My Chosen One

Chapter 3: Choices

He's dead silent. The entire room is. He drops his chin, which pretty much completes the "I'm done with the world" look that he started putting together when he put his hands in his lap. Legs spread just a little bit. Hunched over. Hair falling over his face. I can tell he's thinking, however, by the way his shoulders are. They're the only part of his body that don't look like they're giving up, for whatever reason. They're still pulled back and pretty far down his spine. I wonder, When will he decide? and as I'm thinking this, he starts to straighten.

And then, with his amazingly golden, wavy, honey-brown hair still falling into his sapphire-blue eyes, he stares into my soul and tells me the words I've wanted to hear since I was twelve. "Yes," he says, smiling, the words flowing out of him like water out of a faucet. "Yes, Baz, I would actually really like that," he says, and my head almost literally explodes. It's happening! one part of my brain is screaming, while another part is telling me, Don't panic. Even though it's happening. "Finally," I think out loud. I then flop backwards onto my bed, sitting up after I do so. My royal blue comforter, which I had pulled tight when I got up, is now wrinkled and messy from the impact. I'm smiling, inside and out, because this is something I've wanted since I was twelve. If you hold on to a dream for five years, you can be sure that you're going to be ecstatic when it finally comes true.

And, of course, Simon has to go and ruin our happy moment together by being as fucking oblivious as he always is. "What's 'finally'?" he asks, ruining my mood. How the fuck has he not noticed? Even after all those nights that he spent following me in the Catacombs, even after he became so obsessed with me that he followed me to the restroom to make sure I wasn't up to something, he still. Hasn't. Noticed.

"How have you not noticed? I swear, I have given you so many signs. How the bloody hell did you not pick up on them?"

His right shoulder goes up, and he flips his palm towards his face. "I don't even know what you're talking about!" he argues, his voice (and pitch) rising. "How am I supposed to know if I've seen the signs if I don't know what the signs are for?"

I sigh, pissed off by his lack of knowledge about me. I know every single fact about him. What shoe he ties first. His middle name. The way he looks when he's about to go off. How he stops stuttering when he's defending someone. And yet he hasn't picked up on this one simple fact about me. "Snow," I say, trying to get him to hear me for once. "I have liked you since our second year."

He looks baffled, and his stutter comes back. "You-you've-what?" I decide to repeat myself, since it'll help him get the message through his brain.

"I. Have. Liked. You. Since. Second. Year," I tell him again, enunciating each syllable clearly. He stays still for a second, clearly dazed by what I just told him. He's thinking hard, I can tell. And his eyes are downcast, which means that he's probably telling himself mentally that he's been really, really dumb.

"I'm sorry for not picking up on the message sooner," he apologizes, coming over to my bed to sit next to me. He rests his hand on my thigh. I put my own hand over it, covering it, keeping it there. Locking Snow into me, so that he stays. "I've thought that way about you, too, in the past," he admits, and I give him a teasing smile. He keeps going, closing his eyes in a way that makes it look like he's trying to sleep. "When the Crucible was casting us together and you started walking my way, I thought, My gods, he looks so good." I raise my eyebrow at him, and he starts laughing. He adds, "Now, I don't know what you were thinking at that moment..." and we both burst into hysterics. He smiles softly, as though he were smiling at a sleeping baby and trying not to wake it up with the brilliance of his snow-white grin. Then he moves his right hand out from under my left. My heart is yearning for more, but then he takes my hand, and my world just- it just stops. Because nothing really matters to me, at least for that moment in time. Nothing except Snow. He pulls me close, not realising that at that same time I'm pulling on him as well, and he lays his head on my shoulder. I wrap my arm around his waist, and we stay there for the most perfect minute that God (if he's real) ever planned out. