Charlotte's Story

I'm Here For You

Ryder's POV:

She steps into the office with two towels, one for her and one for me.

We stare at each other as she hands me the towel.

My hand falls on the desk; I'm touched that it is still sitting in her upscale condo. The desk had character with scratches and scruffs on it.

"I kept it," she said, her face dropping down, her eyes falling on the desk, her hand falls on the top of the desk as she strokes the top of it. What I wouldn't do to have her hands on me like that. She stops stroking the desk and peeks at me through her eyelashes. "Why are you here?" she asks.

I want to say: "I'm here for you, and I never gave up on the idea of you." But I know if I say these words, there are no going back, no taking them back in, and knowing her they would be on her blog within the hour. If she could have just had some censorship.

But I knew that the ladies loved me, helping the blog out with readers. "Oh my gosh," a girl said, walking by me a month after I knew everything. She whispered to her friend, and her friend looked over at me. "Are you Ryder Constanso?" The girl had asked me; I was outside of a club smoking a cigarette. This was during one of my many drinking sprees. Around the Portland area, I had become a local celebrity.

"Well, yes I am," I slurred my words.

The girl walked over, a smile spread on her face, and then her hand connected to my face. "This is for Charlotte, you pig." Her friend, whose eyes had gone big, watched the whole thing before stepping up to me. "Do you know how much pain she is in?"

I laughed, calling them both inappropriate words. They gawked at me; before they turned away, they said, "she is better without you."

No... I was better without her, or so I thought.

I turned, walking out of the condo, not knowing what I should say or what I can say.

I came for the answers I needed; there was still that electricity running from me to Ren. I believed it would never be gone, that it would always be there as long as Ren and I lived.

Besides the crazy psycho girls who recognized my picture from Ren's blog, there were the crazy in love with me ones.

One had gone down to tracking my address down; I was living at Josh's house at this time. There was a knock on the door; I opened it without looking through the peephole; standing outside the door was a girl the same height as Ren; she had a trench coat on and nothing on below it. She had stepped in, saying my name. "Ryder," she squealed, and I wonder how many apartment doors she knocked on before finding me.

Luke passed through the living room to the kitchen when the girl dropped her trench coat, revealing her body in the nude. "Um, no," I said, running forward and tying the trench coat back around her.

Ren had turned my life upside down within a matter of weeks.

It was a little hard to forgive, but was I a jackass by not getting over it?