by M. R. Joseph
People start coming through door. Ones I have seen recently, who frequent the bar, others I haven’t seen in ten years. Hands are shaken, hugs are given, small talk is spoken. Name tags are written on, pain in the ass Val is running around like a chicken without a head, annoying everyone in the process. Here she comes, waving those damn red finger nails again.
“Luca, everything is perfect, isn’t it? It’s all amazing don’t you think?”
“It’s great Val. You did a great job.”
“Oh no, we did a great job, Luca.” She gets closer to me and leans in to my ear, “We make a great team, and the sooner you realize that, the better both our lives will be. I can make you forget all about Leighton Parks.” Her tongue darts out and grazes my earlobe and I push her away.
“Valerie, I’ve been too nice for too long, and now I’m not going to be anymore. I love Leighton, I’m in love with her. We are nothing. I have told you time and time again, I don’t want you Val, I never have, if you don’t know that by now, then it’s not sinking in.” I raise my voice, her friends look over at us, and I feel like I’m the worst person in the world, and I could be at this particular moment.
“Fine. If that’s how you really feel.” She smooths out her skirt, and is surprisingly calm.
My thoughts go away from Val and her games to the vision making her way through the door. My love breezes in and spots me within seconds. She looks so freaking beautiful I could just sweep her away from here, run away with her, marry her, have babies with her, and grow old with her. I can’t wait to touch her, so I don’t hesitate to go straight for her.
I grab her face, bend her back, and give her a searing kiss in front of her friends, our old classmates, her brother, and I temporarily forget where we are. I’m so in love with this girl, she makes me forget who I am, where I am, and how nothing is more perfect than what she is. I let her up for air.
“Well hello to you too, Mr. Ferro.”
“Welcome, Ms. Parks. I’ve missed you.”
“You two are totally gross. Can we go to the bar now?” We turn to the voice of Candy who is impatiently waiting for our little make out session to be over.
“Wow, this place looks incredible, Luca.”
“Thanks, M.J. I’m happy with the way things turned out.”
“Guys, why don’t we go find a table, and then find some cute guys who we had crushes on in high school so I can brag about being a hot doctor.”
“McKenna, there are no hot guys here. No offense, Luca. If we want hot guys, we’ll go across the street.”
“No one is going anywhere Candy, we are going to stay here, show our fellow classmates what we made of ourselves, drink, and be merry.”
“I agree, Grace, let’s go.”
I lead them all to a few tables I reserved. Leighton will always get the VIP treatment when she’s here.
They stop to talk with a few teachers and students they knew. We mingle, grab a few Hors d’ oeuvres, I steal a kiss when I can. I spot a few guys I haven’t seen in a long time, and I want to catch up with them.
“Hey beautiful, I see some guys from my old team over there. I’m going to go say hi then I want to show you something, ok?”
“Ok. I’m going to go dance with the girls. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
“Sounds good, I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you too.” I walk away from her reluctantly, but not for long.
If anyone told me I’d be standing here, in this room, with people I haven’t seen in years, who didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, I’d say they were nuts. Certifiably nuts. Especially because of the man across the room from me. I see him glance over at me from time to time, lifting his drink, winking at me, mouthing to me that he loves me. He is straight up better than any character I have ever created, and what makes that different than my books, is the fact that he is real, his love for me is real, and not made from my mind, my fantasies, it’s all my reality.
“So, looks like things are going well with you and Luca. He keeps looking over here at you, you know?” McKenna yells to me on the dance floor.
“I know he is. I love it. Look how adorable he is.”
“He sure is.”
“You know he asked me to move in with him. He wants to eventually buy a home together.”
She smacks my arm, “Shut the hell up! Are you serious? You didn’t even call to tell me, you bitch.”
I laugh at her surprised reaction. “I’m sorry. I wanted to tell all of you tonight.”
“I’m so happy for you, sweetie. I really am. After all those frogs, looks like you landed yourself a prince.”
“I’m a very lucky girl.”
