Fangirling Over You: A Fangirl Romance Read online

  OTHER WORKS BY C.M. KARS

  The Never Been Series

  Never Been Kissed

  Never Been Nerdy

  Never Been Loved

  Never Been Under the Mistletoe

  The Fangirl Chronicles

  Fangirling Over You

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to every fangirl and fanboy out there.

  Whatever you fangirl/boy over - I understand.

  Really, I do.

  This one’s for you.

  Fangirling Over You

  Book One, The Fangirl Chronicles

  by C.M. Kars

  Copyright © 2021 C.M. Kars

  All rights reserved.

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  Cover design by Indigo Chick Designs

  Editing by Aquila Editing

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TO ALL THE FOOTBALLERS I LOVED BEFORE

  ‘Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.’ - F. Scott Fitzgerald

  PROLOGUE

  One month ago…

  “This is the last time we’re going to see each other,” I mumble, squeezing the words past the lump in my throat. I mash my lips together so I can stop my chin from trembling. This sucks, this sucks so very much.

  “Jesus, Aria, it’s not like we won’t keep in touch,” Maddie sighs, hiking her duffel bag higher up on her shoulder, glancing back into the depths of Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport. There’s not a lot of people at this time of day, or it doesn’t feel like it, and the lines don’t look too horrendous when I go on my tiptoes to see around Maddie.

  “You don’t know that, we could totally not keep in touch.”

  Maddie scoffs and waves off my worry. “Don’t be like that. We all have phones, emails, whatever. We’re gonna talk to each other. Don’t worry about it.”

  But it all feels a lot like goodbye forever, like this chapter in my life where I was roommates with the two coolest people in the world—Maddie Chase (soon-to-be professional soccer player with the Women’s Prime League in London, England, of all freaking places!) and Raleigh Montgomery (revamping her entire life to go work and teach English in Seoul, South Korea), and then there’s me, aiming for a much closer horizon in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the only one out of the three of us taking a domestic flight—is done and over with.

  And my heart hurts with it, saying goodbye to them, feeling like I’m never going to see them again.

  Raleigh nearly bumps into me, dragging behind her a giant suitcase that looks like it could fit four people inside, her entire wardrobe and extensive makeup and shoe collection packed in there, ready to cross the entire country and then an entire ocean to the other side of the world. “Ah, shit, sorry. Okay, I can breathe now, my Uber was late, and the guy kept trying to chat me up, and then badmouthed me in Korean. What a dick.”

  Maddie blinks, hiking her bag up on her shoulder again. “Did you tell him you’re, like, totally fluent?”

  Raleigh grins at the two of us, pushing her long burgundy hair off her face, throwing it back over her shoulders like in those old-school hair commercials. “Obviously not. Gave him a real shitty rating, though, for being so rude.” Raleigh huffs out a breath, staring at me, then at Maddie, then back at me, like it’s finally hitting her what all this means, that the three of us are literally going in three different directions.

  “Living with you guys,” Raleigh says, voice a little husky, and I already start to feel my nose sting and my eyes begin to well with tears. God, I don’t want to bawl my eyes out, I really, really don’t. Raleigh pulls in a deep, deep breath, holding it in while her eyes get all glossy.

  Shit, shit, shit, I’m gonna cry, I’m so going to cry.

  Ah, hell.

  “Living with you guys these past couple of years has been amazing, the best ones in my life, I swear.”

  Maddie clears her throat, the strongest one of all three of us, but her eyes are shiny too, and her nose has gone bright, bright red, the way it gets right before she starts crying.

  A tear escapes and tracks its way down my cheek.

  This is goodbye, and goodbyes are hard.

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll see each other again,” I say, voice cracking right down the middle. “Maybe someday in the future we can joke about us blubbering like this, and laugh on the other side, right?”

  Raleigh nods, knuckling away her tears, her makeup immaculate and perfect even though I know she has a total traveling time of twenty hours since there’s no direct flights from Montreal to Seoul. Bummer. “Yeah, let’s set a date right now. Put it in our calendars—one year from now, from today.”

  I nod, because yeah, yeah, this is a great idea. I pull out my phone, hit my calendar app and add one year to today—set a reminder for myself to call Maddie and Raleigh and figure out where they are in the world, what it’ll take to visit them. “I’m doing this, and you’re doing this, too, Maddie. I see you not taking out your phone.”

  “It’s probably at the bottom of my bag, and I’m probably going to have to throw sports bras all over the place to get to it. Give me a second, give me a second.” Maddie almost slams her bag down on top of her feet, crouches down and starts rummaging through her clothes, the stark difference between all our luggage highlighting just how different we are from one another: Maddie with only a duffel bag even though she’s flying to England, Raleigh with her entire life in tow, and me somewhere in the middle, my suitcase the right shade of orange in reference to a show I love.

