"Love arrives exactly when love is supposed to, and love leaves exactly when it must."
—Sarah Kay
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OLIVER BRADSHAW is certain he's earned a nonrefundable, one-way ticket headed straight for hell. After twenty-one years of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he has become the textbook definition of a magnet attracting nothing more than trouble. While his friends are worrying about their college exams, he's trying to warm himself up to the idea of the devil's playground.
When stripped to his core, Oliver's twenty-one years of existence can be broken down into two parts. One part music notes that drown out the deafening silence of slammed doors, shattered hearts, and crushed dreams. One part tragedy because he still hasn't learned how to tear his heart off from his shirtsleeves.
The thing is Oliver has never really been good with words, his vocabulary mired with blunders and incoherent thoughts that not even he can decipher. In many ways, his mind is a looping maze without a solution, a never-ending puzzle begging to be solved.
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JAMIE PARKER doesn't quite have her life figured out. From the start, she's never really had a plan because she knows that, sometimes, plans are made to fall apart. Her life has always been fairly simple, or at least it was before he came along.
Jamie's twenty years on this Earth can be summarized into three parts. Two parts crumbled pieces of paper saturated with frustration, the floor of her cramped bedroom a makeshift place where abandoned thoughts rest. One part dreams too large for her small hands so they always end up slipping through her fingers, her mind an alternate universe.
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WHEN OLIVER MEETS JAMIE, he thinks she makes words sound like piano lullabies, her syllables equivalent to a slur of eighth notes springing from the thick, black lines that encompass them. The way she strings consonants and vowels together orchestrates a symphony he'll never get tired of hearing.
Oliver dresses like dark nights on good days but has a voice that screams cloudy mornings. Jamie, on the other hand, moves like summer rain. Her footsteps are raindrops pattering on glass paneled windows. When he smiles, there's lightning in his curve of his eyes. When she smiles, all he can see is the golden specks lighting up the electric forest that surrounds them
To Oliver, Jamie looks like a rising sunset, a homogenous mixture of warm colors and radiating positivity, a pure contrast to the dark night that covers them. There's a reason why the moon and galaxy of stars always appear so bright against the navy sky. You never know the light until you've seen the darkness.
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Guess who's back with another short story? This has been something I've been playing around for the past couple of months, and I'm so excited to finally share it with you all!
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