Click.

-Author's Note: This story is based on the idea of five polaroid snapshots. Each 'click' represents a new snapshot.-

Click.

The nightscape exudes polite indifference. The girl’s sleepy heart is lured from her mediocre date, captured instead by the young man in her periphery, almost close enough to touch. If they were birds they’d brush wingtips, bridge two flight paths.

But his light bleeds red, her light flicks to green, and the image is torn. Fate washes them apart; two autumn leaves adrift on the currents of a rushing river.

Click.

Face turned her way, he is talking and walking. She, listening intently with bent head, loses track of her body. For one frozen moment she is cushioned by a tiny whisper of air; then their hands brush in polarized alchemy. She veers away like a magnet repulsed, but he remains steady. She is a wild animal; he is a calm voice, oblivious to her internal chaos.

Liquid words bead and drip from his lips. Her heart snags on the jagged facets of his jewel eyes, and for a moment the whole world is hazel-green. Reality redefines itself. Nothing has changed.

Except her.

Click.

She spills into the room, lungs burning, chest heaving, pants rolled up and mud sketched across her calf. Only ten minutes late. Time warped down by the river. She sits down in the chair he offers.

He is close enough to touch. Her curious gaze steals over his notepad. Ending the page are four words scratched in pencil.

I must have her.

Her body freezes; her eyes leap forward. A discreet minute later, he inches the paper to his lap and folds up the bottom.

The last line disappears.

Click.

Two couches lounge in the corner, she on one, he on the other. Bent over a book, her face glows in the soft setting sun streaming in the west window. Her nervous muscles contract, but it’s his head that lifts. His book rests forgotten, a momentary ghost in his cross-legged lap. Her heartbeat rabbits, senses hyper-tune. He smiles, and her lips move in synch. Finally, slowly, her hunched body unfurls in the amber light like a newborn butterfly.

Later, as she closes her door behind him, emptiness hits. The sun has set; the living room, so recently full of light, is now dim.

With a curt jerk of the curtains to close out the darkness, she flops into the spot he just vacated. Nosing into the pillow, she inhales deeply, letting his smell flood into her brain.

Click.

She swims hard upwards, not knowing what lies beneath. Knowing it’s a losing battle. The hand of her betraying heart hauls her deep into the murky depths of love.

“I’m falling for him,” she whispers to the quiet shoulders of her walls. They shrug with inanimate indifference; the tumult of her heart’s earthquakes won’t shake them down. She pleads for some godly vacuum to suck the emotion out of her chest, but all supplication is ignored.

In surrender, she breaks herself in two: the objective observer, unscathed, and the shattered victim amidst the turbulent wreckage.

Click.