The Third Best Thing

by Hughes, Maya

  Jules was The Letter Girl. She was the woman I’d fallen in love with through her words and the one I’d slowly discovered my feelings for right across the street.

  The whole time I fought my feelings for her, it was because I’d been afraid of betraying—well, her. She’d kept that from me. The letters I’d read and re-read hundreds of times. The woman I’d finally said goodbye to in my last letter, she was Jules all this time.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d stood on her porch, knocking and calling her name. Any longer and someone would probably call the cops on me for harassment. The pain in her eyes made me want to tear the place apart and find out who exactly had hurt her—other than her own family.

  I walked back across the street in a daze. A swell of emotions so tangled and mixed up, I could barely hold onto one for longer than a second. Crushing sadness, confusion, anger that she’d kept this from me, relief that I’d finally found TLG and then devastation at losing her again.

  And she was pushing me away, acting like we were so mismatched when we weren’t. No one would think that—she was amazing. That’s what they’d see. No one who knew Jules could hate her… but she’d said her mom and sister were awful to her?

  None of it made sense. She seemed more stressed about strangers’ opinions. What was that about?

  “Did you get any treats from Jules after you busted her?” LJ came down the steps.

  “She broke up with me.” Stunned, I stood in the living room, trying to remember how to breathe.

  “She broke up with you.” LJ held onto my shoulders. “Why?”

  “She said something about not being able to live under my spotlight.”

  “I don’t blame her after the shit people have been spewing online. I’ve reported as much of it as I could. Give her some time.”

  “What stuff? Show me.” Once they’d told me about Jules being TLG, I’d jumped off the porch and rushed to her house. Anything else didn’t matter in that moment, except finding her and getting some answers. Now that need for answers was killed by the ache in my chest. What had I missed? What could anyone say to make her break down like that and push me away?

  Marisa fired up her laptop and pulled up a whole bunch of sites and the comments sections. Ones I wished she hadn’t. The Dough Ho. That’s what they called Jules. And a whole shit load of other screwed up things. Their comments made me want to knock on every one of their doors and punch them in the face.

  I sat on Marisa’s bed and buried my head in my hands. “Why are they picking on her? She’s fucking gorgeous. She’s everything anyone could ever want in a girlfriend. Why do they even care?”

  “It’s juicy gossip. Her letter wasn’t exactly PG, more like XXX. How’d they even get it?”

  “No idea.” I raked my fingers through my hair. “For a while I was carrying them with me everywhere. One of them could’ve fallen out of my bag.”

  “But how’d they figure out it was Jules?” LJ leaned against Marisa’s desk.

  “No idea. Maybe when classes started up, they figured out her handwriting or something? We’ve got a freaking CSI team out there doing handwriting samples. These assholes don’t have anything better to do?”

  I scrambled up the steps to my backpack. The one I always had with me, and ripped it open. The bundle with the present in it was tucked to the side like it always was. Shoving my hand down deep toward the bottom, I hit the stack of letters that I’d stashed there. I pulled them out and snapped off the rubber band.

  Marisa and LJ stood in the doorway.

  The thick stack bounced on my bed, falling over. I fanned out the letters. “There’s a few missing.” I’d written dates on the top corners of them.

  “You take that backpack with you all the time.” LJ picked up one of the envelopes. I snatched it out of his hand.

  It was bad enough when I’d thought these letters were from The Letter Girl, but now that I knew these were from Jules, no one else was getting their hands on them.

  “I know I do.” I raked my fingers through my hair, tugging on the roots. “I should’ve left them here. I shouldn’t have taken them with me. Someone must have gotten into my backpack and taken them.”

  “Who would do that, Berk? Why would they take a couple letters and not any of the other stuff in your bag?” She sat on the edge of my bed.

  “I don’t know. Maybe someone wanting to be an asshole or embarrassing me or something. Get at me through Jules.” I clenched my fists at my sides. Whoever had done this deserved to get their ass kicked. My heart ached for Jules. I wanted to storm back across the street, bust down her door and be the big spoon until she felt better.

