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Everything started on Valentine's Day, because of course it did. Sam had a crush on Deena for as long as she could remember. Before she knew what a crush was, before she had to go through the emotional rollercoaster of finding out she wasn’t supposed to have crushes on other girls and eventually getting over it because there was no way to escape her feelings for Deena so she might as well accept them. Who could blame her though? She spent most of her classes daydreaming, if she couldn’t discreetly stare from afar, about the other girl. Deena played drums, she was the star of the basketball team, had the best hair in the entire school, along with best eyes, smile, jawline, hands, and, well, maybe that was only Sam’s opinion. She was realizing her crush was a little more serious than she’d expected, but she was dealing with it.
“You aren’t dealing with it!” Kate snapped at her one day not long after they started their Junior year.
“I’ll deal with it!” Sam promised in a whisper to avoid the other cheerleaders from listening. It was already distressing enough that Kate and Simon had figured it out, she couldn’t take any more risks.
But, of course , by the time Sam had gathered enough courage to confess her feelings to Deena during their friend group’s annual Christmas party, Deena showed up to Kate’s house hands holding hands with another girl and not very enthusiastically but still seriously announcing, “Guys, this is my girlfriend, Heather. Be normal, please.”
Kate told embarrassing stories about Deena, Simon started calling her sister-in-law, and Sam tried her hardest to act normal . But it wasn’t easy, not when she locked eyes with Deena for longer than a second and the simple act had her running out of the house, out into the snow, to avoid getting caught crying.
After those excruciating weeks of winter, Sam managed to get her feelings under control. This meant not bursting out crying every time she thought about Deena having a girlfriend, it didn’t mean she stopped having feelings for Deena. So, when Valentine's Day arrived in February, she took her chance. And her chance started with the words “Dear Deena, it’s your secret admirer…” written on pink paper and with Sam’s entire heart in between the words.
Later that day, Sam had to face the consequences of it.
“What did you do?” Kate hissed, pulling Sam apart from the other cheerleaders before practice started.
“What do you mean?”
“Deena. The love letter?!”
Despite her guilty face, blushing cheeks, wide-open eyes, and racing heart, Sam almost expected Kate to believe her when she stuttered out, “I, uh, don’t know… I don’t know what you, uh, what you’re talking, um, about.”
“Listen to yourself!” Kate slapped her arm. “As if that wasn’t incriminating enough. Do you think I’m stupid? I’m not Deena!”
“Hey!”
“Listen, Sam, I love you. Deena might be oblivious, but I’m not,” Kate said, trying to soften her tone. “Do I think you’re infinitely better than Heather? Yes. Do I have a problem with her? Also yes. But technically, I don’t hate her. However, I know she’s not the love letter type. That girl wouldn’t know romance if it hit her in the face. You, on the other hand, have been in love with Deena since you were in diapers.”
“Shh! Kate!” Sam hushed her. She was blushing furiously, but she failed to hold back a smile at hearing her friend’s support. “Do you think I’m that obvious?” Sam asked. “Do you think Deena will notice? Do you think I made a huge mistake? What if-”
“ Sam .” Kate interrupted her. At first, she was frowning, but her heart softened seeing her friend’s anxiety at full force. “Come here,” she whispered, and hugged Sam for a long moment. “I know it hasn’t been easy,” she said softly, “I’ve seen you pine after Deena for years, and trust me, she’s missing out.”
“Thank you,” Sam smiled shyly when they pulled back from the embrace.
Kate thought about it for a moment and said, “Look, I think it was a little bit stupid to leave a love letter in the locker of your friend who happens to have a girlfriend. But I think it was a dick move that Heather let Deena assume it was from her, and did nothing to correct her. It’s going to blow up in her face later.”
After saying that, Kate started walking away, but Sam wasn’t ready to let her go just yet. “Wait, Kate!” she exclaimed, “Then what should I do?!”
Kate looked over her shoulder with a mischievous smile. “Keep it up,” she said, and added a wink.
While Kate got the other cheerleaders started for practice, Sam allowed herself, as the best friend of the captain, an additional moment to freak out by herself. However, it didn’t help that she looked around the field helplessly and her eyes found none other than Deena herself, among the other member of band, staring straight at her. As usual, Deena smiled, Sam waved awkwardly and then ran away in the opposite direction.
