A/N: Finally! I'm sorry it took so long to get this chapter up, but I've been super busy with classes all week. Thankfully, it was only a one week course, so I should be back to updating normally. For these last few chapters I might not update every day like I did at first because I'd like to stretch the story out a bit more. There's only four chapters left, by the way, and then I'll start the Nilly. And thank you so, so, sooo much for the reviews. They always amaze me. I was absolutely ecstatic to hear that people actually cried. I didn't think my writing was actually good enough to do that.

Also, love-soaked-blood was the only one to catch on to what I was hinting in the previous chapter. You rock. :)

Disclaimer: I don't own them, but I do pwn them.

These Words

Chapter Ten: Breaking Down

It amazes me how close a person can get to someone in such a short amount of time. In the same way, it's confusing and frustrating and also something wonderful when someone can be completely head over heals for another person without knowing the slightest bit about them. The problem with this, is that these statements pertain to two different girls. Two amazingly wonderful girls whom I am completely torn between. Not only does this situation suck, but it sucks more. Lola is dealing with anything I could never possibly imagine and I wouldn't want to take advantage of that. On the other hand, Elle has no name, no address, and is without a doubt, unattainable, no matter how hard I could try to track her down. I'm Joe Jonas, these sorts of things just aren't supposed to happen to me.

And how is it that when you're doing absolutely nothing, your mind can pretty much be a replica of a tornado? I can't concentrate, and I can't think straight because I'm at constant battle with myself. Not only am I always asking 'Lola? Or Elle?' but I'm wondering how I could have let myself fall so deeply for two people at once? I'm still trying to figure out when and how it all happened.

I let my head fall back onto my pillow with a groan. This had to be the most aggravating and confusing situation I had been in in a long time. I mean, sure, I had about a million and one girls wanting to walk down the isle at any given second, but I had never really fallen hard for two girls at the same time. Even worse, was the idea that neither of them had any idea about my feelings towards them. Lola, I couldn't tell because she was in such an emotional state that I didn't want to just be there as a 'leaning post'. As for Elle, it's not like I had any way of telling her anyways. I could always publicly announce that I was looking for the author of the letters, but that wouldn't be a smart idea. How many identical letters would come in the next day? A hell of a lot, I tell you.

It was nearing noon and I was still in bed. I had decided to sleep in today, knowing that the post office would be a stupid idea since I had found her letter Friday night. I still hadn't read it. It was underneath my mattress, right next to her previous letters and my song book. I hadn't gotten the courage to read it- I was afraid of falling deeper for her, more so than I already had. God, life surely can suck sometimes. Now, for instance.

I dragged my self up, leaning on the wall beside my bed for support. My eyes were still droopy and tired, but I knew I had to get up eventually. My mind was racing, flashing between Lola and Elle, until something finally clicked in my head. Friday night Lola hadn't answered one of my calls, and she didn't yesterday either, which was odd, considering she usually did pick up. I had hoped to get the Hannah/Lola story out of her before the press distorted it into much more than it probably was. I wanted to hear it straight from her, because it seemed like Hannah had gotten the wrong picture.

I reached out, grabbing my phone from under my pillow where it was plugged into the charger, and scrolled through my contacts list. When I finally reached her name in the 'L' section, I pressed the 'talk' button, listening to the ringing and waiting for her to pick up. A while later, after I'd called her almost six times over the course of two hours, I was beginning to get worried. Under her stress level, and with her emotions high, who knows could have happened? Did she even have a ride home last night? Oh God! What if she was kidnapped?! Well- No, thats not really plausible considering it would have been on the news ages ago, but I did have a gut feeling, a sickness almost, that was telling me there was something wrong with this picture.

