Page 15 of Catch Me (Townsend Legacy #4)

I vy

I tuck my feet underneath me on the couch and turn to Ari, watching her scoop another spoonful of mint chocolate chip ice cream into her mouth.

“Are you ready to talk about it?”

She takes a beat and then turns to me. Ari’s hazel eyes are puffy and red rimmed from crying, her bronzed curls are a bit wild, and the grey cardigan she’s wearing hangs off of one shoulder.

“It’s over, Vee,” she half-whines, calling me by the nickname only Mya and she use. “Ron and I are done.”

“But—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Yes, we’ve done this off and on thing for almost seven years now, but I mean it this time.” She peers up at me through those long lashes.

I raise an eyebrow, to which Ari groans and then drops her head into her arm that rests on the back of the couch. I reach out and squeeze her shoulder.

“Tell me what happened,” I encourage, knowing my friend doesn’t need judgment right now.

“Well—” She’s cut off when the door bursts open, making us both startle.

“I know you didn’t start the story without me,” Mya says with her hands on her hips, glaring between the two of us.

“‘Course not,” Ari perks up. “This one,” she gestures her head in my direction, “tried to get me to spill but I told her not without Mya.”

“Liar.” I swat Ari with a pillow from the couch.

“Traitor,” Mya tosses my way before plopping down on the couch between the two of us and plucking the carton of ice cream out of Ari’s hands. “You’re lactose intolerant.”

“I told her she could sleep in your room tonight,” I say. “The last thing I want is for her to stink up my room after eating all of that dairy.”

Mya snickers. “Her ass will be on the couch now since I’m here.”

“Please, you’ll probably listen to my pain and then head right back over to Jason’s, heffa.”

“And leave me here to deal with her lactose-induced farts alone,” I add.

Mya bursts out laughing at my silly comment.

“I’m going to remember that, Vee.” Ari points at me but her lips twitch as she tries to hold in her laughter.

It’s only with these two that we can go from crying one moment to laughing the next.

I blow Ari kiss.

“Love you. Now that we’re all here, since it was me who texted Mya to let her know you were here in the first place, start talking,” I insist.

“Yeah, tell us what happened this time,” Mya adds.

Ari groans again, tossing her hands in the air with her usual flair. She was a drama major in college before she chose to drop out once her YouTube channels took off.

“Well,” she starts, “Ron and I were having a civil discussion over where we wanted to go for this year’s vacation.

He wants to go to Hawaii. Honestly, I wasn’t quite down for it since, you know, all of the complaints I’ve seen online from Hawaiians about their lands being taken over by overtourism and gentrification. ”

“Right,” I say.

“I’ve heard about it,” Mya adds.

“But he insisted. Said it was one of the best vacations he had as a child, and he deserved it after getting his promotion earlier this year.”

“Oh, please,” Mya mumbles.

My lips twitch but I don’t let out my laughter.

Ron Walker is a perpetual underearner. He’s worked in technical retail for years. But he’s yet to hold one position with one company for more than a year.

Ari tells us it’s because he insists he can do more and the higherups won’t give him a chance.

For the most part, Mya and I refrain from passing judgement since Ari insisted he treated her right.

“I finally agreed to Hawaii, but I wanted to add on a couple of days here in L.A. Of course, to see my girls.” Ari looks pointedly between Mya and me, and being the closest to her, I squeeze her hand.

“I figured since we had a layover in L.A. anyway, why not extend it a little and I could see my two besties. He has people in L.A., too. So naturally, I volunteered to meet up with his family out here for a visit.”

She pauses and rolls her eyes.

“He went off. Saying I was adding too much to our itinerary on purpose to make him look bad.”

“What?” Mya asks.

“How does that make him look bad?” I ask.

“Money and time. He said it added too much to the trip, and when I offered to cover the expense, he said that I’m always throwing the fact that I make more money than him in his face.

“Then he claimed that just because my job is on YouTube, I think I can take off as much time as I want and that I don’t think about or consider what people with real jobs have to deal with, like limited PTO.”

“Not him throwing your hard work in your face,” Mya says.

Ari is the very successful owner and operator of three Lo-fi YouTube channels.

When we first met, she admitted to us that she didn’t have an interest in acting or drama as a career, but her parents had insisted that she go to college, and she liked the few theatre classes she’d taken in high school.

