Hi there! It's been a while, huh? I found this piece tucked away on my laptop when I was trying to find inspiration for my unfinished stories. (Or rather I was procrastinating like crazy and by chance stumbled across this).
It's a little Leyton piece, an admittedly short Leyton piece. It's a bit of a strange one for me, not a story but more of a scene. I just kind of liked it, rereading it over the weekend, I hope you do too.
[To anyone reading What If This Storm Ends or Snapshots, I am working on them, I promise. Life just keeps on getting in my way. Then, when I do have a little time, I really struggle with the stories or the flow or the characters being in character, always something. I very much endeavor to give a lot of attention to What If This Storm Ends because I've had the ending in sight from day one. Snapshots is an ongoing adventure and I have a couple of things lined up, I need to fine tune though.]
Anyway, on with the show...
She didn't realise that he used the incredible room adjacent to the bar as his damn office.
If she'd known that, if she'd realised the heightened possibility of running into him at the club, she never would've allowed herself to step inside. But curiosity and nostalgia had got better of her and it had been impossible for her to walk past that club; the one that has always had so much magic and possibility wrapped within it.
She knew that he still ran the place in his mother's absence but she hadn't counted on him actually being there. She hadn't expected for him to be working late; trying to write in the room besides what must have earlier been a crowded, noisy bar.
Only now she finds herself stood opposite him. Staring back at his cool blue shocked gaze with only stammerings of nothing on her lips.
He looks good. He looks damn good in fact. She hates that it's the first thought she has about him.
Six years wrestling with the heartache of what the hell happened in that hotel room and instead of hate she feels attraction. She curses Lucas Scott and his never failing ability to steal away any grasp she has over her emotions.
"You're," He begins uncertainly in a low voice, "…here."
There's surprise and apprehension in his voice. At least she had the upper hand in knowing that there was a slither of a chance that their paths may cross whilst she's in town. He didn't even know that she was home.
"I'm here." She nods. She doesn't want to elaborate. He doesn't deserve the explanation anyway.
He leans back in the doorway of his office and exhales largely, "It's been, what, six years? Why come back now?"
She doesn't want to talk about it. She didn't mean to run into him on the first night being back. She just went for a walk and ended up here.
"No, I'm curious," He continues, "I don't hear from you for six years and now you're back, just like that."
She rolls her eyes largely and he scoffs.
"Unannounced too. You could have at least warned me; told Brooke or Haley to tell me you were coming." He says, "A little unfair, don't you think?"
"Unfair?" She feels her blood rising, running into him was the worst possible thing that could have happened tonight. She points her finger angrily at him and steps towards him, "You want to know what's unfair? What's unfair is-, oh you know what, it doesn't matter."
His brow arches, "It doesn't matter?"
"No." She says coolly, her eyes moving everywhere but towards him. She's in his office now, she definitely didn't mean to step inside. She tries not to notice anything but it all leaps out at her; there's a framed cover of Ravens, family photographs scattered around - one of him in a suit stood beside his blushing bride. She forces her eyes away.
"Why are you here, Peyton?" He asks, his voice icy and cold. "I thought you were happy in LA."
She grits her teeth, "I am happy."
He arches his brow, "No offence, but you don't look it."
"Present circumstances excluded." She hisses back, her arms hugged tightly around her waist. "Look, I need to go."
She moves towards the door to go and almost at the say time Lucas goes to speak before thinking better of it.
She turns her head over her shoulder and narrows her eyes at him, "Is there something that you want to say?"
"You're not wearing a ring." Her eyes fall to her bare left hand. Quickly she covers it with her right and her eyes snap back to his questioning gaze.
"No," The word lingers in the air as though it belonged to a sentence or an explanation. It wasn't intended as a single syllable denial, and both of them know.
His brow arches and the corners of his mouth curve ever so slightly at the edges, "You never,"
"No." She snaps. This time it's clear there are no lost words to follow.
