Stars in our Hearts

Four

C

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The ocean wiped away my tears as I let happiness slip away.

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My fingers bit into the sides of my chair as she walked out of the room.

My feet itched to run after her, to talk to her, comfort her, to make sure she's okay even though I know she's not.

How could she be? She basically made a mental list of reasons why she shouldn't be in Sarnai.

"I should've known this was gonna happen," Hemera scratches the space between her brows, pure anguish written all over her face.

"What?" I ask.

"Alida, she..." She looks around the room, looking for the right words to say. "She doesn't really trust herself."

"I'm assuming that's just how she is, no?" I sit up, my arms folded over my chest.

Hemera's eyes follow the movement, taking a deep breath and staring back at me. She shakes her head, "Alida used to be extremely confident. Every time she'd walk into a room, she'd steal the show, the attention would be on her." She takes a deep breath, like saying the next couple of words dried her out. "Stuff happened in her life. Shit that ruined her."

Tell me about it. "Must've sucked for her. Is she better now?"

Because you can never be okay after shit happens in your life. You can only hope to get better.

She shrugs, "She says she's fine and she's proven to me that she is but, and this probably makes me a bad friend, but I don't know if she is or isn't. She has one hell of a mask on."

So she's not fine. She's less than fine but she's pushing through. If only I had met her way before, before anything happened in her life— in my life.

If I met her earlier, she might've liked me. Not romantically but platonically. I don't know why she doesn't like me, what I did? I have no clue but all I can hope for is some time. Maybe, just maybe she'll learn to like me—or put aside her negative feelings and work with me.

But for right now all of us need to find a way to help Alida, together, not alone. She needs a lot of encouragement since she's very bipolar and indecisive. I just... I don't know where to start or how to even do this or—

"Maybe we should..." Mara starts, jotting something down in her iPad. "Try a different approach."

Or maybe Mara has an idea.

"What kind of approach?" I ask. We all want the same thing for Alida, or at least I hope we do. She's... we can't have her backing out.

"I read this in a book," Mara started.

Oh no.

"Yeah, anyone else have any other ideas?" I interrupt her, we don't need her and her fictional books getting in the way of this. She glares at me, her gaze could scorch my heart, and burn it to ashes if I hadn't looked away.

"Just listen," she closes the iPad. "How about we all take her on a date?"

I think my heart just stopped...

Yep, it stopped.

"A date? Like a friendly date?" Hemera asks. Her eyes are glinting with amusement like she knows where this is going.

I, on the other hand, have no fucking clue.

"Yes, yeah. We can all take her somewhere so she can get to know us a little better. Obviously she already knows you, Hemera. But maybe if she spends some alone time with me and Crius, it can help her come up with a theme. I think it may work on building her confidence too, if she knows who she's working with, she'll feel more at ease."