A/N - Thank you for all the positive reviews! For the first time, I am writing a chapter from Brooke's perspective. I typically prefer to write from Lucas' POV, but I thought this was a moment in time more applicable to Brooke. I thought it was important to see her internal conflict.

Loneliness characterized a lot of Brooke Davis' life. This was an undeniable fact. From absent parents who picked and chose when she mattered based on when it was convenient to them, to being at a party and realizing that it was actually possible to feel alone in a crowded room. Part of that loneliness was self-imposed. When you only show your heart to one person, it can get pretty lonely when they're not around anymore.

For as long as Brooke could remember, the only person who got to see her heart was Peyton Sawyer. At some point, she let others have glimpses. But no one had ever gotten to see her like Peyton had. And with this in mind, Brooke finds herself knocking on the front door of her old friend's home without an exact game plan.

The door swings open after a moment and Peyton stands there, yawning. "Brooke, I love you, but it's like six in the morning."

Brooke doesn't bother to respond but instead pushes past Peyton and heads straight for the living room. She sits down on the couch and immediately gets back up.

"Hey, is everything alri—" Peyton begins speaking in a concerned tone but Brooke cuts her off.

"I need you to tell me the truth. I need you to tell me if it's okay that I start seeing Lucas." She blurts out. She's got her hands clasped tightly because she does not know what to do with them and her heart is hammering so quickly and loudly she is honestly stunned that Peyton cannot hear it.

Peyton's mouth hangs open a little bit. Her eyes narrow but Brooke cannot tell if she looks displeased just yet. Her words are greeted with more silence until Peyton looks away and sighs. When she turns back to face Brooke, she is visibly upset.

"You don't need my permission, Brooke. You don't owe me that." She crosses her arms over her chest, her lips pressing together in a hard line. The tension practically radiates off her in waves.

"You don't like this." Is all Brooke can say.

Peyton shakes her head, laughing a little. "You're wrong about that. It's not you being with Lucas that bothers me. It's that you felt like it might."

The awkward silence is back and Brooke cannot figure out how to put her feelings into words. This was a subject the two of them had stayed away from since the day they patched up their friendship. It had always been a silent rule between them to leave their old love triangle to die. Brooke did not know what to say because she hadn't done this Peyton in almost five years.

She takes a deep breath and lets the past five years finally spill out of her.

"Can you blame me, Peyt? How can you honestly be bothered by that? The only thing to ever come between us was Lucas. So I am so sorry that I felt like asking you was the right thing to do. And I can stand here and tell you that yeah, I don't owe it to you because he was always mine every time you came along." She practically hisses the word 'mine'. "I could make this all about how hard it was to forgive you twice. I could make it all about the pain, and all about swallowing my feelings for years now, so that you could have a chance at getting what you wanted." She sinks into the couch behind her, drained.

"So why don't you?" Peyton's question hangs in the air between them for several moments. It's surrounded by Brooke's mine and by the even harsher forgive you twice.

"Because I don't want to. Because I love you. I'm only asking because I want your support this time. I need your support this time, okay? I need to know you're here for me and I need to know I can trust you with this because—because," She looks away, not able to finish. Peyton sits down beside her on the couch and takes Brooke's hand in her own.

"Yeah, yes, of—of course."

Brooke looks up at her best friend feeling more uncertain than she ever has in her life. She's trying so hard to find the honesty in Peyton's eyes, to have any sort of faith that history would not repeat itself. Instead she just hears Peyton saying 'I have feelings for Lucas.'

"Brooke, it will always be you—"

"Gosh, Peyton, what don't you understand? That's not what matters. I need to know I can trust you because you're over him and because you love me, not because you don't think you have a chance anymore!" She doesn't know when she started crying but she does know she's grown really tired of it.

"I love you the most Brooke." And all of a sudden they're hugging and she's hit with the reality of her decision.

"Don't you think it's crazy?" Brooke doesn't like that she's developed this habit of pacing during times of stress. She was not a pacer, angry people paced. Tense people paced. Her mother paced. That last thought alone is enough to make her sit down. She waits patiently for Haley's response but only grows anxious as the seconds trickle by. "Haley, come on!"

Haley sighs, but follows it up with a smile. "I don't know if crazy is the word. But even if it were, why would that make it such a bad thing? You were once the poster child for crazy."

"But I'm not, at least not anymore. I have a business now, and it's a good one! And I'm living a successful life, I'm in New York half the time—"

"Lucas lives in New York, actually, he's only on vacation now—"

"I don't dive head first anymore. I—I look before I leap. Actually, I don't even leap. And that's because of what happened with Lucas. I can't keep a relationship going, I don't know how to—"

"Well, you did with Lucas—"

"I haven't been with him since I was eighteen, you know?" She finally stops to take a breath.

"Wait, you and Lucas broke up before you turned eighteen." Says Haley. She tilts her head slightly to one side, questioningly.

Brooke blushes and looks away. "We had sex like a week before prom." She mumbles.

"I'm sorry, what? Can you maybe say that in an audible tone?" Haley sounds like she is seconds away from laughing.

