SHE jerks at a pat on her shoulder. Relaxes when she finds who it is.
"So this is where you've been cooping up all this time," Callum remarks, drinking in the gloomy atmosphere of the bookshop.
"Oh," she says, "it's you." She turns in her seat and continues her gazing through the window. The snow is still falling. Her heart is thudding fast — a hundred hoofbeats fast — as she notes how close he was.
"I brought you coffee," he says, puts down two paper cups of coffee on the low table between them, and sits down on the armchair across the nook. The whiff spiralling from the cup is peppermint chocolate latte. Her favourite. But Mahra ignores the proof that he knows her almost as well as her mother did.
While she is reading – or at least trying to process the words with a million fluttering thoughts in her head – he doesn't bother her, doesn't pry for the answers to her suddenly cold, sharp disposition. Ice will melt if you hold it long enough and close enough, he once said. And as the silence stretches into something you want to shatter, Mahra bitterly admits, he's right.
It's a long time till she speaks, or rather, sighs, "What are you doing here?"
"I'm worried for you," he says, sincerely. The sheer candour in which he spoke triggers her to spin around in surprise. Her eyes meet his. His gentle gaze has been on her this entire time, she realizes.
"I don't want your pity," she hisses at him, hurt still clouding her heart. Though not because of him. "I just want to be left alone," she says.
Picking up her book, she feigns to read, leafing through the pages, pretending to resume to her own devices.
"Mahra," he calls her softly. A warm caress. His hand is, too. His fingers stroke the side of her hand, before he untangles her deathly grip on the book. Places her hands beside her.
"Look, Callum, can't you see that I'm busy?" she snaps. Yanks back her hands from him. "I'm reading. Leave me alone," she presses her anger, her frustration in every word.
"All right," he sighs. Then he picks up his cup of coffee, his book, and walks away.
YOU ARE READING
THE DREAMER'S LAMENT
Short StoryIn the hearts of dreamers, lament will always linger. Sadness can bloom into the brightest, lambent shades, like the rain giving way to the phantom of a rainbow, like the promise of hope. But sorrow may also wind down a darker, colder path. Our hear...
