He's young and more than a little stupid so he falls for the pretty girl with the easy smile whose bright blonde hair glitters and shimmers under sparkling lights, all the while ignoring the warning signs that glare before his eyes in bright orange lights.
For graduation, he and his friends head out to Los Angeles because the boys from Boulder, Colorado fancy themselves a bit of California sunshine and soft surf and waves. The pretty girls, model types, actress types, music types, aren't exactly a downside either, and since they're young, more than a little stupid, and more than a little rich (never a good combination), they hit the town and spend a lot of time in a lot of places they really shouldn't be. And so, he finds her.
One night, they head to a club, and he's never been able to remember the name, because he's found that everything that happened that summer tends to blur into a series of long nights spent dancing under the lights, drinking way more than he should, and hooking up with more girls than he should, but the important thing is that he remembers her, that he's never forgotten what she looked like that night.
He's standing at the bar, ordering another round of drinks for him and his friends, when he spots her across a crowded room, across a sea of people, moving and dancing to the rhythm that allows them to forget there's a world outside this star-studded, brightly lit haven for the rich and famous. She dances, laughing with her partner as he pulls her close, blonde hair cascading around her shoulders and moving to the rhythm of her quaking shoulders, hazel eyes dancing more gracefully than her feet.
The bartender shakes him out of his reverie as he slides the drinks toward him and shoves a hand toward him, waiting for his pay. Steve somehow manages to find his wallet and pull out the money even as his mind slips away toward a blonde girl with the prettiest eyes in the world. When he turns around, she's gone, disappeared into the crowd, and he wonders if, maybe, she'd never been there at all. After all, perfect girls with perfect eyes and perfect laughs shouldn't exist in this world, and God knows he's had more than a little to drink.
As per usual, he and his friends, Craig and Danny, wake up hungover, and that morning, he gets sent on the coffee run so he manages to throw on the first clothes he finds on the floor of their hotel suite and shuffle out the door. That morning his head aches, and even the light ding of the elevator as it reaches its destination makes him wince, and the soft lights glowing gently in the hotel hallway burn brighter than stage lights. He's not really sure why they're doing this. Sure, the clubhopping is fun, and so is exploring all the different bars, but it's gotten to the point where each and every place seems the same, and he's not really sure any of their escapades are worth the hangovers, headaches, and vomit. He'll stick around though, because it's Craig and Danny, and they've kind of been friends since the third grade.
He walks through the door of the little coffee shop just across the street from their hotel, and when the bells hanging off the doorknob ring to announce his arrival, he's tempted to rip the damn bells of the door and throw them into the street just so he can watch them get crushed under the wheels of some car rushing by (everything seems to move just a little faster in Los Angeles). For whatever reason, whether it's because he's a mature adult with self-restraint (unlikely) or because he's just too damn lazy (more likely), he leaves the bells in their place and simply slips into the long line of people already waiting for their morning coffee.
The woman in front of him has long blonde hair, and if he bothered to pay attention, he would realize the hair's the same shade as the blonde's of last night. He doesn't though, so he stands in line, scanning the menu he already knows by heart. He looks up from the menu and sees the blonde shifting on her feet, and she ends up taking a couple steps backward, and he winces as she steps on his toes. It makes him want to scream, because his head is pounding over the sounds of cheerfully chatting people, the whirring of coffee machines, chairs scraping against the linoleum floors. She turns around though, and it doesn't fix everything, but it does make his day a whole hell of a lot better.
The girl that he missed by the tips of his fingers is standing right in front of his very eyes, embarrassed smile etched across her face.
"Sorry 'bout that," she says extending a hand and a smile toward him, "My name's Leslie."
And as she smiles at him, blue eyes bright and eager, smile stretching across her face, he doesn't notice much else. Truthfully, he fails to notice the things he should, the things that could have saved both of them.
He's eighteen, and she's twenty.
She soon realizes that he's much younger than her in all the ways that count.
It's not that he's inexperienced that way (he's definitely not). It's just that he and his friends are the very picture of kids raised with the proverbial silver spoon held to their lips. Some days, when she sees the way they throw around money like the rest of the Los Angeles socialites, she can't help but hate them a little (not hate him so much, because she could never do that, but hate people like him who have never had to work for anything).
She just looks at him sometimes and catches a glimpse into his worry-free life and smiles as he looks at all Los Angeles has to offer with starry eyes because he's never known anything like this. When that happens, she remembers that he's the kid whose spent his whole life in Boulder, Colorado, and she's the woman who grew up in the part of Los Angeles that didn't glow and shine under the light of a thousand man-made stars.
