Taylor looked up from his keyboard. He heard the doorbell ringing upstairs.
"Just a minute!" He yelled, thumping up the steps. He ran down the hall and slid to a stop in front of the door. He opened it, and his mouth dropped open.
Ricki cringed. "Taylor?"
Taylor almost choked. "Ricki?"
"Yeah." She said timidly.
"Oh no."
Mary Anne frowned as the insisten knocking on her door grew louder. She got up from her desk and opened her door. Zac pushed past her and hurried into the room.
"Where is she?" He asked. "She's not in our room, where is she?" Zac asked.
Mary Anne just stood, her mouth open. "Oh no." She choked out.
"What?" Zac asked. "Where's Ricki? I need to talk to her."
"Where is Ricki?" Mary Anne said. "Where is Ricki?"
"Yeah." Zac said.
"Where is Ricki?" Mary Anne's voice was growing louder and louder. "Ricki....is in Los Angeles, at your brother's house, looking for YOU!" She screamed.
"Oh no." Zac said. The color drained from his face. "Oh no no no no no..."
"Yes!" Mary Anne shouted.
"Why?" Zac asked.
"She went out there, to tell you that she loved you back! And you're here!"
"Shit." Zac said, sitting down on Mary Anne's bed. "I screwed up."
"You bet you did!" Mary Anne said. "I spent all day convincing her to go out there and tell you!"
"And I left." Zac said. He ran a hand through his hair. "I bet I just missed her."
"Crap Zac." Mary Anne said, sitting down on the bed. "You really DID screw this up."
"What did he say when he was here?" Ricki asked Taylor.
"He told me the whole story." Taylor said. "About the party, the big fight...everything."
"And?"
"And he told me that he left you a letter, and he didn't know what you would do."
"Shit." Ricki said. "Now I'm here and he's there. I need to talk to him."
"I have his cell phone number." Taylor said.
"No." Ricki said quickly.
"What?" Taylor asked, giving her a quizzical look.
"What am I going to say?"
"Tell him.....I dunno. Do you love him?"
"Yes." Ricki said.
"Tell him that."
"What else?"
"What do you mean what else?"
"I can't just call him and say 'I love you'." She said, thowing her hands in the air.
"Why not?"
"Because...because...I...I dunno."
"Listen Ricki." Taylor said. "In a situation like this, that's all you need."
"Do you think?" She asked.
"Yes." Taylor said. "Listen. I don't know much about...all this stuff, but this is going to make for quite story. I've heard that's how love works." he said. "Tell him." He grabbed the phone off the table near him, and dialed Zac's number. He handed the phone to her, and Ricki took a deep breath.
"Hello?" Zac picked up his phone. All he could hear was static. "Hello?" He repeated. He heard someone saying something on the other line, but there was too much static.
"I can't hear you!" He yelled.
"I love you too." He heard a familliar voice yell. His stomach lurched into his throat.
"Ricki?"
"Yeah." She yelled. "I love you too!"
"I love you!" He yelled. "Where are you?"
"Taylor's. I just missed you."
"I just missed you too!"
"I need to see you!"
"I need to see you too! Stay there! I'm coming out there!" The static on the line got worse.
"What?"
"Stay! I'm coming!" He yelled.
Suddenly the line cut off. His cell phone beeped, then went black.
"AAARGH!" Zac yelled and threw it to the floor. His picked up his small bag again, and yanked Mary Anne's door open.
"Wait, where are going?" Mary Anne asked.
"I'm going out there." Zac said. "I've missed her way to many times, and this isn't going to be another one." With the slam of the door, he was gone.
The warm, late night air blew through Ricki's hair as Taylor raced her to the Los Angeles airport in his convertible.
"This is crazy." He yelled over the wind and traffic.
"I know. That's the way most of our relationship has been." Ricki yelled back.
Taylor just smiled and shook his head. Ricki felt butterflies in her stomach. What was she going to say to him? She had been blind and stupid. She could fool her mind, but she couldn't fool her heart. She had known that the second she had seen him in their room. When he had been placed in her room, it hadn't been an accident, it had been fate. Fate had made them kiss, fate had made them fight, and fate had screwed them over about four times in a matter of months.
He pulled into the parking lot, and Ricki paused. Fate. That's what it was. She was certain. They walked into the airport, and found the terminal where Zac was to arrive.
Ricki rushed up to the desk. "Excuse me, is flight 180 on time?"
The woman at the counter covered the mouthpiece of the phone she was talking on with one hand. "Just a moment." She said.
"I just want to know, yes or no." Ricki persisted.
