Work Text:
Three and a half years ago.
By the time Peter arrives at the Starbucks on the corner of Fulton and Trinity, Lara Jean has had two macchiatos and three panic attacks brought on in equal parts by the sheer amount of caffeine and sugar in her bloodstream and meeting up with the ex-boyfriend who had broken her heart so thoroughly five years ago.
She’d been surprised when Peter had emailed her out of the blue last week. His mother and brother had moved to San Diego from Portland right after he had graduated from Adler, so there’d been no one to catch her up on what he’d been up to since she lost touch with him junior year of college. He’d shut down his social media accounts after the Duke Lacrosse team had gotten mired in a scandal of their own making (which, thank god, Peter had not been a part of), so when she got an email from P. Kavinsky in her work email, sandwiched between shitty criticism from her boss and a demand from the social media team for photos of the spring mock-ups, she nearly spit her coffee all over the screen.
He was in New York City and he wanted to meet up.
Peter texts her shortly before 3pm to confirm that she’s still on for 6, and Lara Jean spends the next three hours trying to decipher exactly how to take the winking emoji. She’s had a few boyfriends since Peter, but she never stayed in touch with them after their relationships had inevitably fizzled out.
This is new ground entirely. Does she hug him? Does she go in for the handshake that had made him laugh over their ridiculous teenage fake-dating contract? Does she play it cool and give him a head nod?
(BONE HIM IN THE BATHROOM, Kitty texted helpfully just before five. This had been her go-to answer to all things romance related since she turned seventeen and went a little boy (and girl) crazy.)
Peter, it seems, is not as torn about how to greet her, reaching out and wrapping her up in a huge hug as soon as he spots her at a table in the corner. He smells absolutely amazing, and he’s somehow gotten even taller and broader since they last saw each other. He’s wearing a sport coat on top of a crisp white dress shirt with the top button undone, like he’d errantly popped it after taking off a tie. He looks like… an adult, somehow, which feels odd because Lara Jean apparently never grew out of the awkward sixteen year old she was in high school.
“Covey,” he says, his voice full of affection, and it warms her entire body from head to toe while simultaneously making her heart ache like a punched bruise.
--
Now.
God, how kitsch is it?! Chris texts approximately ten seconds after Lara Jean walks in the door. Three seconds later, her phone buzzes again.
You need to tell me if Melodie is still crimping her hair because I might not be a human rights lawyer, but I will press some charges on behalf of mankind.
… womankind. Fuck the patriarchy.
A little over four years ago, Lara Jean had decided to skip her ten year reunion in a fit of depressed self-pity. She had been living in New York and was thoroughly miserable, despite having a prestigious intern position in the editorial department of Vogue. (The one time her father’s vagina-focused connections (as Chris put it) had done Lara Jean a solid: delivering the niece of the features editor had landed her an interview where she managed to convince them that she had an inkling of what she was doing.)
But here Lara Jean is, walking into the Gullpy Ballroom of The Nines Hotel. There’d been a fire in the gym of Adler - the usual location of the somewhat kitschy reunion - back in May, so the committee had moved it to one of the nicer hotels downtown, right next to the Willamette.
Josh had offered to be her plus one even though technically it was his reunion too, but then Margot had gone into labour with the twins eight weeks early, and Josh had understandably decided not to fly in from Colorado with two preemies to take care of.
Ha, you’re adorable, Chris had drawled into the phone when Lara Jean had asked Chris to plus-one her. She’d been the most unexpected success story of their class, moving from brilliant but lazy burnout to a copyright attorney at one of the most prestigious firms in the country. I barely went to school there when I was legally required to. They want me to show up ten years after finally gaining freedom? No thanks. Besides, I’m joining up with Richie on tour in Japan. Eating my weight in tempura versus watching Gen try to pretend that she’s actually gained some modicum of success over the past ten years? Actually, you know what, that’d be entertaining as hell, but I’m still not coming.
So Lara Jean is flying solo tonight. And the reason she didn’t want to be is standing directly across from the entrance at one of the high tables, surrounded by a group of men who look vaguely familiar.
Peter Kavinsky.
Two years after her move to LA, he’d begun seeing a Broadway actress who ended up doing a well-publicized arc on True Feelings which resulted in temporary B-list celebrity status. This resulted in Peter’s face ending up in a few “cute couple alert” montages in the gossip rags.
One of the bad parts of Los Angeles is that it’s a city that doesn’t care about the source of gossip: New York, Los Angeles, London… it’s all dishworthy news if it involves a famous face. In New York, no one gave a shit about news if it happened west of the Mississippi. Or across the Hudson, to be fair.
(Lara Jean will not admit - even upon threat of death - that she has a few of those magazines hidden away in the drawer of her nightstand underneath copies of Fashion and Cosmo that she steals from sets after they shut down. That’s how she knows that they broke up six months ago, Peter’s face in one half of a heart cracked in two.)
He looks the same as he did three years ago - hot, her treacherous mind supplies - but also positively miserable as Chase Miller and Huyen Park badger him with questions.
Peter smiles as he sees her, that lazy half-smile that made her heart race when she was sixteen.
It’s too late to run now, her mind helpfully supplies, though she made a real habit of it in her teens. Twenty-something Lara Jean Song Covey is a grown ass woman who doesn’t run when she sees an ex she never quite got over, who still fucks her up with a look across a crowded room.
No. Twenty-something Lara Jean Song Covey puts her chin up and walks straight into the fray.
(Twenty-something Lara Jean Song Covey also stops a waiter on the way to the fray and gets a giant glass of chardonnay because she’s not getting through this night sober.
(Twenty-something Lara Jean Song Covey is a realist.)
