Dear Mr. Pessimist {Completed}

~25~ Every Little Piece

Dear Mr. Pessimist,

I loved everything you showed me today. I loved the roses and the poppy's, and of course I loved the box of chocolates, who wouldn't? But I'd like to know why you kept looking at me. . . like you thought I was going to disappear or something. I'm not going anywhere, I promise. Now I'm running out of room here and-

With Love,

Syd

xoxoxoxoxoxoxxo

"Can I take the blindfold off yet? I think I've got something in my eye."

I could hear Bennett chuckling behind me, sounding so close that I was positive he was standing behind me.

"Nope. I'm keeping you blindfolded all day." He replied.

"Really? You do realize I can reach up and pull this off, right?" I said, a joking tone in my voice. I felt Bennett's hand brush against my cheek as he finally pulled the blindfold off, revealing a church altar to me.

"Come up here." He led me up the small steps and toward the row of chairs that I'm sure the choir was supposed to sit in.

"When I was little, I used to love coming to church." He said, sitting down in one of the chairs. I sat beside him, lacing my fingers through his.

"It was one of the only times I was able to see my parents, to feel as if I was good enough for something. We would all be happy when we left, smiling and joking, everything. We were a perfect family, a family you'd only read about in books." Bennett ran his thumb along my hand as he stared at the pews lined up in front of us.

"That was until we got home and we had to really become the perfect family. Mom and Dad had to impress all their little friends. All the rich men and their trophy wives. They would push me away, upstairs to my room, where I would just sit and try to figure out a way to get closer to them."

"I thought working at the bakery would be perfect, but it turns out they were rarely there either. So I decided to just take over, to do everything there to distract me from my shitty life at home and my even shittier life at school." He rested our intertwined hands on his knee and smiled bitterly.

"I used to be so jealous of you, Sydney. I used to see how many friends you had, all the people that came to you. While I was sitting there getting rejected by girls over and over." He said, "All I wanted was to be normal. I wanted to have a family that actually cared about what happened in my life, but the closest I got to that was Tristan. I wanted a girlfriend, someone I could show off to my parents and have them be proud of me about. I learned in high school that it was all useless, I was done pretending." I laid my head against his shoulder, letting him continue on with his story without interrupting.

"So I let them see who I really was, what they had turned me into. I turned cold, I ignored what they told me to do. I slept with girls I met at parties or clubs we got into. I just wanted it to go away, to be able to be normal for just a day." He leaned his head down so it was resting against mine.

"Then I met her, Hannah. These idiot's were trying to mess with her and her friends, so I scared them off. She smiled then, and somehow I knew that there was something different about her. She wasn't the same as all the other girls I knew, she had this maturity about her, it drew me to her. All I wanted was to find a way to get her to like me, to show her to my parents." Bennett paused for a second, sucking in a deep breath.

"But she refused to let me take her out, to buy her dinner. She kept telling me I was too innocent and young even though we were the same age. She didn't want anything to do with me, or maybe it was she didn't want me to get dragged into her way of life." I opened my mouth to cut in, but Bennett continued on before I could.