You Jump, I Jump >> Jack Dawson (Titanic)

THREE; an unfortunate time

Elizabeth's POV

I sat alone in my bedroom, laying in my bed, thinking about the boy I saw today. He kept crossing my mind ever since I saw him. Something about the way he looked back at me was holding me on that deck. The deck. I stood up from my bed, sliding into my slippers, and snuck out of my room. I crept down the hall until I was out of earshot from my parent's room.

I walked up a set of stairs and out to the deck where I'd first seen him. I walked up the edge of the deck, leaning on the railing and looking back to his seat. No one was sat there, just the ghost of his oceanic glittery eyes. The salty air blew a light wind through my hair and across my face. I took in the scent, admiring the galaxy across the sky above me, littered with millions of sparkling stars. Somehow, the speckled sky still brought back his blue eyes.

Blue. A color I could see, a beautiful color in the eyes of a random boy on this monstrous ship. A color I could feel, which kept me down and carved an unshakeable sadness into my heart. The ruthlessness of my father's desire for more money and power was so strong that it completely shadowed his ability to live and care for his only daughter. So driven by his own desirables that he is willing to give away his own flesh and blood to someone she's never even met and could never love.

He himself did not marry out of love, creating a life long chain of treating woman like let's to his own greed, giving him what he truly wants and neglecting his deepest need for love, which is so overpowered by material things. My father's greed has become my life, cursing me to this hell I would find in marrying a snobby rich boy who finds me attractive based on the way my body looks. This rich boy being so driven by his own need for touch, for that contact with a woman that he's willing to marry her for it, not realizing how he's been set up by the ones whose greed shadows their need for that touch they craved when they were his age.

The more I considered the idea that marrying a sex-driven son of a rich man whose only goal is to use me for his own personal pleasure, the more sick I got to my stomach. My eyes filled with tears, which only could run down my face. I walked down the stairs of the deck and walked towards the back of the ship. I kept crying, letting a few audible sobs slip out against my will as I sped up in my stride to the end. I wasn't going to live like this. Not anymore.

I started to run, immediately leaping over the rail of the back end of the RMS Titanic, but holding on to the rail behind me, leaning over the edge and looking at the freezing water below me. Tears poured down my face, my whole life until this point flooding back to me, showing me how much different it could have been if I got out of it. I was so close, but with only a small space to squeeze through without getting pulled back into it. I didn't want this life, and I wanted this to be the ending. Dying on the largest, most beautiful, ship in the world.

"Wait," a voice said from behind me. "Please don't do it."

"Why not?" I replied, not turning to see who it was. "What reason do I have to go on? What do I have to live for?"

"Lots of things," he said.

"Like what? There's only one thing I have to live for, but I don't want to live for it. I'll just regret not letting go at this moment," I answered.

"And what's that?" The young sounding man asked.

"An arranged marriage with some rich American sex addict, James," I told him. I shook my head, turning to face whoever was talking to me. "Why am I telling you this a-......"

It was him. The boy whose eyes had held me in my mind the entire day. I was so shocked to have seen him again, having wondered at least once if he was even real. Now he was here, trying to save me from ending my own life. But why? Why would he save the life of a girl he's never even met?

"You tell me," he said. A look of familiarity crossed his eyes, too, when they met mine. He cocked his head to the side a little, just briefly. It was enough to show that he recognized me, as I did him. "Will you please reconsider? I'm sure the world would be grateful to keep a woman as beautiful as yourself. I mean it with no intention of crossing any boundaries, wanting not to come off in the wrong foot, of course. But please do step back over the rail."

"Why?" I asked him. "How can you stop me from letting go?"

"Well," he said. "If you jump into that water, I'm just gonna have to jump after you."

"The fall alone will kill you," I stated. "How could you possibly try to save me from that?"

"Doesn't matter," the boy said. "I'll still jump after you. You jump, I jump. No matter the price."

"That's crazy," I told him.

"So is the idea of jumping off the back of a ship, yet here we are," he reminded, making a point. It was rather annoying how he was right about this.

"Why are you trying to stop me, anyways? Who am I to you?" I asked him, trying to clear that up. The question had been lingering in the air since his first word to me - wait.

"A fine looking young woman whose life I could save to make both of our lives worthwhile." He stepped up to the railing, a few feet away from me, smoking a cigarette. He tossed the burning roll into the ocean, putting it out in the freezing water we sailed on. "I may not know who you are, where you're from, or what your name is, but that doesn't mean you're nobody to me. If I can at least try to prevent you from doing this, maybe you could fund your own way in the world and not have to marry that rich American sex addict you claim to be betrothed to. And maybe I can feel less useless in my runaround life, too."

Silence settled in, allowing of it to sink in. I looked ahead to the horizon, seeing how the calm sky collided with the raging ocean waves along a distant line. I imagined that's what was happening right now. My raging ocean waves colliding with his calm sky. I didn't even know his name and he had already injected me with his addictive drug of just being in his presence.

He held me in my own mind, his eyes locked onto mine just then, keeping my thoughts at bay and the only thing in my mind that I could sense was him. I was so infatuated with this boy whose name I didn't even know and it would kill me to not know him for any longer than this one moment. "Who are you?" I asked.

"I'm Jack Dawson," he said. "And you?"

"Elizabeth Evangeline Evergreen."

"You'll have to write that one down for me," Jack said, earning a small breath of laughter from me. "So she laughs, too? You're quite the piece of work, miss Elizabeth. I must say."

"How is it that a moment before I met you I was so ready to end it all and now I can't even imagine the concept of death?"

"Luck?"