McKenna puts her arm around me and squeezes, “No, Leightybug, he’s the lucky one.”
Luca comes over to me after I take a seat with all the girls.
“Hey you. Having fun?” He kisses my nose and sits down next to me.
“Sure am. This is just so great. I love the idea of all the old yearbook pictures blown up and hanging all over.”
“Speaking of that, I have to show you something. Come with me.” He holds out his hand for me to take and I follow him. We stop in front of a large picture at least five foot tall of Luca after one of his games.
“This is a great picture, Luca. I remember when it was taken.”
“See that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. How do you remember the day it was taken? Look closely at it.” He points to a section of the picture and there I see myself, baseball cap on, baggy sweatshirt, staring at him like some sort of teenage stalker. My body feels weird, and my hands are shaking.
“Look at your face, why are you looking at me like that? Not that I mind, but I thought you said you didn’t really follow my games.”
“Luca, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Maybe we can talk when we get home.”
He puts his hands on my shoulders and brings his body closer to me.
“No problem. We will talk at home, and soon it will be out home.” He kisses me softly and then we hear a loud tap on a microphone. We both turn towards the stage.
“Attention, class of 2003.” It’s Val with her annoying high pitched voice.
“Thank you all for coming tonight. First I want to thank the owner of this wonderful establishment, Luca Ferro, for allowing us to have our reunion here. Let’s give him a round of applause.”
Cheers and claps erupt through Lucky’s and I smile at Luca. He looks sort of embarrassed, so I grab his arm and link it with mine.
“Well I have a huge surprise for all of you. We just so happen to have a celebrity here among us all. I know she didn’t want anyone to know about her success, and she has been keeping her dirty little secret from us. Ladies and gentlemen, Brianna Maxwell the author of the Love Letters series is here.”
Oh fucking shit! A spot light beams towards me suddenly and I’m shielding my face from the brightness of it. People are gasping, looking towards me, and now I know there is no hiding from this. My heart is racing, my stomach is turning, and I look to Luca, who looks so confused.
“That’s right, everyone. Our very own editor of the school newspaper, Leighton Parks, is the real Brianna Maxwell. Her books are topping the charts right now, and the series is driving woman everywhere nuts. In case you are not familiar with the series, they are books about a girl who longs for the love of a boy she went to high school with, but he doesn’t even know she exists, so she decides to write a series of letters to him throughout high school and beyond. They fall in love and live happily ever after. Now doesn’t that sound like a good story?”
People begin to clap. I look towards my friends who are dumbstruck, then I look to Luca who breaks away from my arm.
“Luca, that’s what I wanted to tell you.” He stops me with his hand up towards my face. He doesn’t speak. He storms over to where my friends are sitting, all the while I see Val still on stage, smiling, loving every minute of it.
“Kenzie,” he growls. “You sti
ll have that book you showed me today?”
Kenzie looks to me, and I’m at a loss for words. They just don’t come.
“Um, yes, I was going to lend it to Grace, so I brought it, but Luca - “
“Give it to me now, MacKenzie, please.” He sticks his hand out for her to hand it over. She reaches in her bag unwillingly, and pulls it out. Luca snatches it from her hands and begins to frantically turn the pages of it. He scans each page he stops on. Grace stands up beside me and grabs my hand.
Luca reads a page from it silently, his mouth open, his eyes processing each written word. When he’s finished, he finally turns his eyes up towards me, they are tear-filled and questioning.
“I don’t understand. I just … I can’t believe what I’m reading here. These are my letters, you took them, put them in here?” His voice is meek and mild. He can’t look directly at me. It’s as though he’s looking through me, like I’m not here, like I’m an apparition.
“Luca, please. I wanted to tell you for so long, I just couldn’t. Every time we were together, it was just so wonderful and perfect, I didn’t want to jeopardize what we have. I’m sorry I was dishonest with you.”
Luca shakes his head, opens another page and reads it out loud. The silence in the room is deafening except for the sound of his voice.
