Twisted Souls

by L. L. Collins

  “Yup. Are you looking for Brooke or Brianna? Because they aren’t here.” Seriously this guy has some sort of communication issue. And if he’s here for my sisters, he’ll never get near them again.

  “Who are they? Your other girlfriends?” What is the deal with this guy? He’s seriously starting to irritate me.

  I clench my jaw. “Listen. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but unless you get to it right now, I’m escorting you off my property.”

  He holds out his hand, a smirk on his face. I want to wipe that look right off his face. “Ronan Collier.” What did he just say? Ronan Collier? As in, Liane’s Ronan Collier is standing on my doorstep?

  “I see you know the name,” he says, pushing past me into the house. “Wonder if she called my name when you were touching her.”

  Oh, this punk is going to get what’s coming to him, and soon. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He settles himself on my couch like he’s a welcome guest. “I thought it was about time I pay you a visit and we talk, man to man.”

  “And what do we have to talk about,” I say, standing next to the couch. There’s no way that I’m sitting.

  “Liane doesn’t love you,” he says, and I laugh.

  “That’s what you came here to tell me? Oh, come on.” I’m not letting this fool get to me. All he’s going to figure out is that he came all this way for nothing.

  “I know she told you that I was there when she got back from Florida,” he says. “But everything she’s told you after that? It’s a lie.”

  “A lie, huh? What exactly did she lie about, big man?” I’ve seen guys like him before. All hot air in their big heads.

  “She forgave me that day. I’ve seen her every day since then, and I’m helping her move into her dorm early before I leave for New York. So while she’s talking to you and reassuring you and telling you what you want to hear, she’s really planning her future with me. She knows she has months before you’re planning on seeing her again, so she has time to figure out how to let you down gently. Except I’m going to take care of it right here, right now.”

  Doubt niggles at the back of my mind, but I know he’s full of crap. Liane would never, could never, do such a thing. To anyone. “Ronan,” I start. “I just met you five minutes ago and I’ve known Liane my entire life. So forgive me if I’m not going to believe the tales of a desperate man just because you want me to. You’re the one that cut her loose, man. You were the stupid one here.”

  “And you sure were there to pick up the pieces, weren’t you, Blake? I knew ever since we started dating that you weren’t her best friend. You wanted her all along. You were just waiting for the right moment to swoop in and be her knight in shining armor. Except that ends here and now, tough guy. Liane and I are meant to be. I’m the one going to put a ring on her finger and make her a mom.” I must’ve shown some of the shock I feel at his words, because he smirks. “Oh yeah, she told me all about that. And the hotel room? Nice touch, Mechanic. Too bad that probably cost your entire life savings and you’ll never be able to do those things for her. Not like I’ll be able to.”

  My head is reeling. There’s no way that she told him about all of that. He must’ve found out from someone else, or overheard us talking. There has to be some explanation. “Oh, give me a break, Ronan. Don’t act like you know me. All you know of me is what you’ve been told. Don’t come into my house and start making assumptions that I can’t or won’t take care of her. And what? You’re going to be an accountant like your daddy and granddaddy? You can’t even go to what college you want to go to? And you have to break up with your girlfriend because they say you should? Don’t forget though… you sleep with her first so you can get your rocks off one more time before you dump her. Oh, probably didn’t know I knew that, huh? Get out of my house, Ronan. I have nothing left to say to you. Liane made herself very clear when she told you she doesn’t want you anymore. Go find someone who can put up with your sorry self, and leave both of us alone. What we do from here on out is none of your business.”

  He has the audacity to smile at me again. I fantasize about putting my fist through his face like I’ve wanted to do for several weeks now. “I thought you might still hold a candle, even after all that,” he says, reaching into his pocket. “So I brought this. She was going to send it to you, but I saved her the stamp.” He holds out a piece of paper, and I’m terrified to take it. There is no way that she would send me anything that he would be happy to give me, so whatever it is, he had to have altered it. That’s the only explanation.

  “Does she know you have this?” My traitorous hand shakes as I hold the folded paper. I instantly remember Liane ripping up his letter and raining it over us when we were at Sanibel, telling me it didn’t mean anything and changed nothing for us. I know she hadn’t told me a story. Nothing about our time together was her faking anything. That just wasn’t in her to do.

  “She doesn’t know I’m here,” he answers. “But this had to be taken care of, once and for all. I took the letter off of her desk, Blake. It was in an envelope with your address on it. That’s how I found you. How else would I know where you live?”

  “Where’s the envelope now?”

  “I have it in the car, as well as my written directions on how to get here. You need to see it?”

  I turn the paper over in my hand, trying to piece this together. He’s lying; I know he is. “So if I call her right now, she’ll say she wrote this letter.”

  “Go ahead,” Ronan looks around the room for the phone, pointing once he sees it. “Call her. I don’t think she’s home. She said something about going out with Gretchen today for the last time before she leaves for California. But leave her a message. Ask her to call you once she gets back. And then ask her when she does if she wrote this letter. She might tell you no, Blake, but that’s only to save you. You know her. She doesn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings. She’s better at writing it down than she is saying it.”

