Beyond Love

Tale

"What are you looking at, Chip?" Rose asked gently, her gaze following the boy's before he jumped with a start—shy and embarrassed.

"Nothing. I-It's nothing."

He backed away from the window which he had been looking out of, resting his feet which had been on tiptoes for the past couple of minutes. "I, um. I just thought that I'd look at the snow," He continued quietly, glancing outside once more as if in search for something—before turning back to his sister.

Rose laughed softly, reaching out to smooth her little brother's hair. "Okay. But you shouldn't stand by the window. Come, let's sit by the fireplace with Shea. It's not every day that we get to see her, right?"

Chip nodded, taking her hand.

He looked up to see her smile, at it seemed out of place for a moment there—for he could also hear the angry words from his mother upstairs.

There was little understanding in those words. He didn't hear them often.

After all, his father didn't visit very often, either.

.

It had been a three years since that cold Christmas night; the night he met someone he thought special.

Little had changed.

Left-over bread occupied the heated oven, the white whir of ovens filling the air along with the sweet scent of waffles and vanilla; a tiny creak in his steps as he descended the wooden stairs from the second floor to the bakery below; the warmth of his sister's fingers as she held his own in the heart of her hand.

And beside the ovens, tucked away behind bags of flour, leaning against the heated sides of the machines to keep it warm—

Was a bag of two hot cross buns.

The eight-year-old had never really questioned why their bakery sold hot cross buns all-year round.

They didn't seem like a popular pick, and neither did they sit very well with his tummy either. So the little one found it rather strange every time he insisted that those remained in the regular selection of bread—for he had begun to wonder where such an insistence arose.

His heart?

But Chip was far too young to understand what the heart was;

How it worked, or how it seemed to ache sometimes and then beat so fast—

Just like how it would, as he recalled, every winter day as he packed those left-over buns into a paper bag.

Only to eat it by himself the very next day,

Quite alone.

He never saw that boy—or the girl—ever again.

Not since that cold winter night.

There was a time when he began to question if it was merely a figment of his imagination; something like a dream...the things that he saw in his head late at night.