Lasts a Lifetime (Covinsky)

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Ya'll. My gosh. About ten days I ago I watched this movie on a whim, seeing cute GIFS of it on tumblr, and I am in love with this movie. With Peter. With Lara Jean. With Covinsky in general!
And, watching it, you cannot tell me that when Peter said 'you've never been second best' he meant that he has always loved Lara Jean and the whole time this was a crazy plot just to date her. I will take that to my grave and you can pry it from my cold dead hands.

As a note, I have not read the books!

Title comes from the tagline of the movie poster 'Sixteen Candles'.

This is currently un-beta'd so all mistakes are my own.

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Peter Kavinsky receiving a love letter, in itself, was not out of the ordinary.

Most of them he got during Valentine's day, shoved into his locker or slid between his books when he wasn't looking, with glitter that would follow him around for days or written in gel-pen that would smudge his fingers and stain the off-white pages of his text book. But hey, maybe cell osmosis could benefit from having something a little more exciting across the boring text, and the next person who got this textbook after him would wonder why the hell their diagram of the human body was accented with smudgy turquoise blue ink.

He got a few on his birthday, usually dropped in his mailbox. He'd find them, between cards from his grandparents that always had a crisp twenty and cards from his uncle that were just really bad puns, and he always thought it was sort of nice.

Getting one in the middle of fall wasn't even all that out of the ordinary. Love letters to Peter would pop up at all times of the year, his 'charm' and 'dorky smile' just simply irresistible; that's what Chris once told him, but when she'd said it, she'd been gagging.

Peter didn't think himself a scientist of any means, but he was one enough to think he could very accurately classify the types of girls that sent him love letters into three categories.

Young, fawning freshman girls who didn't know that it was social suicide to give Gen any reason to hate them. Their letters were always sweet and innocent, a purity that made him just sort of sigh and hide these letters from Gen. There wasn't any reason for Gen to go bully them in the lunchroom over a little infatuation, especially when these girls rarely went beyond writing him a letter.Joke or prank letters. From girls who were dared to do it, and would usually end their missiles with some variation of 'so-and-so put me up to this, so can we just pretend it never happened'. Peter was always fine to comply with that. He didn't show Gen these letters either.Girls who were bold enough to think that maybe if they wrote all the sexy things they thought about him, they could tempt him away from his current girlfriend. Peter did show Gen these, because ever since his dad left he had a thing about cheating or girls that tried to steal boys away.

What was unusual was that the sender of the letter- one Lara Jean Covey- didn't fit into any of these categories. Or, she fit into all of them.

The letter was in his mailbox, sent right through the USPS, the old fashioned way. It was marked ever so carefully, written in a artistic font and when Peter first got it, his only real thought was; What the hell?

He and Lara Jean hadn't spoken in years. They'd been friends as children, acquaintances as middle-schoolers, and finally drifted apart after 8th grade. Gen probably had a part in that, he was sure, but as it stood...he and Lara Jean had virtually nothing to to talk about. Not, on his part, for lack of trying to think of ways to entice her in a conversation.

So, suffice to say, Peter was enraptured by this whole affair from the very moment it began.

Lara Jean's letter was unlike anything he could describe; it was innocent and sweet, written with soft words and poetry language. It was a way that Peter could just imagine Lara Jean writing it, sitting over her desk as her pen carefully scrawled the words. But it wasn't from a freshman girl, it was from Lara Jean, and her feelings were a little bit more complete than the previous girls who had written him. It was genuine, really. It spoke of a love that burned in the bottom of her chest, a love that consumed her thoughts and made being near Peter nearly unbearable. It spoke of a love that Peter had never once fully felt and was beginning to think only existed in movies. But she didn't speak of asking him to leave Gen (which, news flash, Gen had left him) or even to do anything. It was just a frank letter of her emotions.