It was during her sophomore year of college that she started her first channel when I made an off-hand comment about how listening to classical music is helpful while studying.

The following year that channel blew up and had more than half a million subscribers.

Ari made a second channel for meditation with recordings she composed herself. That channel gained over two hundred thousand subscribers within the first year. Since then, she’s moved into video editing for other creators and social media management.

She chose to drop out of school with less than a year to go.

Her channels and freelance work have sustained her independent lifestyle ever since.

“Right?” Ari says. “He pissed me off because I started to remember all of the times he threw little comments like that in my face.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask, my body tensing.

That sounds all too familiar.

“Ari,” Mya draws out her name in warning when Ari goes silent for a while.

“I didn’t want to tell you this because I knew you would judge him.”

“See, now I know this is going to be some bullshit.” Mya sits up.

Ari pushes out a harsh breath. “Fine, okay, so it was subtle in the beginning. He would make comments here and there about ‘it must be nice to sleep in whenever I wanted.’”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I blurt out.

“Right? We know your ass gets out of bed at the crack of dawn.”

Ari laughs, which I know is what Mya was going for. It’s also the truth. Even during college, when students are known to sleep until well past noon on weekends, Ari was up early.

“I work best in the mornings,” she says. “But when I would remind him of that, he would dismiss it. Honestly, I didn’t think much of it, but over time his comments grew in frequency. When I would offer to treat us to a nice dinner, he started saying things like ‘I'm trying to upstage him.’”

Ari looks at Mya.

“Remember your law school graduation?” she asks.

Mya and I both nod.

“I felt like there was tension between you two.”

“We’d gotten into a big fight the day before we arrived in L.A. He didn’t believe I needed to make such a big deal out of attending your graduation. I cursed him out and told him he could keep his ass right in North Carolina, but I was going to my best friend’s graduation.”

“And did,” Mya ad libs. She looks between me and Ari, squeezing our knees. “You both were the loudest in the crowd, cheering for me.”

“Damn straight,” Ari and I say at the same time, clasping both of her hands.

“We broke up for months after that. But when we got back together, I made it clear that he would not ever speak about either one of you again.”

“Again?” I ask.

Ari’s eyes balloon. “Shoot,” she murmurs. “I didn’t mean?—”

I narrow my eyes. “Say it.”

She waves her hand and shakes her head. “It’s no?—”

“Don’t you dare. What did he say?”

“He had mentioned something …” She trails off.

“Ari.”

“Ugh, I should’ve left him for good the moment he said that foolishness. He just made a comment about, you know, what happened at your graduation.”

“You mean the panic attack that I had on stage,” I reiterate.

“Yeah. I mean, he didn’t say it to me directly, but I caught him watching a video on his phone and laughing. I asked what was so funny, but he tried to hide it. I thought it was something that had to do with another girl, but …”

“Shit,” Mya mutters and looks over at me with fear mixed with fire in her eyes.

“He was watching me and laughing.” A lump forms in my throat.

In the days after I went into a full-on panic attack on stage in front of thousands of people, video footage of it made its way onto the internet. It wasn’t until I got out of the hospital a week later, that I started to realize how widely it’d spread.

In those immediate months afterward, I came across at least a dozen videos from YouTube channels mocking me.

Comment after comment of crying laughing emojis on those terrible ‘men who hate women’ YouTube channels and what not only served to bury me deeper into the malaise of the depression that overtook me.

That wasn’t even the worst part, though.

The worst was the harassment from faceless internet trolls that ensued.

There was one main channel and podcaster who was the driver of that vile behavior.

“I kicked him out after that, Vee, I swear,” Ari quickly assures me.

“I only took him back when he unsubscribed from those terrible channels and agreed to go to therapy. In the time since, I thought he was doing better, but today I found out it’s been almost a year since he’s even spoken to his therapist.”

She shakes her head, eyes filling with tears.

“I just feel like a fool for wasting so much time on such a terrible person. Literally, the thought of him disgusts me. I don’t ever want to see him again. After today, we are done, done!” she insists.

I don’t doubt her words. There’s a conviction in her voice that I’ve never heard before.

“I should’ve known better,” she says. “Any man that wants to come between me and my besties isn’t a man worth keeping around.”

The three of us stack hands, and comfort washes over me.