Chapter 3

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Hallow's Eve was swiftly approaching. The leaves went from changing to changed... and the last bit of warm summer air was coaxed to follow. The turbulence of winter would soon blanket the Earth in a covering of white within the coming months, and I loathed October for it's indifference to the cold. It represented the change that brought about frigid fingers and constricted lungs. It waited for me, and when it came it would drag out the period in which the air was neither welcoming nor uncompanionable. Though as much as I express my detest towards this month, I also felt it calming; as if it were a rest within a populous page of music. I could not say I hated it, for at least the propagated cold allowed me to feel something other than enervated.

It was raining again. Of course it was.

I did not deny my infatuation with storms, and their inklings of mischief; their life-bringing sources. Their uproarious and occasionally abysmal nature sparked the clandestine sentiments I held for a certain person living within this household. I knew it to be wrong, as I have expressed many a time before... but I could't help but wallow in such an enormity. This feeling was prodigious; so massive that I felt I would crumble under it's sublime burden, and I wasn't sure I would mind if I did.

I didn't want to be in love.  So deeply in love that I faltered in the tumultuous enigma that was Sebastian Michaelis... that was the butler I gave name and purpose to under the beacon of the moon and stars.  But I was.  I was madly and deeply under a spell as terrible and delicate as the rain and thunder that began to crash bitterly down around me. I stood under the protective dryness of my mansion, by the window, as I always did when it rained.

Elizabeth was scheduled to visit that day.

During a walk in which my fiancé and I were incased in rose petals falling from the manor's garden, her aura seemed to change from cheery to something I'd never before experienced from her.

"Ciel, this is lovely."

Her cheeks were tinted a rosy pink.

"I'm glad it is to your satisfaction, my Lady."

I nodded at her, and my smile was as cryptic - I'm sure - as they come.

She stopped walking, then... staring at me with a sort of trepidation upon her dainty and girlish features. Her gaze hovered over the whole of me, and it was as if she was scrutinizing the very depths of my soul in which was shattered. She reached for my hand from where no soul could coax a caress as she stepped farther towards me. Her touch was a sudden burst of warm autumn air amongst the chilling frost of an impending winter. She laced her fingers within my gloved grasp; a gesture she had never once attempted before. I waited with an inkling of wonderment and anticipation. She placed her other hand so softly upon the cold flesh of my cheek that I wondered if she had even met with it.

And then, without a hint of her usual timidity, she kissed me.

Her lips were much more slight than Sebastian's... her energy far less resolute. The kiss didn't last long, and it contained none of the extreme passion or greed Sebastian's kisses met and left me with. I suppose it was nice. Her lips were so soft and her expression was so calm... I almost felt guilty upon seeing it, for I had not closed my eyes as she had. When she pulled away, the air between us was frozen. She took a step back, her flushed cheeks now stained a shade of deep crimson. I held her hand tightly in mine, for I did not want her to let it go. I wanted to comfort her.

Because I hadn't felt a thing.

She must've seen the repentance glimmering within my visible eye, for an expression of contrition unfolded upon her lovely face. She quickly looked to the ground, ashamed.

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