Letters to Lily (Letters to... #1)

by Christine M. Butler

  “Please, can we just go, before someone sees?”

  “Sasha!” I heard Kristin calling out as my mom pulled away, but I didn't bother to turn in her direction. I wasn't sure who was with her, and I didn't want any of them to know I'd been crying. I saw, in the side view mirror that she hadn't been alone though. She was smacking the hell out of Kade's shoulder when I looked. My eyes blurred up with tears at that point so I couldn't make out the look on his face. I didn't need to, because I was simply destroyed by this night, and nothing would change that now.

  My night ended with my mom helping me out of my dress, wiping the simple makeup off of my face, and then we sat out in the back yard and made a nice little fire. My mom nodded her head once it was going good enough, and I tossed my too beautiful for words dress right into the flames. I wanted zero reminders of this night. I made her delete the pictures she'd taken of me earlier that night too. “It's not easy being a boy's best friend at this age,” my mom had said as we watched the dress burning.

  “No, it's not,” I agreed before I walked away from the fire, and went back in the house to go to bed.

  I didn't hear from Kade that night, or the next day. When I did hear from him on Sunday he acted as if nothing ever happened. Of course, from his viewpoint, I suppose it would be business as usual.

  ~*~

  I lay there in bed thinking about the damn dream, and that horrible night. I had asked Kristin about what I saw in the side view mirror. She wouldn't talk about it though. She said just to forget it, and so I tried to. On the rare occasion that I was able to turn that damn nightmare of a night into a good dream, it was me that he serenaded in the hallway that day, I was the one with the gorgeous silver and white corsage, the person whose ear he whispered into during the limo rides. I was the girl he fed desert to at dinner, and the one who got all his dances during the night. I was also the one who ended up in the hotel with him afterward.

  I had all ready decided that if he had asked me to prom, I was going to give myself to him that night. Looking back, I was most likely lucky that things turned out the way they did. Here we were, almost a year later, and I did lose my virginity to him. At a frat party instead of the prom. As it turned out, I ended up pregnant, and he ran away. Apparently, fairy tales and happy endings did not exist in Sasha Garrett's world.

  I still hadn't heard anything from Kaden by the time I woke up this morning. My heart was beyond broken, and I had to start figuring things out on my own now. “I need to go see my mom today,” I said as I finally hauled my butt out of bed and into the kitchen. Kristin watched me from her perch on the barstool at our kitchen island as I fixed myself a cup of coffee.

  “Are you thinking of moving in with her?”

  “What? No way. She's living with her boyfriend now, and he still has a couple kids at home. They don't have the room. Besides, I have money.” I explained. “She put it in a trust for me after dad died. I guess it was like half of his life insurance policies or whatever. I'm honestly not even sure how much it is. She just told me that I would get access to it after I graduated college. I'm hoping, considering the circumstances, she'll see fit to let me have at least part of it now so I can get ready for the baby.”

  “Do you think she'll agree to it?”

  “Under normal circumstances, I'd say no. She'd tell me that I made my bed and I need to figure it out, or whatever… Once she finds out it was Kade, and how he's not exactly here to help, or even reachable for that matter, I think she'll change her mind. Especially since I can't exactly move back home now that she sold her house and moved in with Jared and his kids.”

  “Good points. Do you need me to go? You know, for moral support?”

  “Nah, I better do this one alone.”

  “Have you tried calling Kade again since…”

  I knew what she meant, since I got that text from Jason. I shook my head no, but pulled my phone out of my pocket anyway. I pulled his contact info up on the screen, and nearly burst into tears just looking at his picture. “I guess I have to put my big girl panties on and keep trying periodically, huh?”

  “It's the right thing to do until you're sure he knows. Even though I don't think he deserves to know since he took off to another state across the damn country without so much as a word to you.”

