Forever and Ever

Forever and Ever (Chapter One)

I PROMISE..
__________________________________

Lauren always loved the look of the barely legible "M" so elegantly traced into her mother's wrist.

Her parents had been soul mates and the world could have seen it by the way they always looked at each other, even without the initials on their wrists.

Lauren loved the stories a lot more than Chris did, so their parents usually ignored the fake gaging noises he made when she asked about their marks.

They had been in college and her mother had been in the library, helping to reorganize the shelves when her father came in, pale in the face, needing to research something for his class because he'd spent all his time procrastinating.
They'd bumped into each other in the world studies section and the rest had been history.

Her father had told her that he'd known the moment he laid eyes on her mother that they were meant to be.
Especially since she hadn't minded his sloppy handwriting being forever imprinted in her skin.

Lauren was six when she got her letter.

She knew just from looking at it on the playground that whoever it was perfect for her.

The "K" was written partially crooked but beautifully, with a curled edge leading into whatever letter would have been next to it.

She felt bad that her soul mate's wrist held a sloppy "L" wherever they might be.

She hadn't written her first initial anywhere at all when she had been learning the alphabet.
She would practice writing it in the sky or imagine it in her head, she wanted it to be perfect for whoever she ended up connecting with but the moment she first wrote it down it still looked as much like chicken scratch as the rest of her name did.

She was too excited to show her mother when she got home from school and she ended up nearly tripping running through the front door.

"Mama! I got it! I got my letter!" She yelled, bounding into the kitchen where her mother sat with her dad and brother.

"Mama, Daddy, look!" She beamed, holding her arm out as far as it could go, too horribly ecstatic to control it.

"Would you look at that. What does it say kiddo? B? Billy? Boris?" Her dad laughed.

"No daddy, it's a K! Like- Well, like.. I don't know! But it's just gotta be the best name ever! I know it, I just know, cause look at how they wrote it. I'm gonna love them someday just like you and mommy love each other and we're gonna get married and live in a castle." She said with a surprising sense of finality.

"How do you know he'll want to live in a castle?" Chris asked.

"Because I said so, Chris."

"Chris, your sister can live wherever she wants to and if the person she ends up with doesn't want to live in a castle with her then they can always sleep in the stables." Their father joked, earning a bright smile from their mother.

"I'm gonna fall in love just like you are." Lauren nodded in the direction of her parents before grabbing a juice box out of the fridge and heading up to her room, glancing at her wrist the whole time.

"I'm gonna love you someday. So you better be ready when that happens because I'm gonna love you too much, forever and ever. I promise." She whispered to the letter on her wrist hoping that somehow her true love heard her.
__________________________________

LITTLE ALLYBROOKE
__________________________________

Lauren envied Ally Brooke, as far as soul mates go.

She had been best friends with hers all her life and when the time came that they finally learned how to write their names and their initials had shown up on each other's wrists, even their parents had expected it.

Ally Brooke and Normani.

It was obvious upon meeting them but Lauren still felt a bit jealous that they'd never had to fight for each other or find each other, but she was happy that her friends had always been happy and it made her all the more excited for the time when she would meet her soul mate.
__________________________________

ITS K-NOT YOU..
__________________________________

Kyle was not her soul mate, neither was Keith, Kevin, Kenny, or Keaton, though they were all pretty cool friends.

All of them had different letters and none of them were L, so she had already known that none of them were her soul mate, but the part that made it obvious was that she had never felt the way her parents had explained it.

She knew love had to be different for everyone but she also knew that somehow, her true love was going to open her eyes someday.