Christopher
I wonder if he heard my heart gushing in a powerless attempt to take flight from my chest, desperate to escape the unfeeling rejection that had frozen over any remaining admiration reserved for him. His pools of blue followed me, and he leaned forward with a contrasting air of care. His nimble fingers lightly threaded through my long tresses. “You have something stuck,” he murmured lowly in the voice that could only ever belong to him, smooth and hushed.
A pause hung heavy between us, and the wind wafting through the August leaves, and the distant roar of car engines outside the park grounds, came crashing down around me all at once. My shame would not leave the ringing in my ears and the tint of my skin. My cheeks and nose were burning with a boundless red flush. He looked over the tears flooding from my hurt eyes, poorly urging the wetness to clear by my numerous, pathetic blinks. I did not shrink away from his touch, despite knowing I very much should have.
I stilled, and the world stilled with me. I had begun, innocently, to fall in love with a forty-four-year-old man, twenty-five years my senior. After three months of pining for my mentor and dear friend, I had learned it was chimerical when Summer ended—and inevitably, so did the ill-fated idea of us, and any future we might have had.
-Dearest Darya
