her to come in the next day with copies of whatever she has for her new book. She goes to bed and wishes she could just write and not have to worry about editors and agents and book releases, tours and readings. She wishes she could just write, but she wished that long ago too, and this is still where she has ended up.
She wakes up the next morning, if you could call noon the morning. She wakes up and she looks in the mirror at her bleary eyes, messy hair, pale skin. She looks at herself and barely recognizes the dead eyes staring back at her.
She takes a shower, uses some fancy soap she got in a gift bag at some press event. It smells like oranges. She makes herself a cup of coffee, black, with three sugars, scrambles an egg and makes some bacon in the microwave. She gave up vegetarianism a while ago, back when she dated a grocer named Finn. He showed her the pesticide mix they used on the vegetables in his store; gallons of toxic chemicals they sprayed on her heirloom tomatoes, her stalks of supposedly organic asparagus, to keep bugs away. It freaked her out so much; she went home and had her first hamburger in years. Now, years later, she eats meat sometimes, when she can afford it, anyways.
She gets dressed, a black dress, black leggings, combat boots. Her closet is nearly all black now, a New York cliché. She remembers how much she used to love getting dressed, how every outfit was an adventure, her body, a blank canvas. She used to revel in the stares of strangers, used to feel special. Now, she just feels tired. Exhausted by the minutia of every solitary second.
She puts on some mascara, concealer, tries to look like she gives a fuck. Stuffs a folder with a few pages of notes into her messenger bag. This month she can afford a cab, but she walks to the subway anyways. She takes the E train, standing up halfway through so a pregnant lady can take her seat.
Aria has only been to her editor's office a hand full of times, to read contracts, sign away her soul. Most of the time, her editor, a tiny blonde named Laura who talks too fast, invites her to lunch. They talk line edits and manuscripts over plates of pasta and glasses of champagne, paid for by an expense account. No, Aria knows that going to the publishing office is something different, something serious. She tries to muster up enough concern to be nervous.
The lobby of Laura's office building is decorated with paintings of tacky vases filled with pastel flowers; hotel art, she calls them, inoffensive, but boring, ordinary. Each time she comes she has to go through security, it's like the fucking airport, she thinks, as she steps through the metal detectors.
The elevator is crowded, noisy, smells like cleaning fluid. She gets out in front of her editor's office, taking a second to smell the fresh flowers by the door, big beautiful roses the color of blood. They remind her of Rosewood, of Spencer's mother gardening in the summer sun, cellphone in hand.
Aria hasn't been back to Rosewood in a year. Her family still lives there; her dad still works at Hollis, her mom, at Rosewood High. They don't live together anymore. Ella got the house in the divorce settlement, got remarried, some guy Aria barely knows, never calls dad despite his insistence. He's young, cute, owns a couple of coffee shops, makes the worst fucking cappuccino Aria has ever had. Byron moved across town, to a two-bedroom apartment near Hollis. He lives with Meredith and her cat, a scrunch-y faced, hairless, grumpy thing named Ruby. When Aria comes to visit, Meredith smiles too wide, tries too hard, makes her endless cups of tea, none of which she will ever drink.
Mike stayed in town too, married a girl from Ravenswood; they have a kid now, a two-year-old hellion who delights in pulling Auntie Aria's hair. Mike works as an orderly at the local mental hospital, Radley, which Aria still finds ironic, though supposedly his problems have long been solved by the miracle of modern medicine. Aria wonders if he sees Mona, if he feeds pills to that crazy bitch, the one who nearly killed his sister.
The receptionist motions Aria into Laura's office and she sits down; there are boxes stacked up in the corner, the desk is uncharacteristically bare. Laura is on the phone, as always. She speaks English in clear, bright tones in between mutterings in broken, stilted French. Aria tries to remember high school French classes, but comes up blank, save for a few lyrics from "Lady Marmalade". Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir…
When Laura gets off the phone, she rushes towards Aria. "I'm engaged, he's French!" She squeals, waving her giant engagement ring in Aria's face. "And I'm getting the fuck out of here. We're moving to Nice!" Aria smiles, stares down at the ring, and congratulates her. Secretly she wonders if her new agent will be as lenient with due dates as Laura was, wonders if she'll have to take meetings in the office from now on.
Aria asks Laura about her replacement, if she'll get to meet him. She presses a few buttons on her intercom, "Joyce, invite Z in! I want him to meet one of his new clients." She shouts into the little speaker, winking at Aria from behind her obnoxiously large hipster glasses.
Z, she remembers…someone used to call Ezra that. The door opens with a creak, and Aria turns around. She sees the guy's shoes first, loafers so shiny she can practically see her own reflection as she looks at them. She takes in his jeans, his crisp white button down shirt and ugly, patterned tie. Their eyes meet. Holy crap, she thinks. Fuck.