#cricket + mack 011

[cricketcampbell]

for: @mackmontgomery

where: outside seascape hotel, nye.

So, there went Cricket's New Year's Resolution for the second year in a row.

With less than an hour to spare this time, which had to be some kind of record she hadn't been purposely attempting to beat; an achievement she didn't think boded well for the rest of her 2025, considering she'd now be going into it not having pissed off just one, but three of the people she never wanted to be at odds with in the first place.

(Soon to be four, once she texted Ziggy to let him know his efforts had been wasted and that she was leaving early.)

Confirming that her Uber was on it's way, Cricket switched apps to do just that, wiping away the tears that clouded her vision with the sleeve of her fuzzy coat as the text cursor blinked tauntingly back at her.

Her attempt to come up with an excuse he wouldn't immediately see through was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. Somehow, she knew even without turning her head who they belonged to.

"Can we actually just maybe not do this tonight?" Cricket sniffled, crossing her arms over her chest. "Like, I'm sorry, I really wasn't trying to start anything, but he deserved to know."

She wasn't sure what it was exactly she'd been trying to accomplish when she told Atlas about Mack and Lori, but the immediate pit that'd formed in Cricket's stomach as she'd watched him storm off to confront them had been a good indication that that had not been it.

[cricketcampbell]

After a month of being convinced that there was nothing else for her to think, Cricket was almost dizzy from the emotional whiplash of discovering the extent of just how wrong she'd been.

Her head was reeling trying to recontextualize all of her--what now felt like flimsy--points of evidence. Every moment between Mack and Lori that she'd witnessed, every moment she feared she hadn't but that her brain had not so helpfully tried to conjure up and supply anyways, every moment with him that she'd thought felt like a Moment but that'd passed like nothing...

None of which had meant anything like she'd initially thought, but that she'd immediately taken at face-value.

Cricket didn't know what she was feeling, couldn't settle on any one emotion. She was relieved to be wrong, embarrassed to have caused such a scene, panicked that maybe none of this even mattered when Mack's standing there telling her how much he'd wanted to kiss her. As in, past tense.

(As in, maybe after what she'd pulled tonight, he was suddenly remembering the reasons they'd broken up and thought they should stay that way.)

Could she even really blame him, if that was the case?

It was pretty much why Cricket had turned him away that last Valentine's Day, when it would've been so easy to invite him in. To convince herself that after one romantic dinner--that they were only at together by chance and a $3 donation to the community garden--they were somehow capable of handling falling back into the same routine, even when it was what'd ultimately lead to her becoming the worst version of herself on a September night she still thought about too often and them not really talking for months after.

It would've been so easy, almost too easy, which was why Cricket had known with a clarity that'd startled even her that if they wanted to figure out a way to be part of each other's lives they couldn't let themselves move so carelessly backwards.

The confirmation that she'd been right about something after being so glaringly wrong about everything else is quickly overshadowed by the realization that Mack had switched back to the present tense.

(I can't shake it and I can't shake you and I don't want to.)

The rush of relief that washes over her is so overwhelming and immediate, Cricket doesn't even realize she's started crying again until the warmth of Mack's hands are on her face, wiping away her tears and apologizing like they were something to be apologized for.

"No, no." She can hardly get the words out, her hands reaching up to grip gently at his wrists to keep him in place until she could compose herself. "You're not. You're not fucking anything up and you're not stupid and you're not--you're not ruining my night. You couldn't, because you're the only one I wanted to spend it with and that makes this, like, the best day I've had all month. It's not even close."

If Ziggy were there, some offense might've been taken to that, and while she knew she'd have some major apologizing to do later, her friend is the last thing on her mind as she answers Mack's half-question with a nod of her own and he leans down to close the distance between them.

Kissing Mack made Cricket feel like she could float.

Like the only thing keeping her grounded to the Earth were the points where his hands met her skin and his lips touched hers. She manages to rise to her tiptoes inside of her heels anyways, hands sliding from their hold on his wrists to rest against his chest in an attempt to be closer, though she wasn't sure there was a close enough that could satisfy that particular urge after so long apart.

(She'd take what she could get, though.)

"I didn't forget." She murmured when the need to catch her breath became too urgent to ignore, what could've been either minutes or hours later. The lack of fireworks overhead pointed towards the former, but Cricket wasn't confident she'd have noticed them even if they had gone off. "You said--you said you've been trying to get me to see you again, but all my reasons from that first day? All the reasons I like you so much that I think it's making me, like, actually crazy? I think about them every time I look at you. Or your name pops up on my phone. Or--"

Turning her wrist over from where her hand was gripped around his tie, the sleeve of Cricket's coat had ridden up just enough to expose the ink he'd etched into the skin there almost three months prior.