Lucas holds up his hands as he shakes his head at her short outburst of irritation. He steps back and falls into his desk chair. That irritates the hell out of her. As though he's ending that chapter of their conversation with his smug little victory over the fact that she and Julian never married. The fact is that he knows nothing about it. Nothing at all. Yet he still pockets that nugget like a priceless treasure.
"Marriage isn't the be all and end all." She says. She hates that she's justifying her actions to him. She doesn't have to. He didn't even push her for an explanation but she's already on the defensive with a hundred different reasonings on the edge of her lips.
"No," He agrees. "I am curious though,"
Her emerald eyes revolve slowly. He's always been this way. Curious and questioning. Everything needs a reason and a logical basis. That's something he never could get his head around with her. She was always more spontaneous, acted with more abandon and damned the consequences. He could never stand for pointless actions.
"Did you turn him down too? Or did he never ask?" There's the mild hint of arrogance mixed with the slight edge of doubt in his voice. She knows that he wants to hear that she turned Julian down too. It's for his ego she supposes but the truth won't change the fact that Lucas walked away and Julian stuck by her.
She falls onto the couch that's sat along one wall. She feels the natural dip of the cushioning in the centre of the seat. It's where he lies and closes his eyes when he's feeling uninspired. She knows that somehow.
Lucas looks on at her expectantly, "He did ask you…didn't he?"
Her eyes hood, "No. He didn't. We discussed it once."
He scoffs at the answer, as she knew he would. "How romantic."
"You wanna know what's romantic?" She shoots back, "Him sticking to his promises to never leave me. Him standing by my side through everything. And him creating a wonderful family with me. That's a hell of a lot more romantic than waking up to a rejected mix-CD in a hotel room."
"You said no!" Lucas rises to his feet then sighs and flops back down. The botched proposal was years ago. A whole other life time almost. Almost.
Silence falls heavily over the room. Neither of them can quite believe that after all this time they're finally falling into this conversation. She's purposely avoided her home town all this time for that very reason; the fear of going over that heart-wrenching event. He's locked the memory away and labelled it as a minor incident in the hope that one day he'll believe that's all it was. For now though it still is the most magnificent of life spinning moments that threw them away from each other.
"I said someday." She corrects in a low murmur, almost as though she doesn't want him to hear.
He scoffs. Again. "Either you wanted to marry me or you didn't. I wasn't asking when I was asking will."
"Don't you dare patronise me." Her voice quivers with the crashing emotion that's plummeting through her. "Don't make out like I'm the only one who made a mistake."
"A mistake?" He returns quickly. Something within him rockets, as though he's on a tip of a revelation. Maybe all this time she's been wishing that she said yes.
She curses her choice of word and his ability to catch every trip of vocabulary she's ever made.
Except for the only time it ever counted. He didn't catch it when she said someday. He heard no.
Her hand grips onto the arm of the couch and she can see her knuckles whitening with the force of the action. "I'm not saying I'd change the outcome but I'd play it differently."
"Play it?" He echoes coldly. It's his marriage proposal she's comparing to a game.
"Would you stop picking apart my words and throwing them back at me? You know damn well what I mean." She rages.
He huffs under his breath but she catches it as he expected her to. She throws him a look that he imagines that she gives to her children when they act out.
"So you never wanted to marry me?" Lucas asks in as even a tone he can manage.
Peyton sighs, "That isn't what I said, Luke."
"Someday." He says hurriedly, "But did you mean that?"
He watches as a flash of hurt dances over her features. It's the distrust he harbours that hurts the most, as though she ever could have lied to him. Their relationship had faults, she's the first to admit but she was never dishonest with him. He meant so much more to her than that. And she'd thought that he knew that fact.
"Of course I meant that." Her voice is tired. Going over the past and pulling at points and reasons is exhausting.
"Then how could you let it end like that?" His tone is new. He's a little hurt, ever curious but mostly reflective.
