Put Your Freezing Hand in Mine

Rachelle Dubois is too sweet to be with me, that's something that I have known from the very start of whatever we have going on - she's been gentle, she's been kind, she's pushed for me to set boundaries where no one else has ever told me that a boundary should be before, which I never expected out of anyone, let alone her.  When I'd asked if she wanted to go on a date with me the first time, I expected her to say no, I expected her to tell me to fuck off and find someone else to bother and ruin because that's what I'm used to.  I'm not used to people deciding that they can take a chance on me, but that's exactly what Rachelle did.  She swooped in with her white-bright smile and her deep brown eyes and her ornamented braids and skin that seemed to practically glow in the sun, golden and brown and warm... Everything about her is warm.

Everything about me has always been cold, and that's something I know about myself that I have more or less come to terms with over the years, it's something that I've learned as a way to keep myself safe.  I'm calculated, if I'm not I can get caught up in the tripwire of my own life and end up hurt, dead, or devastated, none of which are things that I want.  I'm cold because if I'm not, I've learned that people will take advantage of me wherever they can.  My pageant coach Brian showed me that from a young age, always giving me 'special' treatment that I couldn't refuse for fear of being ostracized from the one thing that I'd ever been any good at.  I'm bitter, practically burnt in the way that I respond to people, and I practically drip coldness, cold as ice, cold as snow... But she makes me want to be warm.

She makes me want to be better, she makes me want more out of myself than anyone has ever expected... a life full of kindness, a life full of understanding... She makes me want to figure out why I am the way that I am instead of just excusing it and saying that it's in my nature... She makes me want to be warm like her... I think that's why I like her.

I think that's why I've been spending any time that I can in her apartment with her, lying in her bed even when she isn't there, petting her calico cat 'Specter' and curling up in her warm blankets until she's home from late classes or work... I don't miss school to be with her, I think she'd probably kill me if I did, but I get the urge to spend every waking moment around her, and it's not in the same obsessive way that I wanted to spend time around Juliette.  This feels... So much different.

Even now, as I'm feeling Rachelle's hand trace up and down my spine as she laughs at something on her computer screen, I know that I want to be different for her... I don't want to scare her off, even though she decided to stay despite knowing the things that I did earlier in the year... I don't want the good things to end.

"Mon soleil et mes étoiles... You're being really quiet is everything alright?" She murmured, pressing a soft kiss to my temple, an action that always managed to make me feel like I was blushing down to my toes.

It was ridiculous considering what I normally did with people, the way that I normally have a 'use them and lose them' mentality, that I would be blushing at a kiss to the temple, but it's different with Rachelle.

She's awakened the romantic in me, something that was dormant for long enough that I firmly believed it to be dead.

"Yeah, I'm fine." I insisted, but I could tell from the way that her hand paused it's calming movement that she didn't believe me - Rachelle rarely did when I lied, that was something that I noticed the first time that we really spent any sort of time together.  I'd tried my normal tricks, I'd tried to treat her like I would anyone else that I was going to hook up with, but she'd cut right through my normal persona down to the real me, the me that I'd worked so hard to kill off...

She'd cut down to her and decided that that was the me that wanted to fall for, which I didn't expect... I never really thought that anyone would want to fall for that kid, she was so weak... But Rachelle hadn't seen my vulnerability as a weakness... She claimed to me that it was a strength.