--
Starbucks turns into a weekly meet-up on Wednesdays, the only day her jerk boss Marisa doesn’t make Lara Jean work overtime because Marisa has a pilates class after work, and doesn’t trust her to do anything without direct supervision. It turns out Peter works out of One World Trade Center too, though on a different floor.
“Yeah, I thought it would be creepy if I said I saw you getting into the elevator and tracked down where you work,” Peter says, running his hands through his hair, explaining why he hadn’t told her in the email they worked in the same building. “I asked Andre down at security if he knew if you worked in the building. Then I just stuck your name in a vogue email address and hoped they didn’t make you put a period between your two first names.”
“Ah,” Lara Jean says softly, her heart beating just a little bit faster at the thought of him tracking her down. “That is some grade A stalking, Kavinsky.”
He’s picked up a few freelance spots as a contributor for the New Yorker, a gig he seems to be enjoying. He thinks they’re going to offer him a permanent junior writer position soon, but he’s also been talking more and more to her about the novel he’s been developing in his spare time. It’s hard to believe the boy that used to write her love letters on scraps of his science notebook is now a real writer.
When she shows up particularly frazzled one Wednesday evening, he finally gets how much she hates her job out of her with a little bit of prodding. Embarrassingly, it comes out as a rushed blast of the words between trying to shove back the tears that keep burning at her eyes, desperate to fall.
“If you hate it so much, why are you still working there?” Peter says softly, playing with the cardboard cupholder, his fingers tapping like he’s desperate to keep them busy. Lara Jean doesn’t remember him being so fidgety when he was in high school. He was always the boy who was effortlessly cool and in control.
“Because it’s the dream internship. A thousand girls would kill for this job, and it seems stupid that I can’t get through it.”
“Covey, you were never the girl who did things because everyone else thought they were important or cool,” he says, looking up at her with that devastating stare that makes her guts tangle up. “It’s what I like best about you, frankly.”
Despite their terrible track record with communication, Peter has always been the boy who knew her best, who understood her. No one saw her the way that Peter did.
Breaking up with him still ranks as one of the worst things Lara Jean has ever gone through, even though it was mutual and not exactly unexpected. Maybe she should have heeded her mother’s advice to Margot about not going to college with a boyfriend. When he’d gotten the scholarship to Duke for lacrosse and she’d decided on Parsons, part of her had known that the distance would be too much, particularly for a couple as intense as she and Peter had become.
It had only gotten worse when she had finally slept with him their senior year of high school. Although it had taken a few years and a few boys after Peter to realize it, Lucas had been right: it was different with the boy who took your virginity.
In the end, they’d made it nearly through freshman year before Peter had made the eight hour drive up to New York so they could talk in person to end it. He’d hugged her, tucked her loose hair behind her ear, and told her they’d stay in touch, that they’d still be friends.
She’d cried pretty much non-stop for a month.
“It’s not that,” Lara Jean says, trying not to blush. She is genuinely terrible at taking compliments. “I just… this is what I’ve been working towards, you know? I don’t want to throw it away because my boss is an asshole and I’m basically a coffee mule.”
“If it’s not working, it’s not working,” Peter says, offering up half his macadamia nut cookie. “Did you ever think I’d end up being a writer? Dad was sure I’d end up getting an MBA like him, and I think Mom was hoping for anything other than professional lacrosse player. She cried the first time I was published - more out of relief than pride, I think. But even after I graduated, I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do. Never thought in a million years it would be this, but I love it.”
“You’re not the enigma you think you are, Kavinsky. There were clues. You were always good with words.” Lara Jean takes the cookie from his fingers and shoves half of it in her mouth. “By the time we graduated, those little love letters were getting… how do you literary types put it?” She smiles, thinking of the pages and page of letters she still keeps in the cloth box that Kitty finally gave back to her. “Verbose.”
Peter laughs. “I had the right inspiration.”
--
She only gets halfway to him before she sees him mouth, Save me, at her. A few steps closer and she can hear the tail end of what Chase is saying.
“- must have sucked. She was so hot as Dr. Hunting.”
“Hey,” Lara Jean says, because Peter is looking about as comfortable as Lara Jean feels right now, and something about the playing field being evened up a little makes this somewhat less excruciating. “Peter.”
“Covey!” Peter says, putting a little too much eagerness in it for someone who hasn’t bothered speaking to her in the last three years. She hears Huyen greet her - they’d taken trig together as juniors - while Chase just looks too annoyed having his little gossip session broken up to bother saying hello. “Sorry boys, I’ll have to catch up another time. Later.”
When Peter throws an arm around her waist to guide her away from the table, it’s like a cattle prod has been stuck right into her spine. She tries to walk normally in her heels and not wobble like a complete freak.
“Thank god,” Peter says, oblivious to her internal meltdown. “I thought I’d have to throw myself out a window and we know how well that went last time.”
(The night she’d lost her virginity. Kitty had been at a sleepover, her father in the middle of a delivery that he said would take all night. They’d woken up at a little past 3am to the door opening downstairs, the sound of her dad’s voice grumbling as he tripped over the sneakers Kitty never put away. Peter had gone out the window in his boxers and tripped on the gutter, landing with a thump loud enough that Lara Jean had known something had broken. His wrist, as it turned out, which ended up in a cast long enough to take him out of the last two games of the lacrosse season. Still worth it, he had said with a stupid grin the first time she’d seen the awful plaster monstrosity around his wrist and hand.)
Lara Jean shoots him an unimpressed look because she has absolutely no idea how to respond to that statement, and he laughs under his breath as he guides them to a more hidden spot next to the small stage.
