“How long did it take you to tell Casey that you loved him?” Ainsley asked into the phone as she straightened up the kitchen. She lifted up her glass of wine to take a quick sip before returning to wiping down the counter.

“I think we had been together for like seven months,” Mal answered.

“When did you know, though? Who said it first?”

“I just knew, I don’t know. And he said it first,” Mal chuckled. “Why are you asking me about this, Ainsley?” Her tone was knowing, but Ainsley knew to avoid the question.

“And you knew that you felt the same way when he said it?”

“Ainsley, knock it off!” Malorie shouted into the phone with a laugh. “Why are you asking me this? Do you think you love Jaime?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Ainsley shrugged, suddenly growing shy as she traced over the grout between the tiles of her kitchen counter. “I mean, we told each other that we were serious about this relationship and he said he would fall in love eventually…and I feel the same way…”

“Oh my god!” Mal squealed. “Jaime told you that?” She continued to squeal, and then called Casey from the other room. Ainsley protested as Malorie gushed and told Casey that Jaime had gotten sentimental with Ainsley and confessed his feelings for her.

Casey ended up taking the phone to talk to Ainsley. “He seriously said that? Tell me everything that happened.”

Ainsley explained the anniversary gift to him and how she thought he was going to say that he loved her, and then how later on Jaime had told her that he could see himself falling in love with her. Ainsley felt strange telling Casey all of the details of her relationship, but she knew that he would have found out either way because Mal told him everything, even the dirty details of Ainsley’s relationship with Jaime.

“Oh shit,” Casey said in a breathless whisper. The shock was evident in his words. “Jaime is horrible at expressing his deep feelings like that and like, when he was with Jess, she used to have to pry things like that out of him. I can’t believe he brought it up first.”

“He’s probably trying to do things differently this time around, you know…because he was really messed up after Jess cheated and he doesn’t want to lose Ains,” Malorie pitched in from the background.

“What does this mean, though?” Ainsley asked, confused and worried. She had been in a couple of serious relationships before, but they were so different from this one. Ainsley had never felt this way for anyone before, and she was afraid of messing it up.

“It means,” Casey chuckled, “that he really cares about you. He’s probably got the idea of love floating around in his head but is afraid to come to terms with it.”

“I know the feeling,” Ainsley said as she exhaled.

“What was that?” Casey asked.

Ainsley shook her head even though he couldn’t see her. “Nothing,” she answered.

“Listen, I’ll have Jaime over in a while and if we get on the conversation, I’ll see what I can find out and then have Mal report back to you. Sound good?”

Ainsley sighed. “I don’t know. Shouldn’t I just wait it out? I don’t want to mess it up or rush things or anything.”

“Well, it’s up to you. But I’m still going to find out what’s going on in his head. We need a good heart to heart, anyway.” Casey laughed for a moment, lost in his own little world. “Here’s Mal. See ya, Ainsakin.”

Malorie got back on the phone and immediately began to ramble off about how she was so happy for her, but Ainsley’s head was swimming too much to pay attention to what she was even saying. She heard Felicia calling her from the other room and Ainsley decided that it was time to get off the phone. They said their goodbyes, promising to call each other in the morning.

“Ainsley!” Felicia called out from her bedroom once again, and became somewhat startled when she looked up to see her already standing in her doorway. “Oh, hey. Come here. I want to show you something.”

Ainsley walked over to Felicia’s bed and took a seat beside her as Felicia adjusted herself so she was sitting up with her laptop resting on her crossed legs. On the screen was a grid full of pictures of Ainsley.

“What the hell is this?” Ainsley exclaimed, pulling the laptop over to her own lap. “Are you stalking me or something?”

Felicia chuckled a bit. “This is tumblr,” she explained. “And no, I’m not stalking you. But this is what happens when I search your tag. Now do you realize how everyone in the Pierce the Veil bandom feels about you? Look at this.” She pointed to a picture that was taken the day before. It was a picture of Ainsley and Jaime walking away, their hands locked, and their embroidered mickey and Minnie ears clearly visible. “There’s a whole story along with it.”