She loves him... so much, but he's just so idealistic, so unaware of how the real world works outside his little sheltered bubble. It's too damn easy to lie to him, and it kills her that he doesn't see her lies, doesn't call her on them, doesn't see that she's on the brink of self-destruction, doesn't see enough to save her, because she wants to be better for him. He never sees it because he's young and naive so he doesn't notice just how paper-thin each of her smiles are (the ones she forces just for him so she can fit into the pretty, little rose-tinted world he's painted for himself), and maybe, it's her fault. After all, she just keeps lying, because she can't stop, because lying is all she's known her entire life, because she can't bring herself to shatter the illusion and let it all fall into a million tiny pieces that won't ever be recovered.
She never lets him into her world, the world where she's the beautiful yet broken and forgotten doll that sits on a shelf out of sight and out of mind.
For him, she's just the beautiful girl who smiles (forced smiles) and laughs (fake laughs) and caresses (soft and true) and kisses (passionate and loving, and somehow the only thing that's true).
He never realizes, until it's too late, that she needs a hero.
He gives her the world.
Or he tries, anyway.
Somehow, a summer romance that started with a gaze across a crowded, darkened room (for him) and a coffee shop that smelled soft and warm like slowly roasted coffee beans (for her) become a whole hell of a lot more.
He pulls her into his world, the world where everything is perfect and shining (especially her), and for whatever reason, even though she knows this world of his isn't real, knows that his world can't possibly exist, she lets him. She's his princess, and he's her prince clad in Armani working for a degree in business at USC. She never quite forgets that the world, no matter what he likes to think, isn't this beautiful and wondrous place full of beauty and love. She never quite forgets that the world she comes from is so unbelievably different than the little world that he and his friends get to ensconce themselves in.
It's beautiful though, whatever this thing between them is, and it stays beautiful and perfect until that first December in Los Angeles.
It doesn't snow, because it's Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is never anything but rays of sunshine glowing against the perfect blue backdrop of the sky. The air's a little colder, though, and the warm summer breezes have a little more bite so the cold, on rare occasions seeps into her bones. No one pays the weather much heed though, because it still looks perfect, and isn't that what really matters?
As it turns out, the truth somehow manages to worm itself into Los Angeles even though with the lights and the brightly shining stars, one would think that Los Angeles was immune to such inconveniences. As it turns out, it's not, and more importantly, Los Angeles is not immune to tragedy.
Craig dies.
The day after finals.
Overdoses.
On a mix of Vicodin and alcohol.
When she rifles through the contents of purse later that night when she's alone (she thought she shouldn't intrude on Steve and Danny's pain), after Danny and Steve have called Craig's parents and their own in a panic from the emergency room, after they've had to call Craig's parents with the news of their son's death, after they've dealt with all the stuff one has to deal with after one's friend dies in a tragic accident, she rummages through her purse, searching for a way to numb the pain only to come up empty. The little white bottle filled with little pills is gone.
She lets out one sob, one strangled sob, because she's hurt Steve in the worst way possible, and he doesn't even know it.
That night is hell, and all he can remember is the sound of sirens piercing through the loud thud of bass music as ambulances rush toward them, and the rest is all a blur of flashing lights, white tile floors, phone calls, tears, and saying their last good-byes, and then there's a funeral, a funeral for a guy who barely turned eighteen four months ago, and it's just all sorts of tragic.
It's Christmas, and at a time when the rest of the world remembers a life, they mourn a death, and Steve wishes, not for the first time, that things could be different.
He stands at the funeral, beside the coffin, refusing to shiver even as the cold Colorado winds bite through the fabric of his suit.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Craig's mom and younger sister crying, and he almost falls apart, because they've already lost too much. They lost Craig's father two years ago, and Steve can still remember Leah, gripping her crying brother's hand tightly as she stared straight ahead, the only evidence of her distress the unshed tears gathering in her eyes.
She's crying now, and he can't help but feel responsible.
She slips back into her own world and out of his, because she's pretty sure this is the way it's supposed to be. Rich boys, she thinks, don't marry poor girls. They may love them, may love them more than the world (like she's sure Steve loves her), but they don't marry them, because it goes against some unwritten law (sometimes written law) of the universe. Like attracts like, and they each stand on opposite sides of the spectrum, so apart she often wonders how on earth their paths cross. Then, she remembers a quiet summer morning in a coffee shop and thinks that maybe, rules are made to be broken.
More often than not though, she's sure she doesn't belong in his life and that Craig's death is the universe's cosmic way of sending her a message so she effortlessly slips back into the world she came from, the world of dingy bars and guys with wandering eyes and grabby hands.
She hates it, but she walks back to it, and it welcomes her back with open arms, and he's not there to be the light of the tunnel, because she won't let him.