  I pushed the send button and waited. The weird tone that gets used for numbers that are no longer in service came up, and then trilled the familiar message to me. His phone number no longer worked. The blood drained from my face, and every ounce of hope I had that this had all been some crazy misunderstanding fled with it. I saw the shock register on Kristin's face too as I looked to her for answers she didn't have. Her head just shook back and forth, and then she was moving in on me, wrapping her arms tightly around my shoulders. “I'm here for you no matter what, chica. No. Matter. What.”

  I just shook my head up and down against her shoulder to let her know I understood. I couldn't speak though. My brain was fried, my heart was kicking around on its last leg, and my soul… it was just… nonexistent in that moment. He took it with him. There was no other reasoning behind my body feeling like it had been ripped in two and one half taken away for good. That's what it was, to know for sure, that I had lost Kaden Miller from my life. The feeling prevailed even if I didn't understand how it all happened.

  ~*~

  I parked my car in my mom's driveway, and just sat there staring at the house for a minute. It seemed quiet at first until the front door swung wide open and my mom ran out. “Well, hello, baby! To what do I owe this unexpected visit?” My mom, and her cheerful manner, warmed my battered little heart a bit.

  “Hey, momma!” I called out to her as I got out of the car. Her footsteps stuttered a moment when she saw my puffy face, but then she came and wrapped her arms around me tightly. “The kids are in the house, so if you need to spill your guts lets do it quietly here, okay?” Her words were spoken softly in my ear.

  “Momma,” I whispered. I was afraid she was about to be so disappointed in me.

  “Shh, it's okay, whatever it is, baby. We'll get through it, and I promise I will be here for you.” That was my mom. She was always there to pick up the pieces.

  “I'm pregnant mom. Kade,” my throat was clogging with emotion at the mention of his name. “He's gone though. He doesn't know, but I can't find him.”

  “What do you mean, he's gone?”

  She pulled me over to sit on the warm hood of my car, and I tell her everything that has happened over the past week. “Oh, my baby girl. I thought prom night was my biggest disappointment in that boy, but damn it, he just blew that straight out of the water. What in the world?”

  It's funny that my mom's thoughts went back to that horrible night too. “I wish I knew, mom. I don't know what to do.”

  “Well, I know how you feel about these things, so I don't think I have to ask what you want to do about the baby.” It was a statement not a question, but I answered anyway.

  “I'm keeping the baby. I couldn't… There's no way…”

  “I know. It's okay. I told you, I would help.”

  “We don't have room here for all that,” a male voice spoke up just then. I hadn't even seen my mom's boyfriend, Jared, walk up, but apparently he'd been there long enough to overhear my tale of woe.

  “Jared!” My mom snapped.

  “No, it's okay, mom. I already knew that.” I smiled at Jared to let him know there were no hard feelings about that. “I think I have a plan, but I could use a little help in another way.”

  “You need help tracking him down?” Jared asked.

  “No, I'm just going to give that a little bit of time. If worse comes to worse, I'll hire someone to track him down and take him a message when the baby is born.”

  “But, he needs to be held accountable for the baby, for the financial burden alone. It's not cheap to have a baby, before it ever gets here Sasha. Those medical bills alone…” Jared was a single dad, who took that position very seriously. His ex-wife had
skipped town on him and their two kids five years ago. He tried for a few years to track her down before giving up, and only then because he felt she would cause more harm than good if he ended up forcing her back in their lives.

  “I know that, but I'm not going to force anyone to be in my life or my baby's. I can handle it. I have a job at the coffee shop on campus for now, plus school, and well…” I turned to my mom. “I was hoping you would release at least a portion of my trust to me. I just want to be able to get into a small house instead of the apartment we're in. It will be better for me while I'm pregnant, and definitely roomier with a baby. Kristin still wants to be my roommate, but we only have two bedrooms right now, and I'm not sure the apartment would let us stay there with a baby since it's a student living type situation.”

  “Are you sure you've tried everything to get a hold of Kaden?” My mom asked.