I walked back upstairs from the kitchen to get my phone after finishing my lunch. You didn't really think I'd go a whole two hours without food, did you? I'd laugh if I wasn't concerned. When I walked into my room, I grabbed the phone off the table, and immediately scrolled down to Lola's name. Right underneath sat Hannah's name, since my 'phone book' was in alphabetical order by last name. I thought for a moment, skipping over Lola's name and pressing the call button on Hannah. I figured, if something was wrong with Lola, then she was sure to know.

It took several rings for her to answer, but she finally did. Her voice was coarse and scratchy, her breathing shallow and erratic. "Hello?"

"Hannah?" I asked, just to make sure it was her. The way her voice sounded made her seem like a completely different person.

"Yeah... it's me. Hi Joe." She responded. Her voice was small and barely audible.

"Hi. Um, do you know where Lola is? She's not answering any of my calls lately..." I might as well just come out and say it. There was no sense in beating around the bush. As I listened closely, waiting for her answer, I could hear a soft steady tone in the background. It reminded me of the one that was in the background of many of Lola's calls. Perhaps Hannah was with Lola? If they were together, I was glad to see they had made amends so quick.

"Lola?" She asked, sniffling.

"Yeah..." When I answered her, she immediately burst into tears.

"Lola? She-" Hannah was sputtering, "She's-" She couldn't even finish her sentence because she was hyperventilating so heavily. My eyes were wide and my heart was sinking. Nothing really bad had happened to Lola, right? Please let me be right, because if something had happened to her Friday night, I would have felt unbelievably horrible.

"What's wrong Hannah? What happened?" I asked. My ears were entirely focused on the phone in my hand-- so much that I didn't even realize Kevin had walked into the room.

"She-" Deep breaths, "She found h-her brother's stuff."

"His stuff?" I asked confused, "I-I mean, What? What do you mean? I don't get it?"

"She-" She choked out, "Her brother died yesterday..." My mouth immediately dropped and I took a sharp breath in. Kevin looked over at me, asking me what was going on, but I ignored him. He seemed confused, but this was much more important to me.

"O-oh," I gulped, "That's-" I wanted to say that it was a horrible thing to go through and to send Lola my deepest condolences, but Hannah cut me off.

"She's dying too, Joe." She cried, "And I don't know what to do." My heart was sinking so low I was sure that it was deep into my stomach by now. I couldn't even imagine what it would be like to have Nick, Kevin or Frankie pass away. It would absolutely kill me, and I guess that's what was happening to Lola.

"Wow..." I trailed off, taking a deep breath. I didn't know how to deal with a situation like this one, considering I had never had to deal with the death of someone so close to me. "That must've killed her. I just- Wow, I feel awful."

"No Joe," She cried. I could almost see her shaking her head on the other line.

"What?" I crinkled my eyebrows together. From the corner of my eyes I could see Kevin giving me an odd glance, listening into my phone conversation, trying to see what I was talking about and to whom.

"She's- She overdosed," Hannah was sobbing, but I could barely breath. Had I honestly heard her right? "She found cocaine in her brother's room- S-she was treated last night, but..."

"But?" I forced out. I'm sure Kevin was getting concerned because my eyes were twice their normal size and it was getting extremely hard to take a breath.

"They think she might... She might slip into a coma like Ben did..." I could hear Hannah crying on the other line, but I just let the phone slip through my fingers. I wanted to take in a huge gulp of air, but it was as if I was frozen in place, paralyzed, unable to move even the tiniest bone in my body.

"Joe?" Kevin asked me, shaking my shoulder. His shake knocked me out of my trance and I instantly went back into motion. I scrambled for my phone, picking it up from the floor and placing it back up to my ear in seconds.

"What hospital? I can be there as soon as possible." I asked, my mouth and mind running at two different speeds. It was hard just to utter out that one sentence because of how sick to my stomach I was. Lola couldn't be in a coma! She was too amazing for that. She had dealt with the pain of her brother, and now she herself had to go through with it. The only thing I wanted to do was get down on my knees and pray to God that she would be alright. She didn't deserve this, she was better than this.

