Page 44 of Letters to Lily

Kade (to Brad): Meet me at my place, ASAP, man. It’s an emergency.

I re-read through some of the journals trying to gage how Sasha felt about Brad. There really wasn’t anything in there directly stating that she loved him or was in love with him, but what she did write made it obvious that she cared. I wondered what Brad was going to say when I told him that I was the dickwad he’d been railing about for months. I am the jerk that left that perfect woman here alone and pregnant. FUCK!

My phone buzzed and I picked it up thinking it might be Brad telling me he was delayed for some reason. “Please,” Jenn’s pleading voice came through the phone.

“I’m expecting a call,” I said.

“I just need to see you and make everything right.”

“I’m about to be a father and never knew. You knew for months and didn’t tell me. How can you make that right?”

“She wrote that you had to know by now. I thought maybe you just didn’t care.”

“You thought I didn’t care? You watched me in torment over that girl, and you stuck around anyway. You thought I wouldn’t care about my own baby? And you still wanted to be with me? I’m having a really hard time believing that shit.”

“People give babies up for adoption all the time,” she offered as a weak argument.

“You listened to me tell you about Sasha. There’s no way you can honestly sit there and say I wouldn’t have cared about a baby considering how much I care about her.” Silence came from the other end of the line. “Jenn?” I called her name softly.

“Yeah, baby?” The hopeful sound in her voice made me want to punch something.

“Don’t ever call me again!” I hung up without waiting on a response. I didn’t need one.

I still hadn’t heard back from Brad, so I tucked into my bed and tried to memorize every damn word she’d written in the journal. I even re-read the letter I had written to her that she had tucked in the pages. It was the one I wrote to her when I was finally ready to pull my head out of my ass and give us a real try.

She didn’t make it easy on me either. After I gave it to her, she made me sweat it out for two weeks before she responded to me. In that time, I had to watch her go on a damn date with Mason too. I seriously didn’t think I would make it through that. More importantly, I didn’t think Mason was going to make it through. I was ready to kill him. The night they went out on their date, towards the end of November last year, I had waited at her apartment for them to return like the stalker I was.

I was in the parking lot, in my little Honda, when I watched them pull up. He was a complete gentleman, got out, opened her door for her, and helped her out of the car. Meanwhile I wanted to punch him in the face for doing all those things, but only because I wished it was me doing them with her.

He walked her up the three flights of stairs to the landing outside of her apartment as I watched. The building juts out a bit, forming an alcove after you get off the stairs between the door of her apartment and where the rest of the building meets the stairwell. Once they stepped close enough to her door to have the wall in the way, I wasn’t able to see what went down. I didn’t exactly want to torture myself with watching another man kissing her, but I did need to know if he was truly going to be competition, because there was no way I was giving up.

A few minutes later, Mason was down the stairs and getting in his car. I hadn’t even realized I was out of my car and standing beside him until he spoke.

“Wondering how our good night kiss went?” He asked with a hint of laughter in his voice. My fist balled up at my side, and the look on my face must have told him he was about to walk into a huge pile of shit if he continued taunting me. So, to my surprise, he didn’t. He let his shoulders fall and then did the one thing I’d never expect from another dude where a girl was concerned. He offered me advice.

“Look, normally, I would say to the victor goes the spoils, but I really like Sasha on a deep, personal level.” He saw me twitching again and laughed. “Calm your tits, man. Just listen. I mean that girl is too good for words. She's too good for me, and certainly way too fucking good for the likes of you. But for some reason, she is head over heels in love with you, and I don’t think there’s a person alive that can compete with the ghost of that love in her life. Then, there’s the fact that you’re waiting at the end of her dates to beat the shit out of the guy.” He chuckles again. “She’s in love with you. It was painfully obvious to see when you were hanging on every damn bitch in school in front of her. You hurt her though. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the only guy two steps away from beating your ass over that shit. I get that you have your reasons and she had hers for how things went down. I don’t need to know the details.” He sighed.

“What I am going to do instead, is tell you that if you want her to take you seriously, you need to work for it. It shouldn’t just be about sending her one day of flowers and a letter delivered in embarrassingly public ways. That girl is all about the personal, which is something you should know about her considering how long you guys have been hanging out. Show her in ways that count, that you’re serious, and don’t fucking give up, because the minute you do is the minute you lose her to some other schmuck like me.” He winked at me, then got in his car, and took off without another word.

There I stood, schooled by my best friend’s date on how to win her over. I probably should have been humbled by the fact that he was bowing out of the race before it ever even got started, but then again, maybe he had been smart enough to realize the race began a long time ago. I was the idiot who didn’t realize I was in it to begin with. I fell asleep at some point, despite all the thoughts of our past that rattled around in my head as I did so.

Chapter 19

Oct. 29

Sasha? What’s wrong?” Kristin asked the minute I walked through the door. I started blubbering out the story of what just happened at the diner, but I was sobbing too hard for her to understand, because she stopped me with hands firmly gripping my shoulders. “Breathe!” She pulled me close. “That’s it, just breathe. Give yourself a minute, and then you can tell me all about it, okay?”

I nodded my head against her shoulder and tried to calm myself as she guided us both over to the couch. “I saw him today,” I choked out.

“You saw who today?” She asked before thinking and then added, “Oh. Are you sure? I’m not trying to be funny, but you kept thinking he was Jeep guy.”

“He is Jeep guy, Kris. I saw him at the diner with his arms wrapped around that waitress. They looked…” the emotion literally knocked me over. “Happy.”

“Oh no, I’m so sorry, Sasha.” She pulled me to her again and held on tight. “Wait, the waitress?” I nodded. “The nosey one that used to read over your shoulder and ask you questions like, ‘Kade is a really unusual name,’ that waitress?”

“Yeah, her.”

“Son of a bitch. She knew this whole time, I bet. Do you think she ever told him about you?”

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