“Oh, I remember this letter very well, Brianna.” He mocks my pen name and begins to read.
“My dearest Marco,
When I see you time stops, when I hear your voice, it stills my heart, and yours is the only one I hear, your eyes the only ones I see. I have loved you from afar for so long, but I cannot tell you my name, who I am, or why I love you like I do, just know I have my reasons, but all that matters is that someone in this world loves you for you, and not what you can offer them.”
I feel like I’m going to collapse. Grace grabs my arm to steady me. Luca closes the book, and shuts his eyes tightly. He smooths his hand over the book, and hugs it to his chest. For a moment I feel as though he is going to be ok with all of this, that’s until his eyes open.
“Those words, those fucking words, Leighton, they belong to me, not you. You didn’t write them for me, you wrote them for you and for the money. You have no idea what they did to me, how they healed me, how they changed me. I searched and searched for you for years. Those letters made me feel special, wanted, loved, but they were all lies. You are all lies. You are just a fucking liar. Do you hear me, a fucking liar.” I grab his arm, and he yanks it away before I can get a firm grip on it.
I pled with him. “Luca, I do love you, I have loved you forever, but how could someone like you ever love someone like me?”
“Someone like you, what does that even mean? I hardly knew you. We had one class together. I helped you one time when you were knocked down in a hallway. How do you know that I wouldn’t want to be with someone like you? Did you think I was that shallow, that full of myself that I wouldn’t even want to get to know you? What does that say about you, Leighton? Maybe you should of left that up to me, and not to your insecurities.”
His tears fall like rain and I follow. This isn’t happening, and it’s not the way I wanted him to find out.
“No, no you don’t understand. The letters were the only way I knew how. I didn’t know they would have affected you the way they did. I had no idea. I didn’t mean to hurt you, I never wanted to.”
“Hurt me, you didn’t want to hurt me? Those letters were the only thing that got me through my hurt. Years of pain I had built up over my mother dying, me blowing out my elbow twice, me searching for you, wanting you, needing you. You crushed me, do you even fucking understand that? You crushed my fucking heart.” Luca beats over his heart and I can’t stand this pain I’m causing him.
“I saved every letter, every fucking letter you stuck inside that locker. The moments I spent wishing the day away because I knew at the end of it, your words would be there, filling the hole I had inside. Can you even comprehend that?”
“But Luca, I love you. We can get past this, because we love each other.” I plead with him.
“Love? You want to talk about love. You don’t even know the meaning of it. You think of love as words on a page, in a letter, in a fucking poetry book. You don’t know the first thing about it. You pretend you do because your make money off of it, but all you do is hurt, and lie about it. You deceive and I can’t love someone like that. It’s false, this between us, it’s false. We were never real, we were made up. We are nothing but fucking fiction.”
Luca throws the book across the rooms and runs out the door. My life just walked out.
I feel lightheaded and my mouth goes dry. Grace and M.J. take me and put me in a chair. Kenzie brings me a glass of water.
“Oh, Leightybug, why didn’t you just tell us from the beginning? We would have supported you, no matter what.”
“I couldn’t Kenz, I… just couldn’t.”
Wes walks to me, and kneels on the floor. My tears sting my face and roll down my cheeks like sheets of rain.
“Leighton, please, let me take you home.”
I nod my head. People are staring at me, whispers are heard. I have no idea what’s being said, but at this point, I can just imagine.
I get up from the chair with the assistance of Wes and Grace. Val steps in front of me.
“I’m so sorry about all of that, Leighton, I just thought everyone would want to know what a big star you are. I guess it didn’t go as planned. Poor Luca, I guess I’ll just have to be there for him and pick up the pieces of his broken heart.” She moves closer to my trembling body and whispers in my ear.
“You are nothing but a silly, little, lying whore, aren’t you, Leighton, or should I call you Brianna? Such a shame you have so much to lose, guess you should check bathroom stalls before you tell the world what a fucking genius you are.”
She steps away from me, crosses her arms, and walks away. I got what I deserved. I lost the love of my life. I guess I really never had him.
