05 • address
I couldn't believe my own eyes. Because what they were seeing was that my friend was in bed with Bentley and Blaise had already known about it beforehand. Which not only meant Rachel was into girls and never told me, but that Bentley and Blaise hadn't been together.
And that I had made a terrible mistake.
"Lottie," Rachel finally yelled, snapping me from out of my reverie. "Are you just going to stand there or what?"
Of course, snapping me out of it meant that I finally acknowledged that the two of them were doing a lot more than just kissing and that I was seeing a lot more than I had asked to - especially since I never asked for any of it. I gasped, spinning around and closing the door behind me as fast as I could.
When the sight, but sadly not the memory of seeing my best friend naked in bed with her secret lover had faded, I leaned up against the wall, allowing myself to heave out a sigh. I was still terribly confused, but I had all of the answers to the questions I was really asking.
Were Blaise and Bentley a thing? No, thanks to my friend Rachel who could've told me that from the moment she knew that I knew her as Blaise's friend. But I understood the complications behind it, so that was neither here nor there.
Was Blaise being honest with me through all of this? I had no other reason to assume he wasn't. Maybe there was history, but that was only there because it couldn't go away as much as we wanted it to. Because what started as us reliving our history turned into us starting anew with each other, into the two of us turning the tides of the wave we had been caught in.
Had I made a terrible mistake? I most definitely had. It was a mistake on all fronts even. Because I somehow let the past catch up to me while I was living in the present with Blaise. I had listened to some idiot jocks spreading rumors instead of him because I knew just how possible it was. That was the Blaise I knew from so long ago, the type of guy who turned my life upside down just by being in it. But now, things were the opposite, and every moment since I had sent him away felt like I was engulfed in the flames of the bridge I had burned.
Was there any going back?
Was there?
I guess I didn't have all the answers after all.
♕ ♕ ♕
Hayley squealed with pleasure and excitement, in fact, she had been doing so for about half an hour now. The news that Rachel finally had someone in her life - well, besides us - was the only thing she really cared about after all. The bisexual bombshell she had hit us with was definitely just that, a bombshell after knowing her for so long but not knowing that fact, but it was still great news.
Of course, it had changed nothing but the fact that I was wrong. I talked to Bentley about it and she agreed with the points that I made - basically calling me jealous and crazy to my face, which I took because she apparently knew him better than I did and I got it if they were both mad at me - and that I should make it up to him. After my rejection, he had went out to drink with some friends, so she told me to wait until the morning to find him.
So that was how I ended up on the doorstep of Blaise's dorm room. I had been knocking for a few minutes, and there was still no response, but I stayed put. I wasn't giving up on him - not now, and hopefully not ever.
Finally the door opened up halfway, Blaise's roommate dragging his feet on his way out, dressed in only a towel, likely on his way to the vending machine based on how hungover he looked. I wanted to stop him because I was pretty sure he had no money with him, but he was just too naked for me right now.
"Hey," I heard Blaise say from the door, unusually cheery, making me turn to face him again. "Do you want to come in, Lottie?"
I was feeling about a hundred different things right now, with stubbornness as one of them but I was fine with my pride not being intact for the time being if my relationship with Blaise could be intact instead. I nodded to say yes.
"This is it, mi casa nuevo," Blaise said as he held the door open for me to enter, a smile on his face that made me wish I hadn't done so. But I took the first step already and at this point, there was no going back. Which was funny, because there was plenty of going back as far as he was concerned and he had a terrifying knack for having things the way he wanted to have them, but I dared not to comment on that fact when he had come back into my life and invited me into his home. Maybe it wasn't something I should've been accepting with open arms, but my heart took it and ran with it, declaring war on my mind and at this point, I couldn't fight it.
So this is what surrender looks like, I thought to myself before I took another step in so I was out of the doorway and actually inside of his dorm.
Of course, Blaise's dorm did not look like surrender, in fact it was strangely immaculate in a way I never saw a guy's house look before. Sure it was a much smaller space, so he had less to manage, but even the tidiest of guys had at least a dirty shirt or two flung over a chair, so to see a spotless house with pristine and clean furniture that belonged to the one and only Blaise Cohen was a shock.
"My humble abode," I heard him say when my mind lapsed back into paying attention to him, "my batcave, where the magic happens -"
"Okay," I said as I raised a hand to stop him, "I get it already. But why are you so excited, Blaise? Aren't you mad at me?"