“Thanks for the save, Covey,” he says, letting his hand linger before it drops away from her hip. He’s positioned himself behind her so he’s effectively blocked anyone else in the room from seeing him. “And nice to see you.”
Now that she’s able to swallow her nerves a bit, the worry returns like a category five hurricane. Lara Jean is good at a few things, but handling awkward situations is not one of them. She practically has an Olympic medal in how to make shit more awkward than it already is. “Nice to see you too, Kavinsky.”
For the first time she notices the beer in Peter’s hand. Either staying at the hotel or ubering it somewhere close by, she thinks like a creepy creeper. Peter’s always had a thing about driving drunk; a year into their relationship, he had finally admitted his father’s habit of doing it as his parents’ marriage disintegrated, and how frightened it had made his mother and little brother.
She’s trying to think of ways to start some kind of conversation with him that doesn’t start with, I’m sorry I never emailed you like I promised but you never texted me like you promised, when Peter takes a sip of his Rickards and says, “So how’s LA treating you?”
The designer job she’d moved across the country for had fallen through less than two weeks after she arrived. But as luck would have it, one of the three girls she had moved in with worked in the make-up department of Warner Brothers. A few calls and several weeks later, she’d had a short-term contract gig in the costume department of a small movie about teenagers who could shapeshift into talking animals. Within a year, she’d been booking regularly as a wardrobe supervisor, even a costume designer on a few indie flicks that couldn’t afford to pay her much.
“I love it,” Lara Jean says, and Peter nods solemnly, taking another drink. He doesn’t look upset, but he doesn’t quite look happy either. “You were right, you know?”
“About what?”
“About trying to force it,” she explains. “I didn’t even know how miserable trying to force myself to be happy was on top of the misery of doing a job I loathed every day. I feel like I’ve finally found what I love to do, even though it’s not what I thought I’d be doing.”
“Yeah?” The pinched look slowly melts away into a wide smile.
“I always thought I’d be in fashion, but it… it was just so miserable, Peter. I’m just not built for high fashion, and it took me a while to realize that it’s okay even though I’m pretty sure my textiles professor would disown me for saying it. In the end, I mostly wanted to dress people up in outfits I thought were cool, and now I get to do that every day all day.”
“Good for you, Covey.”
“I do a little designing on the side, though,” she admits out loud for the first time, shocking herself. She keeps a little sketchbook in her desk with ideas that come to her as she works on mocking up outfits for her costume department jobs.
“Of course you do,” Peter replies, his tone not mocking but instead filled with something that might be the offspring of amusement and pride. Eric, the boy Lara Jean had dated after Peter, had, in the course of their two mouth (REBOUND, she hears Kitty sing-song in her head) relationship spent the vast majority of his time subtly putting down Lara Jean’s field of study. By the time she’d told him to lose her number, he’d managed to find fault with romance novels, little sisters, journal-keeping, vintage leather, and the entire state of Oregon.
At the time, she knew Peter had been special - one of the reasons she’d broken her own rule about waiting until she turned eighteen to lose her virginity - but she hadn’t a clue just how special. All the things she’s learned over the past few years to hide from boys (namely fashion, romance novels, journal-keeping, any type of feeling) are the things that Peter never makes her feel ashamed about, the things that while they were dating he actually seemed to find endearing and different about her.
There’d been more boys after Eric, but he’d set the trend for those that followed. These days, Lara Jean rarely gets past a third or fourth date before getting bored or turned off. Chris blames the “false expectations set by those bodice rippers, LJ! No mortal man can compare with a secret crown prince who escapes the trappings of royal life by becoming a cook in New Jersey only to fall in love with the sweet, down-on-her-luck waitress who is the only one to…”
It takes her a second to realize that she’s wandered off in thought, letting the conversation die, so she squeaks out a quick, “How about you?”
“Good,” Peter says. “Kind of hating New York right now. Working on the second book, but it’s like pulling teeth, so I’ve been taking on extra contributor stuff to help keep the blood flowing.”
“Second book?” Lara Jean asks, her jaw dropping in shock. “You published your book?” When Peter looks at her like she’s grown three heads instead of answering her question, Lara Jean yanks on the cuff of his jacket and uses it to jerk him around a little, hoping to knock him out of his daydream. “Peter, your book got published?”
The magazine articles had always called him a writer, but last thing she’d heard he was still a staff writer at the New Yorker. She had no idea he’d finished and published his book.
“Yeah. I mailed you a copy last year. Maryanna gave me your address.” The look on Peter’s face has grown… strange. “Didn’t you get it?”
Maryanna had been another intern at Vogue who had actually managed to transition from unpaid slave labour into criminally underpaid near-slave labour, though just as a contract junior assistant in social media. They hadn’t been close, but they’d gone to lunch enough times that Lara Jean had left her contact info with Maryanna in case she ever came to LA.
The idea of Peter and Maryanna speaking leaves a bizarrely sour taste in Lara Jean’s mouth.
“Was it the address in Huntington Park?” Lara Jean asks.
“Yeah.”
“I moved out after six months. Bug problem,” Lara Jean says, grimacing as she remembers the day she had walked over to her bed to find a big, fat cockroach scurrying across the bathrobe draped over her comforter. She’d hyperventilated into the phone to Margot for two hours afterwards. “I moved to Jefferson.”
“Oh.”
Peter’s face dissolves into what looks like his self-effacing smile - a little bitter, a little sad. Running a hand roughly over his face, he laughs and mumbles something that sounds like, I’m such an idiot, but his hand muffles it so badly she can’t be sure.
“What?” Lara Jean asks, genuinely confused.
“Nothing, nothing,” Peter answers swiftly, schooling his features. “Sorry. I just thought you’d hated it and were too kind to tell me.”