She scrolled down and there were more pictures. She recognized the pictures as the ones that were taken with the two fans, Kelsey and Kat, that they had met. Beneath the plethora of pictures was a long story. Ainsley read over it quickly, eager to read what they were saying about her. It was the story of Kelsey’s mother passing and the words that Ainsley had said to her to cheer her up. Beneath it were a ton of responses from fans.

I love Ainsley so much. She’s my biggest inspiration.

#Ainsakin for life

Such an upgrade from Jess omg

I hope I can meet her someday. Her and Jaime are seriously so perfect

“I like that picture,” Ainsley commented, pointing to the first picture on the post. “Is there a way I can save it?”

“Yeah, here,” Felicia clicked around for a moment and saved the picture to her laptop. She then opened up her email and sent the picture to Ainsley’s phone. “There you go.”

Ainsley got the notification and opened it up, immediately saving the picture and then sending it to Jaime. She then went onto instagram and noticed that she had gained a whole new wave of followers, bringing her up to nearly sixteen thousand. “Dang,” Ainsley shook her head in disbelief as she searched through her tags, looking to see if Kelsey or Kat had posted the picture on instagram so she could memorize their usernames and tag them when she posted the picture on her own account.

Sure enough, she found each of the girls and went ahead and followed each of them. She uploaded the picture and tagged them in the caption.

Had an amazing two month anniversary with @ptvjaime. Thanks @kels0 and @alltimekat for the picture that you snuck. It was fun hanging out with you girls. More pictures to come later!

She watched in disbelief as her phone immediately began to blow up with notifications. “Damn, this never gets old.”

“Oh, I know,” Felicia chuckled. “I post a selfie and get thousands of notes. It’s crazy.”

“How many followers do you have?” Ainsley asked, peeking over Felicia’s shoulder to look at her phone that was sitting in her thigh.

“I think I have like twenty thousand,” she shrugged. “I already had a thousand before I met you guys.”

“Damn, that’s crazy. You got them from tumblr and stuff?”

Felicia smiled. “Yeah, I used to post a lot of pictures of Pierce the Veil so I got a lot of followers. Now people follow me because the guys have posted pictures with me and stuff.”

“Crazy how fast they get into your lives. Yesterday the girls knew it was our anniversary because they had checked instagram while at Disneyland.”

Felicia laughed a bit as she continued to scroll down the tag. Ainsley saw more and more pictures of herself and Jaime, and some of just her. There was one of her from High School, one of her from a few years ago, and a lot of the ones that Mal had posted on her instagram of them together. Ainsley was surprised to see her face all over Felicia’s computer screen. It made her feel somewhat famous, and also a bit uncomfortable.

“I still need to get used to this,” Ainsley sighed. “The first time a fan ever recognized me, before I was dating Jaime, was the craziest thing to me. And I still haven’t gotten used to it.”

“Oh!” Felicia exclaimed. “Tell me the story!”

“It’s nothing special, really. Mike and Vic used to post a few things about me on twitter and such, and so my face used to be around a lot more often before Pierce the Veil really got all that famous, and once I headed out to Warped Tour with Mal to see the guys, and while we were walking to go get some food, a fan stopped us and wanted a picture with us. It was so weird,” Ainsley explained with a chuckle. “It’s just the craziest thing.”

“Are you drunk?” Felicia asked as she moved in closer to Ainsley. She sniffed the air around me. “I smell wine.”

“No, I’m not drunk!” Ainsley exclaimed with shock, but then ended in a laugh. “But yes, I’ve been drinking some wine. So, what? I like wine.”

“Can I have some?” Felicia asked. Her eyes narrowed in and she became rather serious rather quickly. But there was a playful smile still gently toying with the corners of her mouth.

Ainsley played with the idea in her mind, but then remembered that she was only fifteen years old. Maybe if she was eighteen she would let her, but fifteen was just far too young. “No way,” Ainsley finally answered. She stood up quickly, pushing on Felicia’s head as she did so.

