Paper Hearts.

diez

Ashley

"So how's your piano theory coming along, dear?" Ben says, his mouth filled with Ben and Jerry's cookie dough ice cream. I try and stifle a laugh as I place my index finger on his prominent jaw, tilting it upwards to close his mouth. He grins a cheeky grin and I beam.

"No talking with your mouth full." I say. He sticks out his tongue and I roll my eyes. I didn't think it was possible to instantly feel a connection between someone you barely knew, but I was wrong. The first time I saw him, I knew that I had to get to know him. Looking upon his lanky figure fascinated me, what with all his Billabong shorts and surfboard surrounding him at all times. He was like my drug, my magnet. He intrigued me, and I intrigued him.

Swiftly, I reach down into my black leather bag and bring out my little black book of sketches I've started to keep myself occupied during the summer. "I've drawn a picture of you." I say.

"Have you now?" He says, reaching out to me with fingers covered in Chocolate sauce and whipped cream. I playfully bite his finger and he retracts, shocked. "Now what would you do that for?"

"Your fingers look like shit." I say, grinning.

"I think you just wanted to bite my fingers, love," he winks, and I know it's all just friendly banter, but I can't help the butterflies that erupt from the depths of my stomach. This uneasiness, it's fresh, unlike the tension I experience when the presence of him. "Seriously though, I want to see." He whines, reaching out to me as if he was a dying plant and I was the sun.

"Nope," I say, laughing. "Clean up those fingers, I don't like seeing them here thank you very much."

A wicked smile forms onto his full pink lips and I raise my eyebrow. I look up at him through batter lashes and cower. "Is there another place you'd like to see my fingers, hm?" He smirks and gently walks over to me, towering me, sheltering me. He leans forward and my eyes widen as he puts his arm on my thigh. "Perhaps somewhere, I don't know, lower?"

My heart bursts out of my chest and for a second, I am lost for words. My throat dries and suddenly the curtains of beige behind him seem much more interesting. I frown. "I'm thirteen and pure," I whisper weakly, "I don't need you tainting me like I'm some sort of painting-"

"Tainting you?" He drops his hands from my face as if I'd slapped him. He sounds stunned.

"Yeah you always do that shit, tainting me and all," I mumble, but the way his pupils dilate tells me that I shouldn't have said that.

His voice, deep and husky, sends chills down my spine. "What we feel-what I feel- and you think I'm tainting you?"

I catch my breath at the look on his face. "N-no, what I meant um, what I meant was-"

"Then you should have said that to begin with."

"Ben-"

But he was gone from me, expression blank, shut, and locked like a cellar. It's hard to believe that he'd ever looked at me another way. "I've been hanging around you for weeks," his voice was stiff, formal, so unlike him "no other girls, just you."

"I didn't-"

"I've even tried to, you know, kiss you. And you refuse. You refuse me, every single time. I go to bed every night thinking about you. I wake up every morning thinking about you. About what you would wear, what you would do, which one of the thousands of different laugh you would laugh. About the adorable way you blink when you swear, the hollow cheeks that form when you laugh, and your gestures you use when you are ranting. Especially, your ranting. You're the first thing I think about and the last. And to think that what I am doing, trying to get you to reincorporate what I am feeling in to you, trying to get you to feel what I feel when I first see you, is tainting you. That's almost insulting."

I back away, at a loss for words. Who is this guy and what had he done to my best friend? "I didn't think- I can't- why? Why me? I don't deserve you. Surely there are other people, other girls, other-"

"I want you. Other girls are not you. You are what I want. When you refused me, I just- I didn't know what to do. I'd had felt like something inside me had broke. I couldn't take it. It was like dying a slow and painful death. I didn't think you would mean this much to me, I thought you'd just be another girl, Ashley. But you're not. I want you. I've always wanted you. You and only you."

My mouth was agape, like a hanging curtain. Never in my life would I have thought that one day, someone would talk to me the way Disney princes would in the movies. Never in my life would I have thought guys would actually have the balls to say this type of stuff. But Ben's different. He buys me food, he puts his arm around me, he gives me flowers. He's a classic old fashioned boy. And he wants me. Me? A stupid, broken girl? I told myself to never love again, to never feel again. The last time I did it didn't work out too well. And here I am, being a hypocrite to myself.

His eyes take in my reaction and he stills, waiting. I see the light slowly die as a turn away from him, a single tear falling from my face like a rebellious child. "And it's obvious you don't feel the same way." He sighs.

"No! It's not that. I just- I-"

"You still love Brad."

I look down, and nod.

He groans in frustration and I wince. "I just don't get it! It's been two fucking years Ashley! Two! Get over him! What did he ever say to you? Huh? Did he ever think about you the way I do? Did he ever want to be with you the way I do? Did he ever want to do to you the things that I want to do?" He is shouting now, but the last part, his ending, his grand finale, is barely above a whisper.

"Did he ever love you the way that I do?"

I look up, and our lips collide.