She rolls her eyes. “Except that I read the first chapter and told you that I loved it. Unless you killed off Hanna. Then you’d be dead to me, Kavinsky.”
“Come on, Covey,” Peter scoffs, and for the first time in the entire conversation, he genuinely sounds relaxed. “I would never do that to Hanna. She’s the heroine.”
“Damn right.”
A waiter swings around a few minutes later with hors d'oeuvres as Peter is telling her about his trip down to San Diego a few weeks ago to visit his family, how he’s taking some exploratory meetings in LA in a few weeks about possibly adapting his book, and he’d love for her to show him around the city. It stings a bit that he didn’t call her when he was in San Diego, but she reminds herself that she never called either, and Kitty would say she’s being a high grade hypocrite.
So she tells him to let her know when he’s coming down with enough notice to see if it’s possible to work in a few days off.
She notices Peter’s eyes wandering to her left as she talks about some of the small artsy cafes around her new place that she knows he’d like because apparently living in New York has given him an appreciation of the hipster cafes that he used to scoff at in Portland. “What?” she says, letting her irritation wash over her, peering over her shoulder to see what the hell he is so distracted by.
Peter doesn’t seem to hear her, but he does suddenly close the distance between them, shuffling into her personal bubble in a way that makes her adrenaline spike hard. He smells really good - a mix of hair gel and the woodsy scent of the aftershave he’s used as long as she’s known him.
She thinks he’ll stop once they’re practically touching, but he keeps going, leaning into her space enough that she can feel his breath rustle the delicate hair on the side of her neck. In heels, she’s not as short compared to him as she normally is, but he still has to duck his head with purpose to let his breath linger on her skin like this.
She can smell the alcohol enough to know that he’s a little buzzed - likely had one or two before she arrived - but drunk Peter has enough problems with coordination to let her know he isn’t shitfaced.
“Uh,” Lara Jean says, tilting her body away from him slightly. He only makes up the space as soon as she opens it up. “What are you doing?”
“Mattie Greenburg, three o’clock,” Peter says, leaning in to whisper the name into her ear. “She cornered me by the bar earlier and --” He doesn’t finish the thought, which Lara Jean thinks might be a good thing because, one, she does not like Mattie Greenburg, and two, she does not like what Peter’s stiff, uncomfortable posture is telling her Mattie did at the damn bar.
Mattie was one of Gen’s old crowd, a girl that had spent most of her time in high school ignoring Lara Jean’s existence other than to make snide comments under her breath in AP chemistry about Lara Jean’s clothes. Or her hair. Or her boyfriend, who Mattie clearly had a thing for.
Lara Jean ducks her head around, trying to catch his eye and failing. It also looks like he might have a faint blush on his cheeks. “Peter Kavinsky.”
He finally makes eye contact with her, and he looks a little desperate, crushing the amusement spiked with fear she had felt over him stepping into her space. “Please.” The second Peter lets his body drift closer, she finally gets it.
Ten years, and she’s still in damn high school.
Mattie’s face curls into a scowl when Lara Jean rests her hand on top of Peter’s on the cocktail table, following his lead. It’s too obvious if she looks straight at Mattie, but even out of the corner of her eye, she can practically see the steam coming out of Mattie’s ears.
Good, the less charitable part of Lara Jean’s brain hisses. Mine, the possessive part echos, which makes her tug away her hand reflexively, horrified. She gets it about an inch away before Peter flips his hand over and catches hers, interlocking their fingers.
She doesn’t know when Mattie walks away, but when she’s finally able to tear her eyes away from the obscene shape of their hands melded together, Mattie’s gone and he’s still holding her hand. Still watching her.
“Just like high school, huh?” Peter says with a grin lacking its normal confidence. He looks almost nervous, somehow.
“You know,” Lara Jean says, “the last time we did this, you were trying to get a girl, not avoid one.”
Peter’s quiet for a second. He still hasn’t let go of her hand.
“Not that different.”
--
Starbucks Wednesdays turn into Saturday sushi after a few months.
Lara Jean has a few friends in the city, but she’s come to discover that her New York friends are a different breed than her Portland friends. She’s poor as hell given her father is covering her rent in one of the shittiest walk-ups to grace god’s green earth, she’s still got student debt even with the scholarships she recieved, and she gets paid a stipend by Vogue that barely covers coffee.
Lara Jean’s too neurotic to rack up more debt, so unlike her New York friends, who max out their credit cards buying too many shots at the bar and tickets to off-Broadway shows, Lara Jean typically spends her weekends using her sister’s Netflix account to watch old episodes of Friends and looking for jobs that might let her cover her part of the rent at some point in the near future.
Although Peter’s scholarship covered pretty much the entirety of his tuition costs (oh, the overappreciation of men's sports), she knows his father had spent the last year of high school desperately trying to buy back his son’s love. Though Peter wouldn’t take his money, his mother was more pragmatic about Peter not leaving school saddled with debt and had accepted on his behalf. It had made the summer before college particularly tense as Peter and his mother fought over it, but now he’s living debt free while Lara Jean’s diet consists primarily of instant ramen and whatever’s on sale at the bodega down the street.
(Something she lies to her father about on a frequent basis when he calls up and asks if she needs anything to tide her over for the month. Putting three girls through college has put a serious strain on his finances, and she’s pretty sure the few pieces of fruit and the wilted leftover lunch meeting salad she steals from the kitchen at work is staving off scurvy.)