"No Joe, it's okay." Hannah answered back after a moment, "I-I'll take good care of her and I'll call you if I know anything. Just- stay at home, or where ever your going to do press or anything. Li-Lola will be... I'll call you..." And then she hung up. I felt very unnerved at the fact that she wouldn't even tell me that Lola would be okay. Frankly, it scared me, and it terrified me. She had to be okay, if not for herself and everyone around her, then for me, because as odd as it sounds, She had half of my heart that I wouldn't get back if she were to end up the same as Buddy. Dead. And that was something I wasn't ready to deal with.

"Joe?" My head snapped up. Kevin was looking at me with worried eyes, his forehead creased as he looked at me confused, "What is it?"

"It's Lola," I managed to choke out, "She's in the hospital."

"What?! What happened? What's wrong?"

"She might die." When my eyes shifted up to his, I was sure he could see the absolute pain in them because he shifted back a bit. I don't know if he understood that I had already given away a part of my heart to her, but he knew that this was affecting me deeply. He, himself, looked extremely shocked and fearful. Kevin and Lola were never really close friends in the last week we had known each other, but Kevin cared about everyone, close friend or not. He could also see how it was hurting me, and he reached out, placing his hand onto my shoulder and shaking me a bit.

"Hey- She'll be fine." He tried to send me a reassuring smile, but it hardly worked. I appreciated the effort though, and mustered up my very best smile for him as well, uttering an 'okay' before Kev left the room. I just needed to be alone. I had wanted to see Lola, but Hannah had insisted that she would be taken care of. The truth was, that I wanted to be the one taking care of her, and I wanted to be the one she woke up to. I wanted to be the one she loved, almost as much as I did her. Yeah, it was true. I was in love with Lola Luftnagle, and falling fast for the words without an identity. What's a guy to do?

Sometime much later in the day I was sitting alone in my room. I hadn't done much that day besides contemplate my current situation. I was worried and anxious, glancing at my cell phone every few minutes just waiting for a call. Hannah had never called back like she said she would and it was tearing me apart. I tried as hard as I possibly could to stay optimistic, reassuring myself that it couldn't have been that bad. She wasn't really dying, she was just recuperating and needed her rest. At least thats what I tried to tell myself because I was at a complete loss of information.

Kevin had also told Nick, who seemed pretty concerned. I was guessing that him and Lola had become friends as well since he was the one who had given me her number and seemed to know the most about her. Well, not anymore. It was pretty safe to say I was closest with her now, even after only a few conversations. We just had this connection, the same kind that I felt with Elle. It was almost like it didn't matter how long I had talked to her or how much of the little details I knew. But I knew her. I may not have known her favourite colour or if she was afraid of spiders or heights or anything at all, but I knew her feelings, her emotions, her thoughts. I knew what she was going through, and I could feel the difficulties and the torture. I may not have known Lola, but I knew the girl behind the Hollywood scene, and that meant something so much more.

However, whenever I thought about Lola, I couldn't help but find my mind drifting off to Elle. I shared the same connection with her letters that I did with Lola. It was as if I didn't need to know her to know her. I didn't need to know every little bit about her to know that I was head over heels with her thoughts and her feelings and her words. If she was even half as beautiful as her words were, she would still be the most beautiful girl I had ever met. There was just something about her that drew me in. She was amazingly deep, spreading her every thought onto a piece of paper in the most intricate way. She had presence in her words that struck me in the darkest places and made me realize things I had never thought about. If only I could put that kind of feeling into my words, into my songs.

It was then that my thoughts shot to the hiding place underneath my mattress. Her letter was still there, unread, as was my songbook. I couldn't decide which one I should turn to, her comforting words, or my own. I was so afraid to keep reading her letters, to keep digging this grave even deeper. I had already fallen so fast and it scared me to think that there was a possibility of falling absolutely in love with someone I would never know. I didn't want to carry those what if's with me forever, but I didn't want to always wonder what would have happened if I had kept on reading. It was a loose-loose situation for me, and I couldn't decide which was the lesser of the two evils.