Following Kate’s advice, Sam continued making little cards to leave in Deena’s locker. Surprisingly, it got easier instead of more difficult. For the first time in her life, Sam was putting into words her feelings and actually sharing them with Deena. Sure, it was an imperfect situation, considering Sam still had to deal with Deena kissing her girlfriend every time a new card appeared, but at least she was dealing with it, right?
It started with a big, pink, cheesy, glittery, Valentine’s Day card. There were similar ones, featuring poems, dozens of little hearts drawn, papers folded into butterflies and hearts, and then into bats and frogs to make Deena laugh. Then the cards evolved. There were polaroid pictures of sunsets with simple messages written on them, short stories made on a typewriter, use and mention of all of Deena’s favorite things, including lyrics to her favorite songs, quotes from her favorite movies and books, her favorite colors, flowers, and lucky numbers. Maybe Sam couldn’t be Deena’s girlfriend but, at the very least, she was certain she had to know her just as well as Heather did.
This act of the secret admirer with the stolen identity lasted a couple of months. By the time their summer break started, Sam’s heart remained a little broken as it had been since the day Deena announced she had a girlfriend, but at least she was breathing a little easier, and taking that weight off her shoulders made her a little more confident, made her feel a little more like herself. So when the four of them hung out, Sam didn’t feel on the edge of a breakdown anymore. She could laugh with Deena as they had done for years, she could have conversations with Heather, she continued to have a great time with Simon, jumping on his back, letting him carry her around, and her bond with Kate remained strong, they could cuddle watching movies and talk shit about Heather in whispers when they thought Deena wasn’t looking at them. Life wasn’t perfect, but it was manageable, Sam thought.
Then, shortly after their summer break began, on the night of the first big storm in a while, Deena showed up at Sam’s house with red and swollen eyes and a guilty smile and whispered, “Can I come in?”
Suddenly, life wasn’t manageable at all. Sam dreamed up scenarios like this a million times, and just when she was starting to learn how to live without being hyper-aware of her crush on Deena, this happened.
Silently, she guided Deena up to her bedroom, and offered her a clean sweater and a blanket. She looked just as gorgeous, Sam thought, with her hair a mess, swollen eyes, and a nervous smile, as she did when she was all confident smirks and a perfectly nonchalant style.
“Are you okay?” Sam asked her softly, taking a seat on her bed next to the brunette.
Deena shook her head. “It’s been just one week of our summer break. But it’s the first week since Valentine's Day that I don’t get, you know, one of those cute little cards. And I just knew .”
“Oh,” Sam said through a breathless gasp. But she got this far by going along with Deena’s obliviousness, she could hang on a moment longer. “What… what do you know?”
“It wasn’t Heather,” Deena admitted and shook her head again. “There were so many signs, I should have known. She doesn’t know me that well, she never did. She could never… She could never do it by herself, at least.”
Sam couldn’t avoid frowning. Even then, Heather hadn’t fully admitted that she had nothing to do with the cards, at all. “So, what happened?” Sam asked then, trying her best to be careful.
“We broke up,” Deena shrugged, then chuckled tearfully. “To be honest, I don’t even know how, or why, we even lasted this long. Actually, maybe the cards helped, but now the illusion is over and so are we.”
“Deena, I’m sorry,” Sam blatantly lied, and placed a supportive hand on Deena’s back, because she might have been suffering the entire time Deena and Heather were together, but under no circumstances she would want Deena to suffer.
“Don’t be,” Deena replied, and wiped her eyes. There was a brief silence then. Deena took a deep breath, smiled when she looked at Sam, and said, “There’s so much I want to ask you now.”
“Me?” Sam blurted out, forgetting for a moment the soft whispers they had been communicating with. “What? Why? I mean, what do you want to ask me?”
The smile left Deena’s face. She looked down and started playing with a loose thread on Sam’s blanket wrapped over her shoulders. Sam could be wrong, but she thought she could feel Deena trembling more at that moment than when she found her standing under the rain a few minutes ago.
“Deena, are you okay?” Sam asked once more, even softer now, if possible.
“I’m a little scared, actually,” Deena confessed, without meeting the blonde’s eyes. “But I really need to know why.”
