"What's going on inside of that pretty head of yours?"

Peyton looked up to the doorway of her bedroom and saw a freshly showered Nathan leaning against the frame, looking just like the boy she had fallen in love with at sixteen. It was their bedroom now. "You," she confessed as she moved over and he came in to sprawl out next to her. "I have something I wanted to give you."

"I already have everything I need," he reminded her with a teasing kiss. "I have your heart after all."

"I'm serious, Nate," she retorted as she leaned over and opened the drawer to the nightstand on her side of the bed. She pulled out the thin package wrapped in delicate tissue paper and held closed by a simple piece of cheap twine. "I made this for you. Actually, I kind of made it for us. I thought that maybe we'd share it with our kids someday, maybe even Jamie."

His blue eyes glittered with amazement as he tore away the paper and pulled out the black leather sketchbook. "The Story of the Cheerleader Princess and the Basketball Prince" was embossed on the outside cover in a fine silver script. He traced the writing carefully before looking up at her. He slowly opened the book and started to flip through the pages. They were filled with hand drawn sketches of the different scenes of their life, from the day they met in grade school up until the wedding he hoped wasn't too far away.

"I drew all of it," she told him proudly as she turned the page to show a vignette of them kissing beside the ocean in California. "I even wrote the story. I thought it would be hard, but I guess it's pretty easy to write a fairytale when you've already lived it."

"Baby, this is amazing," he said with pure wonder, clutching the book to his chest. He never thought he would be the one to be sentimental, but other than her heart and his son, this was the best gift he'd ever received. "When did you have time to do this?"

She smiled as she leaned her head on his shoulder and looked down at a drawing of them at sixteen, standing on the basketball court of Tree Hill High. "I actually started it like a year ago. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but I had all these images in my head. I had to do something with them. I had to tell our story," she explained. "I've been working on it pretty much non-stop since you found me again. Whenever you were running or at practice or with Jamie, this was how I passed my time. I wanted to give it to you as a housewarming gift."

He closed the cover and turned to her so that he could kiss her properly. "Thank you so much, Peyton," he murmured. "I can't wait until I can read this to our little girl. I can just see her now with your mess of blonde curls and my blue eyes. She's going to be the second prettiest girl Tree Hill has ever seen."

Without a word, Nathan lifted himself off the bed and padded across the room toward her vanity. He scrounged around in the top drawer before holding up his find in triumphant discovery. Peyton smiled as he came back to her, peeled off her socks and rested her bare feet in his lap. Nathan tapped the bottle or red nail polish against his palm before twisting off the cap. "I never could stand to do this with anyone else," she revealed. "I always thought of it as kind of our thing."

Nathan deliberately brushed the shiny lacquer over her cute toes. He had once made fun of her for her feet, but now, they were just another thing he loved about her. He was making a list of all those little things, and it had grown considerably in the two days they had been living at her old house. Their new house. "So, Haley's lawyer has started the divorce proceedings. It should all be over in a matter of weeks," he announced. "I'm going to give her pretty much everything that she wants. We're going to come to fair terms over Jamie's custody. Other than him, there's not much from that life I want to carry with me."

Peyton knew that there were always going to be old ghosts of relationships past that would haunt them. Tree Hill was a small town, and their mangled love rectangle came along with family ties. "I just want you to stop being her husband so that you can be mine."

He brought her foot up and laid a butterfly kiss on her instep. "I'm already yours," he pledged. "As soon as the rest of the world recognizes that, we'll make it official. You know that I can't wait to marry you, Peyton. Other than playing professional basketball, it's the only thing I've dreamt about since I was sixteen."

The two of them continued to dream about the future, much like they had all those years ago when they would spend hours holed up in the room. Nathan painted her toenails and shared those dark thoughts he rarely let see the light of day. Peyton poured over a magazine and confessed all the things she never meant to really say aloud to anyone. The difference this time was that Nathan wasn't painting her nails to get some later; he was doing it just to spend time with the woman that he loved. Peyton wasn't reading about her own interests but rather a story about basketball she'd seen Nathan thumbing through the night before. Finally, when he screwed the cap back on the bottle and gave her toenails one last blow, he brought her into his lap and buried his face in her hair. "This is nice," he whispered. "I like living with you."

"Oh, really?" she asked teasingly, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Well, I like living with you."

"We're so sweet that it's sickening, you realize that?" he chuckled. "What would Peyton Sawyer, adolescent emo cheerleader extraordinaire, say if she could see you now?"

"She'd say that I look happy," she decided. "What would cocky basketball Nathan Scott think?"

"He'd say that I look like I'm in love," he answered. "Luckily for us, I think they're both right."

"Who's right?"

Peyton and Nathan whirled around to see a vivacious brunette standing in the doorway with one hand on her hip and a pair of car keys dangling from the other one. "Brooke!" Peyton nearly screamed as she scrambled off Nathan's lap so that she could embrace her best friend. The two girls clung to each other tightly until the sound of someone clearing their throat reminded them they weren't alone. "Oh, sorry, Mouth, I didn't see you there. What are you doing here?!?"

"That was your other surprise," Nathan explained as he came over to kiss Brooke hello. Peyton moved over to hug Mouth before returning to her fiancée's side. "You needed your car, and I kind of figured you could use your best friend. When I called to see if they could drive it back to Tree Hill, Brooke jumped at the chance to help me out."

"Anything for my P. Sawyer," Brooke shrugged as Mouth slipped his arm around her waist. "Nice digs."

"Yeah, looks familiar," Mouth added. "Who knew you two would end up where you began?"

Peyton shook her head. "We're definitely not where we began."

"Yeah, you didn't really know these two back then, but they were horrible together," Brooke laughed. Peyton suddenly remembered that day in the weight room where she had uttered those words after Nathan had shown her where he'd carved her initials and he'd felt the remains of her temper. "They were a mess."

"I don't know," Peyton countered as she looked up at Nathan. "I think we were kind of amazing. I mean, we can't know everything at sixteen. Sometimes life has to happen to us before we can really start the one we were destined to live."

Mouth looked over at his own girlfriend and nodded in agreement. "Just think of how you saw me at sixteen," he pointed out. "You would have said that we were horrible together then, but I don't think you think that now."

"I hate that the two of you are still smarter than me," she pouted, pushing out her bottom lip. "At least I still have Nathan."

"Hey!" he shouted before the other three erupted into laughter. Before anyone knew it, Nathan and Brooke were bickering about who was smarter, and Peyton and Mouth were trying to play referee. It was a lot like it had been when they were sixteen, only they were different. Brooke wasn't a bitch. Peyton wasn't a loner. Nathan wasn't a jerk. Mouth wasn't a nerd. They were friends.

As Brooke met Peyton's eye, they both smiled at each other. As good as it felt to be together like that, they knew they were missing two people. They were missing the guy who wasn't a bastard son and the girl who wasn't a tutor. They were missing Lucas and Haley. Brooke came over and slung her arm around her best friend's waist, leaning in to whisper, "Don't worry, we'll get them back," she vowed. "For now, be happy that the two people who love you most in the world are here. Enjoy the fact that we're all finally home."