Learning To Fall

Chapter Five

Maya.

Maya Fucking Hart.

His brother's daughter's best friend.

The girl who took a new level of shortness, something that often she was insecure about, and made it seem cute. The girl with the long blonde hair who often wore it in natural ringlets but was beautiful enough to pull off any hair style, looking excruciatingly good when she decided to take the time to straighten it. He never really noticed her freckles before, the ones dotting along her nose - well, he'd noticed them before, but he'd never paid mind, never thought he'd looked for them every time he hung out with Amanda, a girl who was thought that he technically went out with, nor did he think he'd every look for the intensity of Maya's blue eyes in Amanda's green eyed stare.

Maya Hart, the girl who was three years younger than him.

It'd been a month and he thought he'd get over it, Maya's natural taste of honey and watermelon, mixed with some depth of hidden desperation that he didn't even realize he longed for. Something that kept him up half of the night after outside that Bistro in the despite of frustration and guilt and pure nirvana; something he'd never experienced before until he was kissing his niece's best friend. Out of everyone, her. The girl who'd never really spoke to him but the same girl who'd accidentally spilled her lemonade on him when she was ten. Who - the day before Riley's ninth birthday when Maya was already nine and he was twelve - instead of sleeping like everyone else, she used Riley's pastels to draw the Eiffel tower, to give her best friend a little taste of a country she knew she loved. She couldn't sleep, she'd said. Not without making Riley something at least. Around that time, Katy was struggling to find a job and at the age of only nine, Maya couldn't exactly pull money out of her pocket as easily as she might have been now. He hadn't noticed much about that, then. He hadn't really noticed how spectacular she really was.

But now, he noticed her intense love for art, the way she drew for fun on game nights when her and Riley had nothing better to do or she was waiting for her turn. The way he eyes would light up when she saw something intriguing, not just on paper, but something that beautifully presented around her. She never spoke much on it because she was used to smart-aleck retorts or being the normal stubborn teenage girl that everyone seemed to know, but he was beginning to notice the little things that she didn't even notice, the little slips.

He noticed so many things about Maya Hart that he didn't notice before, the way her eyes saddened every time she saw him, trying to get him to re-imagine the kiss they shared and it was ironic because - his eyes never went without staring at her lips and doing exactly that again and again, as that memory was a record playing that same favorite song; but in this case it was his favorite person, becoming his favorite person without realizing and he was beginning to realize how he was actually beginning to fall for her - Riley's best friend, he began to realize that perhaps, that when he first walked through that door last Christmas and she pulled him into her arms smelling of some kind of tropical ocean, something foreign yet beautiful, he might have been pushing away his feelings all along.

Because he knew his heart raced, he knew after he called her gorgeous, he wished to approach her again. But three years older is what snapped him back into the cruel reality. Three years older was going to stop him from whatever move he made, and though it was obvious that she had a crush on him, he knew she'd get over it. But outside that Bistro, when she kissed him, was when the feelings began to crush over all at once, like an angry wave, gathering itself from different waves. All at once these feelings came and hit him hard; and it was between hurting like hell, because he kept hurting her, especially the night outside the window - and also, it was something he'd never experienced. Something new. He didn't know which one he experienced more, but either way, the feelings always seemed to pull him towards Maya.