Current mood:	bitchy
Entry tags:	fanfiction, lucas/peyton, one-shot

Fic: Lying Right Beside You
Title: Lying Right Beside You
Author: monroeslittle
Genre: One Tree Hill (Peyton and Lucas; Peyton's POV)
Rating: G (only minor mentions of slightly indecent activities)
Summary: You're not sure when it became so difficult to understand your own feelings; maybe it was when your mom died; maybe you were born that way. Lying in bed beside a sleeping Lucas during their first night in Vegas, Peyton gets to thinking about her feelings. A one-shot that deals with the somewhat annoying fact that Peyton unquestionably forgives Lucas in 6x01 for being horrid to her throughout the fifth season.

Emotions were never really your strong point.

 

You’ve never really been sure what you feel or what you should be feeling. People have told you what to feel, they’ve told you what you ought to be feeling, but it’s never really sufficed. You’re not sure when it became so difficult to understand your own feelings; maybe it was when your mom died; maybe you were born that way.

 

You’ve learned to live with it . . . for the most part, anyway. Things are never clear. They’re never easy. Well, sometimes you convince yourself they are. But it never lasts long. Something always messes it up.

 

Somehow, you always end up alone. You’re left with nothing but confusion, unsure whether you should be sad or angry, whether you should fight or flee. And as for the big stuff . . . the idea that there’s a thin line between love and hate — it ought to be your mantra. You’re a master at walking that thin line; hate and love have been so mixed up in your life that you’re not so sure they’re any different any more.

 

You know you love him. You can say that with absolute certainty. Many times, way too many to count, you’ve doubted that. The past year — no, the past three years — have been littered with doubt. Again and again you’d think to yourself that maybe, maybe, you don’t love him. Maybe you hate him. You would tell yourself that over and over again, sometimes you even tried to convince yourself that you did hate him, because let’s face it: hating him would be a hell of a lot easier.

 

Yet you don’t hate him. You figured it out in the end. Even if you’ve never been very good with your feelings, you finally realized that no matter what, you can’t hate him. You love him too much. You’ll love him forever. You even wrote it on the river court. You wanted it to be written down. Maybe you were afraid you would forget.

 

It didn’t occur to you at the time that those words you’d so precariously written out would no doubt be washed away after a few rainstorms . . . so much for forever, then. At the same time, when that awestruck teenage girl living in your house and sleeping in your bedroom had shown you the words you written on your closet door, it was proof that sometimes love really could last. That girl had repainted the whole room, had completely transformed it. But she hadn’t painted over your love. Does that mean something, you wonder?

 

You really are a mess.

 

It doesn’t matter, though, does it? Because as you lay in this hotel bed half-naked, he’s lying right beside you. His body warmth is radiating over you, his arm is wrapped securely around your waist, and his face is pressed into your neck as he slowly breaths in and out and in and out. . . . He loves you. He wanted to marry you. He chose you.

 

And you love him so much you feel like it’s all you are. You aren’t your own person anymore; you’re just the skinny blonde who’s madly in love with a romantic blue-eyed writer who stole your heart when you were sixteen years old and he looked you straight in the eye and told you, “That’s me inside your head.” That’s bad for some people. But it’s not bad for you. It’s the only thing that’s right for you.

 

At least you think it is. You never really know these things for sure. When you think you do, something — or someone — always manages to prove you wrong, and, well, it’s gotten rather old. Hopefully this time will be different. Hopefully it’s all up hill from here. After all, he loves you as much as you love him.

 

Why do you love him? You don’t even have to think about that. You love him because he’s a good son to Karen, a good friend to Haley, a good brother to Nathan, a good uncle to Jamie, and a good boyfriend to you. He’s everything good. You love him because he quotes books like he has them memorized in his head. You love him because he’s full of beliefs, of ideals that he so desperately wants to uphold.

 

You love him because his smile never fails to melt your insides. You love him because he always knows the right thing to say. You love him because he saw who you really were when not even Brooke could really understand everything about you. You love him because he was perceptive enough, and sweet enough, to tell you that your art matters . . .

 

. . . to tell you that you matter. You love him because it’s impossible not to love him. You should know. You’ve tried pretty damn hard not to love him, yet here you are.

 

Still, even though you love him, even though he loves you, even though you just had mind-blowing sex with this gorgeous, gorgeous man who loves you, (God, he loves you), you’re still unsure. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that he looked at you with bloodshot eyes and declared he hated you.