Peyton pulls to her feet and shakes her head. Her blonde curls bob with every motion and movement. "It's late, I should be,"
She reaches for her purse as he stands and rounds the desk. He's not letting her leave on that note and she's fully aware of it. Yet she still makes the motions to leave. It's almost as though she wants him to take her by the wrist and pull her back into the memory.
"Peyt, please." His deep blue orbs beg to her.
She lets a simple short sigh escape her lips and inclines her head slightly to confirm that she's staying. Her purse hits the hardwood floor with a thud that's as heavy as her stare.
"I need a drink." She announces, pulling open the sliding door that connects his office to the club she opened with his mother.
Maybe it's for a momentary escape or plain Dutch courage for what's to come, Lucas doesn't know but he can't help from watching her do it.
She crosses to the bar and slips behind the counter, finding her preferred bourbon instantly. It happens to be his too. She sets two glasses out but pours for only one.
Lucas leans up against the doorway and stares as she indulges in that first, lone drink. She winces slightly but it's such a collected action that few would notice the set of her delicate jaw line or the tiny flicker of her eyelid. He does though. He recognises it from her younger days when the burn was harsher on her throat. She would grit her teeth and moan involuntary as her lashes trembled together.
"Do we really have to do this tonight?" She asks. It's been a long day.
"Haven't we put this off for long enough?" He returns simply.
She collects the bottle and glasses in her hand and clicks her way back to the office, "What is this, closure?"
She expects his scoff again but he just sighs, "Maybe."
"Now? You want closure now? This happened when we were kids." She states. Since then he's married another girl.
"We weren't kids." He argues. There were, of course, but it was more than a lust-filled sweetheart romance.
She questions him with his eyes, "It was a High School relationship."
"It was more." He wrote a whole damn book about it. It wasn't just another girl meets boy scenario. There was heart and weight and an almost unexplainable pull of incredible chemistry they both felt.
"Can we move this along?" She requests, setting the glasses on his desk and pouring them each a measure of the amber liquid.
He takes the offering from her extended hand and sips at the familiar drink, "Okay, so what happened?"
Absently she runs her fingers along the mismatched books of one of the numerous shelves of his office. The irony doesn't escape her when she reaches Ravens.
"Why did you still go ahead and publish it?" She asks, staring at the spine.
"I asked first."
Her lip curls into an unavoidable pout. "Fine. What happened. I was over-worked, feeling like I was failing at my dream and I was incredibly homesick. Then you turned up with a proposal in your pocket and I wasn't ready. I don't regret saying someday for a second. And don't you dare make me feel like I should either. I wasn't ready, not a chance in hell. I was still trying to find myself and we were divided by an entire country,"
"I get the picture of why you wouldn't let me put a ring on your finger." Lucas closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall.
"Perhaps." She counters, mainly because she knows that it'll irritate him. "But do you have the first idea of how it felt for me to wake up the next morning with my whole life in pieces, only to find that you'd skipped off to New York?"
Peyton sniffs and a part of Lucas feels bad for bringing this mess up again. It's clear that neither of them are over the events that passed that day.
"I had to pick myself up. I had no idea of what the hell else to do. I went to work and revolved the whole thing over and over. I was a complete catastrophe that day. The thing I couldn't get over was that you just left. What we had – what I thought we were – was so enormous, so epic and unparalleled but so easily extinguished. That's what killed me, Luke. The fact that you could walk away so quickly, so fucking brashly, as though none of it meant a damn. That's what killed me."
"You don't think it killed me when you rejected my proposal?" Lucas snaps defensively.
"No." She says quietly, "I don't."
His eyes storm at her apparent mind-reading ability that is so far from the truth that it actually hurts him. "Well it did, no matter whatever you may have convinced yourself."
"Are you surprised?" She questions, "You jumped on a plane and hung out with Brooke. But don't make this about me getting the wrong idea about your intentions or what happened that night; I know why you sped away to New York. You went because she had read your book. You were getting published."
"That was my dream, Peyton. I worked for that." He says stiffly.
