Evening Tales: Dark Academia Short Stories

The Letter She Never Sent

Ding, Ding, Ding.

The grand clock overhead struck eight, it's din ringing throughout the dim library and off the spines of ancient books. 

For Amelie, the sound was a warning. She tapped her pen impatiently against the clean parchment in her lap, the sound causing a nearby student to grumble and move away from the young girl. 

You're half mad, the clock seemed to say. Three hours you have sat here, with not one word to show for it. 

It was right. For in all things she was losing that night. 

She had come as a sort of solace, to ease her aching mind and the throbbing heartstrings that pulled tears from her eyes. With her knuckle, she rubbed those same eyes hours later, still puffy and rimmed with scarlet. 

What was she doing? It was of no use. Her words meant nothing unless she put them on paper. She was peculiar that way: she could not make a decision solely in her mind for fear it was just a fleeting emotion, there and then gone. So, she wrote letters for everything in her life. For, she believed deeply, everything was more than it seemed, and layers always existed in the unseen.

But it was the letter about Peter Nealy that she found so profoundly difficult to form. 

He was the reason for her red-rimmed eyes and permanent blush. She hated it that way. Loathed how he drew emotions from her that she couldn't quite place or name. 

In fact, her encounter with him just that morning by the town green, him in his usual grey slacks and her in her favorite blue gown, had been what solidified her need to file a letter under Peter's name. 

He had come back from the city after a month's travels, a thin, silver band on his left hand. It was the ring he always wore, so when the sun's gentle rays poked through the clouds to shine on its new place on the opposite hand, she had thought nothing of it. And then her doubts grew from the depths of her mind into a thought, and from a thought to an impulsive question: why was the ring moved?

He had smiled with that classic beyond-possibly-white smile that drove her toes to curl and her hands to shake by her sides. It was a promise ring, he had said quietly. A promise to Anna Lane, the girl he had been courting for half a year. 

Amelie's smile had fallen through her feet and landed somewhere in the mud by the mucky toes of her boots. She had been so preoccupied with ensuring she remembered the way he smelled and the way his honey brown skin glowed when he looked at her during his absence that she had failed to take into account the other woman he had left behind. The one that surely missed him like she did. The one he would return to. 

Because he was not returning to Amelie, at least not in the way he would return to Anna. 

Amelie hadn't known he was already in love when she had first met him. The way he had looked at her when they first met, two students confused about their space in life, she hadn't even room in her mind to consider the possibility of there being another. 

From day one, they had clicked like some long lost answer to a riddle they had spent every life seeking. Amelie did not even need to look into Peter's eyes to know what he was feeling, like the romance books often said. They were beyond that. 

She knew that when they spoke of their homes they both missed so dearly, that he would grow homesick. He would keep up pretenses, plastering a sloppy grin to his face. But she knew that when she turned around, he was hurting. She saw those rusty eyes fall when he thought she wouldn't notice. He had even asked her if she was truly happy there, away from home. She had looked at him, and only then could she truly answer yes.