Love with strings detached

Chapter 27

I watch as small pieces of light blonde hair skim the soft skin of her cheek as she leans her head a little closer to the illuminated laptop screen on my desk.

Her unpainted nails push them behind her ear as my gaze falls on her moving lips. Her brown eyes that are a shade darker than usual due to the gloomy weather outside are bouncing across the screen as she reads my essay.

"It's good, I would give you like a solid 62 out of 100 although I believe you can do even better if you just focus a little bit more."

I watch her lips move with every word before catching a glimpse of her tongue, darting out to moisture her lips.

"Really? Cause I think that's as good as I get," I say truthfully.

"The introduction is strong and the overall structure is good, maybe it would've needed a bit more critical analysis but we'll focus on improving that on the other essay," she says, explaining her marking decision.

"Critical analysis is really what can give or take points away from you, it's all our professors talk about whenever they bring up the essays," she adds, twirling the blue pen she holds in her hand.

"Are those fake plants?"

She points with the pen at the recently bought fake plants on my wooden bookshelf.

"Always," I say.

I got them just because she said to me in the past that I need to put more greenery and colour in my studio. She is also the reason why I opted for grey and white patterned duvet covers instead of just black.

"Nice," she says.

A small smile appears on her face as she examines them.

She turns her body slightly towards me keeping one leg crossed over the other. I let my eyes fall on her body, checking out her outfit for the day. She's wearing a white graphic cami top with zebra print flare pants and white socks.

The natural light coming from the big window beside her doesn't give her beauty justice.

"Now the fun part," she says, grabbing my tattooed arms sleeve and pulling it up to reveal my tattoos as best as possible.

"Here, let me just," I say, pulling the shirt over my head leaving me bare chest to her.

This time she doesn't seem to react to seeing me shirtless as her eyes don't strain away from my tattoos. It's not like she hasn't seen me like this before.

"Which one do you want to know about?" I ask, twisting my arm to show her the remaining three big tattoos.

She pouts her lips, twisting them from side to side as she checks them out.

"This one," she says, softly touching the one with the wounded angel wings wrapped in a string full of thorns on my bicep.

"Why that one?" I ask as usual.

I like knowing what's the reason behind her decision of which tattoo she wants to find out its meaning next. It's fascinating to see how well she can read my tattoos and me in the short period of two months we've known each other.

"Cause it looks intense and I feel like theirs a couple of things tie down to it," she says, looking at it as she traces the wings with her fingertip.

"This one represents life and how it hasn't been good to me in the past. Like I had good moments and happy moments hence the angel wings but I also had some awful moments, very damaging ones that the string of thorns symbolises," I say, looking at the tattoo.

"I still have wounds from those situations that haven't healed with time, that's why they're visible wounds on the wings, even though all of mine are internal," I say.

"Internal wounds tend to be the worse," she mumbles, turning her head to look outside the window.

"Don't I know that?" I whisper, watching the back of her head.

"So, you don't believe in that whole statement where everything gets healed with time?" She asks, keeping her face away from my view.

"Not necessarily. Time does heal but it's like...imagine this right," I say, placing my elbows on the desk as she turns back around, this time looking at my face.

"You have a wound on your arm if you keep putting on medicine it'll heal faster but if you just leave it off like that it'll take more time to heal and might even leave a scar behind," I point at my forearm as I speak.

"Yeah, you're right, healing takes effort," she says, nodding her head.

"Exactly, just like everything else in life," I say, leaning back on my black rolling desk chair.

"Life can be good to some people but horrible to others. Life is unpredictable, anything can happen to anyone at any given moment without warning. Life is tough and it's going to throw all these obstacles at you to try and halt you. A strong person is the one that fights those obstacles wins or loses, falls and picks themselves up again and keep going, not the one that dodges them," I say, whilst shaking my head slightly.

Her lips are pouting outwards, gaze lowered at her dangling feet.

"With that being said, I don't know whether I'm a strong person or a coward. Maybe I'm a bit of both," I say, looking down at my lap.

"I think we're all a bit of both, aren't we? No one is perfect," she says, seeing her bring her gaze up to my face from the corner of my eyes.

There are a lot of times where I wish I would've done things differently, said something else or taken back something I said.

Time can't be rewind unfortunately and you'll have to live with the consequences of your actions, your words for the rest of your life. For some people, those consequences are detrimental to the point where some even lose their lives.

"Yeah...maybe," I mumble.

I always say how I don't want to live my life with regrets but that's inevitable and sometimes you should regret some things. The important thing is what you do after those decisions.

Are you going to take advantage of the time you have or waste it?

A/N

Have you regretted things before?

Do you think everything gets healed with time? Or do you agree with Theo?

I hope you all enjoyed this chapter and stay tuned for the next one as someone makes a big wrong move...👀😬😡

Please don't forget to comment & vote ❤️

I hope you have a great day/night! Xx

All the love - M ❤️