  Once we all set a reminder in our calendars to one year from now, there’s nothing more than to head to our separate sections of the airport—domestic versus international, Maddie heading off where she needs to go, while Raleigh and I still have domestic flights to go through before we reach our final destination, but not that final destination.

  There’s nothing more for it—all there’s left to say is one last goodbye, but the word gets stuck in my throat, and then we’re all huddling together in a three-way hug, crying into it, sniffing hard, and I pass out tissues, prepared for exactly this occasion.

  It’s hard taking a step away from them, even harder taking two, and at three I’m ready to turn back, looking behind me to find them doing the same.

  With a final parting wave, hiking my winter coat over my arm, I head towards my gate, ready to start a new life.

  I think.

  ONE

  Mid-July…

  Not just anybody can meet the man of their dreams, but there he will be, a few mere steps away from me—like, ten tops—and will probably be mobbed by a bunch of other girls. Not just any girls, either, but fangirls—just like me.

  I fidget in my place waiting in line, a whole bunch of people away from him, and my heart starts doing the whole song and dance of trying to trick me into thinking I’ve just sprinted up a flight of stairs for some kind of actual emergency, instead of waiting in line, fidgeting from foot to foot.

  The expanse of the convention hall has me looking around, surrounded by people—some dressed in elaborate cosplay of characters I don’t know, some I do, conversations
going on around me, a geek symphony, bringing it all home that I’m here. I made it here to see him, and this is all I’ve ever wanted.

  And yeah, it sucks going it alone because Candace, who I was supposed meet for the first time in person (turning an online friend into an offline friend), couldn’t make it since her boss is a total dick who doesn’t understand our undying devotion to our favourite show and its characters, and while it bummed me out for most of the day, excitement has taken over.

  I’m here at the world’s biggest comic-con, minutes away from getting to take a photo with the fictional love of my life, Chrisander Gage, otherwise known to the real world and his fans as the actor Ayden Stone.

  I shift my weight from side to side, rocking from hip to hip in a weird kind of dance, my heart tripping up, and I think I have that crazed kind of smile on my face that just sort of happens right before I get really excited about all the things about my favourite show, Leviathan, and one of its leading men. I’m smiling so much my cheeks are hurting, and there’s a serious danger of my face getting stuck that way.

  Here in line, waiting and waiting, I can ignore the hunger pangs and hope against hope that we start moving soon and start actually taking the pictures we all signed up and paid for—I don’t want to be furiously hungry when I meet the fictional love of my life. I need to focus, to pay attention since I’m only going to have his time and attention for nothing more than a fleeting moment and I have to make it count so that it can be forever memorialized in the form of an actual print photo.

  I fish into my purse for the seventh time to get my compact out and make sure that a zit hasn’t sprouted in the five minutes since I checked my face last, but there’s nothing I can do about the excited look in my eyes, the flush to my cheeks.

  Excited yells snake down the line, a game of broken telephone between strangers as the message comes across—he’s here and we’re going to start as soon as we can.

  Excitement grows and expands in my chest, fluttering up to my throat, and I struggle in putting my compact away, movements all jittery. I force myself to take a deep, deep breath through my nose, ignoring the mammoth butterflies that have made their home in my stomach, their giant wings fluttering along my insides, reminding me that I am here, and he is just going to be right over there, and I’m finally going to get to meet him, stand next to him, maybe even hold his hand in a handshake and take a picture—finally.

  The fangirl dreams of fangirl dreams. It’s happening.

  And it’s him.

  It’s not just that Chrisander Gage is everything a man should be—like Captain Steve Rogers for the sci-fi small-screen community, and his character isn’t so well known as to be blowing up all kinds of box office records around the world. Chrisander’s strong without being an asshole, he totally admits when he’s wrong and works to fix the problem instead of lamenting the whole fact of how he’s been wronged and just generally mansplains about his “feelings” that are never actual feelings just entitlement. He’ll make sacrifices for those he loves, and he’s so stubborn in what he believes is right, which doesn’t make him automatically right, and to make it even worse, he’s handsome as hell. The writers for this show have created the perfect man—my dream man—and he’s entirely fictional.

  It’s the worst fangirl problem to have and really, the world isn’t fair.

  The actor who plays the character, Ayden Stone, is just as beautiful as the character he plays—black hair, bronzed skin and gunmetal-gray eyes, and the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a guy.

  I’m interested to find out what Ayden Stone will be wearing today since Chrisander is always dressed in distressed jeans, the kind that have been shown some lovin’ for many years (a remnant of his past on Earth), a plain t-shirt with suspenders hanging low, and the best kind of scuffed boots that make my heart palpitate just thinking about him riding a motorbike in them. Will Ayden Stone be dressed up like himself or his character?

  I’m not stupid, I know Ayden Stone and Chrisander Gage are two very different people despite the fact that they share the same body, the same face, and I know absolutely who my heart belongs to, but I couldn’t pass the opportunity of coming here, where it’s so hot, too hot, and there’s a ton of people I don’t know, and I was rethinking the whole thing of me coming here by myself, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I know I will cherish this moment forever.

