Disclaimer: "Lizzie McGuire" is a Disney creation.
Author's Note: Thanks for such great reviews everyone! I hope I haven't kept you all waiting too long. Due to time constraints, this will be the last chapter. Thanks for staying with the story for so long!
Another Way - Chapter Twelve By: Taygeta
The reply Lizzie received was absolute silence.
"Uh...Gordo...?" She said hesitantly. "Did I say something wrong?"
He took a deep breath and replied, "Maybe..."
It was Lizzie's turn to be silent. She wondered if her ears were working correctly. The ideas that she might be delusional or falling ill also occurred to her.
"W-what?"
Gordo stood up from his chair and started to pace his living room.
"I mean...I don't know..." he stammered into the phone, "I mean...I don't even know what I mean..."
Lizzie could feel her heart beat beneath her chest. It was racing.
She took her deep breath of the conversation to calm herself, and then said as steadily as she could, "Gordo, are you still in love with me?"
She closed her eyes wondering if she was going to wake up to some dream or some nightmare.
It was the moment of truth for Gordo. He knew the truth, but he never thought he would have to say it out loud. Though he wondered if he had somehow led himself to this moment...if all the phone calls had somehow loomed around this subject. He wondered about Gretchen. He loved Gretchen, but this moment wasn't about her.
And in truth, he admitted: "I never stopped."
Her eyes opened. She heard herself intake a sharp breath and found herself rendered speechless. This had to be some kind of dream.
At her silence, she heard him start to explain, "I tried so hard to hate you. You made me believe that you loved me for this tiny fraction of time. You kissed me and the world made absolute, perfect sense.... and then you took it away."
Lizzie felt her eyes water, and she tried to talk, but before she could get out of her verbal struggles, he continued.
"I wanted to hate you for taking that away, but I couldn't. You hurt me, but I couldn't stop loving you. I'm sorry, Lizzie...but this whole being friends again thing might get a little difficult if...I'm still in love with you."
She bit her lower lip, took a deep breath, and said, "Gordo...I don't know whether or not this makes the situation any better, but you should know. I'm in love with you too."
It was Gordo's turn to wonder if his ears were working correctly, if he was delusional, or if he had just contracted some illness that was clouding his thought.
"Y-you are?"
She sighed, "That tiny fraction of time when I made you believe I loved you...I really meant it. Everything made perfect sense for me then too, but I couldn't hurt Gary. Not like that, but just because I walked away doesn't mean I didn't feel anything...that I didn't realize how much you meant to me."
The mention of Gary made Gordo pull back into living reality, "Wait...I can't...Gretchen..."
Lizzie felt a tug in her heart, "I know. You can't do that to Gretchen either, can you?"
"No....not so much that. I don't want to do that to her, but..." Gordo's voice trailed into some undisclosed thoughts.
"But what?"
Before he answered her, his mind looked back at the last time he had made such confessions to her. He didn't see then why she couldn't break up with Gary. He knew that her doing so might have hurt Gary's feelings, but what was the use of being with someone when you really wanted someone else?
"I could if it meant that much to me. I could if I knew without a doubt that I was doing the right thing...that I wasn't hurting someone I cared about because of just a whim," he answered in a voice distant from thought.
Lizzie wasn't sure what to say, especially when he continued, "Lizzie, was I just a whim? Did I not mean as much as Gary?"
Her mouth opened slightly at the question.
"Gordo...I thought we decided that the things that happened in the past would have happened no matter our 'what if' scenarios now."
"Yes...that's true, but I'm not asking you if you could change things then with what you know now. I'm asking you what I meant to you back then."
"Gordo...I just told you," she said, pausing slightly before she continued, "I loved you...I still do."
"Then why couldn't you break up with Gary?"
"Did you expect me to make that kind of decision at that moment?" she asked him in an incredulous tone.
"No, but you did. You said you couldn't.... and I don't get it, Lizzie. I could."
Confused, Lizzie asked, " What does all this mean?"
"It means that as much as I want to believe you care about me that way, I'm not sure I can," he struggled.
"W-what?"
Of all the impossible possible scenarios that had run rampant through Lizzie' head these past five years, this hadn't been one of them.
"I'm not sure I understand, Gordo..."