So when Peter invites her to a semi-expensive sushi place for dinner, she flinches a bit. It’ll mean she’s probably going to be watching him drink Starbucks on Wednesday instead of joining him, but she’s too excited about the idea of spending time with him to say no. It’s one of the reasons she keeps saying no to Claire even though she’s got a solid line on a job that Lara Jean would kill for. Only problem is that it’s in LA, which up until a few weeks ago would have been a bonus, rather than a problem.
Things have changed.
It’s at dinner that she learns that Peter has spent the better part of the last year writing the book he’d been quietly hinting at during their coffee meet-ups, the one she’d been encouraging him to write, not realizing he’d already been working on it.
He lets her read the first chapter over the best sashimi she’s eaten in years, interrupting her with unhelpful comments about the quality or needing to fix things up that let her know he’s actually incredibly nervous about it. She preps herself for having to fake liking it even if she hates it, but finds that she genuinely likes it. A lot. She’s read a few of his pieces that she’s enjoyed, but this is the first thing she’s read of his that really feels like Peter instead of like whatever his editor has handed him.
“Really?” Peter ask incredulously, like he can’t believe she actually likes it. Sometimes she forgets how secretly vulnerable he can be behind the confidence he seems to ooze.
“Well, I am disappointed that it isn’t a romance novel,” Lara Jean says, sticking up her nose in fake snobbery. “But I will take dystopian drama with a hint of romance because Hanna sounds like a badass.”
Peter hails the waiter to order another bowl of edamame. “Next time, I’ll write you a handsome, turn of the 20th century millionaire industrialist who goes undercover at one of his factories and falls in love with a worker... a young, unionist anarchist who has vowed to bring him down not knowing the man she has fallen in love with is her sworn enemy.”
“I know you’re joking, but I would read the shit out of that, Peter.”
He laughs so hard the table next to them shoots them dirty looks.
Later, when she tries to cover her part of the bill, Peter grabs it and holds it against his chest before she can even see how much damage she’s racked up.
“Nuh uh,” he says, looking vaguely offended when she leans across the table to try and snatch it from his hands.
“Peter,” Lara scolds.
“Lara Jean,” Peter says, mocking her serious tone. He shakes his head when she makes one last attempt to steal the check, and furrows his eyebrows in a way that always means he’s not planning on backing down. “No. Seriously. My treat.”
She doesn’t understand why she’s fighting this so much until it hits her as Peter’s punching in the code to his credit card that this is exactly how their dates used to go: Peter paying and Lara Jean griping about splitting the bill until he forced her into submission. Effortless conversation and prodding that felt sweet even when it rankled her.
Lara Jean knew it was dangerous to agree to see him again and again, fold him back into her life like he’d never stopped being a part of it. It had just felt like maybe he’d been right all those years ago, that maybe they could be friends. But she knows that she’s not over him, that being friends is a consolation prize she’ll never be able to settle for when she’s had more. As he’s thanking the waiter and reaching for his coat, she sees Peter as he was five years ago, red-eyed and saying that he doesn’t want to hurt her, that it’s best for them to stop trying to make the distance work when it’s just painful.
Margot once told her that the heart never really heals from the bruises it takes, it only learns to hide them. One stiff poke and the pain comes back as fresh as the day it was made.
This bruise hurts.
She tries to ditch him outside the restaurant, giving him the quick hug that usually signifies the end of a social gathering, telling him she’s heading to the subway (when she knows he usually ubers it late at night). He foils her plans by following her to the station, meeting her raised eyebrow with an, “It’s after eleven, Covey.” She doesn’t even bother mentioning that the station they’re heading to doesn’t service the L because she knows he’s stepping on the Q with her before he even does it.
She tells herself he has a pass, that it’s no big deal, that when she goes out with other guy friends, they tend to ride as far as possible with the girls to make sure they’re safe getting home. But the awful, masochistic part of her brain that loves to torture her wants to read all sorts of things into how he’s taking her home when it is decidedly out of his way, how he leans over occasionally to bump her with his shoulder as they make small talk on the train.
Lara Jean’s her own worst enemy.
“I had fun,” Peter says as they finally reach the steps to her place; the trees have just started to turn and the one thing she loves about her area of Brooklyn are the ridiculously gorgeous trees that have somehow managed to survive in the concrete jungle. “Thanks for coming out tonight.”
“Me too,” Lara Jean answers to his first thought, sounding awkward in the wake of his second. While she’s busy trying to figure out what happens next, what she’s supposed to say or do other than turn around and walk into her apartment (no no she doesn’t want to leave now, not when she’s so close to something she wants this badly), she realizes they’ve lapsed into a silence that is waiting to be filled.
His hand is playing with the frill of her coat mindlessly, the way he used to when he’d walk her home after a date, in their last minutes together before she’d have to leave him, run upstairs and throw herself onto her bed, remembering the way he’d run his fingers from her jacket up to her neck.
Peter’s lips part like he’s about to say something, but he stops himself before a sound comes out.
Just as Lara Jean thinks he’s about to lean down and kiss her, he ducks his head around hers and instead moves in to give her another hug. His arm wraps low around her back, just above her hips, and snugs her up against him.
“See you soon, Covey,” he says as he pulls away, his mouth still close enough that his lips brush the skin of her cheek as he leaves.
--
They spend the next half-hour huddled together at the small table. A few people stop by to say hi to Peter, congratulate him on the success of his book (Lara Jean is still feeling terrible about it, and every Congrats! is a reminder of just how out of touch they’ve been), but the conversations are short and fleeting. He keeps staring at her while other people talk, which is probably because it has the desired effect of making people very uncomfortable about sticking around.
It’s also making Lara Jean very uncomfortable for a completely different reason.
She spends the time downing another two glasses of chardonnay. Margot would be horrified, but her mental version of Kitty is giving her high fives in her head. She’s not sure when Margot and Kitty turned into the angel and devil sitting on her shoulder, but the drunker she gets, the louder the little Kitty on her shoulder gets.