"Just a moment..ma'm." The woman repeated, giving her a pointed look. She went back to talking on the phone.
Ricki reached across the counter, and smacked down the reciever, cutting off the line. "No, not just a moment. Is flight 180 on time?"
The woman glared at her, and glanced down at her computer screen. "yes." She spat out.
"Thank you." Ricki said. She glanced at the clock. She still had fifteen minutes. She went back down to where Taylor was sitting in a row of wobbly plastic chairs.
"It's on time, at least." Ricki said.
"That's good." Taylor said. He smiled at her nervousness.
Ricki sighed. "It's weird. Everything is so clear now."
"Like what?"
"Like...how stupid I was. How stupid he was. I knew I liked him from the moment he put a hanson poster on the wall of the room."
Taylor laughed. "That's Zac."
"Yeah." She said, fiddling with her hands. "I knew I liked him. I just...I was too pig headed to tell him. I should have. If I could do it again, I would have told him from the moment I saw him. I wanted to..." She looked down at her hands. "I wanted to tell him for so long. I just couldn't. I almost did....several times."
"What would you tell him?"
"What would I tell him?" Ricki asked. "I would tell him....everything." She said.
"Really?"
"yeah."
"Cuz here's your chance." he said. She looked at Taylor, and he grinned. She turned her head, following his gaze.
Zac was walking towards them. He was one of the only people who had gotten off the plane. He walked quickly towards Ricki, who had already bolted from her chair beside Taylor and was running towards him.
It only took one look at her tired and hopefully face, and he began to run as well. They bolted towards each other, and barely skid to a stop when their two bodies joined. She flung her army around his neck and squeezed his body against hers.
"Ooooooh my gosh." Zac said, panting slightly. He squeezed her back, petting her hair.
"I know." She said into his neck.
"Finally."
"Yeah." She said. She let go of him, and looked him in the eye. "Zac, before you say anything, let me say this." She said.
Zac nodded, and she continued. "I want you to know...that I love you, and I have loved you for a very long time...I was just too embarassed to say it. And pig headed. And bitchy. I know it. I've been really hard to deal with, and I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you. Nothing was your fault."
"Ricki, it's okay. I was being pig headed too!" Zac said quickly. "I didn't know how to tell you...and I guess my being ignorant came off as being jerky." He said.
"I don't care about that."
"I don't care about it either. None of it." He said.
"Well....what do we do now?" She said. "I...I still want to be with you."
"I still want to be with you too."
"But you have to stay here." She said. "And I have to go back to school."
Zac didn't know what to do. He looked at Taylor, who had walked over throughout their makeup. Taylor could only shrug.
"Can't you give me some brotherly advice on this one?" Zac asked.
Taylor looked at him and shook his head. "This one's got me stumped, bro."
"I want to have a relationship with you, Zac." She said. "I love you. I realize that now. I'm sorry." She said, her eyes tearing up again.
"It's not your fault. Nothing is." Zac said, putting his hands on her shoulers.
"But what are we going to do? I....I want to make this work. Look what we went through today. We already make a mistake once. Let's not do it again.
Zac was caught. Should he dump his music to be with her? Would he be able to give up his dream job for his dream girl?
"Tell you what. If you finish the year at school, then you can come and live with me this summer." Zac said. "We'll give a relationship a try."
Ricki's breath caught in her throat. "You...you mean it? I can come and live with you?"
"I mean it." Zac said. "I can't promise it'll be easy...but I know we can make it work. I mean...love can make anything work..can't it?"
"I hope so." Ricki said. "But I have a feeling in our case it will. After all of that, we can make anything work."
"Yeah." Zac said with a grin. He grabbed Ricki into a hug, tightly squeezing her. "You know, it feels like I've been here and back a million times today."
"Well, we're here, and this is where we're staying....at least for a few days." Ricki said.
"Think of what we have to look forward to." Zac said. He looked Ricki in the eye. In just that split second, she saw all of their heated arguments, their awkward first kisses, and the hidden away passion of the whole year come tumbling out.
She leaned in and placed her lips on his, tentatively at first, then more surely. He returned the kiss, savoring the feeling of it. They pulled aprart, oblivious to the few people who were wandring around the Los Angeles Airport.
"Well...I know that a lot of things in our relationship have been baised on mistakes....and I know that that was the first thing that wasn't." Ricki said. Zac smiled, and picked up his bag.
"Ready?" Taylor asked the two of them.
"Yeah." Zac said. He shifted his bag on his shoulder, and welcomed Ricki's body against his and her hand in his own as they walked out of the airport that night together to start a new kind of relationship: a real one.