Love in Darkness (Castles on the Sand 2)

Two

Dear Alex,

I’m finding it hard to concentrate on my work, which I know is a bad thing. I’m excited to go home, though, and so excited to see you again.

When you dumped me, you broke my heart. It devastated me for days, until I got the idea to put in my own mission papers and move forward with my life. That gave me something to look forward to, and then I wrote to you. I wondered if you were over me, so when you wrote back, I cried, I was so happy.

Okay, I’m going to just say this, and then I’m going to send this letter before I lose my nerve.

I love you, Alex Katsumoto, and I want to be with you forever. I want to marry you and spend the rest of eternity with you. I really hope that doesn’t freak you out.

Write back before I give myself an ulcer, okay?

Love,

Madison

P.S. Remember our first kiss? When you kissed me down the side of my neck until I went crazy and kissed you back? Feel free to do that again in a couple of months.

I stare at her handwritten words until they blur in my vision. Aside from my slip the day we broke up, neither of us has used the l-word with each other. That might seem odd, given how long we’ve been together, but for the first part of our relationship, I went from day to day, assuming the end was just around the corner. Now that I think about it, I’ve felt the same way throughout our time writing to each other. I was only just getting used to the idea that we’d endure, that we’d become something more than the town loser and a girl going through a bad boy phase.

She has our first kiss all wrong. It was nothing like that. Our first kiss went something like this: One day when I was a senior and she was a junior at Pelican Bluffs High School, back in California, I grabbed her and kissed her as a joke that is so un-funny, I’m lucky not to be in jail. She was the cutest, most popular girl in school, and I was… well, me. For the record, this is not the kiss she is talking about in her letter. I’ll get to that one. To make the whole assault stunt worse, I did it where no one saw nor could come to her aid. She called me a creep – which definitely counts as being nice – and then gave me back my deceased dad’s U.S. Army jacket, which I’d lost the day before when I got arrested for smashing a police car with a rock, because I’m cool like that. I’ve made great life decisions, lemme tell ya. The officer made me take the jacket off and leave it there in the road.

Madison had picked it up, laundered it, put everything back in the pockets, and now gave it to me. I’d never thought I was a great guy, but in that moment, I realized I was something much worse than “not a great guy”, and Madison was something better than “an angel of pure kindness.” I fled, certain she’d never so much as look at me again. Except, while she told me off, also called me hot. Specifically, “hot, but not hot enough to get away with assaulting people.” Usually compliments about my looks were the kind of thing I only heard from women tourists who’d make catcalls at me from their convertibles on their way through town.

A few days later, Madison came to a church activity – and I’m not going to tell the long story of how a delinquent like me ended up at a church activity because it involves me threatening Madison with a pair of scissors and then later offering to chase her down the street with a switchblade. But… anyway, I was at this activity, looking like the worst possible fit for the LDS Church in its 175 year history. She was at this activity as another guy’s date and we all went to a movie, and I noticed that I could get her to pay attention to me if I cracked jokes. I even made her laugh and got her to pay more attention to me than to her date, who was a great guy who deserved her. Yes I am a total and complete jerk.