He sighed, "I'm not sure I do either..."
~ * ~ * ~
"So...wait...he loves you and you love him, but he doesn't believe you love him?" asked Miranda as she put Michelle to bed.
"Exactly," was Lizzie's telephone reply.
Miranda stepped out of the room and sighed, "I really don't know what to do with you two...you guys are on this never-ending rollercoaster."
"It's not like I chose to go on this path."
"Didn't you? I mean...don't you ever wonder what could have happened if you had just gone with how you felt about Gordo to begin with?"
"Of course I wonder...I wonder all the time.'
"And even though you wonder, you still abide by your decision. You couldn't break things from Gary...and if I were Gordo, who has probably been holding on to that same moment like you - wondering what could have been - I would be wondering too...with all these new found revelations of 'I love you's'."
"Whose side are you on, Miranda?"
Sitting on the couch, she replied, "No one's. I'm not on Gordo's side. I'm not on your side. I'm playing Switzerland. I'm trying to be the unbiased."
"For the unbiased, you certainly have a lot of opinions."
"Hardy, har, har," she said sarcastically.
"Miranda...what do you think I should do?"
"Honey...I don't think I'm supposed to be answering you that question for you. I want you and Gordo to work things out, but not because I said so. I'll tell you this though, I think you and he need to evaluate things, and both of you need to come to terms with what happened five years ago. Because you guys can't move forward if you can't even get passed that."
~ * ~ * ~
"Why can't there be another way..." sang Lizzie into the microphone at the recording studio.
The song faded.
Bill, the recording director, said, "Beautiful! That's a wrap, Lizzie."
She smiled and took the large earphones off.
When she met Bill in the recording room, he said, "How you feeling?"
"Very relieved," she said. "I hope this works out well."
"If you don't make it big, then at least you enjoyed the process," he said optimistically.
She laughed, "I don't really have plans to make it big...this is a side gig until I can find another job."
"Interesting - not to mention, successful - side gig. What did you do before this?"
"I was head of finance at Ally Records."
"Oooh...so you are Ally Records' Elizabeth McGuire...I thought that was too coincidental."
Lizzie laughed again, "Didn't realize that finance people can have fame..."
"Well, the merger was a pretty hefty story among us recording folk. We thought it was pretty odd that the person that seemed to be heading to retirement was kept on and you were let go."
She shrugged, "Sometimes life doesn't work out the way you think they will."
"But that merger was awhile ago, you still haven't found a job yet?"
"A head of finance who was let go...I'm either overqualified or undesired in my field," she replied.
"Tough," Bill said.
"You're telling me," she replied.
He laughed, "Well, who knows? Maybe Ally Records will be looking for Elizabeth McGuire to be their hot new artist?"
"That's what I've been trying to tell her for the past year," a voice interjected the conversation.
Lizzie looked up at the visitor in surprise.
Bill walked over to Gordo and shook his hand, "David, good to see you again."
"Same here, Bill," he said. "How is everything going?"
"It's a wrap," said the recording director.
"Great! Mr. Essler will be happy to hear that it wrapped earlier than planned."
Bill grabbed his jacket from his chair and said, "While I would love to stay and talk with you two some more, I have a meeting in about fifteen minutes. Lizzie, if we don't have the opportunity to see each other again, it was a pleasure working with you."
She smiled and shook his hand, "Likewise."
When Bill left, she turned to Gordo and said, "What are you doing here? Where's Miranda?"
He smiled, "She talked me into talking to you."
"Way to go Switzerland," laughed Lizzie as she wondered what was to become of Miranda's 'neutrality'.
~ * ~ * ~
Lizzie and Gordo walked on the beach. The recording studio was located in Santa Monica, and the most place fitting for their conversation was the ocean's shore.
The conversation was silence for a long time. Neither knew what to say. They had only spoken on casual terms since Lizzie had arrived a few weeks ago to record the song for Gary's film. They hadn't talked at all about the conversation where 'I love you" fell into 'I don't believe you'.
"So what are we doing here? What do you want to talk about?" she asked finally.
"I just want to say that sometimes I think too much and sometimes I over analyze and sometimes I say things I don't really mean."
"Oh," she said, "And what am I supposed to take from that?"