  I pulled my phone out, pulled his contact info up, hit dial, and let her listen to the fact that his number was no longer in service. Then, I showed her the texts from Jason. She sucked in a breath when she read what Jason wrote. “I just,” her hand went to her mouth as she sighed. “I can't believe everything turned out like this. I never would have thought…”

  “Mom?” I questioned again. She looked up at me then. “Would you help me?” I watched as my mom looked to her boyfriend who nodded his head at her before he came over and swept me up off the hood of the car, wrapping me in a tight bear hug.

  “Of course she will, sweetie,” he spoke into my hair as he continued to hug me. “We're both here if you need anything else too, especially a night out, because babies are a lot of work, and doing it on your own is going to be exhausting.”

  “You know I will. I'll have it all taken care of this week. How about we have some lunch, and then maybe go house hunting?” She smiled as she pulled me away from her boyfriend and into her own hug.

  House hunting. That was something I didn't think I would be doing until I graduated. Actually, that's not entirely true. When Kade had brought up me moving in with him just a few short weeks ago, I had briefly envisioned the two of us going to look at places together so that we were both starting fresh as a couple without any hangers on. Not that I didn't love Kristin, or think that he didn't love Jason, but I wanted us to experience being an adult couple together - alone. If we wanted to get crazy after a date night and rip our clothes off on the way to the bedroom, or hell, have wild passionate sex on the couch, I wanted to be able to do that with him.

  My insides twisted again with the thought, because now, instead of getting to finally live out that particular fantasy I was going to go house hunting with my mom instead. Hunting for a house that I would live in alone with my baby. Sure, Kristin was still planning on being my roommate, for now. Soon, though, she'd meet that special someone and start off on her own adult dreamland venture. I would just be someone's mom. Suddenly, the nightmare about my depressingly lonely prom night was starting to look like a walk in the park, because my future was looking more bleak and lonely than ever.

  Chapter Six

  ~Kade~

  May 4 - I spent the entirety of yesterday in bed. I'm not afraid to admit that my heart is simply crushed. Of all the people, in all the world, the last one I would have ever thought would cheat on me was Sasha. Hell, I never thought I'd ever see her cheat on anyone, but especially not me, considering she knew my family history. The other side of the coin was that I had to wonder if Jason actually told her where I was. Maybe she thought I had left her? That question had actually rolled around in my head on more than a few occasions in the past week. The only reason I blew that excuse off was because Jason didn't have room to lie. Obviously, I could check up and see if he'd actually talked to her for me. Well, apparently I couldn't actually do that since her number changed, and my busted phone meant I didn't have a working number for her mom or Kristin. Jason couldn't have known that though.

  Kristin. That was another sore spot. I didn't have her number or anything else, because we hadn't spoken much since the night of our senior prom. She actually hit me when we watched Sasha crying in the car with her mom before they pulled off. “You did that too her,” she shouted at me. “If you have any kind of heart at all, you either need to make it painfully clear to her that you are only ever going to be friends, or you need to walk away from her and leave her alone.” I had no clue what she was talking about, because I wasn't around Sasha enough to piss her off or upset her at all that night. Hell, the one time I was going to try to dance with her my date, Andrea, had stepped in the way and demanded the last dance for her. I was beyond disappointed that I didn't get to dance with Sash, but she had no way of knowing that I had been about to ask her.

  Memory lane was not letting me off that easy. I found out later that night why Sasha had been crying and it gutted me. I went to her house to find out if someone hurt her, because there was no way it could have been me, like Kristin had accused. Before I could knock on the front door I saw the flicker of firelight coming from around the back, and took off around the house to meet them back there.

  Hearing Sasha's sniffling stopped me in my tracks by the tree at the side of the house. I stood there, watching her interaction with her mom. Ashley was stoking up a fire while Sasha sat in a lawn chair clutching some shimmery material to her. “Tell me everything, and once it's told we'll burn the damn dress, erase the pictures, and pretend the night never happened.” Sasha's head bobbed back and forth a couple times on her neck.

