Wind Blown ✔️

2. Marine is an angel

Marine was drumming her fingers along to one of her old jazz songs. I'd never understood why she enjoyed jazz so much but I knew if I complained she'd argue with me the entire way home so I kept my mouth shut. Watching her from the corner of my eye instead.

She bobbed her head along with the music and it sparked a memory inside of me, a picture washed over my eyes like a veil placed in front of me.

I was sitting in the courtyard, carefully picking through the sandwich I'd bought for lunch. When I heard a voice and noticed a slender looking girl standing in from of me, "Do you mind if I sit with you?"

I was taken aback, my mouth opening and closing like a fish. I quickly noticed how beautiful she was, her long black hair cascaded down her shoulders and back and her chocolate brown almond shaped eyes pierced into mine.

She watched me uncomfortably and I realised I still hadn't answered her, "Yeah, sure, of course," I murmured quickly.

She beamed at me and plopped down onto the concrete, sitting cross-legged and balancing her tray on her lap.

"What are you doing?" She asked, nodding toward my sandwich dissection.

"Removing the tomato and cucumber," I replied, still shaken up by the events, but there was something about her that made me feel usually calm.

"But it's a tomato, cucumber and lettuce sandwich," She retorted, raising her perfectly shaped eyebrows.

I nodded, confusion written on my plain features.

"All you'll have left is the lettuce," She explained, raising a grape to her mouth.

I nodded again, "I only want the lettuce and the bread."

"Why not make a lettuce sandwich, rather than buy a tomato, cucumber and lettuce sandwich just to remove the cucumber and tomato," she replied, popping the grape into her mouth.

"Because it's easier this way," I replied, simply resuming the dissection of my sandwich. I placed the unwanted ingredients onto the wrapper and put the bread and lettuce back together again, staring at my sandwich hungrily.

I ate it in seconds, noticing the way the girl watched me devour it as if I hadn't eaten in weeks.

"It just occurred to me that I haven't introduced myself," she exclaimed suddenly as if her forgetting to introduce herself were an atrocity, "I'm Marine," she added extending her hand. I couldn't help but notice that she'd painted her fingernails pink but nearly all of them had chipped into oblivion.

"Eric," I replied, taking her delicate hand in my own large paw.

We sat mostly in silence for the rest of that lunch, but I'd never sat with someone so comfortably before. I'd never sat with someone at all, actually.

At first I thought someone was playing a joke on me, it didn't seem plausible that someone like Marine would willingly decide to sit with someone like me.

I was the very definition of plain; I had plain brown hair that I combed over my face so that my fringe hid most of my abnormally large forehead, my blue eyes weren't piercing or the colour of the ocean but instead a dull murky blue. My nose was the only exciting thing about me, and even then that was only because it was wider than a football stadium.

I soon found out that not only was Marine perhaps one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever seen but also one of the smartest, she sat with me every lunch and in every class we had together. It was almost as if we were friends, that would make her my first friend and it wouldn't be unlikely if she were also my last.

I was snapped from my thoughts by Marine's suddenly ridiculously loud and off-key singing along to one of her old jazz songs. I shook my head and pressed on the power-off button on the car's stereo, effectively cutting the music off.

Marine glared at me, jokingly, a smile lighting up her perfectly sculpted features seconds later. I grinned in return, until she pressed the power-on button again. I narrowed my eyes until they were slits as her jazz music began again.

"How can you listen to this?" I exclaimed, reaching forward to turn it off but she slapped my hand away, glaring at me.

"How can you listen to anything else?" She replied, turning the music up simultaneously. I shook my head turning to look out the window, the houses on this block were all built exactly the same. As if someone had photocopied them all, the only difference between them were the gardens.

We sped past one of the houses, it was two stories and painted grey like all the others on the block but it's garden was overgrown with blossoming flowers. Explosions of colored buds littered the bright green grass, it seemed chaotic beside their neighbour's perfectly manicured yard. They had two perfectly kept hedges that stretched along the sides of the front yard, and two perfectly symmetrical trees that had bright yellow leaves.

"Maggie used to live here," Marine revealed offhandedly, twisting the steering wheel as we turned off the road with the matching houses.

"Maggie?" I asked turning my gaze back to Marine whose body was now tensed, her knuckles white on the wheel.

She nodded, "I used to pick her up from here all the time."

I sucked in a shaky breath, memories washing over me. "I miss her," Marine murmured, her voice breaking.

I hesitantly reached out to her, placing my oversized hand on her shoulder and ignoring the sparks that ran up my arm as the skin of my palm connected with her bare shoulder.

She smiled sadly, "She'd have liked you, a lot."