Lost ✴Contest Winner✴

II

He came back the next morning, and found her standing under the pear tree in the pale sun, waiting for him. When she saw him, her eyes lit up and she positively glowed. Philip couldn't help but to grin back, a small half smile accompanied by a light blush on his cheeks. He walked over and sat down, gracelessly sliding his back down the trunk of the tree. She followed suit, her white dress settling around her ankles.

"So," he started awkwardly, "You still haven't told me your name."

He waited for a response, awkwardly sitting in a never-ending silence.

"I don't usually tell people...it's strange."

"Strange?" the young boy was now intrigued, "I don't mind strange."

"Promise not to laugh," she said seriously, "Or I'll never talk to you again."

"Promise," he replied solemnly. She leaned forward and whispered it to him, her voice soft and light.

He pulled away, surprised.

"I thought it'd be much worse than that. Longer or something."

"You don't think I'm a freak?"

"No! No, of course not!"

She relaxed, her back falling against the trunk of the tree.

"Will you talk to me each day," she asked, "come back whenever you can? Will you?"

There was something about the way she said it, a pleading in her voice that was impossible to ignore, something about her tone and eyes that only dared him to refuse...

"Of course I will!"

~~0~~

He didn't break his vow, the first one he had ever made that bound him to a woman, and certainly not his last. Every day he would meet her in the pear grove, and they would talk and talk until the sky grew dark and the the stars cold and watching. The sun wheeled overhead, months and years passed, every day she was more beautiful and the growing Philip found himself childishly longing for something greater than their tender friendship.

Every day, he gave a part of himself away, a sentence, a phrase until he wondered if she was only a compilation of his words, some creature that breathed only in the outskirts of his imagination, outside of the reality where he was hungry and cold and the son of a drunkard.

She was elusive, and when she told him of her heritage, he was hardly surprised.

He didn't care if she was a faery. All the legends and tales he had been told, every fireside warning had no meaning, he disregarded their whispering pleas every time he saw her eyes, clear and blue like the sky.

"The stories were wrong", he thought, "how anyone could ever see her as dangerous is unthinkable, she's not that kind of person, she'-"

The wind picked up as she held his hand under the now colossal tree. He stared at her, a smile on his face.

It was sweet, yet they were fools in love expecting perfection from the future, a sign proclaiming that nothing, nothing could go wrong if the only stayed together.

They thought they were composing a splendid duet, no, it was two lilting soliloquies that started in utopia and ended in pain and ink blotted pages. It was two misled youth who misinterpreted and mistook, until everything shattered beneath them and they fell and fell.

But only one of them had wings.

~~0~~