  I clutched my aching chest as I listened to her sob her way through the story of her ruined senior prom. “I turned them all down,” she was saying, “because I was waiting on him.” Surely, she didn't mean me. I had wanted so desperately to ask Sasha to prom, but she never let on that she wanted that. No hints or blatant requests like all the other girls were lobbing my way. In the end, I'd chickened out after seeing her turn down offer after offer. I wasn't sure whom she was waiting on, but it depressed me enough that I finally had to pull my own head out of my ass and get myself a date for the prom. Hell, all the girls I would have been interested in aside from Sasha were all ready spoken for, so I had to come up with a flashy way to get one of them to ditch their date.

  “He sang to her, and you know what? I've never actually heard him sing like that before and I've known him since the fourth grade. I guess he must really like her to have done that. It killed me to watch it,” Sasha was saying. Oh, god no! Please, don't be talking about me.

  “Then I didn't want to go, and you wouldn't let me back out, because he'd all ready bought the extra ticket. The pity ticket…” 'If she only knew,' I thought to myself as I listened to her speaking. I purchased two tickets, one for me and one for her. I had to scramble to get the third ticket at the last minute for Andrea. My heart was aching in my chest as I continued to listen to how I failed her all night long. How no one got her a corsage, because she didn't have a date. The corsage Andrea was wearing was the one I had picked out for Sasha. I guess she hadn't known that it matched her dress and not Andrea's. Then she talked about the painful limo ride where two couples were interacting and she was alone in the shadows. Suddenly I was seeing the night in a whole new way. She told her mom about the dinner, which now that I think about it, I don't remember her eating a thing. I didn't even bother to ask her why, or what was wrong, because Andrea kept distracting me by feeding me her desert and pressing me to feed her mine.

  I swallowed down the thick emotion that was threatening to choke me as I allowed the tree to hold me up while I waited for the final nail in the coffin. I just knew what she'd been waiting for all night now. The same thing I had. The dance that Andrea had stolen from both of us, only I was really to blame for that too, because I allowed it to happen by stupidly thinking that this gorgeous creature - my best friend - wouldn't want me in that way.

  She finished her story amidst more sniffles and tears and I watched as she draped the shimmery material over the fire and then let it drop into the flames. It was her prom dress, an
d man, did that kill me to see. She had looked like magic in that dress, like shimmery moonlight dancing across water. I had to remind myself how to breathe when I'd caught that first glimpse of her in that dress tonight, and now it was turning to ash before my very eyes. “It's not easy being a boy's best friend at this age,” her mom said to her then.

  “No, it's not,” was her response before she turned and wiped at the moisture that was flowing down her cheeks and she went inside the house. Her mom stayed outside, I assume to tend to the fire. The problem was, she wasn't as unaware of my presence as Sasha had been.

  “Did you hear all of that? The whole day's events?” She asked out loud. When she finally looked up at me I simply nodded from my perch in the shadows. “I'm not sure what went wrong, or why you chose not to ask her, but I suggest you take a few days to figure out what it is you want to salvage between the two of you before you talk to her again. I like you, Kaden, I always have; but if you hurt my little girl like this one more time, I promise I will write you off without another thought.” She turned to put the cover over the burn barrel that would help kill the fire. “The only reason you're getting this second chance is because I think you honestly didn't realize. It's a damn shame that you didn't, but there's no changing what's all ready happened.”

  I nodded my head again without saying anything and turned to walk away. It took me two hours to get back home that night because I walked, very slowly, while I thought about every word Sasha and her mom had spoken that night.

  The two people, besides myself, who were closest to Sasha, had put me in my place about her that night. For some reason, my mind kept going back to their warnings and how that night played out as I thought about the possibilities. Was it possible she was cheating on me? Anything was possible especially if she thought we were over. Especially, since it probably seemed like I didn't want to bother getting a hold of her personally. Even if Jason had delivered the original message, I didn't think he'd bother with updating her after that. He knew I was about to ditch him, in a way, for her. I imagine that didn't endear her to him.