Felicia groaned and whined at her answer, but Ainsley just ignored her as she walked out of the room. Felicia followed her, hot on her trail. “Come on!” Felicia begged. “Just a little bit won’t do anything to me.”

“Nope,” Ainsley responded. She picked up her wine glass and swished it around to tease Felicia a bit before taking a sip. “You’re too young. And it’s not my place to give you any alcohol. Maybe when you’re eighteen.”

“Do you think we’ll still be friends when I turn eighteen?” Felicia asked, changing the subject rather quickly.

Ainsley pondered this. It was a little over two years away since Felicia was going to be turning sixteen soon, but she honestly couldn’t tell what the next few years held for them. Would Felicia be moved back in with her aunt? Would she be trying to live on her own? Or would Ainsley grow so attached to Felicia that she wouldn’t want her to move out?

Ainsley could hardly even predict what her work schedule was going to be; predicting something like that was too stressful for her. She just shrugged in response as she finished off the rest of her wine glass and rinsed it. “I hope so,” Ainsley responded, truthfully. She couldn’t imagine losing Felicia anytime soon.

-

The next day at work, Ainsley got a phone call from Jaime. Well, multiple phone calls from Jaime. On her lunch break, she was finally able to call him back and see what was wrong, especially when he didn’t want to mention it over text.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Ainsley asked after Jaime answered.

“Hey, random question, but wasn’t your ex named Bret Jennings?” Jaime paused just before he said his name, as if he was reading it somewhere.

Ainsley’s heart jumped out of her chest when Jaime mentioned his name. She had never really talked about her ex with him before, in fact, neither of them talked about their exes in very much detail, ever. The fact that Jaime knew his name frightened Ainsley. “Yes, why?” she responded as casually as she couple manage.

Could he have contacted Jaime? Could Jaime had found the pictures?

“Well, Malorie posted a picture on instagram from one of her most recent shoots and she tagged him for the photo credit. So I was creeping around his profile, and then a few minutes later, I saw that he was actually following me. Should I be concerned with this?”

Ainsley shivered, the fear Jaime finding out about what Mal had showed her was taking over her body and she felt as if she was going to have an anxiety attack. Bret was a harmless guy, as much as Ainsley could recall. She never did find out what happened on the night that Jeric saved her from his house. He was going to tell her, but they were interrupted, and then Jeric took what he knew to the grave with him. She looked up to the sky, as if she was trying to get Jeric to look down on her and give her some kind of a hint. Is he bad news, Jeric? Please give me a sign.

As if right on cue, there was a loud honking coming from the parking lot as one of the trees in their planters began to fall. It went tumbling down onto a car that was pulling out of its parking space, and the person that was honking jumped out to make sure the other person was okay. It wasn’t a large tree, so there wasn’t much damage done to the car.

“Are you okay?” The one man asked.

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you. But my car!” the woman held onto her head, flustered as she looked at the dents in her car.

“It’s okay, I know a great mechanic a few miles away that can fix it up. Let me give you their address.”

Ainsley’s eyes went wide. The only mechanic around was Jeric’s shop. She looked back up to sky with her eyes wide. That was enough of a sign for her to believe that Bret was bad news.

“Ains? Are you okay? What was that honking?” Jaime asked, panicked on the other end.

“I’m fine. I’m in the parking lot and some tree was honking.”

“A tree was honking? I think you mean a car,” Jaime said with a chuckle.

Ainsley shook her head at herself to try and get herself to snap out of her daze. “Yeah, my bad. A tree fell and this person was honking to warn another person. I’m so out of it.”

“Oh, that sucks,” Jaime responded. “So, should I block Bret or what?”

Ainsley opened her mouth to respond, but instead Felicia started to call her on the other line.

“Hold on, Jaime,” she said, “Felicia’s calling me. I’ll call you right back.”

She flipped over to the other line and answered.’

“Um, Ainsley? The hot water isn’t working…” Felicia said, her voice was slow and she sounded worried as if she had broken it. “I went to take a shower and the water won’t turn hot.”