  Her tears were like razor blades to my heart. All I wanted to do was protect her from all this. What Emmett had said to me made so much more sense now. They couldn’t attack me, so they went for the soft target, trying to tear Jules down.

  And the stuff about her mom. That hurt, knowing I’d been there and she’d been in pain—that her own damn mom had made her feel like she was anything less than the beautiful, kickass Jules she was. I’d thought my mom walking out was bad, but now I didn’t know what was worse: being abandoned or having to look at the person every day and never feeling like they loved you, or waiting for another emotional blow from them.

  “This is all my fault.” I banged my head against the wall. “If I hadn’t been carrying these things around with me everywhere, they’d have never gotten them.”

  Marisa and LJ exchanged looks. “Why would some random person do that? And why would they want to drag Jules into this? To embarrass her? Why?”

  “Because people are assholes.”

  “Who’s had access to your bag?”

  “Everyone. Like you said, I take it with me almost everywhere.”

  “Come on, man. Some random person isn’t going to rummage through your backpack to take a letter they don’t even know is in there.”

  This line of questioning wasn’t going anywhere I wanted it to go. “Then who did it?” I pushed off the wall, going toe-to-toe with LJ.

  “Dude, chill out.” He pushed his hands against my chest.

  “Fine, I’ll say it. You can come and glower at me. It was probably Alexis.” Marisa wedged herself between me and LJ.

  My head snapped down and I stared at her. “Why in the hell would she do that? You’re out of your minds.”

  LJ always went straight to Alexis whenever anything went wrong. If it was me being late somewhere or something going missing, his knee-jerk conclusion was always Alexis, but that wasn’t the case—well, maybe fifty percent of the time.

  “You didn’t see the way she was looking at Jules the two times I’ve seen them meet?”

  “She has a hard time meeting new people and trusting them.”

  “She also looked like if she had a voodoo doll of Jules, Jules would definitely have been in trouble.”

  “Alexis would never do something like that to me. She’d never hurt me like that. Look at you and LJ. You jumped in here in a split second trying to chest bump me away. Would you hurt him like that? You’re best friends. Me and Alexis are family.”

  “Then how’d they find out the letter was Jules’s?”

  Something Jules had mentioned about the recipes…

  “They put up her handwriting on each one of the web shows. And if a letter fell out of my backpack, maybe someone matched it up that way. It doesn’t have to be Alexis’s fault every time anything goes wrong. She’s my sister and she wouldn’t do that to me. Besides, she’s never even seen Jules’ writing. She wouldn’t hurt me like this.” I had to believe she wouldn’t. Because doing that to Jules, exposing her private thoughts to me, knowing who it was? That was beyond anything Alexis had ever pulled before. That bordered on unforgivable. I didn’t have many people in the world I could call family, and losing one of them would kill me.

  LJ and Marisa looked at each other again like they were speaking some kind of telepathic twin speak and shook their heads. “I hope you’re right, man
.” LJ squeezed my shoulder and the two of them left the room, looking back at me like a dude who’d just lost a leg saying he could walk it off.

  No matter how these letters were released, they were out in the world and I’d deal with the consequences. TLG was Jules. All those conflicted feelings I’d had about liking Jules when TLG and I were still writing, keeping her at arm’s length not only because of Nix, but because I didn’t want to betray TLG—I should’ve been pissed off. I should’ve wanted to yell at her for lying to me, but now that I went back over everything in my mind, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

  I’d found TLG. She hadn’t just dropped me and walked away. She’d been right across the street baking for me every day, smiling at me from behind those glasses from her favorite spot with her head on my chest. She’d been in my bed. She’d been too shy to tell me it was her. She was real and in the flesh—and had just broken up with me.

  But I wasn’t going to go down easy.

  The crap Jules was telling herself about all this, the insecurities she’d been good at hiding and slowly overcoming—that was something hard to come up against. I had twenty-two years of that myself, but I wasn’t going down that easy. I wasn’t going to let her push me away because she was scared.

