His voice was warm. It was warm and his laugh was hearty yet demure, and it recalled images of jars of honey, with rays of sunlight filtering through and illuminating the tiny air bubbles held captive in the viscous, amber liquid.
Her smile was warm. It spread wide open and shone like a star in the midst of a living room, the kind of star that people made wishes on. It blossomed like a grand magnolia bloom, unfurling and radiating blissful positivity, so addicting you'd crave it seconds after she left.
They were both warm, two cozy mugs of tea, and after they met, everything was so easy. They joked and listened to music together, and walked together to a cafe tucked in a corner of their town to talk or sit silent, watching people or the walls or each other. They were happy.
There came a day when they weren't as peaceful. They grew the tiniest bit colder, decreasing just one degree Fahrenheit. As if some frost had clutched their hearts, days where they weren't glimmering honey or magnolia blossoms became increasingly frequent, until they stopped walking to the cafe altogether. The employees who worked the evening shift, which was when the two visited, wondered where they had gone. They closed the mystery with the assumption that the warm couple had found another cafe to stay.
There was some truth to that statement. The warm duo had left, rotting away until all that were left were their harsh, unforgiving skeletons. They argued over the phone. The boy stopped eating. The girl stopped sleeping. They were twisted and mangled and bruised, like some awful giant had taken their souls and twisted them into some abnormal shape, before dropping them and letting them fall to the ground.
The boy's family was in debt and on the verge of homelessness. The girl's parents fought and drank and cheated on one another, until her father didn't come home one night and her mother brought home man after man after man, some of them so young they couldn't have been much older than her.
The girl was angry, and so was the boy. She lashed out at him, and he retaliated with the same force, until they were ripping each other apart.
They stopped talking to each other.
The girl stopped going to school.
The boy stopped living.
