Page 1 of Letters to Lily

Chapter 1

April 29

I listened foolishly as the robotic voice dashed my dreams again before hanging up. I’d already left numerous voicemails pleading with Kade to call me, because I had something important to discuss with him. I dropped my phone into my lap and let the tears fall where they may. Apparently, our argument had been bigger than I thought.

“Sasha?” My roommate, Kristin, pushed her way into my bedroom. I guess my weeping wasn’t as silent as I thought. No, I realized now that I had been sobbing, loudly. “Honey, what’s going on? I’ve never seen you like this before.” She pushed my usually curly fringe of bangs back off my face and out of my eyes. The moisture they’d soaked up from the tears cascading down my face made them stick to the sides of my head. “Should I call Kade for you?”

A half-choked sob escaped me as I hit redial on my phone and pressed the speaker button so she could hear. Her eyes widened with understanding as she pushed the end call button. “Maybe he just turned his phone off for a while so he could think about how to handle things? You know how guys are when you disrupt their bro-code. Hell, he’s been attached at the hip to Jason since high school.” Kristin’s bright smile, framed by her golden-spun hair and bright blue eyes, made her look like an angel. Maybe she was acting as my guardian angel this morning, keeping me from breaking my own heart.

“Yeah, well he was attached to me long before that,” I huffed out indignantly. The tears started up again when I thought about the possibility that Kade might choose staying with Jason over me, and what would that say about us, really?

As much as I needed to tell him my news, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do that until I heard his answer to our living situation. We had argued the night before about my moving in with him, because he wanted me to move in with not just him, but his roommate too. I told him I couldn’t do that. After all, I had a roommate I was living with as well, and I had known her just as long as he had Jason. If I was okay with telling her I wanted to move in with my boyfriend instead, then he should be willing to do the same, right?

Now, I was worried that he felt I’d given him an ultimatum: his friend or me. It really wasn’t like that. I just didn’t think we should start out as a couple, living together, with other roommates involved. That kind of dynamic rarely worked well. I was freaking out more so because our relationship as boyfriend/girlfriend was relatively new still. We’d only been officially dating for three months. I’d known Kade since he moved to Northbrook, North Carolina when we were in the fourth grade. It wasn’t as though we were strangers who just started dating and attempting to live together.

He was the new kid, more aptly described as the cute new boy, when I first met him. The other boys in class didn’t like the fact that the girls were fawning all over him. They were complete jerks, and Kade couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t bother trying to tell Kade, because he had a sea of girls around him for the first week he was there. They were asking him all kinds of questions and hoping to be his girlfriend. Personally, I thought most boys were stupid.

That point was proven the day that I punched Johnny Lincoln in the face. I overheard him telling James Beggs and Andy Walker that he was planning on beating Kade up after school. Johnny had a crush on Sarah Beth Conn at the time, and she was the number one girl currently hanging all over a very uncomfortable looking Kade at lunch every day. As luck would have it, Kade had been standing behind me, and heard this nefarious plan too. I didn’t realize he was there until after I punched Johnny and started yelling at him. “That boy has done nothing wrong to you, Johnny Lincoln. Just because Sarah Beth thinks he’s cuter than you, that is no reason to go beating people up. Maybe, if you’d been nice to him, you could have just told him you like her, and he would have pushed her away more than he already does. None of you boys will talk to him, so who else is he supposed to hang out with? That’s right, the girls who won’t leave him alone.”

“I can’t believe you punched me in the nose, Sasha!” Johnny said in a nasally whine, completely missing everything I just pointed out to him. I rolled my eyes and huffed.

“You better not let me hear you laid a single hand on him, or I swear I will punch you in the nose again!” Even though James and Andy were Johnny’s best friends they were both bent over double, laughing their butts off at him as he held his bloody nose. While they were laughing, Johnny’s eyes grew big at something behind me.

When I turned, it was to see half the darn school standing there gawking, but the person at the front of the crowd was none other than the boy I had just defended. The girls looked a little ticked that I had let their ‘secret’ out of the bag, as if they weren’t being completely obvious anyway. Kade had a completely different expression on his face though. If I had to pick a word back then, I suppose it would have been wonder. He was looking at me as though I was something amazing, puzzling, and untouchable all at once. That lasted for about five seconds before he swept me up in a huge hug, planted a sweet kiss on my cheek, and whispered into my ear, “Thanks for being my hero today.”

