This is love to me

Chapter two: In your eyes

She had winked.

But no, she had not winked at their audience. Nor Carly, nor even to spencer when he wandered through between scenes in footage he was editing out. Sam had winked past the camera, directly towards Freddie. He was completely and utterly shaken by this, how had he not noticed? Was he just that ignorant? Did Sam still love him? Did she want him back? Did there remain a chance that Freddie could stoke the sparks of their old flame and have it roaring to life again? Recapture that moment, that feeling?

"Nah," Freddie said to himself "Probably messing with me, make me have to edit this out. Sam and her obnoxious sense of humor."

Besides, it wasn't his fault that he hadn't noticed. Sam had done it in the same moment as when their antagonistic doorman was screaming at a husband and wife over them having a PDA. Nobody would be paying attention to a smirk and a sly wink in the background. And she had left it in deliberately because she knew how intricate Freddie was when he edited. He could film well, but his editing was his strongest point because he valued precision above all else.

She probably had done this because she thought it would be funny to make him question where their relationship stood. He could genuinely say for the briefest of moments that it had worked. She had made him believe that it was possible for the two of them to work it out and come together again.

Freddie was certain he was right. Sam no longer cared for him,  she was done with him. Had moved on. All for the better, it would seem. They could get on with their lives, after all, they were nearly finished high school. Soon they would all have "aged out" of the appeal that their web show had on the internet. It was ideal for them to move on and to forget about each other.

But he didn't want to. As much as he tried to convince himself otherwise, Freddie still harbored feelings for Sam that he couldn't explain. When they were together, she filled a hole in his heart which he didn't even know of in the first place. Had he known that the void in question was there and could be filled so wholly by actual love, he wouldn't have even questioned his feelings for Sam. His brief fling with Carly only made him feel emptier, because even though Carly had tried to make her love obvious, it still felt more like an infatuation more than real, unconditional love.

He closed his laptop about ten minutes later after some simple editing to disguise Sam's wink at him. He knew that Sam had what she wanted now. She'd made him waste his time fixing her gesture and simultaneously, slyly, planted an inkling of a long dormant desire in his mind. They'd been over for a year or so now. But just as time can heal many deep wounds with a year, the right person could painfully reopen them all, in a trice. In just the blinking, or the winking, of an eye.

Freddie Drifted off to sleep, his mind filling with fantasies and memories. Thoughts which accumulated in a swirling sea of sexual imagery. He felt Sam's hands against his more erogenous zones, he saw Sam's body against his, he felt her sweat making it hard for hands to get a grip. He felt them writhing against each other, he could practically taste the skin of her neck and chest and almost smell her pheromones pulling reeling him in. He short for breath and caught up in the heat of the moment, all over again, just like that one magical night.

He woke up at 03:48 A:M soaked in sweat, and with some sticky sensation in his boxer-briefs...

"Fuck," he murmured groggily.

He considered getting up and changing them, but he couldn't, he was in a dream like state, and so groggy he could barely move. Yet he lied there awake, anyway, contemplating this dream he had just finished. So many things swirled in his head, Sam's gesture, his desires, his conscious choice to repress these desires. What would he do? He would fall asleep. That love for Sam was a time long since passed, after all. His phone buzzed with a text notification, but he ignored it.

Freddie allowed his mind to drift back into a better time, a time when he felt loved and valued, and not so empty and conflicted. But that better time with Sam would always exist, even if only inside his head, filling his dreams and memories and corrupting his subconscious with these feelings of sweet addiction to her, tempting an increasingly welcome relapse. Beckoning him, luring him in. Freddie wanted more, but these dreams would be enough for him, if only for now. After all, why should he be privileged to damn her to his love for the sin of her beauty? And why taint her soul for the crime of his love?