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Jun 27

Let the Light In |17|

Tara Carpenter x Female Reader

Chapter Seventeen: Letters and Long Distances

summary: after days of silence, you show up at the door with an envelope and a quick exit — and tara is left to read what couldn't be said out loud.

warnings: emotional vulnerability, references to prescription medication, brief anxiety, implied sexual content (referenced, not depicted)

note(s): new 'with her i die' chapter coming very soon.

taglist: @t-wylia @lesbianpepsi @jennasfav @alyciaddict @justafoolinlove @steffido1993 @niqmandu @severelyuniquereview @darklron @ravenousinferno @smut-religiously777 @beautifulmongerbanditsalad @vanatalye @morganismspam23

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The buzzer made a sound like an animal dying.

You'd forgotten how dramatic it was—this single, strangled note that vibrated through the whole entryway of Tara's building, like the building itself was personally offended someone wanted in. You stood there with the envelope in your hand, watching the little intercom light flicker, and thought, with total sincerity, this could still not happen.

It happened.

"Yeah?" Sam's voice, tinny through the speaker.

"It's, uh." You cleared your throat. "It's me. Y/N."

A pause that felt longer than it probably was.

"Come up."

The door buzzed and clicked, and you pushed it open before you could think too hard about it, because thinking too hard about it was exactly how you'd ended up standing outside this building for eleven minutes already, rehearsing a speech you already knew you weren't going to give.

The envelope was getting soft at the corners from how tightly you were holding it.

By the time you reached Tara's floor, Sam was already in the doorway. Arms crossed. Not hostile, exactly—Sam Carpenter didn't really do hostile, not toward you, not anymore—but there was a particular stillness to her that made you feel like you were being assessed by airport security.

"Hey," you said.

"Hey." Sam's eyes flicked to the envelope in your hand, then back to your face. She didn't ask about it. "She's in her room."

"Right. Cool. Thanks." You shifted your weight. "Is she—"

"She's fine," Sam said, in a tone that suggested fine was doing a lot of structural work in that sentence. "Door's open."

You nodded and slid past her into the apartment, very aware of Sam's eyes on the back of your head the entire walk down the hallway. Dook watched you from the arm of the couch with the profound disinterest of a creature who had seen this exact scene play out before and found it tedious.

Tara's door was, in fact, open. A few inches. Enough that you could see a sliver of her room—the corner of her desk, a stack of books, one socked foot hanging off the edge of the bed.

You knocked anyway. Soft, with one knuckle.

"What," Tara said. Not unkindly. Just—flat. Tired in a way that made something in your chest twist.

"It's me."

A pause. Then the creak of the mattress, footsteps, and the door swung open the rest of the way. Tara stood there in an oversized hoodie—yours, you registered distantly, the one she'd stolen weeks ago and never given back—hair pulled up messily, looking like she'd spent the better part of two days in this room and had only recently remembered that other rooms existed.

She looked at you. Then at the envelope. Then back at you.

"Hi," she said, carefully.

"Hi."

Neither of you moved for a second.

"Can I—" You gestured vaguely past her, toward the room, toward anywhere that wasn't a doorway with Sam's presence radiating from somewhere down the hall like a low-grade weather system.

"Yeah." Tara stepped back, let you in, and closed the door most of the way—not all the way, because some habits ran deeper than current circumstances, but enough.

You stood in the middle of her room. The envelope felt enormous in your hand, like it had its own gravitational pull, like everyone in a three-block radius could probably see it.

"So," Tara said.

"So."

"You're here."

"I'm here." You looked around her room like it might offer you something useful—a script, an exit, anything. Dook's collar, hanging off her desk chair. The rabbit-shaped water stain on the wall. None of it helped. "I, um. I wanted to—okay, here's the thing."

Tara waited. She had her arms crossed loosely, not defensive exactly, more like she was bracing for something without knowing what shape it would take.

"I've been trying to figure out how to say some stuff," you said. "Like, actual stuff. Real stuff. And I had this whole—I had a plan, actually, I had a whole thing I was gonna say, and I practiced it, which is embarrassing to admit, I practiced an entire speech in my bathroom mirror like a lunatic—"

"Y/N."

