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[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR 

Every step she took had a bounce to it. Every time she brought a guest to a table in the back dining room, she could feel Taylor glance up and see her smiling and laughing with customers.

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

He lay as still as he possibly could, so as not to wake Andry and ruin this perfect tableaux of normality. In some other universe, this is how they always woke up.

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

She kept trying to pull away from him. She didn’t want to become tangled up in another labyrinth of feelings and complications and friendships and more-than-friendships. She didn’t know if she could take it. But every time her brain tried to tell her body to stop, she clutched on tighter, digging her fingers into his shoulders, making sure he didn’t leave her here. Alone. Again.

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

But now, all of the bravado was gone, as though the resource had completely run dry. Now, she seemed helpless. Broken. Taylor hated it, but he was pretty sure Andry hated it even more. 

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER THIRTY

The guys had started playing, but Andry couldn’t care less if she tried. She would have another drink, chat with Amelia, and then get the hell out of here. She clearly was not wanted.

[distractedbythesun]

Chapter Twenty Nine

He could see her mouthing along to the lyrics, as if she was pleading to Zac - please...please don’t promise me anything you can’t keep. Stop lying to me, stop looking at me like that, just stop. Let’s start over. It was like he was hearing the song again for the very first time, with this new and heartbreaking context.

[distractedbythesun]

PENNY AND ME

It feels wrong without her, but maybe someday it won’t…someday when you stop looking for her on the street or in the window of a passing subway car.

@justfinethanx​

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

He had hardly spoken to Zac since their argument. The air in the apartment remained stagnant and tense, and he tried his best to never be home. He hated that he even had to do that, because it was his place too, but he supposed it was good to be out. The baristas at the coffee shop between his place and Bella Cucina now knew his name, order, and what kind of muffin he preferred. 

[distractedbythesun]

DANCING IN THE WIND

A week earlier, Taylor had gotten a call from Natalie telling him she was pregnant. He was under a month shy of turning nineteen. When he heard the news, he felt his knees buckle.

@justfinethanx​

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

It had been a week since the night with Zac. She texted him incessantly, wondering where they stood. She was certain that the night they had spent together would change everything, and it had, just not in the way she was hoping. 

[distractedbythesun]

STRONG ENOUGH TO BREAK

Taylor glanced at the yellowed calendar on the wall. No one had ever bothered to change it, which seemed fitting. Since his very first day in the dismal mail room, he’d seen the calendar as a harbinger of doom. In the mail room, time would halt. It would be June 1987 forever.

The entire Anthology Series is written by both myself and @justfinethanx​, but for some reason Ao3 is not letting me add her as a co-creator!!  So as you read, remember to show her some love too, while I try to figure out how to add her! 

[distractedbythesun]

Part 3 of The Anthology Series.  

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

He had been so excited to see Andry, he even got to work a little early. He imagined her going home the night before and listening to the records all evening, maybe painting as the sun went down, and falling asleep with the music swirling around her thoughts.

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Andry wasn’t sure when it was decided that Zac would not be driving her back home that night. After spending hours in the pool, they got out, practically pickled in chlorine, and changed into clean clothes.

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE 

She didn’t want to get into the fact that they texted about certain songs; discussed certain lyrics. She didn’t want him to know that these were in fact albums that he recommended to her while she and Zac weren’t talking, and that this very music had helped her through those weeks of silence.

[distractedbythesun]

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO 

He stopped in his tracks when he saw the Soccer Mommy album. He and Andry had talked about this one at length - her visceral lyrics cutting Andry to the core after she laid her heart out and offered it the Zac on a silver platter and he had...left it there. 

[distractedbythesun]

everybody is so bored while stuck inside bc of covid-19 that i just got an ff.net alert that a fic from 2009 i was following updated with a new chapter for the first time in FIVE YEARS