  If only the line could, like, maybe start moving?

  A couple of girls—about high school age maybe, but I’m notoriously bad at guessing people’s ages—in front of me are fangirling hard. They’re clutching the graphic novels to their chests that had been specifically produced for this event and are bouncing up and down in their cosplay of one of the love interests in the show—Amy Eames, the co-captain of the ship Leviathan. Her character wears a stiff uniform in navy blue, decorated with dull medals that mean something to the military faction she’s a part of as the ship sails through space, wanting to escape her past on Earth and the military background that she was raised with.

  Yeah, she’s a badass character, but I’m not a Chrisamy shipper. Like, they have chemistry, but it’s baseline, the kind of chemistry you’d have with a friend you met through work or high school and never really talk to about all the crap that’s going on in your life, not the kind of person you’d ask for advice and actually use.

  The noise in here gets impossibly louder, more shouts and yells of excitement, and if I crane my head and go on my tiptoes, I can see through the floor-to-ceiling-length windows between the gaps that people make as they slide past one another in this giant line, all of us waiting to get a picture with the cast or individual photo ops with the actors in Leviathan. Everyone’s talking, a jumble of syllables that pass through me, and a group nearby screaming in excitement isn’t something to be worried about, despite the tons and tons of milling conversations around me.

  We’re all kinda really happy to be here.

  I think I might seem like a loner to everyone else in this line, and it’s true—a lot of my friends and family don’t really understand my obsession with this show, the way I pore over all the trivia ever accumulated about Chrisander in the past three seasons that the show’s been on the air, how I collect their action figurines, or how I’ve read every graphic novel ever produced cover to cover multiple times.

  I love everything about Leviathan—the show has excellent writers, asking thought-provoking questions about humanity (or whatever is left of it) on the ship headed for some distant planet that the remnants of humanity can someday call home. It’s incredibly interesting, and the whole fact that I’m obsessed with one of the main characters is a guaranteed good time for forty-five minutes every single Wednesday night (I have zero patience to wait for all the episodes to air and then binge them later on). Watching the show also breaks up the work week nicely, and I always have something to look forward to, even though the torture of waiting for the next week’s episode can sometimes be a bit much. Especially with last season’s finale, and now with the show’s hiatus finally coming to a close after this Con is all wrapped up.

  Now I’m here, about to meet the face behind Chrisander Gage, and I’m sort of freaking out.

  I can’t seem to keep still, so I fidget in my spot, practically knocking into a person squeezing passed me to get to the front of the line, flashing a bright yellow badge on a striped lanyard around her neck.

  Damn VIPs—I should’ve sprung for that. The anticipation is killing me. This line is killing me!

  For a second, my wild imagination takes hold as I imagine what’s going to happen next, once I get to the front of the line and get to have my picture taken with Ayden Stone.

  I was super careful with my makeup this morning, classy but a little sassy, and I’m wearing plain clothes today, no cosplay involved, even if my nails are the precise color of the Leviathan’s captain chairs, a shade only fans will know, the shade literally called Earthly Blue. Everything I’m wearing has significance to me,
significance to the show, right down to the jewelry. I’m wearing little Leviathans as my earrings, which I got off Etsy, and a replica of the medallion necklace that Chrisander wears of the archangel Raphael. I’ve got a plain white tee paired with distressed jeans, but the pièce de resistance is my shoes—patterned to look like the exoskeleton armour that glows silver, which the military wears on the show. I’ve gotten so many compliments on them today, it feels like I haven’t stopped smiling since I got here.

  Finally, finally, finally the line’s starting to move in fits and starts. With each step I take, I find myself struggling to take a deep, calming breath.

  Oh, I’m going to be super pissed if I do something like pass the frick out before getting my picture taken with Chrisander Gage.

  Don’t do this to yourself, Aria, don’t freaking do this.

  I’m excited—that’s an understatement. I can’t breathe with the butterflies growing, multiplying in my belly, taking up space and space and space…

  Then I try to rationalize my behaviour, try to keep myself focused and grounded, which would have been way easier if Candace were here.

  Except she’s not and I’m an adult and I can do this. I can so do this.

  He’s just an actor, a human just like everybody else, playing a role that he’s getting paid to do. Don’t screw this up for yourself. Keep it cool and you’ll get a sweet-looking picture out of it that can become your phone background.

  Right.

  Oh shit, shit, shit, here we go!

  I can see him now, even if there’s maybe ten people still ahead of me. There he is, Chrisander Gage—I mean, shit, Ayden Stone.

  Is it normal to be that beautiful in real life? Does he have makeup on or something to make him look so flawless, or am I looking through my own special kind of fangirl-tinted glasses? I exhale a shaky breath, gulp down whatever saliva that I have left in my suddenly dry mouth.