c h o i c e

Her hands grip the steering wheel, knuckles pale and waxen as she drives down an unfamiliar road. The air is thick with aspen trees and summer fog, a sweet scent dangles through the branches.

“Are we there yet? Where are we going, anyway?” The boy in the passenger seat says, breaking the silence. She glances at him through the corner of her eye. His eyes are blindfolded with a silk black scarf – one that he had bought her on their holiday to France – and hides the pale blue of his irises. The wind ruffles his hair with silvers of its icy breaths that gush in through the open window.

“Well…” She begins, eyeing the tall hills and high rising silhouettes in the distance with excitement. “Seeing as you go to the city every day, I thought it would be nice to take you somewhere nice. Somewhere natural.”

He can’t stop the guilt that floods through his veins. He can feel it’s every movement in his chest, his fingers unsteady trail their path. It reaches his lungs, filling his alveoli. He wants to gasp for air, choking on the oceans of culpability rising up his throat, but he swallows it down. He swallows down the guilt like the words that are on the tip of his tongue.

There’s someone else.

She looks at him again, admiring the harsh lines of his cheekbones that cast sepia shadows across his marble skin. She notices his thin, archer fingers are positioned over his chest, but she doesn’t question it. “We’re almost there.”

He can’t stop his mind from wandering away from the girl in the driver’s seat. He thinks of someone else. Her dark hair that feels like silk. Her dark skin that feels like satin. Her dark eyes that look like collages of coffee beans and cocoa. The way her hand fits perfectly in his, how she feels like forever because he knows she won’t let go.

The girl in the driver’s seat notices his silence and assumes he is nervous. She laces her fingers between his, marvelling at how their palms fit almost perfectly together. She squeezes his hand. In the second that he hesitates to squeeze back, she feels as if he is slipping through her fingers.

She drives in silence.

After seventy-three minutes, she arrives at her destination. She stops the car and turns to the boy with the gold hair. She leans forward, her porcelain fingers reaching behind his head to undo the blindfold. The black material falls away and she takes a sharp breath when she sees his eyes.

Blue balls of crystallised candy stare at her. Her train of thought is derailed as she takes him in, stunned by his beauty.

She loves him.

She moves her hands to rest on his cheeks, the hard lines of his jaw settling in the nooks of her palms. They feel like home. She kisses him, savouring the sweet, sweet flavour that tastes like the mountain air. She is confused when he does not respond. She slowly sinks her teeth into his bottom lip, craving a reaction.

Her teeth felt like needles piercing his skin, injecting lethal doses of a love he doesn’t deserve into his body.

The high rising ridges of his palms feel like mountains pressing into the flat planes of her stomach as he pushes her away.

“You look beautiful.” He blurts out. And he’s right – if this was the first time he had seen her, he would’ve thought she was the most beautiful woman on the planet. Her walnut coloured hair that looked Tuscan brown in the sunlight. Her bumblebee coloured dress that clung a little too tightly around her body.

But now there’s someone else.

“Thanks.” The girl with the brown hair murmurs. “I’m going to get the picnic ready.” The girl says as she unbuckles her seatbelt. She swallows down the questions that threaten to spill out of her lips. She opens the car door and slips out his sight. He remains in the car. He sighs, the air gushes out from behind his teeth and colours the air a sad, sad blue.

He watches as she unrolls a picnic blanket on a patch of grass. The sunlight makes the dew sparkle like diamonds and the grass look like blades of emerald. It makes her yellow dress look like the colour of dreams and the sweet, sweet air of the mountain feel like cotton candy in his lungs. He sees her wave to him and he unbuckles his seatbelt.

She watches him get out of the car, a faraway look in his eyes. His hair dances in the wind as he walks closer to the red, patchy blanket she is sitting on. She motions to the basket as he takes a seat beside her, just out of arms reach.

“You hungry?”

“Not really.”

She peeks at him through her lashes, admiring the harsh lines of his face. His sharp jaw, his angular cheekbones. The tilted angle of his eyebrows. The way his eyes turn up when he looks at the postcard blue sky. The fine line of his nose leading to the curve of his cupid’s bow; the bridges of his lips built from late night whispers and lies.

He is beautiful.

She sees it in the way his irises cloud over like the fog settling over the musky planes. The way the wind blows his hair and carries his thoughts someplace far, like the way gusts of air rob aspen trees of their leaves. 

He is no longer hers.

He looks at her and sees it. He sees that she sees right through him. He sees that she is hurting. He sees that she has known all along.

“I’m sorry-”

“Stop.” She says. Love is a choice, not a feeling.

And she understands that he chose someone else.