"Or when I look at this. Which is kind of a lot lately." She admits sheepishly, lifting her gaze back to his. "But I just--I want you to know that I didn't forget, and that it's not because of the elevator. It's never been. It's always been you, Mack. I just see you."

@mackmontgomery

The waiting in the present for Cricket to catch up to what he was trying to tell her felt as eternal as every second of the last few months, leaving him to brace himself for an impact that would no doubt shatter him despite his reassurances otherwise.

"You're not supposed to think that," He says feebly when she asks what else she was supposed to think, knowing there was little scope for him to claim it was ludicrous to ever put him and Lori together in a sentence like that given what he had to tell her after Halloween. Logic was one thing, his feelings were another and he couldn't imagine ever having feelings for Lori the way he did and does about Cricket.

( He couldn't imagine feeling that way about anyone, not on the same magnitude. )

It doesn't all seem quite as lost when he sees her hear him and believe him, eradicating some of that fear that had been seizing a hold of him. He still feels like he may be skating on ice, but it doesn't feel as thin underfoot and he doesn't feel as wobbly when she tells him she wants him to be happy with her more than anything else.

He wishes he could get a timeout then so he could hone in on that with, to get it's definition from her on whether she meant it as alongside her like a friend or with as in something more.

Mack knows he wants the more, but he's fallen into the pitfall of being too much far too often, so he focuses instead on what he knows to be true.

( Between with or without, he's hearing her say the one he's been praying for. )

"I did want to kiss you," He blurts out, like the window to confess that might slam shut on him if he didn't throw himself through it there and then, "I don't think I've ever wanted to kiss anymore more than I wanted to in that kitchen with you but I didn't want to put you in another situation like Valentine's Day where I'm doing something dumb like kissing you and you're doing something smart like telling me why we shouldn't. Not on your birthday."

Despite the slight sting it had caused him at the time, she had made the right call for both of them on her doorstep when she had sent him home rather than invited him in.

"And I'm glad you did that because I don't think we would have ever figured out how to be friends again if we kept fucking around and fucking up and I might be fucking up in a whole other way right now, but I can't shake it and I can't shake you and I don't want to."

The sight of tears cuts through him easily, his heart sinking at being the cause of it. He can't keep his hands to himself then, framing her face with both of his as he gently brushes away a stray tear from her cheek like he could banish all the bad by gesture alone as he looks down at her.

"I'm sorry, I'm really not trying to make you cry. That's literally one of my big resolutions for the new year and I'm already fucking it before it's even here," Mack hopes he can pull it back with confirmation of what might have been his dumbest move in what had become a long stretch of moves that fell under the same definition.

"Yeah, I have. And trust me, I hear how ridiculous that sounds. Up and down, up and down like a doofus. But I'd hang out in that sweaty deathbox all day every day just for the chance to see you."

That plan being a complete and utter fail made him acutely aware that the reality of where he stood at that very second -- though not ideal in how it had started -- was the exact kind he had been trying to manifest in the elevator and her kitchen and the rooftop of Ocean Crest and stood by the dance floor at X and Van's wedding.

Just her, him and a moment he's not willing to pass him by like each of the ones that had preceded it.

"I know we shouldn't but can we just--"

With no end to his sentence along with little care to whether or not it was midnight and the built in excuse he had been pinning his hopes on earlier, Mack rolls the dice on leaning down and pressing his lips to hers that would either be the first of many or the last they would share.

@cricketcampbell

[cricketcampbell]

There's no satisfaction gained from the acknowledgement of what Cricket knows had been weeks of radio silence on her end.

Part of her had figured (hoped?) that he'd been aware of it, at least on some level. The switch up from their previous months of rambling texts about anything and everything to a read receipt and nothing more felt obvious to her on the nights she couldn't keep from scrolling back through their past conversations, which was most of them these days, but if Mack had noticed the shift, she was confident that nothing about his texts had said so.

(Not that it would have mattered. She wasn't sure what she'd even have said to him if they had.)

Cricket crosses her arms over her chest, a fight against both the nighttime chill and the weight of Mack's suddenly pitying gaze on her. He might not have actually been laughing at her then, but Cricket could hear it in his tone that he thought she was being ridiculous, which meant it was only a matter of time before they started to say things she wasn't sure they'd be able to come back from this time.

This was exactly why she hadn't wanted to do this tonight--or ever at all, ideally. She didn't want to go into another new year not knowing if he'd be a part of it.