"—and every single time I tried to actually say it, like, out loud, to a person, to you, specifically, my brain just—" You made a gesture with your free hand, something between an explosion and a shrug. "Short circuits. Just completely. Every time. So."

You held out the envelope.

Tara looked at it. Didn't take it immediately.

"What is it?"

"It's the speech," you said. "Sort of. It's—I wrote it down. Because apparently that's the only way I can actually get through it without my brain doing the thing where it just goes static." You pushed it toward her another inch. "It's not, like, a big dramatic thing. I just—I needed to say some stuff and I can't say it, so I wrote it, and I figured if I wrote it I could actually give it to you instead of, like, chickening out for the fortieth time."

Tara reached out, slowly, and took the envelope. Her fingers brushed yours for half a second—you both noticed it, you were sure of that, the way her gaze flickered down and then back up.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay." You exhaled. Looked at the door. Looked back at her. "I'm gonna go now."

"You're gonna—what?"

"I can't be here when you read it," you said, and the honesty of it surprised even you, the way it just fell out without your permission. "I tried to think about it and I just—I can't. I'll spiral. I'll watch your face do something and try to interpret it in real time and it'll be a disaster, so I'm gonna—" You gestured at the door again. "I'm gonna go. But—"

You stopped.

Tara was looking at you, envelope held loosely in both hands, an expression on her face you couldn't entirely read—somewhere between confusion and something gentler, something that made you want to leave even faster before it could fully resolve into whatever it was becoming.

"But what?" she said, quiet.

"Just—" You swallowed. "Read it whenever. No rush. And then, um." You looked at the floor, then back up, because you'd come this far. "Call me. When you're done. Okay?"

Tara's grip on the envelope tightened slightly. "Okay."

"Okay." You nodded, once, like that settled something, and turned toward the door before your nerve could finish dissolving entirely. You paused with your hand on the frame. Looked back at her.

"For what it's worth," you said, "I'm glad it's you."

You didn't wait to see what she did with that. You let yourself out, said a slightly too-fast goodbye to Sam on your way past—who gave you a look that you didn't have the bandwidth to decode—and were down the stairs and out onto the street before you let yourself breathe properly for the first time in twenty minutes.

Tara stood in the middle of her room holding the envelope like it might detonate.

For what it's worth, I'm glad it's you.

"Unbelievable," she said, to no one. To Dook, who had wandered in through the gap in the door and was now surveying the scene from the foot of her bed with mild curiosity. "Do you believe this? She just—she drops that, and then she leaves. Who does that?"

Dook didn't seem to have an opinion.

"That's so—" Tara dropped onto her bed, envelope still in hand, and glared at it like it had personally wronged her. "That is the most Y/N thing I have ever— she can't even— she writes a whole letter because she can't talk, and then she can't even be there when I read it, and then right as she's leaving she just casually drops 'I'm glad it's you' like that's a normal thing to say and then walks out the door—"

She flopped backward onto her pillows, holding the envelope above her face, scowling at it.

"You absolute coward," she told it. "You absolute, certified—"

She rolled her eyes. Scoffed, audibly, at the ceiling.

"'I'm glad it's you,'" she repeated, in a mocking imitation of your voice that wasn't actually very accurate but made her feel slightly better anyway. "Just gonna—just gonna say that. And leave. What am I supposed to do with that, Y/N? What am I supposed to—"

Dook climbed into her lap, apparently unmoved by the monologue, and began kneading at her stomach with single-minded focus.

Tara sighed. Looked at the envelope again.

It had her name on the front. Just Tara, in your handwriting—the same blocky, slightly-too-careful print you used for everything, the kind of handwriting that looked like it had been taught discipline at some point and never fully forgiven for it.

She turned it over. The flap wasn't sealed, just tucked.

"Okay," she said, mostly to herself. "Okay, fine. Let's see what the big mystery is."

She opened it.

Tara,

Okay so. I wrote and rewrote this like six times, so if it's weird in places that's why. Also I'm aware this may be a poor way to communicate with someone you're—whatever we are. I know. I'm aware. Bear with me.