  He’s wrong. I cross the room, punching her number into the phone again, despite the fact that I just called her before he arrived. Where is my family? I need them to come back and help me out here. I feel like her slime ball ex is bamboozling me. Just as he predicted, her answering machine picks up. “Li, it’s me again. Can you call me as soon as you get home please? We need to talk about something. Please? Thanks.”

  “Guess you didn’t want to ask her on a machine, huh? Do you want me to read it to you, or can you read, Mechanic Boy?”

  I shove him against the front door before I even realize I’m doing it. “You don’t deserve her, punk. For your information, I have a genius IQ and graduated top of my class. So you can take your condescending comments and shove them where the sun don’t shine, Accountant Boy.”

  “Read it,” Ronan says, making my stomach drop to my feet. He’s convinced that whatever this says, it will make all the difference. I open the paper, seeing the familiar stationery that Liane has written me letters on over the years. It has a purple L in the corner and flowers around the edges. It even smells like her. It isn’t addressed to me, but it’s her handwriting, no doubt.

  I look at Ronan one more time before I start reading. He has that smug look on his face again, which makes me want to rip the paper up and then kick him out of my house. But now I have to know what this says and why she’s writing to me when we’ve been talking every day for the last five days.

  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’m sorry for writing this instead of saying it, but I just can’t bear to hear your argue why I’m wrong when I say this. Plus, I’m not sure you would really listen anyway. Maybe this isn’t the right way to handle it, but it’s the only way I know right now. It’s been great, it really has. But I have to move on. I have my whole life ahead of me, and so do you. But our lives are taking two different paths, and they aren’t together. A part of me will always love you, and I’ll always have the wonderful memories we made together over the years. But I can’t continue so
mething that doesn’t feel right to me anymore. I hope someday we can move on from this. I’ll always care about you, but I don’t love you anymore. Take care of yourself.

  Li

  There’s no way. She didn’t write this. Someone forced her. Maybe Ronan had something on her. “She didn’t write this. What did you do?”

  Ronan laughs. “You’re dumber than I thought, Blake. Isn’t that what you call her, down at the bottom? Li? Isn’t that her handwriting? Her stationery?”

  I look at the scrawled name at the bottom. Li. She’s always said that only my family and me were ever allowed to call her that. She wouldn’t sign ‘Li’ at the bottom of any other letter. “Why doesn’t it say my name at the top? Every time she writes me a letter, it always says my name on it. How do you explain that one?” I know I’m grasping at straws.

  “Dude, accept it. She’s been keeping this from you ever since you got back from Florida. She didn’t want to hurt your feelings. She’s probably been planning to get back together with me ever since she got my letter.” No. I refuse to believe that. That would mean that everything we did at the hotel was a lie. And it wasn’t. “She had this all addressed and stamped, ready to send it out. I saw it after I was getting dressed…”

  I see red, my fist going through the drywall behind his head before I can even stop myself. He jumps, but just moves over to continue to stare at me as I fall apart. “Oh yeah, I guess you didn’t want to hear about that either, huh. Well, sorry. Her parents weren’t home, and we hadn’t been together in weeks. It was time. Then when she was in the bathroom, I saw the letter. She had all your pictures stacked on her desk, too. They were gone from her bulletin board.”

  “Get. Out. Of. My. House,” I seethe, knowing I’m going to lose it in just seconds. He finally listens, shutting the door behind him. It’s then that I realize I’m still clutching that god forsaken letter. I go to crumble it up, but I can’t. It might be the last thing I ever get from her, if what I read is really true. But I won’t take what this says without her telling me on the phone, no matter what this says. If she’s really throwing us away, she’s going to tell me.

  I DRIVE AWAY, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. I have no idea what song is playing on the radio, but it’s catchy and I’m ecstatic. I think of the letter I left with Blake and smile. She’s going to be mine now, and for good. She’s been telling me all week that she isn’t interested in being with me, but I know that isn’t the truth. She just needs to get a certain someone out of her life, and then she will remember how great it is with me. The letter she wrote me was just an added bonus. Especially when it had been so easy to erase that ‘a’ at the end of Lia and make Blake think she had written it for him. I mentally thank her for not putting my name on the actual letter. Of course the pictures of Blake had been down from her bulletin board; she’s taking them with her to college. And she hadn’t even let me give her a hug, much less have sex with her, though I planned on rectifying that very soon. Listening to her conversation with Gretchen when they were out for lunch had been the icing on the cake. Knowing those details about Sanibel had put the last seed of doubt I needed into that low-life’s head. Getting his address from her address book had been easy enough, but I’d convinced him I had it on the envelope she was going to send him. Good thing he didn’t ask me to see it. And all I had to do now was keep him from talking to her for the next three days, and it would all work the way it was supposed to.

  My phone rings, and I reach over to grab it. It’s great to have the mobility of a cell phone now. “Hello?”

  “It’s all set,” the voice says. “I’m going to make sure I’m in the right place at the right time, if you know what I mean. I’ll get all the proof you need. I expect your payment as soon as possible.”

  “That’s great. You need to make sure it happens, Emma. I’m counting on you.”