"After we talked to each other," he began, "I broke up with Gretchen. I couldn't stay with her, even though I didn't know if you and I would ever have anything. It wasn't fair to her that I was with her when I could honestly say that I was in love with someone else." Lizzie gave him a silent, slight smile, and he continued, "And do you know was the first thing she said to me after I had my whole 'it's not you, it's me' spiel?"
"What?"
"'I know you love Lizzie...I just hoped it would somehow stop, but I guess we're not meant to be,'" he quoted, 'I guess...you and Lizzie are meant to be.'"
"She said that?"
He nodded.
"I talked to Gary," said Lizzie, "I gave him a hypothetical situation that was a little too detailed for him to really believe it was hypothetical, but he played along anyway."
"What did he say?"
"He told me that he probably would have accepted it, but that we probably wouldn't be as good of friends and that you probably would have never given him his film opportunity. Then he said that there are things in his life that he wondered about - wondered what would have resulted if he hadn't made those past decisions - but whenever he got to thinking about those things, he realized, they didn't matter."
"How so?"
"They only serve as a reference, and he's not the same person as he was in the past. Things change...things evolve..."
Gordo took a deep breath, "To what?"
Lizzie thought for a moment before saying, "Who knows? But some things don't change though Gordo...like the fact that I never stopped loving you. Though, it really hurt to realize that you didn't trust what I had to tell you."
Gordo took a moment before he said, "It's not that I didn't trust what you had to say. I didn't trust myself. I spent all this time wondering if I could risk myself again. For all of our declarations, Lizzie, we haven't actually fallen into any relationship other than being friends."
She nodded, "I realize that, but I'm inclined to believe that wherever we go from here, has to be better than that moment that has taken so long to get to here. I'm not saying that we shouldn't remember that it happened, but if we dwell on the past...things go nowhere. I'll tell you this: I don't want to hear the 'friend' line, but I can live with that if that's what you mean."
He looked into her eyes, and wordlessly, he took her hand into his. She glanced at him, unsure of what this all meant. Then, he leaned over and kissed her.
She needn't any explanation.
He then held her close and she heard him say, "I'd rather we go another way."
They stood in this embrace and let time slip from their understanding.
THE END
Author's Note: Thanks for such great reviews everyone! I hope I haven't kept you all waiting too long. Due to time constraints, this will be the last chapter. Thanks for staying with the story for so long!
Another Way - Chapter Twelve By: Taygeta
The reply Lizzie received was absolute silence.
"Uh...Gordo...?" She said hesitantly. "Did I say something wrong?"
He took a deep breath and replied, "Maybe..."
It was Lizzie's turn to be silent. She wondered if her ears were working correctly. The ideas that she might be delusional or falling ill also occurred to her.
"W-what?"
Gordo stood up from his chair and started to pace his living room.
"I mean...I don't know..." he stammered into the phone, "I mean...I don't even know what I mean..."
Lizzie could feel her heart beat beneath her chest. It was racing.
She took her deep breath of the conversation to calm herself, and then said as steadily as she could, "Gordo, are you still in love with me?"
She closed her eyes wondering if she was going to wake up to some dream or some nightmare.
It was the moment of truth for Gordo. He knew the truth, but he never thought he would have to say it out loud. Though he wondered if he had somehow led himself to this moment...if all the phone calls had somehow loomed around this subject. He wondered about Gretchen. He loved Gretchen, but this moment wasn't about her.
And in truth, he admitted: "I never stopped."
Her eyes opened. She heard herself intake a sharp breath and found herself rendered speechless. This had to be some kind of dream.
At her silence, she heard him start to explain, "I tried so hard to hate you. You made me believe that you loved me for this tiny fraction of time. You kissed me and the world made absolute, perfect sense.... and then you took it away."
Lizzie felt her eyes water, and she tried to talk, but before she could get out of her verbal struggles, he continued.
"I wanted to hate you for taking that away, but I couldn't. You hurt me, but I couldn't stop loving you. I'm sorry, Lizzie...but this whole being friends again thing might get a little difficult if...I'm still in love with you."
She bit her lower lip, took a deep breath, and said, "Gordo...I don't know whether or not this makes the situation any better, but you should know. I'm in love with you too."