Peyton's long fingers tug at the book in question, freeing it from its literary neighbours. "This book haunted me for so long."
She flicks through the pages, surprised to see annotations in his handwriting. On the page she's memorised by heart there are so many scrawls of his looping untidy writing that the words are barely legible any more.
"You could have told me you know." She says lightly, "You could have had the decency to warn me."
He sighs, conceding to the fact that in this instance he was in the wrong. He should have told her that their story was going to be printed for all the world to see. "I thought Brooke would have."
Peyton brings the back of her hand to her eye, "You exposed us, me, and you didn't even let me know it was going to happen!"
"I'm sorry." He shakes his head. He can't think of anything else to say to her.
"It's done." Peyton says with a roll of her eyes, abruptly calling an end to the conversation. Or the argument, depending on which way she chooses to look at it.
Lucas deflates at her easy dismissal of the subject. If she were still mad about it, he could safely assume that it still meant something…that she still cared.
"I can't wait to explain this book to the kids." She says through a gentle laugh.
The mention of her family causes a skip in Lucas' heartbeat. It's the casual reminder that the future Ravens alluded to will never be.
"Like Julian will let them see a copy." His voice is bitter, ugly and sour.
Peyton clucks her tongue in annoyance, "He's not like that."
Lucas doubts it. "What kind of guy would allow his kids to read all about their Mom's old boyfriend?"
"Julian." She answers defiantly. "It's in the past. He's not going to get insecure about them knowing about you. Plus he appreciates good art."
"He's read it?" Lucas splutters. He doesn't like that.
She shrugs, "It was a New York Best Seller, Luke, it's kind of readily available."
She skips the part about Julian finding her numerous copies in a box under their bed.
Lucas watches as she sips her whiskey and drinks in his words as her eyes fall over the pages of their book. He can't claim it to be his book, not when she was the inspiration, the motivation, the subject, the story and the dream. It's never been his book. It's always been theirs.
For a moment he imagines that this is their life. Her sneaking into his office when she knows he should be working, teasing him away with that liquor and those legs. They always were a fatal combination.
It's ridiculous, he knows. Just a few blocks away his wife is waiting for him. From where he's stood now though, it feels as though she could be a whole ocean apart from him, the distance feels that great.
"I still don't get it." Peyton says, absently running her thumb through the pages of the book that will forever bind them, "How could you publish it so soon after…after us?"
He doesn't have the answer to that question, not really. It wasn't a conscious decision on his part. He just got caught in the rollercoaster of bad timing. It was hard to go over and over his account of their young relationship following the break-up but a part of his tortured soul found it reflective and therapeutic.
"It wasn't a light decision, it wasn't impetuous," He begins.
"You've never been impetuous." She cuts in.
He wants to argue but there's no point when her eyes are storming like they are right now.
Instead he just sighs and shrugs, "They were words that I crafted, feelings I believed in. Those moments and events I'd written about didn't lose their meaning. They were still things I wanted to tell the world."
Her eyes pierce him and she swallows down the rest of her drink, "You wanted the world to know 'The realization that we had always been meant for each other and every instinct to the contrary had simply been a denial of the following truth. I was now and would always be in love with Peyton Sawyer.'?"
He turns away from her to stare at the frame on the wall celebrating his best seller achievement. "Maybe I wanted you to know that."
She runs her fingers through her long curls. Whatever answer she'd been expecting, she wasn't sure that she liked what she'd just heard. It was sweet and romantic but that just made everything all the more tragic.
"Obviously you've read it." He says, noticing that she didn't have to read from the page to quote his words, "So I take it that you didn't feel the same way."
"No, I did." She admits. It's a bold statement and she likes the way it hits him in the same way his comment knocked her down. "I was still so in love with you. And I read those words and I believed that you felt the same."
"You know you could have done something about that." He points out.
"And you couldn't?"
They both roll over their actions once more. Every time they went to dial the other's number. The words he wrote to her but never let her read. The music she descended into, darker and more powerful than any she'd known before.