  I was scared too, but I was scared that she’d shut me out and walk away from what we had. A plan formed in my head and I got to work, going to my desk and throwing open the bottom drawer. This was exactly what I needed. The perfect thing to show her she’d always been on my mind and that a little viral sensation wasn’t enough to scare me away. She was so much stronger than she thought, but now it came down to whether or not she thought I was worth the risk.

  34

  Jules

  “Remember what you said to me when I was lying in bed after my break up with Nix?”

  I rolled my head to the side and stared at Elle. My hoodie, the one I used to wear every day, that I’d had to search through piles of clothes to find, now covered me like a blanket. It had been weeks since I’d worn it, but I needed the safety of its soft gray cocoon. “You’re completely right to wallow and I’ll bring you more chocolate chunk cookies.”

  The corner of her mouth lifted. “Not quite.”

  “A pep talk isn’t what I need right now.”

  “But it’s what you’re going to get.”

  I lay in my bed, staring up at the ceiling. “I can’t. I really can’t. Not right now.” I breathed through the burn in my nostrils like I was seconds away from breaking down again.

  “How about I lie with you then?”

  I nodded and the bed dipped as she swung her legs up and settled down beside me.

  “You have nothing to be embarrassed about.” She tilted her head toward me.

  “When people look at you and Nix, they get it. You make sense. Despite knowing you’d been seconds away from removing his balls with an ice cream scoop and the whole getting-him-arrested thing, I never, ever batted an eye at you two dating.”

  I sucked in a shuddering breath.

  “But with me and Berk. We don’t make sense to people. They can’t figure it out. Like why in the hell is he with her? Is it pity? Is it a dare or a bet? A fetish? And it’s only a matter of time before he starts to wonder the same thing.”

  “You know him and you know that’s not the type of guy he is.”

  “But can I take that chance? He would destroy me. Not even on purpose—this is bad enough, but once I’m in even deeper than I already am? How could I come back from that? How do you recover from having a piece of your soul shredded? It’s so early and I already feel like I was halfway there.” The tears pooled in my eyes.

  I didn’t even know how long Elle stayed with me before leaving for an event they were scrambling to get back on track after the snow. She took the liberty of hiding all my electronics to keep me from tying myself to a whipping post of scrolling social media. And my mother’s messages had been particularly helpful.

  Julia, do you have any idea how embarrassing this is for our family?

  Julia, we’re going to have to rethink your participation in your sister’s wedding. We don’t want to cause a scandal.

  You’d think we were Kennedys or members of the royal family with how important keeping up appearances was to my mother. But for once, her words weren’t the most hateful things I’d had said about me. People behind their keyboards had certainly had a field day with my outing.

  Their words floated in my brain, looking for a nice soft place to burrow and infest my thoughts. Classmates from high school had backed up the big reveal with notes I’d scribbled in their yearbooks and everyone was a handwriting expert now.

  The internet pitchfork mob had ruined everything. I wouldn’t get to lay in Berk’s arms at night. Watch his face when he walked into the house for the party Alexis and I had planned.

  She’d given me her phone number, thawing the ice between us to frigid water. My plans for Berk’s birthday were in play. Anytime I texted her with an idea she’d replied immediately with a ‘Call me!’ Maybe my letter had gotten her to see I wasn’t just a user. I could only imagine the women falling over Berk all the time. When we talked last she’d suggested I recreate a kid’s birthday of sorts. Kind of like the ones you’d have back in the classroom that everyone loved so much because it meant cupcakes instead of whatever math worksheet the teacher had planned.

  Now I’d have to let Alexis know the party was cancelled. I curled up even tighter. Maybe she could still throw it without me. My heart felt like someone had taken a hammer to it—the claw end. A birthday party would help take Berk’s mind off how I’d slammed the door in his face as he asked me not to.

  A figure loomed in my doorway and I screamed.

