Unclouded [One-shot]

Do you ever have those moments, where you have so much to say, so much in your mind, yet there’s nothing coming out of your mouth? All those bottled up emotions and pent up feelings, swimming in your chest, drowning you in your own thoughts. Yet you couldn’t grasp the right words to say, or maybe it just wasn’t the right time. Love is all about timing, after all.

“Go get him, tiger.” He gave me words of encouragement with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, the usual spark in them, absent.

I snapped out of my reverie and faced him from my seat.

“That would be tigress,” I say with a smile playing on the corners of my lips.

“Right. I sometimes forget you’re a girl,” he laughs, the sound filling up the small confines of the car. Somehow, in a few years time, I’ve gotten immensely familiar with that particular sound.

“You look beautiful tonight, by the way,” he said quietly, avoiding my eyes. He scratched the back of his head, a nervous gesture. My cheeks tinged pink at what he said, but of course I wouldn’t let him see that.

I opened the passenger door and made a move to get out. “I’ll see you inside,” I said before closing the door behind me.

The party venue was pretty crowded by the time I got inside. There were a lot of people dancing and the bar was quite full. I scanned the crowd, looking for a familiar face. I saw Carli wave at me and I waved back, planning to approach him for some company. I didn’t get very far, as a warm hand encircled my waist; the other one captured my eyes.

I slowly slid off the hand obscuring my sight, and faced my captor. I looked up to see a beaming Denis, looking back at me.

“Hi,” I greeted. I could feel only a soft fluttering in my stomach and nothing more than that.  Maybe now I was sure my faraway crush on him for the past few years had already died down to a fleeting jitter.

“Schön," he smiled at me, and I gave him a puzzled look in exchange, wondering what that word meant.

Instead of giving me a response, he led me away to a table where a few of his teammates were seated. We exchanged casual greetings as I settled down with them.

A lot of talk went around the table, but I admit that I had trouble keeping up with my mind floating everywhere. A considerable amount of time had already passed by, and a few drinks had made it into my system somehow.

Did u tell him?  I receive a text from Matthew. I scanned the room for him, but my eyes didn’t find his familiar ones. 

No was all I replied.

What was left to say when it was all gone anyway?

I stood there in the throng of people, yet just another girl in the crowd. I watched as the game wrapped up before me, my eyes on a particular German player. The whole team was making their way to the crowd as a thank you for coming to the game. I knew this was my ultimate chance to snatch a bit of his attention, so I built up the courage inside me and made my way to him before I lost my small bubble of audacity.

The number of fangirls just like me waiting for their favorite players was low compared to most days, and that’s why I finally decided to seize the opportunity. Most of the other people were by Carli’s side, asking for autographs and pictures while the guy I was waiting for, didn’t have much of a crowd going for him since he was still new in the team and not a lot of people knew about him. But of course he wasn’t able to escape my notice. There was something about the way he looked that made my knees into jell-o and my mind to go haywire.