(BONE HIM IN THE BATHROOM, she squeals.)
Peter puts his hand on her lower back, his thumb rubbing just low enough that the sixteen year old Lara Jean would have been thoroughly scandalized. Twenty-eight year old Lara Jean is mostly heartsick, sexually frustrated, and having an argument with herself in her head that is making her testy.
“Too bad you’re not wearing jeans, Covey,” Peter whispers into her ear.
Lara Jean’s never had much of a tolerance for alcohol, so even though she’s had far less to drink than Peter, she’s very, very buzzed. Really, she’s one step away from drunk. And the Covey girls all have different reactions to alcohol. Margot gets giggly, Kitty gets aggressively loud, and Lara Jean… well, alcohol makes Lara Jean say things like,“What is this?”
It comes out almost belligerent, and seems to throw Peter truly off-balance for the first time tonight. He takes his hand off her lower back, and the regret of losing that warm pressure only makes her angrier. “What?”
“What is this?” Lara Jean repeats, the alcohol taking over completely. The filter that keeps her from saying things she’ll regret has been replaced by chardonnay and aggravation, so she adds, “I’m tired of the mixed signals.”
“Mixed signals?”
“You never texted me when I got to LA. You never called. Now you’re making plans to visit and touching and ass pockets,” wow, she is not making any sense now, “and I’m tired of trying to figure out if it’s real or fake or if tomorrow you’re going to go back to radio silence.”
Peter’s never been the type of boy to lose his temper; even when they fought as a couple, it was usually Lara Jean who typically ran hot while Peter’s fuse was a cold burn that ended in silences. But he’s having a hard time keeping the anger and irritation off his face.
“I’m sorry I didn’t text, but I thought you made it pretty clear how you felt in New York,” he says, his voice suddenly cold like ice. It’s not a tone she’s used to coming from Peter at all, and for the first time in a long time, Peter’s making her feel really uncomfortable for reasons outside of her general awkwardness.
“What?”
He runs a hand over his mouth, turning his head away in a move that lets Lara Jean watch his adam’s apple bob up and down as he thinks. “You gave me the cold shoulder, Lara Jean. I thought you were interested and then you fucking moved to LA.”
“I moved to LA for a job!”
“You told me practically the day after our date. Convenient.”
“Uh,” Lara Jean says, confused, because out of all the things that could have come out of Peter Kavinsky’s mouth, that was literally the last thing she expected. “Date?”
“Yeah,” Peter says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world and he can’t quite grasp why she’s not on the same page. Except he never told her it was a date, and she’s not sure if it doesn’t make what happened even worse.
“I don’t know why you’re acting like this,” Lara Jean blurts out. “How was I supposed to know that was a date? You were seeing someone else!”
“What?” Peter practically laughs it out, his mouth twisted into something slightly ugly. If she were less buzzed, Lara Jean would regret her impulsive accusation, because it’s the kind of reaction she’d expect from Peter when he’d been accused of something he didn’t do.
But because Lara Jean is buzzed, she keeps digging her hole deeper. “I saw you in the lobby with her.” Peter looks thoroughly puzzled, so she adds, “Pretty tall blonde? Australian, I think?”
He’s quiet for a minute, like he’s trying to wrack his brain for who she might be talking about. Suddenly, the smug smile disappears, replaced with something flat and completely unamused. “You mean Lucy, my literary agent? The one who has a wife and a kid?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” His exasperation is obvious, a little sarcastic, and unfair in Lara Jean’s opinion.
She wants to kick herself for not taking her advice from four years ago. Coming tonight was a mistake. The uncomfortable silence just gets worse and worse until she can’t take it another second of it.
The smart Lara Jean would take a breath, explain to Peter that maybe he should have told her it was a date, that she was an idiot for making an assumption about the leggy, willowy Australian blonde and that she might owe Margot an apology.
This Lara Jean is not the smart Lara Jean.
“Nice seeing you again, Peter,” she says, picking her purse up off the table and turning on her heel fast enough that it’s clear she takes Peter by complete surprise. She’s nearly across the room before she hears her name said loudly enough it clears over the bad music being played by the DJ.
She moves as fast as her heels will allow her to run, cursing her decision not to go with the cute gold flats she bought in Pasadena. But she’s forgotten how long-legged Peter is, because he catches up with her in about ten seconds in the lobby, his hand closing around her upper arm and tugging her to a stop as he says, “Lara Jean!”
When he doesn’t let go of her arm, she fully panics and blurts out exactly what she doesn’t want to admit.
“I saw you with her and I thought, there you go again, Lara Jean! Wanting a boy who isn’t interested in you, who’s interested in someone else. Who wants to be friends.” Whoo, her voice is edging on the side of hysterical, but it’s like a train that’s gone off its tracks: there’s no stopping it now. “The boy who dumped you.”
Peter looks like she’s slapped him right across the face, a blend of shock and shame. “I need you to stop running away from me instead of just talking to me!”
“I really, really don’t know what more to say, Peter.”
“Okay, fine,” he says, guiding them out of the main part of the lobby and toward the semi-private alcoves near the elevators. There’s still a number of people from the reunion milling around the lobby and frankly, Lara Jean does not want an audience for this conversation either. “My turn to talk, then.”
He pulls her into an alcove, the wall at her back. This time, it seems he’s bringing in physical reinforcement to keep her from running.
“I was going to kiss you that night,” Peter says. “That night outside your place. I just chickened out at the last minute. But when you gave me the cold shoulder the next time we met, I thought that I had read it wrong and pushed it too far with you. I thought, Christ, good job, Peter. She’s moving across the fucking country to get away from you.”
