Graphite Roses ✓

third

"It's beautiful." His voice wrapped around the word so elegantly, so lucidly, it seemed to acquire a whole new meaning.  

Her confusion and wariness over the ocean-eyed stranger were great, and her first thought was to ignore him altogether. But. . . the curiosity stirring in her would have been too much to bear. She followed his unfaltering gaze down to the pages beneath her pencil-smudged fingers. He was staring at the pine-leaf close-up she'd just been working on.

She squeezed a shy shrug out of herself. "They're just sketches." 

He peeled his eyes off the sketchbook and met hers. "I like them."

Her tongue lay numb at a loss of a response that seemed to be in her cue. 

She didn't want to care. She didn't have the energy for it. All she wanted was to forget— to get away. From everything, from anything. But that stranger was forcing life back into her senses and she wasn't sure she liked it, at all.

Still, she didn't change her seat to avoid him. Curiosity — what a capricious little thing, indeed.

"You also looking for inspiration here, in this lonesome train cabin, sketchbook girl?" 

Ah, what an innocent assumption on his part.

He assumed she was like everyone else. He assumed her heart was free from the dark turmoils of her past. He assumed that she could easily breathe, live, spend her days jumping into random trains to be filled with inspiration — like himself.

Alas, it wasn't like that. But he couldn't have known.

One can never know what storms others bear inside themselves.

She hesitated. "Not exactly." Then, more to shake the focus off her, than out of genuine interest: "So is that what you're doing?"

"I was. Till I found it." His eyes stayed distinctly fixated on her as he delivered his truth, and she suddenly understood what he was implying. 

He had found his inspiration. . .in her? Again, she didn't want to care. And perhaps that's why his light-hued eyes were beginning to displease her. Because they were almost impelling her to care.

"Who are you?" She finally released the question that'd been prickling the tip of her tongue ever since the moment she first saw him.

He brushed a dark lock of hair back, head cocked slightly, in consideration. The question was too broad and a bit ill-formulated, but it's not like he could blame her. She wasn't the one with a gift for unfolding thoughts into words out of the two.

"I'm. . . Finn. Finneas Blake Gray, to be exact, but Finn'll do." His tone was blunt, matter-of-fact. 

"But," her phrases came out rather sharp-edged, unassertive. Very much unlike his free-flowing speech. "why are you. . . talking to me?"

A good-natured smirk slithered onto his subtle lips. "Why not?"

She exhaled a puff of air — marveling at his sneaky way of getting around the answer. "Because. . . you don't know me? For example."

"I want to, though." His reply hopped along quickly, as always. That skill of his was remarkable — you'd think he'd actually rehearsed every response of his every conversation yet to come. One could never catch him off guard.

She couldn't brush aside the foreboding suspicion that she was being mocked. Though it wasn't like it affected her much. 

She couldn't bring herself to feel anything lately, let alone offense.

It's what happens when one gets too hurt. Numbness — the backlash to consecutive pain.

There's only so much a human heart can take. Only so many pieces it can break into.

She chose to just turn away from him, plugging her headphones back in, her face veiled now behind the ash-blonde locks falling in the way.

His smirk didn't wane as he shifted in his seat, fingers dancing against his notepad. He glanced off through the window into the foggy distance, before clicking his pen on and jotting something down.

He breathed in deeply, inhaling the scent of stardust and air castles. His heart was violently hammering his chest. No one else but him could understand this feeling, this thrill. This was it — he knew exactly now. The beginning of a fresh new chapter.

A new story.