18 Letters to You [Completed]

FOUR

Rory

"Let's go," Perry says grabbing as much of our equipment as he can hold and giving me a look that said more than any words could.

"I'm not in the mood," I grumble and take another gulp of beer.

Perry shakes his head, "not tonight."

"What?" I ask.

"We finally have a decent gig. I can't have you pissy and drunk."

"Fuck off."

"Let's go," he repeats then opens the door and walks down the few steps to our car.

I run my fingers through my too long hair and stand up. I just have to get through the rest of the shows we have lined up and then I can go home.

I can figure out a way back to Stella as soon as we are done here.

This battle between hurting Perry or continuing to hurt Stella is weighing on me. I don't know who to choose, especially since neither party is making me choose.

"Thank fucking God," Perry says when I finally put the rest of our stuff into the trunk.

I roll my eyes and slump over in the passenger seat, "you are such pleasant company," Perry mumbles.

I ignore Perry. He continues talking throughout the short car ride about who knows what and I don't give a shit.

But when we pull into the already crowded lot he gets out and walks over to my side of the car. He opens the door and bends down so we are at eye-level with each other. His familiar eyes are as intense as I've ever seen them, "I know you're hurting. And I get it. But this can be it for us," Perry nods towards the lot that still seems to be filling up even though we are hours early, "we've been waiting for this and Stella wants this for us. We can't let her or ourselves down. And after we fucking kill this. We go and get your girl. You know I'm always on your team, right?"

I'm speechless as I step out of the car and nod at Perry. We don't speak much, we have never needed to fill silences with meaningless conversation. We have always understood when life gets to be too big that silence can be okay.

"Right," I answer finally.

We get our stuff and head into the bar.

The bar is set up like a music venue, which is something we aren't used to. Normally we play at bars that have tables throughout the floor and a small dance floor up front.

This place has a wide open floor for people to dance and further back has seating as well as an upper level with seating. The bar is all along the far back wall, which means that this place can potentially hold way more people than we are used to.

"Sold out," Perry says.

"Shit," I say taking everything in.

"How the hell did we get here?" I ask talking to no one.

Perry shrugs and goes to check us in with the event manager.

I remember when Perry, Stella, and I decided we wanted to figure out a way to play music and write music and make people feel the things we were feeling when we listened to music.

We were sitting in Stella's empty house on her couch watching T.V on mute, "if you could do anything or be anything what would you be?" Stella asked looking from Perry to me.

I shrugged, "probably play music."

"You'd want to be famous?" she asked challenging me.

"I don't think fame would matter. I'd love to have money though," I said and we all sort of looked around her empty house that was falling apart and I'm sure we all thought about the lack of food in her fridge, "but that music would make me happy and I think I could make other people happy with my music too."

Perry started laughing, "could you imagine Rory dealing with paparazzi?"

Stella joined in, "oh God, every other news article would be about Rory punching another one in the face or something."

But then we all stopped laughing, "yeah, I'd like to do that too," Perry said, "play music. Make people happy with our words."

Stella nodded, "I think we could do it."

And then all of a sudden we were making plans and figuring out how we would get from our small nowhere town to Nashville where we could actually do this. Where we could actually become something.

But we were seventeen and Caleb's accident hadn't happened yet.

Plans change quickly. Life changes quickly. One second we were preparing for a long road trip, a lifetime full of memories, and the next second we were calling an ambulance and hoping we didn't witness Caleb's last breath.