Beautiful Accident

Chapter 1: The Meeting

Sadness. Loneliness. Fear. Anger. Pain.

She had no idea what she's feeling, but she knew it's one of those things. Maybe all of them mixed in one. She could feel a shooting pain in her stomach, like someone is repeatedly pushing a knife in the same place in her abdomen. Her mind was crowded. Not with thoughts, but with feelings. She had no thoughts on her mind. She stopped thinking about things a long time ago.

Maybe it's nothing. Maybe there's only emptiness inside of her. Maybe she's broken.

She orders another tequila. She knows she shouldn't, tomorrow is the first day on her new job. But she licks the salt, empties the knee cap, and puts lemon in her mouth. She doesn't even make a squirmy face people usually do after drinking tequila and feeling the sour taste of lemon in their mouths, so the waiter eyes her, but she ignores him. Instead, she orders another tequila.

She looks around the bar. She sees him looking at her. Glancing, really, with the corner of his eye. He looks tired. His suit is lingering from his body like he's a skeleton, his eyes are a little bloody, and his ashy brown hair is messy. He looks like someone important, but sitting on the stool by the bar, he's only another customer. He's one of them. And he seems to enjoy that fact, that for a split of a second, no one is expecting anything from him. Like he has to work miracles on daily basis.

He looks sad, but he tries to hide it when he catches her looking into his direction. He's broken as much as she is, maybe more. Maybe in more ways than one.

He smirks at her. That smirk reminds her of him. That smirk ruined the mood. It wasn't his fault, she would see his smirk on the every person that would smirk into her direction. She was sure the man across the bar was nothing like him. He didn't look like him, he didn't sit like him, he didn't dress like him. The man had something behind his eyes, he was radiating with goodness, and in a way, that annoyed her a little. How can someone so good be so sad? She found it unfair, so she thought maybe he's faking it. Being sad or being good, doesn't matter. But how can someone fake the goodness behind their eyes? Eyes are a mirror of the human soul, correct? And that kind of sadness, it can't be faked, she knew that better than anyone. So maybe it is what it is, the world being an unfair place, were bad people smile, and where good people cry.

She didn't want to think about him, but the man's smirk trigered her memory of him. She could feel the scars he left in her mind. He never touched her skin, but sometimes she wished he did. She thought she can handle physical pain better than emotional one. She thought she can hide bruises better than the feeling of unworthiness. But she never found out, because he never touched her skin, he only bruised her mind. She could hear him whispering into her ear every second she spent awake, and sometimes, she could hear him in her dreams. She thought moving away will wash him off of her, but she was wrong. He was everyhwere, and it was only today that she became aware he's going to haunt her forever. She would kill herself if she wasn't so afraid he would find her there too and pull her down to spend and eternity with him in hell.

She had another knee cup of tequila. She looked up and saw the man standing up from his stool and walking towards her. He sat on the empty stool next to her. He didn't even ask was the seat taken, because he could see she doesn't care if anyone is sitting next to her or not. She can't see above the walls she built around herself. She doesn't want to.

The man was handsome. He had a body of a man, but face of a boy. She wondered how's he from the inside. A man, or a boy? His eyes looked old, but his smile and his skin were like a baby's. But she didn't care was he handsome or not, she didn't even notice them on the street anymore, when every one of them had something wicked inside of them. A little devil that would take over them. Or maybe it was her fault. Maybe it was she who made them act the way they do around her. Maybe she's the devil who deserves to be punished and talked down to. Maybe she did something in the previous life, or will do something in the next, so she's paying for her deeds in this one.