Just You and Me

I'm currently on a Stephen/LC kick right now, so expect more soon.

Replies are appreciated!

<3

"When we go to San Francisco, that's it, I'm leaving Kristin behind. I'm not gonna need the excess drama she seems to bring into my life, when I could be partying it up and having fun with you. Plus, Cabo proved that it wouldn't take her five minutes after I'd left before she was off with some other guy if we stayed together. There's just no point anymore. It's gonna be me and you, LC. Partying it up in the beautiful city of San Francisco." He'd told me, and I'd had no reason not to believe him at the time, despite the fact he'd also told me they were done in Cabo, and many other times throughout the duration of their relationship. Maybe I believed that the distance would be what kept them apart this time around. Maybe I was just holding on to long lingering hopes that San Francisco would finally be what allowed Stephen and I to be together, a hope I'd been holding onto since I was young enough to hope.

And it had proceeded to entertain those hopes for a while. We'd had a rough year back in Laguna in our final year of high school, with Kristin at the root of it all, but our friendship had managed to battle its way through the storm of his relationship with Kristin and his inability to stop kissing me at the same time. San Francisco had rebuilt us stronger than ever, from the moment I saw Stephen waiting for me as I exited the airport in San Francisco. That was the beginning of small, albeit unnecessary, things that Stephen would do for me as we began our life in San Francisco. Some days he'd show up early in the morning to drive me to classes, or stop in on his way home with dinner. Occasionally it was just a phone call or a text message or a flower, but he was trying to make up for all the heartbreak he'd caused me in the previous year, and fix the mistakes he'd made. He'd kiss me, promise me that there was no more Kristin, and that the future was him and I; in fact, he probably had nearly promised me the world, and in that one breath between kisses, it would be right back to Kristin, her apologies, and they'd pick right up where they left off.

And for some reason, I thought San Francisco had changed that about him. That he'd left the betrayal and the lies and the mistakes behind. We'd fallen into a routine of dinner twice a week, one night I'd take it to him, and one night he'd bring it to me, a movie, and a general catch up. If classes permitted it, we'd see each other more nights in a week too, but we promised each other that there would be those two nights without fail. We weren't together, yet we weren't exactly seeing anyone else either. We'd fallen in between once again, almost mirroring our relationship in Laguna, hiding under the somewhat false pretence of friends, but the kisses screamed that there was something more behind it.

Maybe that something was worth chasing, but for me and for my heart, already fractured too many times by Stephen Colletti, I wasn't willing to chase something that kept running away and leading me astray.

So I kissed him and revelled in the knowledge that for once he wasn't kissing anyone else in the pause we took to breathe, and that he wasn't going to break my heart just yet.

I fell into allowing the comfort back into my life and forgetting the heartbreak he'd once created on my heart, gaining my comfort both from him and from knowing that Kristin was wrecking havoc on guy's hearts back in Laguna, six hours drive away from here. Maybe I fell too fast into the comfort, and fell too blindly in thinking I was safe in our current relationship, the in between that actually was more like us stuck in the middle in no mans land. Our routine, our moving on, the safety I'd garnered in the comfort of a new city, I laid all my hopes on that being what would hold us together and keep us together once school ended and we were back in Laguna.

And of course that day came too sooner than expected, home for break, and all I wanted to do was stay in our security net of San Francisco and our routine, fearful of what would happen as we left our bubble. The irony of living in a bubble in San Francisco was that growing up in Laguna, all teenagers complained about living in the bubble. We longed to escape from it and be free from it, yet I'd formed a new bubble in San Francisco, a bubble filled with naivety and what could only be described as false gullibility. I didn't want to believe that it could take one little pin prick in the shape of Kristin Cavallari for our bubble to burst, or that Stephen would interrupt our routine with a girl, from the past or new entirely.