When I lifted up my mattress and grabbed both items out, my eyes darted between the two. Finally, I took a deep breath, placing the notebook to the side momentarily and preparing to dive into the letter. I opened the blank envelope I had found on Friday and gently pulled the paper out. I had become all to familiar with the writing on the paper, and scanned my eyes down to her signature 'L' before trailing them back up and beginning to indulge myself in the words.

I'm falling. I'm falling so fast that I'm not sure that I can begin to pick myself up. I can't help but wish for every second to fade into nothing and for the time to stop ticking away. I want nothing more than to be nothing, to be empty. At least if there is nothing, there isn't this. Everything is becoming unbearable and things that were always so easy are so complicated. Everything has a string, a motivation, an ulterior motive that connects it all together. But my strings have been cut short, releasing the web and letting my life fall to pieces. This world doesn't make sense, this isn't what I wanted or wished, and nothing seems to be falling into place. It's all a disaster zone where the wind is whipping at me, pushing and pulling in ever direction, enticing emotions I never knew I had.

And yet, the world continues to spin as if I am nothing more than a spec in this continuum of grueling events. As if I am nothing at all. The world pays us no attention and we go on alone, scared of the future. The uncertainty is nagging and gnawing at the walls of my heart as the emotions spill out from my eyes onto paper. I'm keeping hope. I'm keeping hope that you'll wake up and that everything will be okay. He's giving me hope, and he's reassuring me and he's making me better. He's all I can lean on, and all thats keeping me grounded when all else is fading from me. He's the only light I've found in this darkness, and I promise I'll hold onto it for as long as I can.

I'm trying to find a way, getting better every day. I still need you, cause I'm so alone. All I need in this life is one, just one, thing to believe in.

My mind froze up. The very first thing I had noticed was the 'him' in the letter, and my heart had cracked just a little. She had someone already. I shouldn't have cared as much as I did because it wasn't as if she was ever going to find out that I felt this way about her. At the very least, at least she had manged to find some bit of happiness in whatever she was going through. That thought alone set my mind at east just a little bit.

When I set the letter aside, I pulled my notebook closer to me. I flipped the pages, trying to find a blank one to write down an entirely new song. However, my fingers found their way to her song, tracing over the words that I'd written. The words my disaster were scribbled at the top of the page and I couldn't help but feel like the words described her perfectly. She may have been lost and confused, with her emotions going haywire, but she was beautiful no matter what, and a part of me would always be her's, and in some way, I would always consider her to be mine. It didn't matter if I never met her, these words would stay engraved into my soul for eternity.

"Hey Joe, I-" Nick walked in suddenly. I scrambled to shove the notebook underneath my pillow and hidden from sight, but it seemed as if he had caught me.

"What's that?" He asked suspiciously. I guess it was a natural reaction since we had just heard of Lola's overdose this morning. It was completely out of the question that I would ever consider drugs, but the motion probably did look weird.

"Nothing," I told him hastily. That only heightened his suspicions, as he raised an eyebrow, walking closer to me.

"What is it Joe?" He asked, standing right in front of me, looking down as I sat on my bed.

"Nothing Nick," I answered again, "Don't worry about it." His skeptical look never faded from his face as he stood there.

"Well, okay Joe," He sighed and my body relaxed, "If you say so." Without another second to spare, he dove towards my pillow, catching me off guard. I went to block him, but my moment of relaxation had slowed my reflexes and he was able to grab the notebook.

"Aha!" He cried, looking it over, "It's a... notebook?" He got a closer look. What the hell else did he expect it to be? I lunged forward, trying to grab it off him, but he moved away from me quickly.

"Give it back!" I yelled, "It's personal!" I was standing now, reaching around him and trying to grab the notebook. His eyes were scanning over the page as he tried to hold me back.

