Child of Youth

Chapter 4#: Cottage on the Hill

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Warning: Chapter contains romantic content that some viewers may not like. Read at your own risk.

"I've found a place."

Liana's head snapped up in a daze at the sound of her boyfriend's voice, she had been practically sleep walking the last mile or so. Heavy-headed, groggy and booger eyed with her mascara mixed into the red veins that the whites of her black eyes showed, she looked a little... scary, to be frank.

She slowly turned her head in the direction Paul stood, about 100 metres ahead of her, pointing at something.

It was a one room little log cottage, painted white, with a pink chimney and two half broken windows in the front. It had a small porch which had no paint left on it, and a plank sized hole in one end. There was a staircase leading up to the porch, since the cottage was built on a small, green hill just behind a valley.

There were many tall, dark poplar trees surrounding them. Here and there, around the cottage and a few hundred yards away from it, grew a lonely wild flower, some of which didn't smell that good or strong. There were a couple of old, dark red climbing roses growing wildly from the ivies surrounding the right pillar of the dusty porch. And yes, Liana had always been a fan of poplar trees.

"What is this...? Some kind of forest?" Liana asked, after taking all this in, a little breathless in fascination, lifting her throat to the sky. "Oh, Paul, isn't it beautiful?"

"I don't know."

Liana burst out laughing, her mug of amusement spatting into overflow. "That's a funny answer, my little Einstein...huh?"

"Don't lovey dovey me," the boy turned his head unexpectedly to answer her in an unusually gruff tone. He looked down at her with a slight air of superiority in his serious eyes. "It doesn't matter to me anymore whether things are ugly or beautiful... not right now. It needs to be functional."

With that, Paul jerked up his sleeves firmly, stood even straighter, and then marched towards the "ugly" little cottage as if he was a young Marine with a box of tools to work on a nuclear bomb with... or something like that.

Hurt and intimidation flashed in her eyes for an instant, but then she shook her tears away along with her ruffled, though thickly flowing black mane, and followed him with short, quick strides and a dramatic, determined swing of her slenderly feminine arms.

"I think it's kind of magical, misty and ... musty," she told him dreamily, while they hesitatingly stepped up the couple of steps leading to the porch, afraid it would fall in and break. Paul just snorted in response.

They stopped to look around and see if anyone was watching them... Someone who might own the house or want to own it or rob it or destroy it. Then Paul reached out his hand, grabbing the dusty, little copper door handle. After light pulling, he began to use all his might...but that didn't help either. The door wouldn't open.

"What the...?"

"Paul! Don't swear. You never do. It's heinous above all evil. The Good Book warns against it, you know." Liana was almost in hysterics.

"And what does the Good Book say about running away from your family at night with your lover, especially when you are only 11 years old? You're basically a little girl!"

Liana paused to think about that for a few moments, closing her eyes in shame. When she opened her teary orbs again, and looked up at Paul with tears on her lashes like dew drops on thin black liquerice strings... or butterflies, even, her lips quivered for a couple of seconds. Then she burst her water balloon of temper, exploding it into a fully spatting fire.