Ainsley immediately slapped her free hand to her forehead. She couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill, but for some reason she didn’t think that everything would be shut off so quickly. “Oh shoot,” Ainsley said. “I know. We have to take cold showers for a while. I didn’t have money to pay the gas bill. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t have money? Why can’t you borrow money from Jaime?” she asked. “He has plenty of money.”

“I know he does. But I don’t like asking for money. And I don’t want him to know how badly I’m struggling or else he’s going to start paying for everything. I’ll pay the bill this Friday, just…don’t say anything to him about this, okay?” Ainsley instructed. It was far too embarrassing to admit that even though Ainsley loaded her schedule with work, she still couldn’t afford to pay her bills. All of her money went straight to rent, that she hardly had enough left-over for her electricity and water bills.

“Okay, fine,” Felicia huffed. “This is going to be the worst shower ever.”

“I’m sorry, Felicia,” Ainsley pouted. “Maybe run a bath instead? And let the water sit for a while so it can get to room temperature?”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll try that,” Felicia sighed. “Have a good day at work, see you tonight.”

“Okay, bye.”

Ainsley groaned and went to call Jaime back, but when she looked back down at her phone screen she noticed that she only have fifteen more minutes of her lunch hour left. And she still had to eat and use the restroom before clocking back in. She sent a quick text to Jaime, telling him that she was busy and would call him as soon as she clocked out. He replied right away with a sad face, but an understanding text message.

-

Ainsley pulled her phone from her bag as she began to walk across the parking lot, over to where her car was sitting all alone. She had gotten off work a lot later than she anticipated, and there was nobody left in the entire shopping center. She got into her car and searched through her contacts, looking for Jaime’s name.

A black car slowly rolled into the parking lot and circled around, just one, before it came up and parked right beside Ainsley’s passenger side. She tried not to look over at it in order to make eye contact with the person driving, and instead set her phone down in the cup holder and turned the key in the ignition. Jaime could wait for her to call once she got home – this car was giving Ainsley a bad vibe, mostly because out of all the parking spaces in the entire parking lot, they chose the one directly beside her.

Before the car could start all the way, her passenger door opened and a body climbed inside.

“Hello, Ainsley,” a deep voice greeted.

Ainsley froze and shut her eyes tight, hoping that maybe when he opened them again he would be gone. But he was still there, waiting for her to greet him in return.

“Hello, Bret,” she replied as she exhaled. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you, of course. I can afford the gas for a forty-five minute car ride to see you, don’t worry,” Bret chuckled as he unbuttoned his blazer to sit more comfortably. The last two times (including this time) that Ainsley had seen him, he was always dressed as if he was a movie star, or a big business executive – slacks, button-down shirt, blazer, and dress shoes. He looked good, but always over-dressed, as if he wanted to constantly remind the people that he was with that he had more money than they did.

“I know that you can’t afford it, though,” Bret chuckled a bit.

“What?” Ainsley asked, her words coming out as barely a croak. “Have you been-“

“Following you? Stalking you?” Bret finished her sentence. “No, I haven’t. But my sources tell me that you’re really struggling right now.”

“Mal told you, didn’t she?” Ainsley remembered back to her phone call with Jaime, and how apparently Malorie had done a photo shoot with Bret. Surely, Mal thought that Bret was a harmless guy and would only tell him this because he wanted to know how Ainsley was doing – she was sure that he was probably playing the curious ex-boyfriend card, but really, he had to of had more of a motive than that. Especially since he was so willing to drive out to Oceanside just to talk to her.

“Maybe,” Bret shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, though. We’ve got a lot to talk about, don’t you think?”

Ainsley slowly released her hand from the ignition, slowly becoming more interested in what Bret had to say to her. The smile on his face told her exactly what he was referring to, and Ainsley couldn’t stop herself from tensing up. Her face flushed – all color draining her body as her nerves kicked in.

“Ah, so I’m assuming you’ve seen the pictures we took.”

Ainsley shook her head. “No, you took those pictures. I had no idea what was going on.”

Bret clicked his tongue inside of his mouth before making a ‘tsk’ noise as he disagreed with what she was saying. “Well, either way. The pictures exist, and that’s what I am here to talk to you about.”