"Okay, okay! I had sex with Lucas before prom, after we broke up, happy? I missed him and I needed him and then I left before he woke up and I—and I let him go. And I spent so many days after wondering what would have happened if I'd stayed and let him wake up next to me, but we were too broken and I didn't trust it, I didn't trust him or myself around him." It feels like a huge weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She hadn't told anyone about that night, and Haley's lack of knowledge on the subject let her know that there was a good chance that Lucas hadn't told anyone either.

"What about now?" It is a loaded question, one to which Brooke realizes she does not have an answer.

Life had been easy in so many ways in Brooke's first sixteen years. She had a knack for getting everything she'd wanted. Almost anything, if you counted her parents, whom she'd stopped counting by the time she'd learned how to count. Hearing the word 'no' did not happen often in her world. Sure, there had been more to her life than the ease of obtaining her desires. There was the day Peyton's mom died, the day that had felt like a month. The day she learned that family wasn't just a mommy and a daddy, but that friends were family too. There was the night she'd gotten alcohol poisoning and her mother had asked the housekeeper to check her out of the hospital instead of leaving her business lunch. There were rough patches. But it all felt like a cakewalk in comparison to Lucas Scott.

Her life had been easy where it counted to her, it had been fun and good enough and she went and complicated it by falling in love with him. She often likes to think that she really didn't have a say in the matter. He crashed into her life so suddenly, had stood out so much from all the rest of the guys. He had seemed to be so much more than just good enough. And all of a sudden, she was the one who might not be good enough.

Her feelings for him had hit her like a freight train back then. This was by no means a slow or a patient love. It was earnest and sweet and curious. It was as hot as the middle of the afternoon on a sweltering July day with all the magic that came with the lazy summer night to follow.

She feels the weight of all her feelings hit her and realizes that her fear was now coming from not feeling prepared. The morning she'd crawled out of his bed for the last time was the day she'd put away the feelings. She had made the decision and with that decision came the acceptance of never being with him again. So she had not been prepared for all this, he had never been in the cards for her.

But she also realizes that no one makes her feel the things she feels when she's with Lucas. It's a chemical reaction. Her blood boils from love and from anger, from happiness and from betrayal. They're not all great feelings but he still makes her feel so much and that is more than anyone has ever been able to do.

"What we had—what we have, it makes everything else pale in comparison." She takes a deep breath before taking the plunge. "Four years later, it still makes everything else pale in comparison. And maybe I needed that time to know that it was possible to live a life without you in it, but that doesn't mean I didn't want you in it. I'd always thought there was something beautiful about the tragedy that we must have seemed like. Like, even though we didn't end up together the fact that we were able to love each other like that was what actually mattered. Like even if the relationship didn't exist anymore, the feelings existing at all in the way they did was important."

"I couldn't agree more, Brooke Davis." He chuckles as he pulls her into a hug and she lets her body sink gratefully against his and decides to stop letting fear get in her way. For the longest time, she'd thought that being brave meant being fearless. And there had been nothing more satisfying to her than being told she was brave and nothing more disappointing when she'd realized she had fears like everyone else, big, scary fears.

It is in this moment that she realizes how wrong she had been. Conquering her fears was what would make her brave. Fearlessness, she decides, is for the foolish.

She does not call him boyfriend. But it's at the end of every sentence, silent. She feels it sitting on her tongue, pushing against her teeth. Its presence is palpable in the air, it surrounds them constantly.

They head to New York together. With the tour over, Lucas must start working on his next book. Brooke needs to finalize her Spring line. They work a lot, side by side. She leans against the back of his couch, drowning in sketches and fabric swatches while he sits beside her, computer on his lap, coffee in one hand. Some nights he took a break from writing and just read. She never took a break.

On one of these nights he is sitting across the room from her, yet another book in front of his face. He calls her name and she immediately looks up, losing focus. He glances down at the page he is on briefly, a smile breaking out on his face. She returns it, feeling the warmth that his smile always brings.

"I have read this book countless times. It is one of my all-time favorites." He says. She takes a look at the cover and sees that it is This Side of Paradise.

"You always have loved your Fitzgerald. That's a good one, but I like Gatsby better. The parties are more exciting." She says, pleased as she remembers reading that very book during her senior year after Lucas raved about it for weeks, begging and pleading with her to give it a chance.

"'They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.'" He reads aloud from the page he is on. She recognizes the line as one of her favorites. "You think that's why we're here? Because we never recovered?"

She's taken aback by his question and finds herself unsure of what to say. She stands up from her spot on the floor and walks over to the couch, moving his legs aside so she could sit beside him. He folds the corner of the page down and closes his book, putting it aside.

"You hate dog-eared pages. You always made me use bookmarks." She says, eyes still on the book. He places two fingers below her chin, gently pushing her head up so that she is looking at him instead.

"And you never used them. This page was already folded down, thanks to you." He smirks and then kisses her forehead. The moment is far more intimate than she has grown accustomed to in her years without him. But it does not startle her.

"Maybe we didn't recover. But maybe that's okay." That pesky word lingers in her mouth, this time it's past her teeth but does not make it past her lips.

She does not call him boyfriend.