"I was," he said, sitting down on the bed, "but you're here. And that means you're saying sorry, right?"
I smiled, reaching into my pocket for what I came here to give him. "I have some mail for you," I said.
I held it out to him, an envelope with a letter enclosed, one that I had addressed to him. Blaise took it in his hands, shooting me a look of uncertainty before deciding just to dive straight in and open it up. He made quick work of tearing the sealant on the flap with his finger, opening it and withdrawing the piece of paper inside.
"You wrote me a letter," he asked, finally catching on.
I rolled my eyes. "Just read it, Blaise. It's pretty good, or at least I think so. After all, I was up all night trying to write it for you."
He chuckled, still in disbelief but he kept it to himself and unfolded it in front of me. "Dear Blaise -"
"Well don't read it out loud," I cried, cutting him off from reading it. "No wonder Rachel calls you Blaise the Bastard."
"Hopefully she wasn't calling me that when she got together with my friend," he said, placing a hand on his hip. "And no, I think I deserve to read this out loud, Lottie. Especially if it's as good as you tell me it is."
"Fine," I said, sitting down on one of the armchairs he had in his room. "Just don't eviscerate me if it's not as good as I thought it was after all. I just don't want to disappoint you."
Blaise chuckled lowly. "I know that's not going to happen."
I felt a blush rise to my cheeks, but I ignored it, more concerned about how he felt towards my letter, whether it was good enough or not.
"Dear Blaise," he started all over again, "you and I know each other a lot better than we seem to think we do. Why else would we keep finding our way back to each other? It seems that's because deep down, we both get the feeling that this is going to work this time, that if we do everything differently and take good care of the details, then we won't slip up again. And time after time, we get it wrong, but we know we have to keep trying to make it work. We just haven't been trying it the right way.
"When you came back around this time, not one of us had even willed it to be. No, in fact, you came crashing back into my life yet somehow you made no noise when you came in. You and I had somehow moved into the same floor of the same building, and we somehow had the most incompetent mail deliverer who somehow tied our fates back together. We didn't need grand gestures or fighting our way back to each other this time. And that was just how it should be.
"This time, I definitely was the main one who screwed up, but in my mind I had been so used to our old ways and I couldn't help but fall back into those ideas. But you and I both now know that this experience made us better and stronger together, that we belong together. So I want to apologize for how I doubted you as well as us, but also to tell you this time we're playing for keeps. Besides post office, I think that's a much better game to play. Love, Lottie."
Blaise looked up at me, his eyes wide with confusion, his cheeks reddened to the color of an apple. "Wow," he said, "you really wrote all of this? For me?"
I nodded, my lips spreading into a grin. "Yes, Blaise. I want this, I want you. And I'm sick and tired of letting things get in the way of that."
He quickly crossed the room to me, his long legs shortening the time it took for him before stopping in front of me. He dropped his hand down to pull me up. "I would very much like that, but there's still one last thing left to do."
I frowned, concerned as to what in the world he was talking about. So I simply asked him, "what are you talking about?"
"It's the rules of the game, Lottie," he said. "You brought me a letter, so in exchange, I have to kiss you."
And just like that, he kissed me. Hard and fast, his lips met with mine and it felt like I was floating. Like there was no air beneath me and he was holding me up. His lips were warm as they collided with mine, caution be damned, as if everything was leading up to this.
For me, there was a part deep down that was caught completely by surprise, a part of me that held onto the past like religion and couldn't see past our history but the taste of his lips and the feeling of his hands moving down the small of my back shut her up. Some terrible things had definitely happened between us, but that was then and this was now. We were young, we would learn, sooner or later.
So my arms snaked their way around his neck, pulling us closer together so I could reciprocate his actions. I could remember back on Thanksgiving break what I had thought to myself, that like history, we were bound to repeat ourselves. It had honestly sounded like doom and gloom back then, but we had come to that point and we were better than ever now.
He broke apart from me, pulling his t-shirt over his head before crashing our lips back together. I used my displaced hands to unbutton my shirt as he did so, pulling it off frantically because I knew what happened next. And because of that, I was terribly excited.
"Is the door closed," I heard Blaise murmur against my lips between kisses, his voice glazed with pleasure and anticipation, clearly just as ready as I was.
I smiled. "Yes, I think so." I actually wasn't sure if the door was closed or not, but I wasn't exactly concerned about that. That's because history was being made and remade right before our eyes and this time for better, not for worse.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
♕ THE END ♕