“Get rid of them, I want nothing to do with them. I’m not interested in whatever-“

“I have a business proposition for you, Ainsley. I’m a very wealthy man, and I can make you a lot of money,” he said, cutting her off. “Interested now?”

The way he was speaking to her made her sink lower into her seat. The tone of voice that he had reminded her of when they were dating. He was always controlling over her, and something about him just made her submit to him so easily. He was never abusive, but always manipulative. Even though his appearance and status had changed, his manipulation sure didn’t.

“I thought so,” Bret said with a smile. He flashed his overly white teeth in Ainsley’s direction, giving her a moment to prepare for whatever he was going to say.

“Go on,” Ainsley muttered, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Well, you see, you and your new boyfriend have a lot of publicity. Publicity that I would like to have access to,” Bret paused for a moment to get his thoughts collected. “Now, here’s where you come in. Those pretty little pictures I have of you can give me access to those followers you guys have. You see, I get money every time someone downloads one of my photos or visits certain pages on my website. So we’ll be making money every time one of those little fan girls clicks on your pictures and is directed to my website. Those fan girls, plus the followers I already have can give us…” he paused to count something out in his head. “…well, they can give us a shit ton of money, to put it simply. And I think it’s only fair to give you a cut since you’re the star of the show.”

Ainsley shook her head. She knew that there was no way she could accept this offer. It would be the wrong image that she was willing to portray. There was no way she could exploit herself like that, and how embarrassing would that be to Jaime? And to Mike and Vic, also, since she had known them for so long. And what the hell, Tony, also! Because he was a part of the band and it would affect him as well.

“I’ll give you forty percent of the profits, with a check made out to you weekly. This could be money that you could be receiving for the rest of your life, Ainsley. As long as those pictures are up, it’s a chance for you to make money.”

Ainsley shook her head again. She was too afraid to open her mouth to speak, because she was afraid that her voice would say what her mind was thinking, and that was to take the money. But her body was involuntarily shaking, telling him that it was wrong by shaking her head.

“I’ll cut you out a check, right now,” Bret offered. “I’ll pay you for the pictures. How much do you want? Ten thousand? Fifteen thousand?”

Ainsley’s eye shot wide open at the amount of money that he was offering her. That much money and she would never have to worry about paying her bills again. She could save up her paychecks and always have a cushion in her bank account.

“I’ll tell you what,” Bret sighed as he pushed his checkbook back into his coat pocket. “I’ll give you a while to think about it. But in the meantime,” he paused and pulled out his wallet this time. “Here’s some money to help you decide.” He set the money down in the cup holder, right beside her phone. As if on cue, it started ringing, Jaime’s face lighting up the car. “You might want to answer that,” Bret said with a sarcastic smile. “Tell him I said hey.” He winked once and then exited the car.

Ainsley waited for the black car beside her to pull out of the parking space, and then out of the parking lot entirely before she reached out to count the wad of bills that he had left her.

She counted out the twenty-dollar bills, separating them by the hundreds as she counted. She reached six hundred…seven hundred…eight…nine…she dropped the final twenty dollar bill down in her lap and stared at the pile of money.

“One thousand dollars,” she muttered to herself in shock. Bret had just handed her over a thousand dollars as if it was a one dollar bill.

What was she going to do? If he was willing to give her one thousand dollars without the guarantee of her even saying yes, how much money would she make if she agreed to it? And the fact that he was willing to give her an advance of fifteen thousand dollars nearly made her sick. That was too much money just waiting to enter her hands, but it was also risky, seeming as those pictures weren’t exactly appropriate for her image.

Her phone began to ring once again, Jaime’s bubbly face stared at her from the cup-holder. Surely, Jaime wouldn’t approve of the pictures, especially if she decided to distribute them.

She looked back down at the money in her hands, and then back over the picture of Jaime’s face.

“Fuck.”

Notes

dun dun dunnnnn!!!
A bit of a stressful chapter, don't you think?

Here's another update for you guys since I sucked at updating for like a month.

What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the pictures are of?

Let me know what you think! Love you all!