"Yeah, well," Cricket scoffed. "What else am I supposed to think, Mack?"

She knows she isn't wrong, is the thing. Completely or otherwise, Cricket knows what it was that she'd seen happening between Lori and Mack the last few weeks. Of course she did, when every instance, every interaction, every day that passed where they looked her in the eyes and continued to lie to her had ultimately led to her inability to even be in the same room as them, two of her favorite people.

(But that was all just supposed to be okay because they had talked about her while continuing to sneak around behind her back?)

"Oh my God." Cricket had to laugh, or else she'd cry, but she was embarrassed to find that she was already doing the latter. "You do get how that's worse, right? Like I'm just so sorry that I was the one who had to remind you that maybe you should feel just, like, a little guilty about--"

Not being in love with Lori?

Cricket blinked to clear her blurred vision, as if the tears clinging to her lashes were the cause for her mishearing the words coming from his mouth. Even that somehow made more sense to her than thinking he'd actually meant for her to be the one to hear them...

At least, it did before she watched him pinch the air in the space between them; a distance that'd felt like miles narrowed down to mere inches with a mirror of a silly gesture that two months ago she never would've imagined had the power of making her heart stop beating right in her chest the way it did seeing it tonight.

It picks back up in a panic when Cricket realizes her stunned silence has allowed Mack to jump to a conclusion that couldn't be further from the truth that'd been threatening to claw it's way to the surface for months now.

"No! I mean, no, you--" She shook her head, forcing herself to take a deep breath as she tried to decide where to begin. "You're right. I have been ignoring your texts."

Not the most pressing matter, but perhaps the easiest for Cricket to be able to address and explain.

"But not because I don't want to talk to you. I, like, always want to talk to you, and you have no idea how much it's been killing me to pretend that I don't."

Her face softens as she realizes that maybe she was wrong about that, too.

"Or that the thought of you and Lori being together hasn't actually been killing me. Because it has. And I told myself that it was just because I hated that you guys were lying to me, and that if you would just tell me, then I could get over it and be happy for you because literally all I want more than almost anything is for you both to be happy...but to be so completely honest, Mack?" Cricket sniffled. "I think the one thing I want maybe even more than that is for you to be happy with me again."

A desire she hadn't thought was a real possibility not even five minutes ago, but that the hope of was already beginning to bloom something fierce in her chest.

"It's just--after the wedding, and then everything we talked about after Halloween, I thought maybe--some part of me thought maybe you could want that again too. But then on my birthday there was like this moment in the kitchen after everyone left where I thought you were going to kiss me and I realized then just how much I wanted you to but then you didn't and that's when I really started to notice how much you'd been hanging around and I just thought--"

Well, he knew exactly what it was she'd thought. She could feel her embarrassment from the sudden heat of her own tear-stained cheeks, but Cricket doesn't shy away from looking at him. Not when it's the closest she'd been to him all month and still had the slightest possibility of being the closest she'd be to him ever again after the scene she'd caused tonight.

"Have you really been riding in the elevator every day just to see me?"

@mackmontgomery

“I don’t know, I can barely get a text back from you these days. Do we talk about anything?”

December had been harder than he anticipated it ever would be, the approach of his second favorite holiday dulled in excitement by the absence of her that felt colder than California weather ever got. After the double whammy of Thanksgiving and his birthday being a joint bust that had only been redeemed by the portion of it he had spent with her, he had thought that would have led to spending more time with her.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Cricket appeared intent in joining him in that respect as he listens to her list off moments she had observed and managed to miss what had actually prompted and connected them all.

( Her. )

Her accusation is laughable, but he doesn’t laugh.

His expression softens to sympathetic where utter confusion had previously been, some kind of rock existing in the space where his stomach used to be as his hands meet at the back of his head, a rapid flash retrospective of the instances with Lori playing out in his mind but from what he thinks her perspective was rather than his own actual memory.

“Oh my god, you really do fucking think that’s true.”

His hands drop back to his sides then, like he needed to create some sort of audible action to make the way that shatters his heart just a little bit for her.

“I don’t think it’s funny and it’s not a joke to me, Cricket.”

His mother had insinuated the same at Thanksgiving, that he was what he dealt in the most — a joke. It had hurt because there was some truth in it, his own discomfort with real feelings that weren’t diluted by humour to blame for it and he knew he was walking a thin line in the last stretch of 2024.

( He knows he can’t hide from the potential gut punch behind another punchline. )

“You’re not completely wrong,” He corrects, continuing so he didn’t any blanks for her to fill in with her own assumptions, “I have been hanging around your apartment with her and we’ve had a lot of talks without you around because they’ve been about you.”