We leave Lucky’s, and Wes and Kenzie bring me to his house. I can’t go back to my place. It’s not even my place, and it will never be mine again.
When we get back to Wes’s place, the girls come with us. They sit me down, give me a glass of tequila, and Kenzie gives me a change of her clothes. My head is killing me, along with my heart, and my soul. We all sit around, all is quiet, as I just rock back and forth wishing this nightmare I’m in will end.
“So what are we going to do now? Are you going to tell everyone else in the world who you are?”
“M.J., I’m sure the world knows by now. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I know I can’t stay there. My stuff is probably out on the porch as we speak.”
“You can stay with me for as long as you want, sweetie. You’re my sister, and I’ll do whatever you need me to do. But I just don’t get why you didn’t say anything in the first place. I’m still so confused. When did all this start?”
I clear my throat and take back a shot of the clear liquid that’s placed in front of me.
“I’ve loved Luca since I was sixteen years old. He was all I ever thought about, ever dreamed about, and always hoped for. I was shy, not confident, and I thought the best way to tell him how I felt was through my letters.” I take another deep breath.
“When I grew up and went to college, I stopped the letters when I found myself. I transformed into someone else. I was tired of being a nobody, tired of loving someone from afar, and I knew that Luca was just my distraction until I got what I wanted, knowing I could never have what I really wanted. When I came back here, I fell in love with him. I realized he was all I had ever wanted still, and I knew in time he would find out about the books. I was just prolonging the inevitable.”
“But the books. Why did you write the books?” Grace asks.
“I wrote them because I had them in my head and in my heart. I knew they would make a good love story, because it was my love story, except I added the happy endings, that was before I ha
d mine, or at least I thought I did.”
“I read them all. They touched me in a way that I never thought a book could. Maybe there is a chance Luca will see it for what it really is, the true, honest feelings of someone who really loved him for the person he is. Maybe he can read between the lines and realize all the real love behind them. You just don’t turn love away at a snap of a finger. Give him a chance to cool down and think about it.”
Kenzie is wise, she knows me, and her words bring me a little comfort.
“I’m sorry I lied to you all. I was waiting until September when I was going to be in New York for the book tour. I was going to reveal who I was, try explaining it to him, and quit writing the series. It would be pointless to continue it if Luca knew. I decided that loving him was way more important than any books I could ever write, but now the love of my life walked away from me, and it’s my selfishness that drove him there.”
I begin to cry again. I feel drained, lifeless, alone even if there are ten other people around me.
“Ok, guys, I’m going to get her to bed.”
“Thanks, Wes. I’m going to try and sleep now.”
I hug everyone goodbye, and Kenzie walks me to Wes’s spare room. She comes in from the bathroom with a cool washcloth. I crawl under the sheets, and lay my head on the soft pillows. She runs the cloth over my face, wiping the dried tears, and smeared mascara away. She doesn’t speak, just comes in the bed, snuggles behind me, and puts an arm across me. I lay there, the tears returning, and I’m not sure how much more I can cry. I could fill a dried up river with my tears, and I’m afraid, deathly afraid, this heart ache will kill me. I already feel dead inside, so it’s just a matter of time before the breaking finishes me off, and I deserve it. I deserved to lose the only thing that truly mattered.
Nothing can prepare you for a broken heart. No matter the warning signs, even if it’s clear, bold as can be in front of you, the pain doesn’t lessen, time doesn’t heal, it’s all bullshit.
It’s been a few days since the love of my life broke my heart. She lied, deceived me, not just a few nights ago, but for years. She was my letter girl, my letter girl. How can this be? I should have known from the way she was looking at me in that photograph. She loved me for years, that’s apparently a fact, but what I don’t understand is why she did what she did. I get it, she was a kid when she started to write me the letters, she didn’t realize what they would do to me, how they affected me, but then she wrote the books, and I feel betrayed. She put something out to the world that was so private and personal. I feel exposed and stupid for thinking those letters were just for me.