Red cup lifted to her lips, Cassidy drained the last few dregs of her beer, slamming the cup down on a table as she watched Slater come into view. Rolling her eyes, she lifted a perfectly manicured hand, a perk of her new side hustle, reaching for a new cup. She feigned indifference, but bumping into him as she was working on saturday had left Cassidy shaken a little. This new secret between them making her feel closer to him, like she owed him something. She hated it. He was currently the only other person who knew about what she did, unless they happened to have come across it. She raised an eyebrow, taking a sip of her drink. “Well? Is there something I can help you with? Or are you just gonna stare?”
(based on that one letter also i'm cryinh bc i didn't know how to finish it also i edited before posting just now but im on mobile so ill be around to interact in a while when i get on my laptop ok nbye)
Dear Amelia,
I’m really bad with words, did you ever notice that? I shouldn’t waste my time here, considering I can’t write much, and I don’t even know where to begin but I’m gonna do my best. All I ever wanted was to be good for you— to you, but instead, I mistreated you and you never deserved that. If I could, I’d take it back and start all over, but I’d do it right; I’d love you the way I always have, but was never capable of showing. I was 15 when we met, I’m 24 now, but only for one more night and then I’ll die; maybe not tomorrow, but it’s coming soon; and I’ve loved you since. I knew from the first moment that I caught you from the corner of my eye giggling in class, that I would love you so long as I lived. It sucks that I was never able to show that to you, to earn your trust again and show you that I did change, despite all of the negativity in my life. I was willing to change for you, and I did, but you never gave me a second chance and I don’t blame you. I only hope that, if there is an afterlife of some some sort out there, we’ll meet again. I love you.
Her fingers began to shake first, and though she clenched the paper tightly within her trembling fists, nothing stopped it from twitching like the last leaf fighting to remain on a tree in autumn. Before she knew it she was half way down the road without an umbrella. Her hair was soon plastered to her face and though she'd prefer to scream at them all, Amelia took the sympathetic and strange looks from passing drivers without protest. She stared sullenly at the ground her whole way home, and after what seemed like the longest walk of her life, she reached the steps to her apartment.
She was sitting, then, against the nearest wall she could find with a convulsing piece of paper clenched in her small fists and a face stained with tears, rain, and makeup; the quickly written words had already dampened in the rainy walk over and the letters were all bleeding or blurred together until they meant nothing, or at least appeared to. The cell phone that had somehow found itself cradled between her shoulder and ear clamored to the ground as the line went dead. The only person she could think to call was dead. In fact, at this point everyone and everything seemed to be dead, or getting there.
Dead.
It was such an ugly word, a disgusting one and Amelia was left wondering how she could ever accept something so cruel as that. Every form and variation of it now sickened her; death, departed, dying, dead. How could Slater Keelty be dead? Her Slater? As her eyes searched the paper for a shred of sense that was once written, her brain was filled with thoughts as quickly as if a bucket of water had been poured over top of her and she remembered. Amelia remembered everything from their terrible fights to when they'd first said "I love you," she remembered when the things he whispered to her made her swoon like a little girl, and when the words they yelled to each other broke them down all at once.
What they'd known would happen for 25 years came crashing into her at full speed, and what she'd neglected to realize since Naomi's death was that she couldn't have prepared herself for it again even if she tried. It was now, as she sat in a hallway, soaked head to toe in rain, that what she'd been accepting all along came back to hit her. Hard.
