Breathe Me

Chapter-2

Boy I need you here with me          We cant go on this way

I am falling hard for you                   All I can say

                                 We are going round and round  

Chapter Two

Catherine

Flash Back

ONCE UPON A time, I’d fallen in love with the wrong person. He had caught my eye in French class, of all places, during my freshman year of college. I’d already taken four years of French in high school, but figured it’d be an easy A, so I might as well kick back and enjoy myself. Still, I didn’t want to fail my first semester, so this was an obvious choice to cover my international culture requirement.

Samuel Koval had slipped quietly into the empty chair next to me as I shuffled my binder and pens around. The room was filled with long, white laminate tables, separated into two distinct sections with a worn, carpeted path down the middle to the front board. I remember glancing at him in my peripheral vision, observing how light his blonde hair was, almost as if it had been bleached either by chemicals or by a long, hot summer under the blazing sun. Not a trace of sunburn could be found across his smooth skin, but he wasn’t as pale as some of the guys in the room. Most never saw daylight, having spent the summer before the start of the semester avoiding responsibility and holed up in their rooms or apartments, playing video games and eating munchies.

Not Samuel, though. He’d spend summers at some beach, any would do. His twinkling, indigo eyes studied every crevice in the room and hovered over every face. I was pretty sure he’d memorized everyone’s features in mere seconds, including mine, when I realized he was staring right back at me.

I flicked my eyes away from his handsome face as fast as I could and bore them into the whiteboard at the front just as the teacher, Ms. Andrews, made her way to the podium. Heat rose, rushing across my face and making the sweat seep from my body. Still feeling the weight of his eyes on me, I shuffled my folders and pens, hoping to look much too busy to be affected by the most perfect specimen of a man I’d ever seen.You can imagine how little I heard that first day. It was sheer torture sitting through the endless drone of the teacher’s monotonous voice as she went through the syllabus and spoke French as much as possible, forcing the room to repeat the rolling r’s and use our tongues in ways the English language had no use for. Maybe that was why I loved French so much. It was romantic and sensual in the way it made you use your lips, sway your tongue and made one want to flit the hands into the air.

It was a fine distraction from Samuel, whose name I’d finally gotten to know when Ms. Andrews forced each one of us to introduce ourselves and stand up to the absolute attention of the crowded room, like we were still in middle school or something. Apparently she was the only French teacher at this college, so her classes were jam-packed. The more the merrier. It just meant there were probably twice as many eyes studying the sweat stains on my back than there’d been in my high school classes.

Never had I ever been so relieved to watch the clock tick to the eleven o’clock hour. Class was only an hour long, but it had felt like an eternity to me. Rushing toward the door only found me caught up in the clog of students trying to escape just as fast as I’d wanted to. The funnel kept me in the room longer, long enough to feel a sharp tap on my shoulder.