“Why?”
“Why did you do it? Why did you help her?”
“ What? ” Sam wondered, feeling like she had stumbled into one of those thousands of scenarios she had imagined for years, but she had missed an important part of the story. Finally though, Deena explained it all.
“Look, I asked Heather about the cards, and she couldn’t give me a straight answer. I figured she couldn’t do it by herself, and whoever was helping her stopped, and she couldn’t manage to keep going alone. One thing led to the other and we broke up. But I still don’t know who was helping her. Well… I have a theory. Because, Sam, very few people know me this well. Kate did a shit job at hiding how much she disliked Heather since the beginning, and something tells me it wasn’t Simon. So…”
“Deena…”
“I just want to know why?! Why would you help her? Why did you stop? Why…” Deena started crying softly. “ How didn’t you see that I would fall in love with those cards instead of the real Heather? And how fucking confusing and complicated it would be for me when I learned the truth?! Why, Sam, why the fuck would you do all this for me when you’re dating Kate?!”
“ What the fuck… ”
When Deena started crying, Sam had followed suit. Sam was having an internal breakdown, realizing she would have to explain herself, finally confess everything to Deena and apologize. But then Deena had said that last thing and Sam’s brain simply experienced a short circuit.
“Don’t try to deny it, Sam,” Deena frowned and wiped her tears a little more aggressively now. “I’ve seen you, for years, you two are in love and it's so obvious it drives me crazy . All the hugs, the whispers, the secrets, the stupid fucking winks during cheer practice! And it’s okay, really! I’m a big girl, I can take it, I can keep my feelings to myself. And I found Heather, didn’t I? It was okay, I could pretend… But then you had to go and… Why did you do it, Sam?”
Sam’s heart and mind were racing, but she managed a small smile. “Deena, I swear that Kate and I aren’t dating at all. It’s a very, very impossible thing, I promise.”
Deena attempted a smile, but didn’t quite manage it. “I find that a little hard to believe,” she whispered.
Sam was feeling so many emotions at once that it was enough to cloud most of her usual self-restraint. Carefully, she moved her hand to Deena’s face. She softly wiped away Deena’s tears with her thumb, and left her palm there cradling Deena’s cheek. It was an indescribable feeling what she experienced when Deena leaned into her touch.
“Can you please tell me what feelings you were trying to keep to yourself?” Sam asked, not without a great amount of fear.
Her words didn’t please Deena. The brunette jerked away, so that Sam had to pull her hand away. “Don’t make me say what’s obvious, Sam,” Deena groaned.
“Deena, look at me, please,” Sam whispered, and when the other girl complied she smiled. “If I’ve learned something over the course of this conversation is that nothing is ever obvious. At least not for us.”
“What do you mean?” Deena frowned in genuine confusion. And Sam found her expression so endearing that she couldn’t help but spill every last word she had been holding back for so long.
“Deena, I didn’t help Heather with the cards. She had nothing to do with them. It was all me,” Sam confessed and watched the realization take over Deena’s face. “I’ve had a crush on you for an embarrassing number of years. Kate has been comforting me and trying to get me to confess through most of them, but nothing else. These cards were the only way I had to express my feelings and I’m really sorry I didn’t just tell you the truth. I was just…”
“Scared,” Deena finished for her.
“Yeah,” Sam sighed.
“I was scared too.”
Now that the confession was over, she expected to feel a lot of things, like relief, embarrassment, mortification, fear. But with the way Deena was looking at her, Sam couldn’t feel or think much of anything at all. “Now what?” She asked with a trembling voice.
“Now, if you please let me, I’d like to kiss you the way I’ve wanted to do for years,” Deena replied.
Deena’s word made Sam smile with unmeasurable happiness. She took Deena’s face in her hands and pulled her in for a kiss. Their first kiss of many more to come. No more secrets, no more hiding their feelings.
Sam’s favorite part? Other than that first kiss? It was waking up the next day and finding out that Deena had managed to hide a letter under her pillow the previous night. It was written on a ripped page from a notebook, it had a couple of scratched-out words and sentences, but it also promised to be the first one of many more.
It started with “Dear Sam, it’s your secret admirer (Deena)...”