"No matter your problems, face them with a bright smile and a bucket of chocolate ice-cream," nana once wisely told me. At the time, I was barely twelve and thought that I could summon a unicorn if I just believed in myself.
A decade later, despi...
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Mark's point of view.
For as long as I've known Maeva, she's always been the confident girl whose eyes could set a town on fire. Even when she struggled with confidence and body image issues, she'd always known what she wanted in life and chased it till the very end.
Lately, however, she's lost that spark and mixed signals are all that she seems to give away.
When I found her drinking at the bar, the other day, her lips were smiling and the round of drinks she'd ordered showed how excited she was about her new job. Her mattified eyes were screaming for help, nonetheless.
Then when she told me she wanted us to be friends, the words she'd used were piercing as hell. The way she'd bitten her lips and looked me in the eyes told me not to believe her, though.
And now, although she seems pretty pissed to be sharing a room with me, her eyes tell me otherwise. The way she jumps whenever we touch is pretty amusing, and her jitteriness makes me laugh like a kid playing with a kitten.
"Come in, Mark. I'm in the room," she says, her hushed voice hitting me with a jerk of electricity.
I swear this girl's unpredictable. One minute she's drawing a cat on my face, the next she leaves me in the middle of a restaurant. We were calmly having dinner and I thought she'd behave for the remainder of the night. Little did I know that she was plotting and drawing elaborate schemes during the battle she was having with a lettuce leaf.
Why are the lights off, though? I don't want to end up in the ER the night before the bar exam. As I finally find the light switch, I lift it, and she jumps at me like a burglar caught heisting a mansion.
"Turn it off!" she screams and I do as I'm told. I know better than to mess with her plans. I've tried it before, and it didn't go well for me, at all!
Moments later, I hear the rasp of a lighter, and her face is dimly lit by a candle. Just as I thought that her eyes couldn't get any more hypnotic, she stares at me with a flame lighting her face.
With the faint floral fragrance conveying hints of mystic to the entire room, she looks like a fairy coming from an alternate dimension. Her curls keep bouncing with every step she takes, and the shine of them makes me want to bury my head in her hair and never getaway. Looking at me with her lower lip plumping under the pressure of her teeth, I knew I was going to approve of everything she says.
"Take your clothes off," she orders and my head tilts instantly to the right in a questioning yet muted "really?". Rolling her eyes at me, she hands me a robe and points to the bathroom. Although I assured that it hasn't been two hours since I took a bath, she insists that I shower with the soaps she'd chosen for me.
Twenty minutes I left her. Twenty minutes! To say that this was a last-minute plan would do no justice to the elaborate presentation she'd concocted in such a short time. I wonder where she'd found plant infused soap and aromatic herb twigs, that late at night.
