28. Cass
CASS
PLAYLIST: WRECKING BALL – MILEY CYRUS
My mind doesn’t catch up to what Addy just said. I stare at her as I repeat the words in my mind.
She was in love with someone else.
“How do you know?” I hear myself ask.
“Lilian,” I say. “Elise planned everything.”
I shake my head.
No.
No.
This is not really happening.
Addy grasps my shoulders.
“Breathe and walk to the car,” she says.
“There is a letter for you from Elise in the truck. I haven’t read it.
It’s yours, and yours alone. You will read it, and if you want to run, you’ll take the truck and get home, wherever you think that is,” she says with such a beautiful smile on her face and watery eyes.
“However, if you decide to stay, I’ll wait here for you. ”
Part of me wants to run to the truck.
A part of me wants to never leave.
She kisses my forehead.
“Go,” she says.
I am scared.
Scared that if I go, I might wreck down the world behind me.
A letter.
From Elise.
She was in love with someone else.
“Tell me to stay,” I whisper. My breathing flattens.
“No, I won’t,” she says. “Because if it were reversed, and that letter was from Hailey, I’d run to it.”
I stare at her, frozen to the spot.
“Go,” she says again. “Run. And if you decide to come back, I promise you I'll be here.”
My breathing is erratic.
I can’t.
How can I walk away from a woman like her?
How can I put a ghost before her?
How can I even think—
She mouths I love you.
I look into those blue eyes for just one moment.
Then I turn.
I walk.
Then run.
Run to the truck and rip open the door.
There it is, waiting for me as if it had always been there.
I grab it.
Sit down in the truck.
Stare at it.
She was in love with someone else.
My fingers tremble.
I unfold the paper.
My love,
This is the fifteenth time I've tried to write this letter, and I am nowhere near getting it right. There is so much I want to tell you, so I’m gonna start by saying I am sitting here in a house so beautiful you can’t comprehend, in the middle of pure nature, green grass and the ocean right in front of me.
Although your New York City ass would probably suffocate from too much clean air.
I can literally hear her dry humor resonating through me as if it were yesterday when I last heard her tell me that I am not meant for everything outside of New York.
We got lost upstate because she “knew a shortcut”.
The memory of her laughing her rich laughter as we stood in absolute darkness and nothingness somewhere in the Adirondacks with just the moonlight falling onto us.
A stabbing pain in my chest thinking about it.
Anyway. I tried to find the right words, but I don’t have them, because I know I will rip out your heart twice. Because I broke our promise. And I broke it in ways that made me the happiest person on this planet.
I fell in love.
I love.
I love so heart-wide open it feels like I am losing my mind.
Her name is Amy. She has the most radiant smile. She’s also fucking badass. You would love her. She saved me from drowning and made me feel again; can you believe that? She made me fucking cry.
I promised myself never to have feelings again.
I broke that promise to myself.
I broke the promise to you. To love only you.
But turns out, you can love more than just one person, and it changes absolutely nothing.
Love is endless.
I know I broke our other promise too. Because what I am doing is something I have to do by myself. For myself.
I know you will hate me, but you can’t hate me more than I hate myself. And yet, between all this hate, there is just love.
Endless love.
I never stopped loving you, and I never will.
You were my first love. You will always be my first love. And Amy…Amy is my last.
Uncontrollable tears run down my cheeks at this point.
I hope you won’t do anything fucking stupid.
Meh. I know you will; you are one hell of a mentally unstable and overly reactive idiot.
A teary smirk steals its way onto my face as I read the line.
Whatever you do, I need you to know that I never stopped loving you. And I won’t ever. I will be here, watching over you. And I want you to get so fucking happy that I can hear your laugh through all five dimensions.
My tears blop onto the letter, because this letter is so Elise. It’s like she is sitting next to me right now, playfully rolling her eyes at me.
I know you will curse at me for telling you this, but yes, your mom sucked. She fucking walked out on you for a man and money. But just because she walked out on you doesn’t mean everyone will walk out on you.
Yeah, little hypocrite, you’ll think right now, because I walked out on you, too. I’m a selfish bitch, you know that. And I chose me. But I also learned one thing:
You can’t walk away from the real thing. You will know when it’s real. And when you know, you can’t walk away.
Ride or die,
Elise
The amount of tears that stream down my face by now is unreal.
“I hate you,” I say through the sobs that follow the tears. “I hate you and love you at the same time.”
My eyes shoot up as if she laughs at me up there in the sky, and I cry.
I cry and cry and cry.
I cry so much that I am catching up with years of tears that have been swallowed down, drowned in alcohol, and finally silenced by reckless driving.
It doesn’t matter how many times I wipe them away; there are just more coming. Until, eventually, there are just no more tears left. My lips crumble dryly, and my throat is sore as the last tears dry on my cheeks.
I take a deep breath in.
Close my eyes.
And somehow the world that has been crushing me every day ever since doesn’t feel as heavy anymore.
I am sitting in a truck in fucking L.A., and I can breathe again.
I hate warmth.
I hate nature.
I hate being anywhere else but New York.
But I don’t hate being here.
In the middle of nature, on the other side of the country, where it’s always warm, dragged here by Elise’s sister.
You can’t walk away from the real thing. You will know when it’s real. And when you know, you can’t walk away.
A smile appears on my face as I send a prayer from my heart up into the sky.
I am here because I cannot walk away.
I am here because I know it’s real.
I am here because I would lose anything for her.
With that, I put the letter back into the envelope and walk back to the open door leading to the Hollywood sign.
Addy stands in a circle with her family; they have beers in their hands and laugh together. She is telling a story to Lorie, but stops mid-sentence as her eyes meet mine.
A smile on her face.
A smile I will never forget for the rest of my life—shy at first, broadening into that radiant glow with her eyes.
I walk over to her.
She stretches out her hand.
I take it, and she pulls me into her, not asking a single question; she simply continues with her story with Lorie as if nothing had happened.
I love you, I tell her in my mind. And when the time is right, I will say it out loud.