My legs went wobbly and my heart turned to mush. I hadn’t been crushing on the new boy like all the other girls. I had simply done what needed to be done to get everything back to normal in our little fourth grade world. The joke was on me though, because after that moment, my world was never normal again. Nope. From that moment on, I had a best friend in Kaden Andrew Miller, and we stayed that way right up until the end of fall semester last year, our first year in college, when he started trying to get me to go out with him.

While our dating history was short, my love for him went all the way back to that day when he kissed my cheek and called me his hero. If only he’d felt the same way back then. He didn’t, and I have to say, it was really hard being his friend some of those years in between. I always had it in the back of my mind that he never felt the same about me, so what would happen if we started dating and he decided he still didn’t like me that way? Now, with our argument about living together with his roommate so fresh, and our not having spoken in days, I was beginning to wonder if my worries weren’t a real concern after all.

“It’s okay, honey. You will be just fine. He’ll call. He’s just a dumb boy. Give it time.” Kristin was saying as she rubbed my back.

“Kris…” I sobbed out and couldn’t stop the tears or thick emotion from clogging my throat any longer.

“This isn’t just because of the radio silence is it?” I ran for the bathroom and started tossing up the little bit of food I’d managed to hold down since the night before. Kristin followed me into the bathroom to do the best friend thing and hold my hair up off my neck. I heard her sharp intake of breath and new she’d found it.

“Oh my God! Is this? Sasha…” my name was a whisper on her lips as she picked up the little plastic stick that held my fate. “He doesn’t know?”

“I…” hiccupping through another sob stopped my sentence short. “Just found out, and he… no calls.”

“Tell me you didn’t leave this news on a voicemail or text message?”

“What? No! I just told him I had to talk to him about something important.”

“I thought you said you were being careful. Hell, I thought you said you guys had only…” at my destroyed look she stopped herself short. “… a few times.”

“Our first time,” I whispered through my sobs. “We weren’t very careful, because we had both been drinking. It probably would have never even happened, I mean, we would have never happened, if not for that night…” my voice trailed as I remembered.

“Why can’t more girls be like you, Sash?” Kade whined to me before taking another swig of beer from his cup. His hazel eyes were greener than anything tonight, and they were shining out from his too handsome face as he spoke.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I was slightly offended by his tone, because up until a few hours ago, I had existed in his world solely as his best friend. I was invisible as a “girl”. Well, that wasn’t completely true. He’d been trying for the past few months to get me to take him seriously as more than a friend. I just couldn’t get past all the girls he had paraded around in front of me at the beginning of the previous semester.

“No, it’s just…” he was trashed already, I could tell. I was actually more than a little disappointed by this. His light brown hair was a sexy mess from him running his hands through it all night, and he had light stubble decorating his strong jaw line already. It all added to the drunken sexy aura he had going on as he explained himself. “They all play these games, and you… you’re just genuine, all the damn time. I tried not to like you, because I didn’t want to ruin us.” That both felt good to hear and hurt all at once. He’d purposely tried not to see me as anything more than a friend all these years. I was happy that he valued our friendship, but considering I’d been in love with him forever, it hurt to know he’d never been willing to go there.

I didn’t respond. I just sipped my own drink. Okay, I chugged my own drink to keep from responding. Probably not a good idea either since I wasn’t much of a drinker, and apparently this concoction Kristin had slipped me earlier was all rum with a tiny splash of something else in it for flavor. I shivered as the alcohol burned down my throat. Kade was watching me, and suddenly I felt really self-conscious.

“I’ve always thought you were beautiful,” he offered, and my insides twisted with the words. I was a giant ball of confusion when I was around him on the best of days, but with his admissions to me over the past couple of months it was getting worse. He had been dating pretty much all the girls on campus all of last semester. While he was doing so, he was breaking my heart on a daily basis, because those bitches were vicious and would do horrible things to get me out of the way. Sometimes, they’d even push me away from his side and he either never noticed or didn’t care. Yes, it was frustrating, because he held my heart in his hands and didn’t realize what it did to me every time he had a new skank on his arms, or a new conquest sticking her tongue down his throat in front of me. He had been clueless until one of his male friends pointed it out. Of course, his friend also asked me out on a date in the same breath. That is what ultimately got Kade’s attention.

I swallowed hard, tried to go back to drinking my rum, and realized I had already drained my cup. He took it and set it aside on the counter. Then his lips were on mine. I was immediately engulfed by the spicy scent of whatever body wash he used, the beer he’d been drinking, and something else that was all Kade. The first touch of his lips to mine was a gentle, small, and tentative move. My hands found their way to his hips in order to steady my trembling legs, and I suppose he took that as his cue to ramp things up a notch.

---