It was Gordo's turn to wonder if his ears were working correctly, if he was delusional, or if he had just contracted some illness that was clouding his thought.
"Y-you are?"
She sighed, "That tiny fraction of time when I made you believe I loved you...I really meant it. Everything made perfect sense for me then too, but I couldn't hurt Gary. Not like that, but just because I walked away doesn't mean I didn't feel anything...that I didn't realize how much you meant to me."
The mention of Gary made Gordo pull back into living reality, "Wait...I can't...Gretchen..."
Lizzie felt a tug in her heart, "I know. You can't do that to Gretchen either, can you?"
"No....not so much that. I don't want to do that to her, but..." Gordo's voice trailed into some undisclosed thoughts.
"But what?"
Before he answered her, his mind looked back at the last time he had made such confessions to her. He didn't see then why she couldn't break up with Gary. He knew that her doing so might have hurt Gary's feelings, but what was the use of being with someone when you really wanted someone else?
"I could if it meant that much to me. I could if I knew without a doubt that I was doing the right thing...that I wasn't hurting someone I cared about because of just a whim," he answered in a voice distant from thought.
Lizzie wasn't sure what to say, especially when he continued, "Lizzie, was I just a whim? Did I not mean as much as Gary?"
Her mouth opened slightly at the question.
"Gordo...I thought we decided that the things that happened in the past would have happened no matter our 'what if' scenarios now."
"Yes...that's true, but I'm not asking you if you could change things then with what you know now. I'm asking you what I meant to you back then."
"Gordo...I just told you," she said, pausing slightly before she continued, "I loved you...I still do."
"Then why couldn't you break up with Gary?"
"Did you expect me to make that kind of decision at that moment?" she asked him in an incredulous tone.
"No, but you did. You said you couldn't.... and I don't get it, Lizzie. I could."
Confused, Lizzie asked, " What does all this mean?"
"It means that as much as I want to believe you care about me that way, I'm not sure I can," he struggled.
"W-what?"
Of all the impossible possible scenarios that had run rampant through Lizzie' head these past five years, this hadn't been one of them.
"I'm not sure I understand, Gordo..."
He sighed, "I'm not sure I do either..."
~ * ~ * ~
"So...wait...he loves you and you love him, but he doesn't believe you love him?" asked Miranda as she put Michelle to bed.
"Exactly," was Lizzie's telephone reply.
Miranda stepped out of the room and sighed, "I really don't know what to do with you two...you guys are on this never-ending rollercoaster."
"It's not like I chose to go on this path."
"Didn't you? I mean...don't you ever wonder what could have happened if you had just gone with how you felt about Gordo to begin with?"
"Of course I wonder...I wonder all the time.'
"And even though you wonder, you still abide by your decision. You couldn't break things from Gary...and if I were Gordo, who has probably been holding on to that same moment like you - wondering what could have been - I would be wondering too...with all these new found revelations of 'I love you's'."
"Whose side are you on, Miranda?"
Sitting on the couch, she replied, "No one's. I'm not on Gordo's side. I'm not on your side. I'm playing Switzerland. I'm trying to be the unbiased."
"For the unbiased, you certainly have a lot of opinions."
"Hardy, har, har," she said sarcastically.
"Miranda...what do you think I should do?"
"Honey...I don't think I'm supposed to be answering you that question for you. I want you and Gordo to work things out, but not because I said so. I'll tell you this though, I think you and he need to evaluate things, and both of you need to come to terms with what happened five years ago. Because you guys can't move forward if you can't even get passed that."
~ * ~ * ~
"Why can't there be another way..." sang Lizzie into the microphone at the recording studio.
The song faded.
Bill, the recording director, said, "Beautiful! That's a wrap, Lizzie."
She smiled and took the large earphones off.
When she met Bill in the recording room, he said, "How you feeling?"
"Very relieved," she said. "I hope this works out well."
"If you don't make it big, then at least you enjoyed the process," he said optimistically.
She laughed, "I don't really have plans to make it big...this is a side gig until I can find another job."
"Interesting - not to mention, successful - side gig. What did you do before this?"
"I was head of finance at Ally Records."
"Oooh...so you are Ally Records' Elizabeth McGuire...I thought that was too coincidental."
Lizzie laughed again, "Didn't realize that finance people can have fame..."