"I came to your book signing, in LA." She admits after the silence grows too uncomfortable between them.
The snap of his gaze is quick.
A sad soft smile runs to her lips as the tears build in her eye. "And you were there. With her. I saw a kiss between you two and I swear my heart shattered right there in that moment. You gave me hope and I still believed in us. But we were gone."
"We weren't. I wasn't with Lindsey then." He argues pathetically.
"No?" The tremble in her voice runs right through him, "Sure looked like it from where I was stood."
"Peyt," He reaches for her hand but she snaps it away, "It wasn't like that. I've been on so many tours, they all blur into one, except that one. I remember everything about that day, because I spent the whole time waiting to see your face in the crowd."
"What was the point of this?" Peyton questions icily, blinking away the tears. "I have to go."
She slams her glass down ferociously onto his desk. He sees it as a typical show of Peyton Sawyer anger but really she hadn't intended the force at all.
Shards fly in every direction, skittering across the floor and over pages of his notebooks. It glistens in the light, twinkling like a thousand teardrops spread over his words.
"Don't move." He instructs. She's wearing ridiculous shoes; he doesn't trust the soles to protect her feet from a sharp splinter.
She gasps and he takes it to be delayed shock. Then he watches as she uncurls her clenched fist and a single fragment of sharp pointed glass falls to the floor.
Instinctively he grabs for a shirt that's slung over the back of the couch. He strides towards where she's clutching her hand to her chest, the sound of crisp crunching glass echoes beneath his feet. The beat of his heart quickens as he sees the trail of crimson red snaking quickly down her wrist.
They don't speak. They don't need to supply the words. It's always been the most natural of things. It's as easy and familiar to them as breathing. Him saving her.
She waits patiently as he binds a makeshift bandage around her hand. He works swiftly but affectionately. Not that she ever could've doubted that he would. When he finishes he strokes her arm lightly.
They both find themselves staring to the floor. Between them lies Ravens splayed open on the floor amongst the smashed glass and the few drops of her scarlet blood that they both notice.
Their eyes lock and the empty space between them is filled by the broken possibilities once at their fingertips. Now those dreams, of that life, are just whispers than run between their shared sapphire-emerald gaze.
"You should get that looked at." Lucas says, the first to snap out of his memories. "I'll go with you."
"You don't have to," But she knows he will. It's late, she can hardly call Julian, he's with the kids.
Lucas just grabs their coats and her purse. She stands rooted to the spot for a moment before he wraps a cautious arm around her waist and guides her out of the room.
"Luke," She stops and he turns to her at the sound of the pet name she always preferred to call him by.
His eyes fall to her and she can read the urgency within them. She knows that he's fighting with everything he's got to stop and listen. All he wants to do is get her to the emergency room.
"We never got married, me and Julian." She swallows and he knows she's about to share a secret she never thought she'd tell anyone, "He wanted to, but I couldn't. I just…I couldn't. It wasn't a question of love because I love him with all of my heart and we have the most wonderful life,"
"I know." He nods. It was unfair of him to ever ask that question of her; why she never married Julian.
Her eyes spark with tears again and neither of them feels any unease when he strokes the pain away.
"Do you ever think about us?" She asks softly.
"Yeah, sometimes. And maybe in some other world we could have been incredible," He says objectively.
She angles a glance upwards at him, "It's always going to be there, isn't it? You and me."
"I hope so." He says frankly.
She smiles softly, "Yeah. I hope so too."
Thank you so much for reading. I know the ending was probably not too conclusive, but without writing them out of their current situations, it would have been difficult to get them together without them being unfaithful. It could have been multi-chapter but we probably all know how terrible I am at updating. Plus, I like a me some tragic LP sometimes.
Last thing, I know some people probably don't like the idea of Peyton with Julian (I'm not the biggest fan either) but I didn't want for Peyton to be single in this. We saw that in the show and I wanted her to be on a level with Lucas, so to speak.
Lexie :)