“I didn’t move to California because of you.”
Peter nods. “I know. I’m not that self-involved. But can we fairly say that neither of us has a fantastic track record interpreting the actions of the other well? All I knew was… I thought we could move past what happened back in college. I thought you might have forgiven me.”
To say that she’s shocked is an understatement.
“I thought I fucked it all up. Mom said I did the right thing by ending it with you during college, that giving you space was the right thing to do instead of making it harder for you… and for me. I didn’t want to break up, but it would have happened later and been messier. I wanted to end it in a way that meant it wasn’t over forever.”
And oh, there’s something more to that, but there’s already too much to unpack and Lara Jean feels like she’s in round 10 of a boxing match - she’s not sure how many more hits she can take.
“But I knew I hurt you, I knew there was a chance you wouldn’t take me back again. So when I didn’t hear anything after I mailed you the book, I figured I had gotten it right the first time, that you weren’t interested, and I made it weird with the book.”
She doesn’t quite understand how a book could make things weird, so she wonders if he sent a letter with it. It makes her feel gross that whoever moved into her apartment after her has something so personal now.
“And then you walked in today and smiled, and I couldn’t help myself. I’m sorry if I wasn’t respectful of your boundaries. But I don’t want you running off believing whatever’s brewing up in there in that brain of yours,” he says, reaching for her arms and cradling them at the elbow. “I was interested. Every week, Covey. Every week, I looked forward to Wednesday night because it meant that I got to see you again. I was interested. I am interested.”
It feel like she’s been run over by a truck. The lightest breeze could knock her straight over, she’s so completely floored.
“Lara Jean?” Peter asks nervously.
She has absolutely no idea what to say, so she leans up and kisses him instead.
--
Three days after Lara Jean makes a complete fool of herself at their sushi get together, she’s making yet another coffee run for Marisa when she sees Peter hugging a tall, willowy blonde in the lobby at One World Trade.
She throws herself against the cold stone wall of the elevator banks and peers around the corner, watching the two of them talk. The willowy blonde says something to Peter in what sounds like a pretty, sing-song Australian accent that puts the biggest smile she’s ever seen on his face. In a moment she knows she’ll relive in her nightmares for the foreseeable future, Peter leans forward and hugs the willowy blonde again, this time in a way that seems really, really overly familiar.
That bruise on her heart roars to life, thumping like the ache of a broken bone.
“You always do this,” Margot says over their skype date that night. She’d tried to bail, but Margot had just rung and rung and rung and then texted and then phoned and then rung… until she had beaten Lara Jean into submission and she had picked up. “Maybe she was just a friend… or a colleague. You always jump to the craziest conclusions.”
“No I don’t!”
“Yes, you do. You said that it was a good night, that it seemed… datey.”
“It was and it did, but… I don’t know, maybe I just read it wrong.” Lara Jean feels like crying, but she hates skype crying more than anything else in the world. Nothing like being forced to watch your own bloated, red face sobbing away in the upper righthand corner. “I’m an idiot.”
“Hey,” Margot says, employing the mom-voice that always grates a bit on Lara Jean. “Don’t talk about yourself like that. You’re not an idiot. I’m just saying that Peter’s always been crazy about you. Maybe there’s another reason.”
“You wouldn’t understand.” When Josh came to visit her two weeks ago, she’d helped him pick out a vintage engagement ring she knew Margot would love. He’s taking her up to Washington state next month on a romantic getaway to propose. In Lara Jean’s experience, people in happy relationships are so love-optimistic that it skews their point of view.
Lara Jean flops down on the bed, outside of camera range. “I don’t know why I’m so upset anyway. I’m taking the job in California.”
When she is met with silence, she picks herself back up off the mattress. “Margot?”
“Please tell me you didn’t decide to move across the country because you saw Peter hug a girl.”
Lara Jean lets out an angry ugh. “Of course not. I’m not that pathetic.”
“I never said you were pathetic! I wouldn’t ever. I just want to make sure you’re making this decision for the right reason.”
“I’ve decided because if I have to fetch coffee one more time for Marisa, I might stick cyanide in it. I had the second interview last week, and they sent me an offer yesterday.” She doesn’t add that she was secretly hoping that they might not offer it to her, that after her dinner with Peter, she’d begun thinking about ways to survive New York. She’s pathetic. “The job’s good and the salary is decent given my experience. I need to do something else, Margot. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
“Oh hun,” Margot says gently.
--
When Peter pushes her up against the wall in the elevator, the little Kitty-shaped devil on her shoulder hisses out, BONE HIM IN THE ELEVATOR.
This is part of the reason she doesn’t heed that little voice. There is definitely a security camera up in the ceiling and while she’s just slightly buzzed enough to ignore a security guard possibly watching her kiss Peter, her one experience with recorded voyeurism in high school is more than enough.
Thankfully, Peter doesn’t do more than feel her up a little and kiss her like he’s a dying man given a reprieve. The second she’d kissed him in the alcove, he’d been responsive, taking control of the kiss, tipping her head so he could deepen it, breaking apart just long enough to guide her to the elevator and hit the call button.
He’s staying on the fifth floor, so it’s not a long enough ride for him to do more than run his hand up the back of her thigh. It’s enough to make her shiver, get so wet that she feels oversensitized as she walks with him down the hall to his room, stopping every few feet to kiss.
Though Peter may have missed them earlier, Lara Jean doesn’t mind that she’s not wearing jeans when he is finally able to fish his card out of his pocket and press it up against the lock, the small little black pad letting out a cheerful chirp. No, the dress she’s wearing makes it much easier for him to push her back up against the closed door and sink to his knees, reach up under the skirt and wrap his long fingers around the waistband of her panties.