"Well, the merger was a pretty hefty story among us recording folk. We thought it was pretty odd that the person that seemed to be heading to retirement was kept on and you were let go."
She shrugged, "Sometimes life doesn't work out the way you think they will."
"But that merger was awhile ago, you still haven't found a job yet?"
"A head of finance who was let go...I'm either overqualified or undesired in my field," she replied.
"Tough," Bill said.
"You're telling me," she replied.
He laughed, "Well, who knows? Maybe Ally Records will be looking for Elizabeth McGuire to be their hot new artist?"
"That's what I've been trying to tell her for the past year," a voice interjected the conversation.
Lizzie looked up at the visitor in surprise.
Bill walked over to Gordo and shook his hand, "David, good to see you again."
"Same here, Bill," he said. "How is everything going?"
"It's a wrap," said the recording director.
"Great! Mr. Essler will be happy to hear that it wrapped earlier than planned."
Bill grabbed his jacket from his chair and said, "While I would love to stay and talk with you two some more, I have a meeting in about fifteen minutes. Lizzie, if we don't have the opportunity to see each other again, it was a pleasure working with you."
She smiled and shook his hand, "Likewise."
When Bill left, she turned to Gordo and said, "What are you doing here? Where's Miranda?"
He smiled, "She talked me into talking to you."
"Way to go Switzerland," laughed Lizzie as she wondered what was to become of Miranda's 'neutrality'.
~ * ~ * ~
Lizzie and Gordo walked on the beach. The recording studio was located in Santa Monica, and the most place fitting for their conversation was the ocean's shore.
The conversation was silence for a long time. Neither knew what to say. They had only spoken on casual terms since Lizzie had arrived a few weeks ago to record the song for Gary's film. They hadn't talked at all about the conversation where 'I love you" fell into 'I don't believe you'.
"So what are we doing here? What do you want to talk about?" she asked finally.
"I just want to say that sometimes I think too much and sometimes I over analyze and sometimes I say things I don't really mean."
"Oh," she said, "And what am I supposed to take from that?"
"After we talked to each other," he began, "I broke up with Gretchen. I couldn't stay with her, even though I didn't know if you and I would ever have anything. It wasn't fair to her that I was with her when I could honestly say that I was in love with someone else." Lizzie gave him a silent, slight smile, and he continued, "And do you know was the first thing she said to me after I had my whole 'it's not you, it's me' spiel?"
"What?"
"'I know you love Lizzie...I just hoped it would somehow stop, but I guess we're not meant to be,'" he quoted, 'I guess...you and Lizzie are meant to be.'"
"She said that?"
He nodded.
"I talked to Gary," said Lizzie, "I gave him a hypothetical situation that was a little too detailed for him to really believe it was hypothetical, but he played along anyway."
"What did he say?"
"He told me that he probably would have accepted it, but that we probably wouldn't be as good of friends and that you probably would have never given him his film opportunity. Then he said that there are things in his life that he wondered about - wondered what would have resulted if he hadn't made those past decisions - but whenever he got to thinking about those things, he realized, they didn't matter."
"How so?"
"They only serve as a reference, and he's not the same person as he was in the past. Things change...things evolve..."
Gordo took a deep breath, "To what?"
Lizzie thought for a moment before saying, "Who knows? But some things don't change though Gordo...like the fact that I never stopped loving you. Though, it really hurt to realize that you didn't trust what I had to tell you."
Gordo took a moment before he said, "It's not that I didn't trust what you had to say. I didn't trust myself. I spent all this time wondering if I could risk myself again. For all of our declarations, Lizzie, we haven't actually fallen into any relationship other than being friends."
She nodded, "I realize that, but I'm inclined to believe that wherever we go from here, has to be better than that moment that has taken so long to get to here. I'm not saying that we shouldn't remember that it happened, but if we dwell on the past...things go nowhere. I'll tell you this: I don't want to hear the 'friend' line, but I can live with that if that's what you mean."
He looked into her eyes, and wordlessly, he took her hand into his. She glanced at him, unsure of what this all meant. Then, he leaned over and kissed her.
She needn't any explanation.
He then held her close and she heard him say, "I'd rather we go another way."
They stood in this embrace and let time slip from their understanding.
THE END