Tomorrow, With You

1.2 | The Night We Met ❂

——Friday, August 20th

"THERE YOU ARE," Adrian Dawn grunts as he heaves a weighted sigh. He rests his arms on his knee, inhaling large chunks of oxygen.

"What? Did my dad give you a load of crap for losing me?"

"Hell, yeah"—Adrian swings both of his hands up into the air—"I practically belong to that old man."

Marielle cannot disagree. After all, he's worked in her dad's bakery since forever. Not to mention the little crush Marielle had on him all throughout her childhood.

He struts towards the brown-eyed girl with only a white tank top covering his chest and too low jeans barely strapped around his waist. On his right hand, a gray sweater is gripped between his fingers.

"For fuck's sake pull up your pants Adrian," Marielle complains and rolls her eyes, "and tell Dad I don't need you to act like my overprotective brother anymore."

"A brother?" He smirks. "I'd rather die than hear you call me brother again." The blonde-haired boy tosses his sweater onto Marielle's vacant face, smacking her head with an interweaved scent of fresh loads of laundry and sweat. It's true that he annoys the hell out of her, but it's also true that whenever he's around, her mood comes to ease. To her, he's like candlelight—so calming, yet chaotic.

"Wear it."

He flops his body next to her, resting gently his head against the wooden body of the weeping willow. And as the summer breeze welcomes the stillness of the August ambiance, it feels as if she can momentarily forget about everything—everything that's been pressing down her heart.

"You know, before you came, someone was here," Marielle blurts.

"Really? girl or a guy?" he jokes.

"Why does it matter? besides he's way out of my league," Marielle bubbles, "too attractive for a girl like me."

The blonde-haired boy smirks and as the moonlight shines onto his sparkling blue irises, Adrian maintains his gaze on the river. Once or twice, his lips part as if he is about to say something, but close again contemplatively. Eventually, he turns around and meets her eyes.

"What's wrong with a girl like you?"—Adrian ruffles her hair—"you're not that bad."

"Not that bad?" she giggles, "you're so bad at making people feel better, Ad."

"What?"—Adrian squeezes her cheeks, "at least you're better than a piece of shit."

"Yeah I guess you're right"—Marielle drags her face in his direction—"at least I'm better than you."

Marielle releases a laugh as the two friends remain perched beneath the beaming stars. She buries her head under Adrian's gray sweater, deeper and deeper until the world momentarily mutes.

She's never really admitted it, in fact, she'd rather the ocean waves swallow her whole or the midnight sky falls flat onto her face than for her to admit it. She'd rather anything but admit that Adrian Dawn might've been her comfort person. Someone like a sunflower, or a dandelion, perhaps lilies and other days he could be muted red peonies. Marielle Bellerose isn't quite sure, but what she knows is the fact that sometimes, whenever she'd imagine the day Adrian would say his last goodbyes, walking away without ever looking back, she'd get... well, sad. Unfathomably.

He might've been the reason she's still here; breathing in the air, gazing upon the hue, and feeling alive.

"Adrian, do you think my mum hated me?" The brown-eyed girl suddenly recalled her fragile voice three nights ago.

"And why do you think that?" he answered.

"I don't know," Marielle whispered, "it's just that... how could she ever do that if she didn't?"

That night, and every night she'd begin her inevitable contemplation, all that he did was hug her—hug her tight as if she's a blue China, a melancholic chandelier, a broken glass. He never answered her, not because he's scared of saying the wrong thing, no, but because she needed the silence. He knows that.

And as she shut her eyes against Adrian's shoulders, day and night catapult before her. She began to envisage the life of her mother as her age—a young woman.

Was she as forgetful as me?

Was she as stubborn as me?

It's her dad's fault for making her think that her mum was just like her—looked just like her. That she had identical auburn curls with tinted highlights of gold, burgundy cheeks like ripened pomegranate, and a dashing smile as sweet as honeysuckle. She was probably clumsy too, and would forget where she'd put her reading glasses last, or where she had put down the book she was reading a minute ago.

She was human, just like any other, and to think about the last moments before her death, before the unforgivable decision of taking her own life, to leave her one and only child behind, to finally shatter the glass of a hopeful future, to do anything but be a good mother, Marielle Bellerose can't help but come to the impossible conclusion that her mother does hate her. What other reason could there be, right?

... Right?

"Mar, let's go home?" Adrian finally says, breaking the spell Marielle had built around herself.

"Yeah, let's go home."

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