“I want to make you come,” he says into her thigh, staring up at her with his fingers still gripping her panties but not moving them. She remembers this well, his need to ask over and over, at each step, needing to know that she wanted it.
“Please,” she says at the same time he asks, “Can I?”
She barely has time to blink before Peter has her panties down on the floor, joining her discarded heels and tossed away purse. Lara Jean lets out a startled cry when he puts his mouth straight over her, tongue pressing in deep as she struggles to find a grip on the wall that will help her stay upright as her knees begin to buckle.
By the time Peter slips inside her later, her hair spread across the white linen on his bed, the last ten years have become nothing more than a blur of time lost in the angle of his hips, the thrust of them pushing every last thought straight out of her head other than more more more.
She forgot how good this was with him.
--
“Los Angeles?” Peter asks, looking hurt and a little perplexed. What he has to feel hurt about, Lara Jean isn’t sure.
“Yeah, they offered me a job and I’m taking it,” she says, trying to force down her own swirl of volatile emotions. Part of her had hoped Peter would skip their Wednesday get together this week, but he had texted her at 6 when she hadn’t showed, and she’d run like an idiot from the office because she was too chicken to cancel on him. “They’re giving me a few weeks to get things settled here, and I’ve already put in my notice.”
“Covey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she answers. She’s been doing a terrible job of acting normal. From the moment she walked in the door, the hurt kept her cold and cut off from the normal teasing Peter threw her way. He’d scaled back the jokes and ribbing when he sensed her mood, but she’s too devastated to fake anything close to jovial. She wants this over. She wants to go home and begin shoving all her things into boxes.
“Bullshit,” he snaps, clearly a little frustrated with her. “I know you. Something’s wrong.”
“You told me to do this,” Lara Jean says, her emotions shifting violently from cold indifference to sadness. She can feel that nasty telltale pressure behind her sinuses start, and she will straight up walk into traffic if she starts to cry. Can she not end the day without mortification? “You said I needed to stop making myself miserable and find something that makes me happy.”
“And Los Angeles makes you happy?” he asks solemnly, leaning forward in the arm chair.
“I have to try it.”
Peter nods, looking miserable, and flops backward.
--
The Revocation has 4.1 stars on Google Play, and Lara Jean purchases a copy of it on her phone in the bathroom of his hotel room while he’s sleeping. Apparently they line the bathroom walls with lead, because the wifi signal she was getting just fine in the bedroom grinds to a halt, and she’s left waiting for a good two minutes for the thing to download.
She uses the two minutes to pee - she’d learned from her mistake the first time, thank god for Planned Parenthood and the Cipro that had cleared up the UTI as quickly as it had started. Peter’s always been a bit of a light sleeper, so she decides not to flush the toilet until she’s ready to leave the bathroom. She doesn’t want to cap the evening off by making him think she’s hiding from him in the bathroom.
She’s just washed her hands when her phone vibrates, letting her know the book has finally finished downloading. Flicking through the first few pages impatiently, she nearly misses it. Something makes her stop though, the single line of text on an empty page catching her eye before the repetitive motion of her finger makes the screen skip to the next.
She swipes back to the dedication and sucks in a harsh, shocked breath.
To the first girl I wrote love letters to. Here’s one more.
She nearly drops the phone into the toilet.
“Jesus Christ,” Lara Jean hisses, plopping down to sit on the edge of the bathtub, her legs suddenly feeling so shaky she doesn’t trust them to hold her up.
Holy shit holy shit holy shit.
She gets it. She gets why he didn’t text her after she never reached out, after he mailed her the book. Right now, she’s mostly shocked he smiled at her when she walked into the room tonight, that he was kind instead of closed off considering he likely thought she got the incredible gesture and promptly ignored him. Peter seems brave, but he’s sensitive and has a tendency to beat around the bush instead of telling her how he feels until he’s backed into a corner. As Chris would say, Lara Jean only catches a hint when it’s delivered with a hammer.
She’s not sure how long she spends sitting on the edge of the tub, but her phone eventually beeps angrily, warning her she only has 15% of her battery left. Finally flushing the toilet, she takes a look in the mirror before she exits the bathroom. Her make-up has seen better days, the mascara holding up but the eyeshadow mostly brushed off, and her hair will be one big knot by morning given she’s barely able to tame it into a ponytail now.
Not to mention Peter’s wrinkled white dress shirt draped over her shoulders, stolen from the floor on her way to the bathroom.
She’s a fucking mess. The little Margot on her shoulder tells her not to cuss, but she lived in New York too long not to develop a potty mouth. Los Angeles didn’t help things, but she was probably already a goner by her sophomore year at Parsons.
The way Peter’s eyes open when she slips back into the bed lets her know that he was definitely already awake when she came out of the bathroom. She really hopes it was the flush that woke him, and that he hasn’t been lying out here wondering what the hell happened to her as she had a mini meltdown in the bathroom.
She’s nearly settled when he reaches out, snagging the curve of her hip and dragging her back towards him until she’s half-draped over his side, her head notched under his chin. His arm is a pleasant, warm weight over her shoulder, keeping her pinned to his chest.
“You gonna break my heart, Covey?” Peter says into the crown of her head, his voice heavy with sleep and exhaustion.
It’s taken her ten years to realize she never grew out of the girl that spent most of her time writing down her feelings instead of speaking them out loud. Admitting things - even to herself - usually lands her in trouble and pain. But she can’t lie to herself about this, about him. She’s in love with him.
Whatever’s between them isn’t done with them yet.
“You gonna break mine, Kavinsky?”