Coffees with Luke & Audrey

I

“I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. Like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they make a sandwich or even just walking along the street and even if they were really weird and had no friends at school. I think after seeing them at their most vulnerable you wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with them.”

— Anonymous

He was watching her. Again. She knew because she somehow could always feel his gaze on her, so intense and focused that she often wondered if that alone could burn a hole through her very self. Wondered if maybe his stare could burn the notepad she held so close to her nose that it would sometimes, when she was not paying attention, bump her nose. Audrey put the notebook this close so maybe, just maybe, it would help to forget that he was there.

It was not always a notepad she brought along on these afternoon coffees. A lot of the time, she had a book too.

When she was reading, not much could pull her attention back out of the world she created using only someone else’s words and her imagination. Except he could. And yet, he had not uttered a single word to her. Sometimes, she thought perhaps she saw – not that she was looking of course – him shift slightly, as though torn between moving or staying put. He always chose the latter. And then it would not take long after that for him to exit just as silently as he had entered the little coffee shop.

Then she would sit and read for the remaining of the early evening until it got too dark and she would leave, notebook empty like the ideas in her head, pen still full of ink eagerly waiting to be used. Back home to the smell of her mother’s cooking and her father’s seemingly endless newspaper; the one he read while the television was on so none of them would have to endure that eerie silence that only came with night.

And when she was lying in bed before sleep would ever claim her, her mind would wonder back to the boy in the coffee shop, who had yet to do anything, but had somehow done everything.

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And it begins. 

The whole point of this, really, is for a light read that will, hopefully, warm your heart and leave you with a cheesey smile.

Disclaimer: I do not own any images or music used for this story.