With Love...

she never forgot

THEO

Belle left her journal here. I think she dropped it on accident, and to be honest I'm surprised she still has it after all these years. The bounding on it is falling apart and it looks way too fragile to be a journal. it's mostly how I remember it being. What I'm most surprised about is how she never came back for it. She was obsessed with always being like two inches from it at all times.

The sensible thing for me to do would be to give it back to her. However at 1am when I couldn't sleep because she was on my mind the entire time (I hated that by the way), and her journal was sitting on my desk across the room, I couldn't help myself. Part of me feels bad because it's technically an invasion of privacy but at the same time I could barely bring myself to care when she's put me through the wringer.

It was filled with song lyrics for songs that never got produced, they had life to them. They screamed 'Anabelle'. That's probably why they never left the pages of the book. What I noticed is that so many of them were about me. Or me and her. A normal person would be flattered but this just made me so angry. She didn't go a day not thinking about me. If I wasn't in the song lyrics then I was in a regular old journal entry. She made journal entries about me potentially hearing the song she performed the other night.

She never forgot about me, but she sure as hell acted like it.

The countless numbers of pages are filled with memories of us. I spent hours reading them all last night. It just made me mad to read them so I'm not even sure why I read them but I did. I read every last one and practically memorized some of her words. God, she has me in a chokehold that I'm itching to get out of. And I can. But I clearly don't want to bad enough.

And now she's here, standing in my kitchen with her messy black curls and those stupid cutoff shorts. Her eyes look glassed over and she's scanning the room again. I clear my throat and she snaps her head to look at me.

"Please, sit down," I beg her. "You're stressing me out."

Her cheeks flush pink and she rubs her arm. "Sorry."

I slide a plate of food over to her and she mumbles a thank you.

"How are you?" she asks me and I look back at her and raise my eyebrows. Her face drops and she rolls her eyes. "Please, Theodore."

She says my name so effortlessly. God, I can't stand her. "I was good."

"was?" she asks, confused on the past tense.

I cock an eyebrow at her and she sighs dropping her head. I can't help but act this way. It's so difficult to just be normal with her. It doesn't come naturally to me anymore. Not at all. I feel bad, but not bad enough to push years of emptiness she has caused me aside. It's damn near impossible to.

"I'm trying, Theodore," she whispers. I almost don't hear her, but the way she chokes on her words catches my ear.

I look at her. She brings her head up to look at me. That's when I see her. Just Annabella. Not Belle Graves, international pop star and world renowned artist. Just her. I see everything in her. Just the way I used to. I want to hug her. So bad. More than anything. She's right there. Like she never left.

I sigh and drag my hand over my face. "I know, Annabelle."

"Do you remember that big fight we had? We were 12. It was that summer before 7th grade," she brings up and I remember instantly.

I smirk a little. "Yeah, I do."

BELLE

6 YEARS AGO

"You cheated again, Theo," I whined, but all he did was smile at me. I rolled my eyes and fell back on his bedroom floor.

His head popped up over mine, a grin wide on his face. "I did not cheat. You just suck at rummy," he told me.