He’s not sure how he’s made as much of a mess of this as he has while spending every waking second since X and Van’s wedding trying to carefully not do that, but he couldn’t deny that that seemed pretty on par for them.

“I’m not in love with Lori. I never have and never will be in love with Lori. I have no feelings towards her other than hella gratitude that she’s had to deal with listening to me for the last two and a half months trying to figure out how the fuck I’m supposed to tell you that I like you.”

Even to his own ears that sounded so spectacularly stupid that the only thing he could do was keep going.

“I like you so much it’s making me so, so stupid. And I think maybe a little bit insane.”

Mack knew she would know exactly how much he meant when he pinches the air in front of him, the gap between his thumb and index finger a confined space that had no real hope of containing the vastness of everything he felt about her within it.

“And my bad if I’m ruining our friendship right now and double my bad if I’m ruining it for good because it was so hard to get here after everything. And I know we broke up for a reason..A lot of reasons really..but I don’t see any of them when I look at you. I just see every reason that I lowkey fell in love with you five minutes after meeting you in that elevator the first day you moved here. I’ve literally been hanging out in that thing like two hours a day the last week to try and catch you getting it at the same time because I thought maybe if I could then you’d think about that as well and you’d think about me and you’d remember some of those reasons too.”

He knows if he stops short of getting it all off his chest he might never be able to, even while struck with a sudden innate awareness of himself and gravity and how the air around him felt like it doubled and made it a little harder to breathe.

( Or maybe it was the tie. )

He reaches up to loosen it, looking down at her with minor apprehension and major hope.

“I’ve been spending so much time trying to figure out how to get you to see me that it didn’t hit me until right now that maybe you just don’t see me like that anymore.”

That possibility tastes like a phantom downed battery acid cocktail when he swallows.

“And I need you to know that it’s okay if you don’t,” Mack wants to mean that, even if the slight shake in his voice when he says it implies otherwise, causing him to clear his throat, “Don’t get me wrong it would suck on an intergalactic level for me for a while, but I’d be okay. I wouldn’t dip on you or vanish from your life and divide our friends or turn into a fucking weirdo again like after we split. You matter to me forever, no matter what it looks like. I’m sorry to be doing this one New Years Eve and I’m sorry if I ruined your night but I can’t let you go into a new year not knowing and leaving me in the past when I want you to be my future.”

@cricketcampbell

[cricketcampbell]

"Oh sorry, I forgot. Because we actually talk about these things now, right?"

And the thing was, she really thought they had been. Everything since their Valentine's Day date: Mavis, and then Trevor, Mack's disastrous birthday...serious topics they might have once danced around, or made a joke to try and downplay their feelings about but secretly let build and fester under the surface, were for the first time since they've met things they were talking about, really talking about, with each other.

Before the last month and a half, Cricket would've included Lori on that list, but it'd been made abundantly clear to her in that time that that wasn't actually the case.

"I've gotten it all wrong." She laughs wetly, swiping hurriedly at her eyes once more as she turns to face him. "I've gotten the months of lingering looks and the whispered conversations and--and the you suddenly hanging around the apartment with her, like, all the time...I'm the one who's gotten that all wrong?"

Her head shook disappointedly.

"I know it's a joke Mack, and we all laugh, and it's so funny that Cricket's just so oblivious to everything, but I actually do pay attention, you know, especially to--" you "--my friends, so it's literally been just, like, so fucking obvious that you're in love with Lori, and yeah, maybe I shouldn't have been the one to tell Atlas that, but you both have had months to say something and you just haven't and I don't understand why even now with it all out in the open, you still just can’t tell me to my face!”

@mackmontgomery

“No, I think we need to do this right now, Cricket.”

The majority of his night had been spent in an anxious state, willing himself to conjure up the right words to say the right way to her and coming up short each time. The only other person in the room who truly understood how he felt about everything he was feeling had just had to be human blockade between him and what might have been a fist thrown his way by Cricket’s cousin.

Pulling Lori aside how he had was innocent in nature and looked guilty in execution, something he only realised when he had an angry Floridian in his face while Cricket looked guilty from across the room.

She had left so he had left, extracting himself from Lori and Atlas’ argument to follow her outside instead despite being unsure about whether it was the right thing to do.

“What the fuck just happened in there? What do you think you know?” He tries to be careful with both his words and his tone, not wanting to accidentally launch them into another post-Summer rave level fight, “I guarantee you, you’ve both gotten it all wrong.”

@cricketcampbell