I'm not going to explain everything. I think you know that, and I think you're not going to ask, which—thank you. But I also don't want to just... not say anything. Because that's what I usually do, and I think the not-saying-anything is part of what's been making this so weird. So here's some stuff. Not everything. But some stuff.

The medication thing. I've been on it for a while. Longer than you'd probably guess. And the part I never really talk about—the part I don't think I've ever said out loud to anyone, actually, not even Henry, not even my mom—is that sometimes I don't know which thoughts are mine.

Like. I'll feel something—anxious, or sad, or just this flat nothing—and I won't be able to tell if that's just me, like, my actual personality, the way I'd feel regardless, or if it's a side effect, or if it's the thing the medication is supposed to be treating poking through anyway, or if it's withdrawal from missing a dose, or if it's just a Tuesday. And there's no way to know. There's no test for "is this me." You just have to sit there and feel the thing and not know whose feeling it is.

It's been like that for a long time. Long enough that I stopped really noticing it as strange. It just became background noise—this low hum of "is this real, is this mine, would I feel this anyway." I got good at ignoring it. I got good at a lot of things by ignoring them, honestly.

I'm not telling you this so you feel bad, or so you treat me differently, or so you start, like, monitoring me or whatever. I really don't want that. I just—you know now. About the bottles. And I didn't want there to be this thing where you knew something and I knew you knew and we both just kept walking around it like it was furniture. That's worse. I've done that before, with other people, and it's worse.

So. That's some of it. Not all of it. But some.

Anyway. Call me when you're done reading this. I'll be around.

—Y/N

Tara read it twice.

The second time, she read it slower—not because the words were complicated, but because she found herself stopping at certain ones, going back, turning them over.

Is this mine.

Sometimes I don't know which thoughts are mine.

She set the letter down on her chest and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Dook had given up on the kneading and curled into a loaf against her hip, purring in the low, steady way that meant he'd decided she wasn't going anywhere.

She thought about the cabinet. The bottles, slightly out of place, the names she'd recognized from Sam's medicine cabinet years ago. She thought about every time she'd seen you go quiet in a room full of people—not sad, exactly, just elsewhere, like part of you had stepped out and left the rest behind to keep up appearances. She thought about the nightmares Anika had mentioned once, off-hand, the bad weeks in winter that always seemed to track with something Tara had never quite been able to place.

She thought about you, sitting on a bathroom floor at some point, at some unknown hour, trying to figure out if the thing you were feeling belonged to you.

"Christ," Tara said quietly, to the ceiling, to Dook, to no one.

She picked the letter back up. Read the part about I'm not telling you this so you feel bad again, and felt bad anyway, in a different way than she suspected you'd been worried about—not pity, not the kind of bad that made people awkward and careful and distant. Just—an ache. A specific, located ache, for every version of you that had sat with that low hum of is this real and never told anyone, because telling people felt like handing them a weapon.

And then you'd handed it to her. In an envelope. While fleeing the scene.

Tara let out a short laugh, mostly at herself, mostly fond.

"God," she said. "Okay."

She sat up. Reached for her phone.

------

It rang twice before you picked up.

"Hey," you said. Your voice had a specific quality to it—too casual, the kind of careful-casual that meant you'd probably been staring at your phone for the last however-many minutes, willing it to either ring or not ring, you couldn't decide which.

"Hey," Tara said.

A pause. The kind of pause that, on any other day, with any other people, might have been awkward. It wasn't, exactly. It was just—full. Loaded with the specific weight of two people who'd just exchanged something neither of them had words for yet.

"So," you said.

"So." Tara picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. "Cool cool."

A small laugh, disbelieving. "'Cool cool'?"

"I said it once."

"It sounded like twice."

"It was one word, repeated for emphasis. That's different."

"That's not a real distinction, Tara."

"It's a very real distinction."

"Okay," you said, clearly grinning now, "noted. 'Cool cool' is your thing now. I'm gonna bring it up forever."

"You absolutely will not."

"I absolutely will. It's on record."

"There's no official record."

"There's an official record now."

Tara rolled her eyes, but the smile won out anyway, tugging at the corner of her mouth even though you couldn't see it. "Can we circle back to the fact that you handed me a letter and then left?"

