One shots

Forget me not

"In the end we'll all become stories."
-Margaret Atwood.

The first time she met Emilio she was ten and he was thirteen. She remembers the day for several reasons. First for it was the hottest day of summer and she was outside, working on the lawn. She decided it was time to make it pretty and for the past week had mowed, planted flowers and trimmed the bushes. All that was left was now painting the white fence white. Again.

She was covered in flecks of white paint when she saw the cars and moving truck drive past her to the empty home three doors down from hers. She looked up by chance when she heard some boys arguing and that was when she saw him. He was an awkwardly lanky kid, who was all bones and smelled. Something she would come to learn in the next few years they would be around each other. There were two younger kids who he was bickering with both younger than him. She watched how the tip of his pointy nose turned red matching the sun burn that ran across the apple of his cheeks. The way his black eyes grew flecks of honey gold as he pushed past one of them exasperated towards the other car, where another boy his age got out looking smug and happy. He spoke to him, stink eyeing the younger two before she would catch his eye.

He stared at her. Well more glared with a question in his eyes. And she decided in that second that this boy would grow to be the man to throw her whole world into disarray. She just didn't know how. She smiled a secret smile as if it held all the answers of the world before looking away. She watched as a woman walked towards a man, rubbing a faint bump on her stomach, he kissed her temple and they both looked at the house. They looked well dressed. Too well dressed to be living on her street, not that she was dirt poor. But they looked like the family who could hold the world in their palms. And she wondered to herself how it felt to be part of something so big and so happy.

It would be a week later that she would meet those kids, a boy and girl, twins her age that would become good friends. Their home a haven by the time she is twelve from the new man her mother bought home that gave her the creeps. On more than one occasion she would find herself at there's late into the evening wishing she would not have to go home. A home broken and as lost as her mother who's light was dimming day by day.

It would be four years of knowing them before she would be ripped away from her only solace on a late evening. She had run to the home three doors away, late in the evening in the hopes of saying goodbye one last time. She knocked on the door gasping, slightly bent over. Tears tracks marred her cheeks and the bushed tears sparkles like glitter in her eyes. Hope bloomed in her chest as the door opened to be squashed, sort of when it wasn't the twins nor their parents who stood in front of her. Emilio stood in front of her topless, with a pair of shorts in. His brown hair wet and slightly long falling in messy waves over his forehead and the sides shaved closer to his head. She felt her cheeks flush as he looked surprised and concerned. His hand flew out to run up and down her arms when she shivered and goosebumps peppered the skin of her arms. She knew she was taken aback by her appearance.  She also knew he made her feel warm and at peace.

"Are the twins home?" She managed to croak out.

"They're on their way home with mom and dad. But you, are you okay Chi?" She closed her eyes savouring the way her nickname fell of his lips.

Only to be startled by the sound of a car door and the hollow voice of a woman that was once the centre of her universe.

"Chiara!" Followed by rapid footsteps and a vice grip on her wrist before she could even react.

She was dragged out the heat of his body. Watched as his eyes widened in shock. Hers in fear. She dug her feet into the ground.

"Wait, wait!" She pleaded freeing herself and running back up the front steps of his home.