She waits tables and puts up with sleazy men hiding away from the world and their wives, and Duncan, the bartender, slips her vodka or whiskey, and she revels in the sensation of the liquid burning its way down her throat, chasing down smooth, slick pills. This is her world.
He refuses to let it go, though.
He keeps calling, and the phone just keeps ringing, and he leaves a million messages on her machine, his voice thick and scratchy on the tape, but she can't quite bring herself to go back to him, because he's broken and she's broken, and two broken people can't possibly make a whole.
But she misses him.
So, so much.
So when he shows up at her apartment one afternoon while she's sleeping off a hangover, she cries, and he wraps her up in his arms and kisses her until it doesn't hurt so much anymore, and she decides that maybe, he can be her world.
She goes back to him.
They're doomed (she's read it in the stars), but they both cling on, holding each other tighter than before, because even though they both know it has to end, they don't have the strength to be without each other, because broken people can't stand alone any more than they can stand together.
He takes her to Florence and watches her fall in love with a city, a history, and a culture, and he wishes they could stay forever, ensconced in Italy on the banks of the River Arno.
One night, he walks out into the room with a freshly chilled bottle of champagne and spots her standing on the balcony, moonlight bathing tan skin and blonde hair in silver light and smiles gently when he catches sight of the wedding ring on her slim finger, and he wonders why his family doesn't get it, doesn't see why he loves her.
He thinks she's beautiful, and though he doesn't know it, more often than not, she thinks she's far from it.
They leave Florence.
They leave Italy.
They leave magic and beauty.
They return to the real world, and she watches him throw himself into work, because he's a Tanner, and she's come to realize that means certain things to his family and the rest of the world. It means he stands to one day inherit a business empire. It means people tend to bow down at his feet like he's a god while she wonders why people can't see how human he is. It means he has a thousand social obligations, which she also attends, wearing pretty dresses and pretty jewelry, because she's apparently the trophy wife.
She hates it all and thinks that he, on some level, hates it all to, because she can't fathom that the guy she met one magical summer in Los Angeles would enjoy the endless cocktail parties, galas, and charity dinners.
She remembers mornings running through the park on Saturday mornings and forcing him to watch Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles, and most importantly, she remembers watching him break and realizing that he, just like her, could crash and burn and break.
His wife gives him a beautiful baby girl, and he almost can't believe that a chance meeting in a coffee shop has culminated in this, a perfect little girl that they'll raise and cherish and love forever.
He looks at her, looks at his baby girl and smiles, thinking they all have forever together.
She has a little girl, a perfect life, but old habits... die hard, and like she has so many times before, she slips back into the old trap.
She just... she feels so alone when he's at work and even when they attend all those parties and events and she wonders how she can feel so alone when she never gets a moment to breathe, when there's always someone or something there.
She thinks she hates herself as she revels in the burn of alcohol slipping down her throat and the sensation of sleek pills forcing themselves down her throat as her daughter sleeps upstairs and Steve sleeps a thousand miles from home so that he can give his wife and daughter the world.
She can't stop though.
She's never been able to stop and never will.
He finds out at Christmas, discovers her transgressions.
He finds her passed out on the living room floor, empty glass of vodka and container of prescription pills in hand. He doesn't say anything, just picks her up in his arms and takes her up to their bedroom and tucks her underneath the sheets.
He doesn't sleep in their room that night, steals away to one of the many guest bedrooms in the cavernous house.
The next morning, he says nothing and neither does he. They eat breakfast in silence, and he catches the furtive glances she sends him from underneath her eyelashes.
This, though he doesn't know it then, is the beginning of the end.
It's Christmas Eve, two weeks after Lauren's fifth birthday, and as the cold winds blow, a mix of water and slushy snow falls from the sky, and the roads are slick, but he drives carefully, because he's nothing, if not careful.
As he approaches his driveway, his stomach sinks, and all he can see is rain and snow falling down in a haze of red and blue as the lights illuminate the water drops hanging in the air and the sharp sound of sirens pierces the air.
And then, he spots his daughter on the front steps, alone and crying, and that's when he knows it's over, because he loves her, loves his daughter more than the world and won't let Leslie hurt her, no matter how much he loved her.
He only half listens as the paramedic tells him how his baby girl found her mother passed out on the cold tile floors of the bathroom and called 911. He doesn't hear any of it, because he's stuck, stuck in memories of what could've been as he wonders where it all went wrong.
It ends in a blaze of lights and cold wind and it's not what anyone ever dreamed of. It's not romantic kisses at sunset or a love for the ages.
And weeks later, in precise black print on white paper, he signs his name on the dotted line and she does too.
They move on.
She runs.
He builds a life with his daughter on a bed of lies.
It's not a fairytale.
It's life.