Serendipitous (Gawsten)

63. Spring

"I want to show you something."

Geoff was holding tightly onto Awsten's hand as they walked together down the side of the river, the younger boy not realising how big it actually was. Geoff's car was out of sight by this point, they had been walking across the pebbly bank of the river for about ten minutes already, the older boy insisting that they were nearly there, wherever 'there' was.

"Where are you taking me?" Awsten stumbled behind the older boy, careful not to trip over any rocks or sticks that may have been in the way of his careful steps.

"To show you something beautiful." Awsten sighed aloud which earned him a snicker from Geoff but continued to trail closely behind the older boy, lost in thought as he cautiously watched his feet for a while, completely forgetting about what they were doing until his thought process was interrupted by the sound of Geoff's voice. "Look up, sweetheart."

Awsten did, lazily rubbing the haze out of his eyes as he stared out in front of him. This was something he'd never seen before yet he had, it was just so naturally constructed that he immediately understood why the older boy wanted to show him this.

He was stood in front of a field; a meadow, per se. The grass was tall and dry, meeting at his hipbone if he were to walk through it, but the entire space was littered in wild flower bushes. Bright, wild roses. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of densely growing rose bushes that appeared to suffocate one another as they snaked in between the other branches.

He stood and stared at the roses for a while. They weren't typically shaped, though, they were more flat, having only one ring of petals that carved out an almost perfect circle on each one. He couldn't stop staring at them. He could also feel Geoff's gaze travelling down his body, the older boy also not being able to look away from him. Perhaps they were both suspended in awe as they were mesmerised by things that they each found beautiful.

Awsten had the urge to walk through the field, lay down in the flowers. He couldn't see any butterflies or bees but he could see them in the film in his mind, a bright spring day. A bright spring day where the birds were chattering around him as the mimicked the violent thrash of the perfectly contrasted river that spilled gently across its rocky tracks. He imagined the smell of the pollen that supposedly attracted lovers as he lay in the field and stared up at the singled-out clouds that had been abandoned, yet somehow that made them more beautiful. Perhaps Awsten was just an adrift cloud.

He imagined laying in the field, head on Geoff's shoulder as the older boy lay with him. That was the one part wasn't impossible to be doing right now, except it was, because the uninviting thorns that held possession to the brightly thriving flower stalks were enough to drive away anything, including vanilla romantic fantasies.

So Awsten compromised with the unspoken plants as he softly walked on the outskirts of the unspecified meadow, careful not to inconvenience any thorny stalks that may be reaching out, grasping for some sort of attention.

And Geoff cautiously trailed behind Awsten as he admired how careful the younger boy was as he gazed over each individual rose as if he knew that if he looked hard enough, he could find a trait that not a single of the other hundreds of roses in the field had. Geoff grazed his hand down the stalk of one of the brighter flowers, careful not to cut his fingertips, breaking the flower off with its long stalk, individually detaching any of the thorns as to not put Awsten in any danger.

"For you," Geoff smiled, handing the flower to Awsten, who lit up brighter than the flower. Brighter than the spring morning that the younger boy had just imagined. He looked as if Geoff was the first person to appreciate him in his life. Maybe he was.

So Geoff picked another, slowly building up a rough bouquet of bright yellow roses, which Awsten couldn't see the colour of, each rose being an eight or nine out of ten. Awsten wondered why Geoff wasn't picking the prettiest ones.

"Sometimes, the most beautiful ones should stay."

And Geoff picked another one, laying it in the boy's hands with the others. He was gentle even though he'd seen these bushes before, they would become winter-kill, blackened and dead as a victim to the attractive snowflakes. "So that's why you picked me?" Awsten pouted as he carefully brushed his fingers along a rose that was still attached to its bush. This one was a ten, it was obvious.

"You've got it all wrong," Geoff just shook his head, walking over to Awsten's side and carefully snapping the flower that the boy had been touching off near the top of its stalk, carefully taking off any thorns that managed to stay on the small portion of stem that was still attached to its head. He brushed away some of Awsten's blonde hair from the boy's face, carefully tucking the yellow rose behind Awsten's ear. "You see, sometimes I just can't help myself."