  “Have I ever let you down before?”

  “Not yet. But you can’t start now. This is really important.”

  “I’ll take care of it all, Ronan. Don’t worry about me,” she says, and the line goes dead.

  “THANKS FOR YOUR help, Ronan,” she says, blowing a piece of hair out of her face. “I’m sure my dad will appreciate not having to carry all of these boxes up three flights of stairs tomorrow.” She steps back, and it takes everything I have not to pull her into my arms like I used to. She’s so beautiful, with her long hair pulled into a ponytail and sweat dotting her face. But I force myself to slow down. It’s going to happen; it’s only a matter of time now. The final nail is going to go into the coffin of the Blake-Liane summer romance. I can’t wait for her to fall back into my arms, where she belongs.

  “You know I’m always here,” I answer, smiling at her. She looks at me for a beat too long, and something I don’t recognize crosses her face.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says. “Can you grab the boxes from the den?”

  “Sure,” I say, knowing that I’ll follow her before I get the boxes. She darts into the house and I follow, wondering what she needs to do right in the middle of packing boxes into her car. Those shapely legs in her small shorts make me want to go upstairs for a totally different reason, but I check myself. Her door is shut, so I press my ear against it. I hear nothing for a moment, then her sad voice.

  “Blake, can you call me please? You’re worrying me. We’ve never gone this long without talking. I love you. I’m leaving early tomorrow morning to head to school, so after then you have my dorm number. Please call me.” I hear her sniffle as she replaces the phone, and I breathe out a sigh of relief. So they still haven’t spoken. I couldn’t have planned this better myself. This is all going to work out just fine.

  I WATCH THE mile markers as I get closer and closer to finding out what in the hell is going on. I should be there within thirty minutes. It’s been days since Ronan showed up spouting all his foolishness, and I’ve yet to talk to Liane. She’s called me a few times, but I just couldn’t call her back. I had to process and think about what was going on in my head. I took a few days off of work and started the trek to Kentucky. There is no way this is happening over the phone or in a letter. I’d gotten in the car in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep (again… I wasn’t sure I’d slept more than a few hours total since he had visited me), and now it was barely noon and I was already here. She had said in her message yesterday that they were leaving early this morning for the school, so that meant she had been there an hour or so already. If Ronan was correct, he was there helping her move in.

  When my mom came to me last night and asked me what was going on, I had unloaded everything on her, including the letter. She had shaken her head, agreeing with me that this wasn’t Liane. I replayed the three messages on our answering machine that she’d left for her to listen to as well. In every single one of them, she said she loved me. Was she playing me? I couldn’t believe that she had that in her, but then there was the evidence. When I had told my mom I needed to go see this for myself and get it straightened out, she agreed. She knew I was on the verge of losing my mind and that this was the only thing that would make it better. Or ruin my life. Either way, I need to know.

  I look over at the letter sitting on the passenger seat. I don’t need it anymore; I’ve memorized every single stroke of her hand on the paper. But I plan to hand it to her and ask her if she wrote this for me, because I still doubt what Ronan said. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him. Why isn’t my name on the paper? I should’ve asked him to see the envelope, but he had made a good point. If my address hadn’t been on there, how had he known where to find me? So then why haven’t you talked to her, you chicken. Because you have a suspicion that she could be back with Ronan. It had been my worry, my nightmare the entire time we were in Sanibel and after we returned home. Liane had never stood up for herself, and I know Ronan’s type. Especially now that I’ve met him, I know he’s ruthless in getting what he wants. And with me eight hours away and only able to call and write, what if h
e had gotten to her?

  I can picture him standing behind her, forcing her to write those words to me. And then she’s been calling me, professing her love on my answering machine. It’s all so confusing. I haven’t told Brooke and Brianna. I don’t want them to hate her, and I know they would. I can’t stand anyone hating her, no matter what the truth is.

  Seeing the exit ahead, I slow down, my mind racing a million miles an hour at what I’m going to find when I get there. Of course she doesn’t know I’m coming, and that’s the way I want it. This is either going to be the best surprise in the world, or the worst. For both of us. This isn’t exactly how I pictured our first reunion after going home, but I also didn’t expect to see Ronan at my house a few days ago, either.

  My parents’ cell phone that I borrowed for the trip rings on the seat, and I pick it up. “Hello?” Liane doesn’t have this number so I know it isn’t her.

  “Hey sweetie,” my mom’s voice comes through, soothing me for just a second. “How’s the trip?”

  “I just got off the interstate,” I answer. “I should be there in twenty minutes, tops.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Blake, are you okay? Really?”

  “I’ll find out how okay I am in twenty minutes, Mom. I have to see her and find out what’s really going on.”

  “This isn’t her, Blake. I just know that you’re going to find out this guy was manipulating the situation. Even the letter was fishy, sweetie. Don’t go there angry, go there to listen. Okay?”

  “I love her, Mom. I’m not angry with her unless she’s been lying to me. But I think you’re right and he has manipulated this whole thing somehow. And that’s why I had to come here and see her myself.”

  “Let me know how it goes,” she says. “I’m always here for you, Blake. No matter what.”