It was less awkward after that. We talked together, laughed together, all the while holding hands. Every time he looked at me, it was like seeing the sun rise up in a parallel universe. I discovered a lot about his eyes.
It always seemed to me that eyes were the highlights of a person, where you could see into their soul, not in the way that you can hear it and never understand when they talk through their mouths, but the way you can just look into the depths of their irises and see all their thoughts and feelings and everything about them. If they've just had the best experience in their lives or not. If they're lying. If they really believe it. Julian's eyes were like portals of light that seemed to glow in the dark. They looked like a grenade just detonated in them and showered them in stars, and not like the ones I used to see outside of my room -- a black sky with a few dots of white -- but a curtain of the darkest, purest black, and with infinite specks of dazzling white. I liked how the sky would always reflect in them, and I could imagine taking a picture of them and taping it to my photography wall, a wall with so many pictures on it that it wasn't so much a collage as part of the wall. I could almost imagine what I would write on the picture I would take with my Polaroid. A sky full of stars, I think. Maybe.
He catches me staring for what seems like the fifteenth time and asks me, "Do you like me?"
I drop my gaze. And I don't answer, my cheeks blazing.
And so he leaves, forcing his way back through the rain.
YOU ARE READING
Islands Away
RomanceShe wakes up. Alone. In a desperate and destroyed world. As Scarlette and Julian become friends, they scavenge what they can to survive, all the while discovering that their world might not be the haunted, torn down place that they thought it was.