  “Jesus Christ!” Nick jumped and stepped into the light, clutching his chest. His bare chest. With a towel wrapped around his waist. “Are you ever dressed?!”

  He tightened his grip on the towel. “Sure, for classes and stuff. And it looks like you’re having a moment, so I wasn’t sure how to bug you.”

  “Bug me for what?”

  “That pomegranate body wash you bought is all gone. Do you maybe have some more?”

  My laugh was pure disbelief. I shoved up off the bed and stalked to my closet, grabbing my spare bottle and shoving it at him.

  “You’re the best, Jules.”

  “I’ve been told.”

  My stomach rumbled.

  “Might want to take care of that. Also, you’ve been locked up in your room for days. It’s getting a little rank in here.” He fanned his face. “Maybe air it out a little.” He walked farther into my room toward the windows.

  “Touch them and die.” I glared at Mr. Towel.

  He raised his hands in surrender, backing into the hallway. “Sorry, just trying to be helpful.”

  I trudged downstairs. There had to be some sliced turkey and cheese in there. Maybe some chips. Not that I needed chips. I stared down at my body. The body I’d worked so hard to love and accept, but sometimes—sometimes it was so hard.

  The doorbell rang after the first bite of my sandwich. Divine intervention?

  Opening it, there was no one there but the inky darkness of night. When the hell had the sun set? I stepped back to close it and spotted the bundle of notes, with the same paper Berk always used, with a daisy on top of it.

  I looked out over the porch, but the street was silent. Taking it inside, I closed the door and opened the bundle. The notes had dates written across the top. I headed back to the kitchen to open them.

  TLG where are you? It’s been over a week since your last letter. I didn’t think you were serious about ending this. That’s it? If you don’t want to meet, we don’t have to, but don’t just end what we have like this.

  I slammed my lips together, trying to hold back the swelling emotion.

  Please don’t end things this way. I can’t tell you how much your words mean to me. Can you walk away like this didn’t mean anything?

  The words swa
m on the page as tears welled in my eyes.

  Just let me know you’re okay. Did I do something wrong? I’m sorry if I was too pushy.

  I squeezed the letter to my chest, breathing through the ache in my heart. His sadness radiated from these letters. He’d never let me know, actual me. When he came over and talked about finding TLG the depth of his pain over the letters stopping never came through, but I had hurt him. I dropped my chin to my chest and my tears fell onto the neatly printed words.

  Please.

  A quiet sob shook my shoulders. Berk, I’m sorry. I squeezed my lips together and flipped to the next one.

  I’m not even sure why I’m writing these letters anymore. I guess sometimes you felt like the only person I could really talk to. But I thought I should tell you, I’ve met someone. I think you’d like her. I don’t know why, but I think you would. I hope you’re okay.

  My throat tightened and I flipped to the next one. This one was dated over a week ago, before the Dough Ho blow up.

  This will be my last letter. Remember that girl I told you about before? I’m crazy about her. She’s kind and beautiful and makes me want to tell her things that would scare her away in a heartbeat. Things that I told you that made you stop wanting to talk to me. I don’t know how, but I’m going to show her how much she means to me without sending her running for the hills.

  And I hope wherever you are, you’re happy.

  I wiped at my tears and clutched the notes to my chest. Once again, I’d pushed him away. Once as TLG and now as me. I’d hurt him twice trying to protect myself.

  Another knock on the door stopped me in my tracks.

  I rushed to the front door and threw it open, looking at the floor and instead of another note, there were a pair of legs, attached to Berk.

  “Berk.”

  He stared back at me with red ringed eyes and I hated myself a little more. And that was why I was in this mess in the first place. I hated that I couldn’t be the perfect daughter my mother wanted. I hated that I couldn’t keep the family together as my dad would’ve wanted. And I hated myself so much that I’d shoved Berk straight out the door when all he’d ever been was amazing to me. He’d made me feel like I mattered from our first handshake with a wide smile that made my heart gallop in my chest.