The Way We Learned to Love ✓

34 - lily

Hi, everyone. I wanted to give you a heads' up before you start reading that there is some intense stuff coming up in these next few chapters that's more descriptive than anything in the story so far, so I recommend looking back at the trigger warning at the start of the book before you read. Please feel free to comment or message me if you have any specific questions about the content! I'll try to put *TW at the top of the other applicable chapters as a reminder.

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october 2018 : 1 year and 11 months ago

"What are these?" Lily asked, drifting over to investigate the cardboard boxes spread out across the dining room table in front of her aunt.

She came over to the Caruso's house mainly to give the cat some extra attention as Henry had once requested, but she also genuinely enjoyed talking to her aunt and uncle. And sneaking snacks out of their pantry. She scratched Beary, who was currently plopped in her arms, behind the ears.

Uncle Robert had answered the door for her and then returned to the living room to resume the unfortunate task of grading papers. Lily wondered at first why he wasn't doing it at the table but then saw that Aunt Jenny had completely taken it over. She was seated at one of the chairs, softly smiling and reading a piece of paper that she had plucked out of one of the boxes. It wasn't until Lily came over that she realized all of them were full of what appeared to be handwritten notes.

"They're letters," her aunt explained upon noticing her curiosity. "To each other."

Lily's eyes surveyed the number of boxes on the table again. It must have amounted to hundreds of notes. "These are all love letters?" she asked incredulously.

"Mhmm," Aunt Jenny affirmed, the smile still tugging at her lips as she set the one in her hand down.

Anything and everything even remotely cute was melting Lily's heart into a puddle these days. In the midst of experiencing the bliss of being in love for the very first time, she was way more sentimental these days than she usually was. And this felt like a scenario pulled out of one of the rom-coms she made Liam endure with her, not the sort of thing that actually happened in real life.

"There are so many..." she murmured, still in awe of the volume of letters and the fact that they kept them all.

"We used to do it all the time," Aunt Jenny reminisced. "Most of them are from the really early days before we got married. Writing was never the most practical, but it was much more fun than talking on the phone because there was always that exciting anticipation of waiting for the next one. The necessity obviously went away once we lived together, but we'll still do it on occasion just for kicks."

"Really?"

Her aunt nodded. "It's almost ridiculously pointless now that we have texting and Facetime and we're in the same room half the time, anyway, but that gives it the same kind of endearing appeal it had in the beginning."

"Maybe I should try," Lily contemplated.

On second thought, she was horrendously unpoetic, so that probably wouldn't go too well. Liam would probably write her the sweetest note in the world and the best response she'd come up with would be "thanks."

"I recommend it," Aunt Jenny advised. "We'll never be able to prevent men from saying stupid stuff, so we might as well get as much of it as possible in writing to make fun of them with twenty years later."

Lily giggled as her aunt carefully picked up another letter and started reading it. Whatever was written must have been pretty funny because she pressed her lips together like she was trying not to giggle like her niece just did.