the other side of us | ✓

1.26 | me without you

Mason felt as if his stomach had moved into his chest cavity as he pulled up in front of Charlotte's building that morning. His legs felt heavy, and Mason wanted nothing more than to turn around and avoid this entire situation. He looked at Gemma sitting next to him in the car, her eyes glazed over as they had been for the past two weeks.

               He looked down at the envelope in his hand, knowing that it was the wrong thing to do. That there were other ways to handle this situation, but unable to force himself to do the right thing.

It had been two weeks since his sister had—

               He couldn't bring himself to think about it.

               Somehow, Mason forced himself out of the truck, slipping the letter into the mail slot on her door.

               And then he got back into the driver's seat, closing the door softly before driving away from the love of his life.

***

Charlotte stared at the note in front of her, blinking in disbelief. It was Mason's handwriting, something that she knew nearly as well as her own by this point, but the words that he'd written didn't make any sense to her.

Charlotte,

I love you.

I'm sorry.

Mason

It didn't make sense.

What did he mean sorry?

He loved her?

Charlotte hastily pulled out her phone and tried to call him, but the call didn't go through. She hurled her phone into her purse and grabbed her keys, not bothering to slip into a jacket.

Something was wrong, she knew it.

She drove to Mason's house with a knot in her stomach, barely taking time to follow the traffic laws.

He wouldn't leave her with no warning. He wouldn't. This was Mason. He'd promised that he'd take care of her, that he wouldn't hurt her like her mom had.

He had promised.

I love you.

I'm sorry.

Yet his apartment was empty.

The door was unlocked and Charlotte let herself in. Everything was gone. The bowl of lemons that sat on the coffee table, the couch, Tara's tests that used to hang on the fridge. Charlotte went room to room, finding each as barren as the last.

She didn't want to believe it.

I love you.

I'm sorry.

He hadn't left her like her mother had. That he wasn't just gone. Not when she lo—

No.

Charlotte leaned against the door and slid to the ground, the pressure on her chest too much for her to handle. She scrubbed angrily at the tears that threatened to slip from the corners of her eyes.

She would not fall apart here.

And so, she mustered her strength and walked back to her car on shaky legs, her head already pounding.

*

Charlotte stayed in bed for the rest of the week, and she would have stayed in longer had it not been for graduation. Even though she felt like she was falling into the pit of despair, she still needed to worry about her future.

Mason had disappeared without a trace, and the time had the nerve to continue on.

The morning of graduation was bright and sunny, the complete opposite of how Charlotte was feeling at that moment. Her shower was rushed, the product of waking up late.

But Charlotte couldn't rush her makeup. Over the course of her self-imposed hibernation, Charlotte had completely forgone any sort of skin care routine that she'd had going, which had left her face a greasy and lifeless mess with gigantic dark circles to match her mood. She painstakingly applied foundation and eyeliner in an attempt to make it look like she'd spent the past week enjoying the time off school rather than holed up under her bed covers with the most recent season of Grey's Anatomy and a tub of ice cream.

Self-pity at its finest.

"Lottie?" her dad asked tentatively through the door. "Almost ready?"

Chief Evans hadn't known how to take his daughter's behavior. He knew that Mason was gone, and he wanted to kill him for it, but his daughter had never gone through a heartbreak before. She'd hidden in her room and barely come out for meals. It had freaked him out, and he was honestly surprised that she was coming to her graduation at all.

"Ready," Charlotte replied, swinging the door open and stepping out.

The drive to the park where the graduation was being held was strangely pleasant. Charlotte got the feeling that her father was waiting for her to snap and lose it, but she was grateful. They hadn't had a calm moment together the entire time that she'd been with Mason. It was refreshing.

Then they drove past his street, and Charlotte saw his building. And she came crashing back to reality.

Charlotte sighed loudly, and Chief Evans furrowed his brows but said nothing as Charlotte turned the radio up.

She would not cry.

Maybe if her life had been like those romance novels that Devin was addicted to, it would have worked out. Mason would have told her where he was going and why he was leaving, and they would've been happy together. But this was real life. And sometimes opposites don't attract. Sometimes they bounced off each other and hit the ground hard.

But Charlotte didn't have time to pick up the broken pieces of her love life right now. She'd mourned, but now it was time to get back to normal.

She had a business to run, and this wasn't going to stop her.

—
Part two will begin uploads tomorrow!!