Solace

three

STANDING LESS THAN TEN FEET IN FRONT OF ME, tall and daunting, was the very boy I had danced with four years ago, Colton Anderson himself.

Matt and Katie rushed towards me with paper napkins, dabbing at the floor tainted by my spilt coffee.

"Please excuse her words and her clumsiness, Mr. Anderson," Matt sided up to Colton, his eyes pleading. "I'm sure she didn't mean to."

But Matt's attempt to convince him was to no avail, for he continued to stare directly at me, his hazel irises dark and his body calm yet somehow uptight, in that elusive way only he could pull off. He looked mature now, and if before I found him dashing, with his jet black hair and chiseled features, then now they were more prominent than ever, drawing attention to those golden, hazel eyes that one could melt underneath the gaze of.

"We're sorry," the others chimed in nervously, as if somehow that could make things better, though I did appreciate the effort. They didn't know that he was standing so frigid and cold not because he was enraged by what I had said, or how I had clumsily dropped my coffee like a complete klutz, but because it was me that stood in front of him.

I fell a few steps back, finally no longer frozen in shock, my back hitting Matt's desk, which I was sure would turn into a bruise, though I paid no mind to it.

I darted my eyes towards the opened doors that led into the balcony, debating with myself whether I should make a run for it.

Run now! My mind screamed. My body turned around, my feet twisting towards the direction of the balcony, the heels of my feet beginning to move beyond my control.

"Thalia," the soft, profoundly resonant voice spoke behind me, just as gentle yet assertive as I remembered it before.

I stopped immediately, my traitorous body turning around.

He took a few steps forward, and it felt like hours, his each step so agonizingly slow. I held in my breath, no clue as to what to do next. But before I could even think straight, he bent down and kneeled in front of me, pulling out a handkerchief. With a gentle touch, he wiped off the coffee that had left a nasty pinkish burn on my feet.

My heart palpitated, lulled into a dreamy state, all while the rest of the world seemed to have stood at a stand-still.

━━━━━━━━

We were stood outside the balcony, with fleeting cars that passed underneath us. But still, the only sound I could hear was his deep, sonorous breathing, and the only thing I could see was his hardened gaze at the view below us, his arms propped up against the balcony railing.

Silence always seemed to consume us whenever we were together. Too many words we wanted to say perhaps, that the best option was saying nothing at all.

"I thought I'd never see you again," he was the one to break the silence this time. I wanted to speak, to explain myself, why I had left that day, but the words were stuck in my throat, and they refused to escape.

I had imagined countless times what I'd do if I somehow crossed him again. Seventeen year old me would've desperately wanted that fairytale ending she always dreamt of, I presumed, despite knowing better. Twenty-one year old me was at a mean's end, though.

"You remember me," I blurted out instead. I had wore a mask that day, and although it only covered the rims of my eyes and he could still have seen my eyes and the rest of my face clearly, there was a part of me that assumed he'd forget me. I had wondered, often, whether the night had only been romanticized in my mind because one's first ball would always be magical. I had wondered whether the dance we shared, to him, was just one of many dances he had once shared with countless of other socialite girls, girls that in fact, belonged in his world.