"We can circle back to that, sure. Briefly. And then we can circle away from it again, ideally forever."

"Forever's a long time."

"I'm an optimist."

Tara huffed out something that was almost a laugh. "You're really not, though."

"No," you agreed. "But it sounded good."

The line went quiet for a beat—not heavy, just settling, the kind of pause that came after the hard part had already happened and both of you were figuring out how to stand in the space after it.

"Thank you," Tara said, finally. Simple. Quiet. "For telling me. I know that wasn't—I know it wasn't easy."

"Yeah, well." You exhaled. "It's done now. So."

"So," Tara echoed, and let it be enough.

"For the record," you added, after a second, your voice dropping slightly, losing some of its performative ease, "I meant it. The thing I said before I left."

"I know," Tara said. "I meant it too. For what that's worth."

"It's worth a lot, actually."

"Good."

Another pause, softer this time—both of you sitting in it, neither one rushing to fill it.

"So," Tara said again, eventually. "What are you doing tonight?"

"Currently? Lying on my floor, recovering from emotional exposure."

"You're on the floor?"

"It felt appropriate."

"Get off the floor."

"I'm comfortable."

"You're being dramatic."

"I contain multitudes." A pause, and you could hear the shift in your own voice—lighter, but not fully steady, like you were testing the ground before putting your full weight on it. "You wanna come over?"

"Yeah," Tara said, immediately. Then, like she needed to dial it back a half-step: "I mean—yeah. If that's okay."

"It's okay."

"Okay." Tara was already up, scanning her room for shoes, for her jacket. "I'll bring snacks."

"You don't have to—"

"I'm bringing snacks, it's not a debate."

"Fine. Bring snacks. I'll see what I can scrounge for a movie."

"Anything but documentaries"

"Noted. Anything but documentaries." A pause. "What about DEBS?"

"...DEBS?"

"We didn't get through much of it last time, 'cause we—" you stopped.

"Distracted," Tara finished, and you could hear the grin even through the phone.

"That's one word for it."

"It's the accurate word."

"Sure. Okay. DEBS, then. We'll see how far we get this time."

"Statistically," Tara said, "not far."

"Statistically," you agreed, "yeah."

Tara laughed—a real one, short and warm, and something in her chest loosened that had been tight for days. "Okay. I'm coming over. Give me, like, fifteen minutes."

"Take your time."

"See you soon."

Tara hung up. Sat there for a second, phone still in her hand, looking at the dark screen, feeling lighter than she had in days—not lighter like the weight was gone, exactly, but lighter like she'd finally set part of it down somewhere she trusted to hold it.

The letter was still on her bed, folded back along its original creases. She picked it up, looked at it once more, and tucked it carefully into the drawer of her nightstand—the one she kept things in. Important things. Things that mattered.

Then she grabbed her jacket off the back of her chair and headed out into the apartment, already half-distracted, already thinking about snacks and Debs and the specific, familiar warmth of your couch.

Sam looked up from the kitchen counter as Tara passed, takeout containers from the night before still drying in the rack. "Going out?"

"Y/N's," Tara said, not stopping, already reaching for her keys by the door.

"Mm." Sam went back to her book, then added, without looking up, like it was the most casual thing in the world: "Text me if you're staying over."

Tara paused with her hand on the doorknob.

A week ago—a few days ago, even—that sentence would've landed differently. She would've heard something underneath it that wasn't there, gotten defensive about a thing nobody had accused her of, made it bigger and sharper than it needed to be because that was easier than just—being seen.

She didn't do any of that now.

"Yeah," Tara said. "I will."

Sam glanced up at that—just briefly, just enough to catch the difference, the absence of an edge that was usually there. She didn't comment on it. Just nodded, small and easy, and went back to her book.

"Tell her I said hi," Sam added, as Tara opened the door.

"Will do."

The door closed behind her, and Tara stood in the hallway for a second, keys in hand, feeling something settle into place that she didn't have a name for yet—except that it felt like the opposite of bracing. Like she wasn't holding her breath anymore.

She headed for the stairs.

#tara carpenter x reader #tara carpenter x you #tara carpenter #tara carpenter x y/n #jenna ortega x reader #let the light in au

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