Loving Rain (Watty Awards 2011)

Chapter 23 - The Choice

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Loving Rain - Ch. 23

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               Both boys looked at me automatically, realizing that I knew more than I was telling. I mean, if I was being honest to myself, and someone came to my castle searching for someone, the first person I would think of was the new mysterious stranger.

               The stranger that had almost just kissed the oldest prince.

               I groaned inwardly, not knowing what to do or say.

               Luckily, Cian broke the silence hanging in the air. “Rain, do you realize what’s obvious right now?”

               I wanted to say no and act like I was stupid, but somehow I didn’t feel like that would work. Cian’s eyes bore into me and Gunter’s were busy switching between us, trying to decipher what was going on over in the little chair we both occupied. “Yes, I realize it,” I admitted.

               “Good. So now, the appropriate thing to do would be to tell us what you want to do.”

               What? They had someone at their castle doors, whom they knew was looking for me, and they wanted to get my opinion on the matter?

               I sucked in a huge amount of air, hoping to maybe suffocate myself with it. Because I didn’t know what I wanted. Because Alan had come for me.

               So he didn’t have another girl. Maybe there had never been any other girls. I might’ve been the only one he ever cared about, and now he was scouring the globe searching for me, because he didn’t know that I had abandoned him. Because I promised that I never would…

               But I did, and the realization hit me in the gut, knocking the air out of me. I forced my head between my legs to keep myself from hyperventilating. Alan… those deep blue pools… those loving kisses… the way he held me at night, comforting me… the surprises… the way he proposed…

               I missed him so much. He was the first person who ever tried to look into my mind, who focused on anything other than the skin-deep surface. Alan was the first man who ever cared about me at all. Before I met him, I didn’t even know what it felt like to be loved.

               And he had three years of my life in his hands. It wasn’t a lot, but for now, that was almost my entire time of being a teenager. He was there throughout everything that had happened to me. He gave me Milky Way, and Lee, and so many other things that I couldn’t even imagine anyone else caring about.

               Fate had put us together, and I couldn’t deny it. I felt like every second I went without being by his side, I was slowly disintegrating. My soul was withering away into nothing… That year in the tower, and the days I spent running away from him, I felt like I was disappearing, like there was no reason to be alive without him. This feeling had been there the whole time, but I had hidden it because I didn’t know whether or not he felt this way, too.

               But now, it was obvious. He was looking for me. He thought about me. He hadn’t given up on me.

               Oh, I thought, as the pain in my stomach grew. Alan had less than a year until his eighteenth birthday. And he’d wasted all this time trying to find me. His trust was completely in me, and he didn’t care about anyone else.