letters to no one

Chapter 1 Love Letters

“Good morning, Perfect. Have a great day at work. I’ll see you as soon as you get home from work. I hope your day is as amazing as you are! All my love, Sam”

Simple and to the point, love is as easy as putting a note in a pack of cigarettes in the morning. We were always doing little things like that for each other. It was just our way of trying to show that we were always thinking about each other. We didn’t really get to spend a lot of time together, because we worked opposite shifts most days. So we tried to make the most out of the time we had. What made this particularly tricky was that he hadn’t actually left Michaela yet. So, on top of our conflicting schedules, we also had to try to not get caught.

A lot of people will probably think less of us for sneaking around. I don’t really care. It made sense to me to wait for him. I never even thought of it as cheating on her, I thought of it as trying to give her time to get back on her feet. She had just got a new job after being unemployed for almost a year. It just seemed more sensible to let her get some financial stability before telling her she had to move out. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t my fault. I never planned to fall in love with him, it just happened. Of course I felt bad about it, but only because I knew that eventually it was going to end up hurting them both, her more than him. I pitied her.

It was funny the way it all started. It was so unexpected. Joel and I had been friends ever since we had been introduced almost a year before. We had connected almost instantly for reasons that neither of us could have explained. There was just something about him that made me feel as though he belonged in my life. At first it was just a matter of us all hanging out in groups at a local bar on the weekends. We would laugh and joke about a lot of random things. His girlfriend always seemed to hung out on the fringe, never really a part of the group. I always kind of questioned their relationship. You could tell by looking at them that he was way out of her league. I always tried to make the effort to pull her into the group on those rare nights when she would join us at the bar. She seemed to prefer to stay home most of the time though.

I’ll never forget the first time I realized that their relationship was not really as good as she wanted everyone to believe. Joel was sitting outside one night talking to my then-boyfriend Jon. Michaela had just left her job and of course, Joel was looking for someone, anyone, to talk to. I thought it was odd because he and Josh had always just tolerated each other. They had never had a real conversation. He started telling Josh how bad things had gotten between him and Michaela. She was always trying to control him and telling him what to do. He said he would do anything for a good relationship with a girl who cared about him. He started naming off things about other girls in the group. How Rory always seemed content to just be with Steve, no matter where he took her. He talked about how Amaya was always willing to come to Kenny’s defense, even when it was Kenny who was picking the fight. Then he told Josh how lucky he was to have me. Joel told Josh he would do almost anything to have a girl like me. I’ll admit, when Josh told me about the conversation later I was flattered. After that I started to develop a crush on Joel. After all, he seemed to appreciate all of the things about me that Josh had been ignoring for a long time.

Not long after that, Michaela decided to take a trip with her family to the beach for a couple of weeks. She had the free time since she wasn’t working, and it was all being paid for by her dad. Joel decided not to go, he told her someone had to stay behind and work to make sure the bills got paid. Usually if Michaela went out of town, Joel would come to the bar almost every night. I always thought it was something he did out of boredom from sitting at home alone all of the time. That Saturday I learned something about Joel that I had never even suspected.

I saw Joel sitting at the table with everyone and like always I went up to tell him hello. He hugged me like always and then kissed me on the cheek. That wasn’t something he normally did, and I had a feeling if Josh had been there he wouldn’t have done it. I tried to remind myself that he was taken by asking him one simple question. “Where is your girl tonight?” Joel was in the middle of explaining to me how Michaela had gone to the beach with her family when Steve suddenly pulled me away.

“Come outside with me, I want you to hear a song.” That wasn’t unusual, Steve was forever more trying to get me to ‘think outside the box’. It amused him and frustrated him at the same time that I never tried to sing anything that wasn’t a country song. Steve is the central part of our little group. He’s pretty much the one that pulled us all together, at least he was for me. He was the one who had brought me here in the first place. So we sat outside listening to different songs for almost twenty minutes. When I finally went back inside, Joel was talking to some woman at the bar. Well, talking wasn’t really the word to use. The woman was hanging all over him. The weird part was, he wasn’t doing anything to push her off, even though she looked old enough to be his mother. That’s when I realized Steve had another reason for pulling me outside. Joel was looking to get into trouble, and Steve didn’t want me getting pulled into his games. In hindsight, I probably should have listened to Steve from jump. Oh well, I’ll know better next time.