All My Sins

An optic

*been having a little bit of a hard time lately, this chapter has just been sitting waiting to be revised and published for awhile. i'm happy i finally got around to working on it. enjoy :;;)*

Marshall had gone outside to the little cobblestone terrace that overlooked the lake. Artificial lights cast their shine on the black water. The air was very cold, but he did not mind that.

With his mind only half-present as he walked back into the banquet hall, he suddenly felt a knot in his stomach on seeing what he could not believe to be Maureen.

A dark green fabric was wound about her hips, clinging to her form. It excited him so that it took him a few moments before he acknowledged the foreign hand pressed to the small of her back. It was the same hand that had stirred such a commotion in his classroom, the same hand that had drawn blood from his lip... He was perplexed. A major factor in Marshall's attraction to her was the fact that she kept to herself. How was it, why was it, that a girl like her would be at something like this? And with HIM? The dress seemed too short to him then. Too short and too revealing for all of these high school boys. He paced back into the dance hall and found her sitting at a fairly deserted table while her date, the red-headed football player enthralled himself into another group of people. And this was the picture of her that was familiar to him. Yet she still looked different. Perhaps it was the make-up. Her eyebrows were filled in and held a more defined shape. Her lashes were longer and dark. And there was this mesmerizing fade of color around her eyes. Purple, blue, and red lights illuminated across her face and exposed shoulders. She looked beautiful. So beautiful that it brought a flood of emotions from within him that seemed unnecessary considering just the short period of time that he had known her. There was nothing that could stop him from approaching her. She was so lost in her own thoughts, though, she did not even realize that he was there.

But when she at last recognized his figure nearing from the corner of her eye, she wished that some atmospheric force would swallow her into dark and empty space.

He wished to sit down beside her in one of those empty chairs, but knew that amongst such a large group of people that it would appear strange. So he resolved to leaning against the wall just a few feet away from her.

"Hey..." He called out to her over the blaring music, thrumming through the very floor.

"What?" She spoke so quietly, that if he could not read her lips then he would not have been able to tell what it was that she was saying.

"Come outside with me." He told her.

"I don't feel like talking right now." She told him.

"Meet me out there." He insisted anyways.

Maureen sighed. If she had not been so sad and so desperate to just be free of this social toxicity, she would not have gone. But in that room, Marshall was seemingly the closest place of comfort for her.

A few paces behind him, she followed. He lead her to a set of large doors, and once she stepped outside, allowing the heavy exit doors to swallow up the constant buzz of music, she felt the blood rush back to her head. She breathed in the air unmanifested by sweat and perfume of a thousand brands, and it brought her peace. She could breathe again.

Her eyes leaned to the closing blue sky against the galactic water, dark yet still holding reflections of blue and stints of light from the string bulbs wrapped around the dock's roof.

While Marshall felt good being the only man able to take in her appearance. It did not matter that her face was painted over or that she was rid of her normal clothes, or even that her heels made her just slightly taller. Her walk alone held the same timidness of her character that he had come to know.