Trust

Part 3

The only excitement Anya has for winter is Christmas and the break from teaching. She loves her students, and she loves the challenge, but by that Friday before the break, she was ready to pull her hair out. The following Monday after the dance, Noah showed up at the door of her classroom with a bouquet of carnations and daisies, her favorite. She had been mortified, knowing her entire class of twenty teenagers was watching them like a movie at the theater. Noah asked her to dinner that night. Monday night date nights became a tradition, and they never canceled unless he was paged to an emergency. It has been three months and she still cringes at the awkwardness of that first date.

Having not been able to find a conversation topic that lasted more than a few minutes, there was more silence between them than talking. Anya had her hands clenched so tightly in her lap that her fingernails left imprints in her palms for a week. When they prepared to say goodnight and part ways, he stopped her from walking inside her door by grabbing her arm lightly. "I am going to say this now before I never get another chance. I love you, Anya." She stared at him for a few lingering seconds while his moment of courage started to fade. "I know that it is way too soon to say it, but that is how I feel. That is how I have felt since we met, even though you were sixteen and I was twenty-four, as creepy as that sounds." Anya had to bit her lip to keep herself from laughing at the ridiculous realization of their age gap. At their age now, it is not quite as creepy, but back then it certainly was. "I don't want you to think you have to say how you feel now..."

"Do you think I would have kissed you at the dance if I didn't feel anything?" Anya found herself questioning and his eyes gaze up at her. "You gave me the chance to walk away, and I stayed. I am in this, a hundred percent." He did not wait for her to say anything else.

Now, with Christmas officially over, according to all the events they were required to attend today, the two can finally kick back and relax. They sit on the couch watching a Christmas movie that they have both seen a thousand times, and casually converse over their thoughts on it. "You know that if they had just turned around in the first scene, all of the rest of the movie could have been avoided. Roll credits." He laughs as the movie enters a climactic scene.

"That isn't the point, and you know it." Anya, with her head on a pillow on his lap, turns to glare up at him in a humoring sort of way. "If they had met at the beginning of the movie, neither of them would have been the people they were by the end of the movie, and they wouldn't have worked out."

"Would we have worked out?" He questions with hidden interest and she thinks back on their situations back when they met. His eyes look back to the tv, but she knows he is holding his breath for her answer.

"Aside from the fact that you were twenty-four and I was sixteen?" She returns and gets a glance back at her with one raised eyebrow. "I don't know. I am not that same girl I used to be. I needed to learn how to stand on my own, to be okay with being by myself, and find what I wanted. You were just starting pre-med and trying hard to get out from under your parents' influence." She returns, remembering the party he had been forced to attend. "I think we could have tried to give it a go, but with my protective parents, even though they love you, you probably would have been put on a watch list for relations with a minor."

Noah gives off a hearty laugh that makes her smile. "You are probably right. I don't think I could have kept my hands to myself back then." He wiggles his eyebrows at her. "Not that I can now, either." She smacks a hand to his chest. "But you are right that you were a minor, and I was..." He breaks off with his brows furrowing together. "Damn, I was old." He looks so concerned and upset at that sudden thought that Anya cannot help but laugh at him. She momentarily thinks about revealing that he is even older now but decides against it.