4. Storytelling "Everyone has a story to bear, what if the story started off with the villain being the hero."
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WHEN YOU READ A STORY, YOU READ TO JUMP OUT OF YOUR WORLD AND INTO A NEW ONE. To share laughter with the characters on the pages, feeling the butterflies in your stomach when enemies finally become lovers. Taste the glorious foods they ate and feel the alcohol in your liver as they drank. You read for all of that, live a life you couldn't in the real world. But I know your secret, the real reason you read.
You read to be loved.
You read to feel the love of a mother, a father, siblings, lovers. You read to fill that void of hating to be touched by imagining the touch of people who didn't exist warming your body in comfort and safety. You mourn when your favorite characters die because to you, they gave you that love and comfort you never had growing up.
So you like to think you had a pretty good hold on the idea of love and how it was supposed to feel. Just not a good hold of how others felt, their own love dwelling in their chest and swirling around in either awe of that person, or despair.
Gunther sat peacefully in the cushioned booth at the diner you had worked in for a short period of time. A diner you still had to come into a retake that position as a waiter. He was shocked to his core when you had told him of the job. You... weren't a people person. Rather you would always lean closer to him whenever the two of you were in public places together and whisper to him insults of strangers who always seemed to ruffle your feathers with the slightest of words. He would join you in the little whispers of insult, but to only stroke your own cords of amusement. Gunther didn't mind people as much as you, he was just one of those people you could never find anything bad about. But of course everyone has their flaws, and one of them for the young chess player was his way of keeping his mouth shut in times he should speak his mind.
It was one of the reasons why you had slipped through his fingers and into that William Johns. He was still upset at the memory of his long muscled arm wrapped tightly around your waist, his thumb rubbing against the slight drift of skin that escaped from under your navy knitted sweater. Gunther had never felt that bitter jealous in his bones before, shaking and leaving them buzzing lowly with the poisonous emotion. If he had let it, the little thing could have turn his entire soul inside out and leave nothing but a shred of who he was left for the Devil to poke at in Hell when he finally passed. Even the thought of his expected future if he had gone down that path left a shiver down his spine like a cold ice cube at been dumped under his shirt.
It was the reason he started to dabble in chess again, in a competitive look. To distract himself and calm down that bitter shake in his bones by putting his entire mind at work at learning new strategies, plays. So there he sat, comfortably slumped over a chessboard with the chess pieces placed in the Queens Gambit. A strategy many chess player knew like the back of their hand, a move they knew how to counter and turn the tables on their opponent. If Gunther could picture each one of those counters, he'll have a nice easy breeze through slightly harder competition in this town. Coal Creek had its own share of chess players who knew more about the game than revalue players. With not a lot in the town to have fun in, they quickly became intrigued in the game of chess, spending their extra time learning and growing in their games.
