She’s livid when she wakes up. She’s disappointed. He made a show of himself. It had been all about him, and his needs, and his time, after all. His aching. His urge. His desire.
She’s angry at herself for dragging this out for so long. For pretending not to notice the signs. For insisting on the good guy narrative. When Brooke calls her later that day, her voice worried and anxious, she tells her he kissed her. He tried to sleep with her best friend on the same day he’d left her alone in a hotel room. As if the relationship had been a favor being granted. As if she had a debt.
She thinks of his interest. He wanted Nathan’s girlfriend. The illegitimate son looks for validation by trying out the legitimate son’s life. It’s all clear in her mind, really, she doesn’t get how she didn’t see it before.
To him, she's a symbol. She's his triumph over his pain, over his loss, over his dad.
To her, she realizes, he's a symbol too. Because, if she convinces herself to love someone like herself, she'll then love herself, too, right?
Brooke had said the other day - love is how we act. Compatibility is within our core values.
Therapy was looking good on her, Peyton is happy for her. She finds herself learning a lot from Brooke these days, more than her arrogance had ever let her learn before, when she was foolish and too young to know and to see those things she does now.
She was very lonely back then. She felt ashamed of needing people. She tried to push Brooke away all the time. But she came back every time Peyton put on a wall. He wanted to use Brooke to hurt her. Just like he had used her, Peyton, to hurt Brooke in the past. And she had fallen right into his trap, because as much as she wanted to pretend she was fine and independent and ice queen, she was not. She wanted to be wanted. She wanted to be needed. She kept on looking for something to fill her father’s void, when she should have worked on finding her mother’s parallel this whole time. The one thing constant in her life, that she kept pushing away, that kept coming back, with love and kindness and forgiveness even when she didn’t deserve it.
Especially when she didn’t deserve it.
And now the motherfucker had tried to pitch them against each other again, to seem like the good guy. To seem like the guy for them. His pretty girls. Peyton feels like vomiting, because now the veil is off and she sees it for what it is - it’s predatory. It’s abusive. It’s aggression.
He minimizes them. He finds himself superior. He’s arrogant and misogynistic but he’s always roleplaying. He makes mistakes and ends up being the victim over and over again. She thinks of what he’d said to Brooke when she thought she was pregnant. Brooke was sixteen. She was a child raising herself. She didn’t have her parents’ love, she couldn’t count on Peyton at that point (guilt blows up against her again; she’s done all the worst things to the person she loves the most). She was depressed and betrayed and he judged her, Mr. Morally Superior, called her a slut and doubted her loyalty (Brooke, the most loyal person Peyton knows!), when he had been the one to cheat on her.
When they had been the ones to cheat on her.
She ruminates on it over and over and over, trying to understand– Rationally, she does. Mixed feelings, loneliness, depression. She sees it all, she identifies the patterns, but she could have lived a different life. She keeps on replaying the night before inside her head. Lucas kneeling down, Keith’s ring, her urge to vomit as soon as she saw it. She felt like running away. She felt like she was having a panic attack. She didn’t want to be his wife. Not then.
And, after she truly understands that he’s left her alone and went to NYC and tried to get into Brooke’s pants– Well, she doesn’t ever want to see him again, for starters.
She hates that he went after Brooke. She knows that he doesn’t care about their relationships - he doesn’t see them as individuals, as people who deserve dignity and basic respect. He doesn’t care to break her apart from the only family she has. He doesn’t care about doing the same to Brooke.
This is Larry’s fault, too. He’d been gone too much, for too long. She accepted everything eagerly because there was no one there to look out for her as a parent. Brooke, bless her, didn’t know much better back then.
She feels narcissistic, because Lucas is a reflection of her. Of all the worst in her - her pretentiousness, her fake niceties, her higher moral ground who doesn’t live up to what she actually does. She sees now that she looks at him and sees herself - blonde, tall, scrawny and bony, timid, broody, traumatized. It’s a trauma response.
She rarely laughs with him.
When she does, it’s because she starts it.
He doesn’t make me laugh. I make him laugh.
She knows someone else who makes her laugh all the time.
Who calls her out on her shit but never makes her feel like she owes her anything for the love they share.
Who touches her and makes her feel less of a loner, less of a burden.
She thinks of Ian. Of different sides of the same coin. She thinks of the fear. She knows she made the right decision. You don’t cure yourself from your biggest fears and traumas by repeating them.
You find a safe haven.
She finds herself humming Guns’n’Roses most famous radio hit (pretentiousness aside now). Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place where, as a child, I'd hide. And pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass me by…
Love is cliché like that, even if she tries running from it, even if she tries slipping in the mud on purpose, even if she disappears for a while.
This is not the time to think too hard about that - there will be a time, later on, when her scars close and the nightmares stop and she can just be herself again, not feeling in debt to an useless image of a man. And, when that time comes, she’ll reach out, and she’ll choose the truth, this time, and she will tell her everything she’s always kept to herself for fear of being seen as a freak. For fear of losing the one stable thing in her life for real.
(Deep down, she knows she won’t. She knows the ending, now. She’s known the ending for a decade, honestly.)
But now is not the time.
Now she heals. And works. And breaks off every weed, every bad seed, every last scrap of those men who made her feel small and unwanted. She builds herself again, she makes herself new, she makes herself true.
She lets it go, the stupid fantasy of finding herself in someone else just because they share her musical taste or her bad mood.
What she feels, really, will help her. She’s pretty confident about that.