 

It wasn’t so long ago that he proposed to another woman. It wasn’t so long ago that he stood at the alter beside a girl that wasn’t you and told her those two fatal words: “I do.” He’d even smiled, damn it. And then he’d spent forever pinning for her, until suddenly it was so terrible that he blamed you for it, and thus he hated you.

 

So what changed? What sort of big epiphany did he have? Why did he call you from the airport? Why you? You’ve never understood him. He’s always madly in love with someone — sometimes you, sometimes Brooke, sometimes Lindsay. And he’s so devoted to that girl he claims to love; he fights for her and he pines for her and he does everything for her — yet he can’t really love all of you the same, can he?

 

Brooke says it’s really you. She says he wrote a whole book about how much he loves you. She says that you’re destined to be together. She says that she knows what it’s like to be the girl caught in between you, and that it isn’t pretty. She says you’re the one.

 

He does too.

 

So why should you question that? Lying here beside him in the dark, why the hell are you questioning anything? Are you angry at him? Maybe you are. Maybe that’s it.

 

You’ve been through a lot of shit in your life, but somehow this past year has been the worst of it all, worse than your mother dying — both your mothers dying, — worse than a psycho stalker. And he did that to you, didn’t he? Sure, you were to blame too; you should have said yes the first time.

 

But even if you didn’t say yes, you didn’t say no, either! You just told him to wait. And hadn’t he promised that he would wait for you? What the hell was that?! You want to throw something all of the sudden. The urge pricks your conscious and travels down the length of your arm, tingling in your fingers the very same way it did when you shrieked at him and threw copies of his book at him furiously. You let out a sigh.

 

It’s like your head and your heart are running in circles. You’ve had this conversation with yourself a thousand times in the last year. It always ends the same.

 

You don’t know what to think or feel.

 

And yet, even if a part of you is angry — at him, at yourself — you love him all the same. You’ve figured that much out. And he chose you. He’s lying here with you, and the two of you are going to get married tomorrow. End of discussion. There’s nothing more to think about, nothing more to stress out over. You’re finally (finally) going to be his wife.

 

It’s going to work out this time, you know that. It’s going to work, because you didn’t run this time. Every single time he hurt you in high school, you ran. You pretended you’d stopped loving him; you convinced everyone that you didn’t love him — at times you even convinced yourself that you’d stopped loving him. Look at senior year: hadn’t it taken a mistaken mumble in a dream for you to realize that you hadn’t gotten over him, that you still loved him?

 

But this time around, this time, when he’d been so allegedly (allegedly, as in seemingly, as in not really, right?) madly head-over-heels for Lindsay, when he’d proposed to her and almost married her, you didn’t run. You stayed in Tree Hill; you confessed your love to him on more than one occasion. You kept fighting. You didn’t run.

 

And he came back to you. He picked up his cell phone and he called you. You.

 

So it’s going to work this time. It doesn’t matter if you were to blame for what happened between the two of you, or if he’s to blame. It doesn’t matter that he almost married Lindsey, that he would have married Lindsey had she not called it off. It doesn’t matter that he offers no apologies or explanations.

 

He doesn’t need to offer anything (and asking for something more would just make a mess). He’s given himself, and that is more than enough. So you’re not going to question it. You’re not going to risk it . . . just in case. It’s time for a clean slate. After everything, you’ve proven that you do deserve him, and you’re pretty damn sure that he deserves you. He’s always deserved you. And now you can finally be together. Everything’s going to be different this time around. Everything’s going to work out.

 

Right?

 

You let your eyes drift shut. You’re too tired to think anymore. You snuggle even closer to him. He murmurs your name in his sleep. It makes you smile. You’re Peyton Sawyer, and he’s Lucas Scott, and you love him. Best of all, he loves you too. You’ll deal with all the other feelings involved later, back in Tree Hill . . . sometime later. . . .

 

Feelings were never your forte, anyhow.

 

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A/N: This is the first time I've written in this style before; I hope it came out okay. I was trying to deal with my own recent irritation with Lucas. I love Lucas and Peyton together, but I got the urge to slap Lucas numerous times during the fifth season for treating Peyton like, well, let's face it: shit . . .

This wasn't beta'd, so all mistakes are mine -- I apologize. Please review?