"There's only so many times I can put my heart back together"
"Why are you so sure I'll break it again?"
🖤🤍🖤
Andrew had a perfect life. Or so others would think.
Living under his father's control was a nightmare. Having his dreams ignored and bei...
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The sky was all shades of oranges and reds when Alice finally left her last class of the day. She had been looking at the sun descending through the window. Even now, as she walked out of the building to go home, she kept staring at the sky through the windows.
A loud sound of metal hitting stone snapped her attention away from the outside. There was some skinny kid fighting the disconnected vending machine and everyone kept walking past him without a care for it. The machine bounced with how hard the guy shoved it and hit the wall once more.
"Wow, what did it do to you?" she approached him, smiling.
The boy looked back at her and she recognised him. It took a while for her to remember where she knew him from, but eventually, it made sense in her head.
"The machine swallowed my money and turned off," he complained. "It doesn't give me the change or my snickers."
He kicked it one more time, but she pushed him back. All that savagery was unnecessary and if there was something Alice hated was violence. That's why she avoided Miguel.
"There's a trick to it," she explained. "This place is ancient, just check the plug."
She stuck her hand behind the machine, and suddenly it lit up. More than his snickers, one of each snack fell down and all his money was returned to him.
"Are you kidding?" he exclaimed, grabbing the coins and counting them one by one. "I can't take all of this. I didn't pay for it... Actually, I didn't pay for anything at all."
She leaned against it and shrugged. "You're already paying your eyes off to be in here. Do you want to pay for food, too?"
His eyes met hers. He had a scholarship; he wasn't actually paying.
"I'll take my snickers," he said. "You can take the rest."
Alice smiled and stuck her arm inside the vending machine, taking out everything that had fallen. She threw him his snickers, which he barely caught, and looped her arm in his before he could protest.
"Let's go have a picnic!" she beamed. "You're Gio, right? I'm Ali."
Giovanni let himself be pulled by her with a nod. They ended up in the grass field outside, protected by the banister next to them so the students walking in and out wouldn't bother them.
Alice tossed her bag to a corner and sat criss-cross on the sod, right next to Giovanni. She displayed everything in front of them and grabbed a bag of chips before leaning against the banister.
"You're a friend of the girl from the cafe, aren't you?" he asked, taking a bite of his snickers.
She nodded, though she wasn't very found of being remembered as someone's friend.
"Do you help strangers with vending machines often?"
She giggled. He didn't look so scared now as he did when she first met him.