"Joe..." He trailed off, turning around. When I saw his face I knew that he had read it all and my body slumped. There was no use in trying to snatch it back when he already knew the words on the page. "Joe, did you write this?"

"Yeah..." I nodded my head at his question, sitting back down on my bed, "Please don't laugh, or tell me it's horrible."

"No, no, no!" Nick looked up, his eyes worried, "It's not horrible at all, Joe! It's- It's amazing. When- I mean, how?" I could only shrug my shoulder, grabbing the book away from him when he sat down next to me and offered it back.

"Is it about anyone? Or Just-" I cut him off my nodding my head again. It seemed odd that I was almost speechless. I felt scared- I felt like I was vulnerable and had shown myself to the world. I was so afraid to get torn, to hear that my feelings were stupid. To hear that falling for someone's words was insane and idiotic. It was almost as if I needed someone else to validate my feelings before I felt okay about feeling them.

"Elle." Was all I could manage to mumble, and Nick only answered me with an 'Oh.'

"Nick?" I asked. He looked up to me, "I... I want to be alone, okay? Please don't tell anyone about the song. It's personal."

"Oh.- Yeah, yeah, okay." He coughed, "I won't, I promise." He smiled, squeezing my shoulder as he stood. I watched him as he walked towards the door, opening it and walking out. At the last second he turned, telling me one last thing, "You know Joe, if you really like her, you should tell her." And then I was alone in the room.

Just seconds later I could hear my phone going off to the side of me. I scrambled towards it quickly, my mind still on Nick's words. In an instant, I pressed the talk button, hoping to God it was Hannah calling to tell me that Lola was okay. Instead, I was met with the voice of a radio talk show host, calling to interview me. Timing really isn't my thing.

"Joe Jonas! Your on air with 102.8!" When the hell had I agreed to this?

"Um, hi. This really isn't a-" I tried to tell him that I wasn't in the mood to talk, but he cut me off.

"Just a few questions Joe," He tried and I reluctantly agreed, "So it's been everywhere in the news. Just who is this Elle that Kevin mentioned?" Just the question I didn't want.

"She's- um, she's a girl." I responded lamely.

"Well, tell us a little about her! We're all dying to know."

"Um. She's cool." I tried again, unable to come up with something to tell him.

"Oh," The interviewer seemed a little put off by my answered, "What about the name Elle? Gorgeous name for a gorgeous girl?" I could almost imagine the smirk on his face.

"Sure." I forced out, frustrated. I didn't want to be interviewed, and I didn't want to talk about her. He name wasn't even Elle.

"So why did Kevin spill the beans and not yourself? What made you reluctant to tell the press?" He asked. It would seem like an innocent question, but it was easy to tell he was insinuating that I was ashamed of her. To say the least, my frustration had grown a little... or a lot.

"Shut up!" I cracked. "Her name isn't even Elle. She's not some legally blond, spend four hours in a hot tub, kind of girl! Her name is L. The letter, L, as in Lemon, or Lime, or Lilly." The words spilled from my mouth, "And she's absolutely amazing. She writes the most beautiful letters, and she's passionate and deep and I care so much about her even if she doesn't know that I know who she is. And yeah, you heard me right, she doesn't know that I know her, and no I'm not a stalker. She writes letters to the stupid fan mail, okay? And she doesn't have an address or a name, just L. And all I know is that she's the most incredible person, and-" I paused, taking a deep breath, "And that I love her."

It was then that I slammed the phone down, hanging up. I remembered Nick's words 'If you really like her, you should tell her' and I prayed to God that somehow she had been listening to that radio station, because I needed her to know. I just needed her.

A/N: I hope you liked it :) Four chapters left. Question: If Lilly does happen to wake up in time (if at all) do you think she should hear Joe's confession on the radio? I'm also thinking of having a co-writer (They'd write one person's POV, and I'd write the other) or maybe just a person to help me out with ideas for my new Nilly. Interested? PM me :)

Review please! You guys are the greatest.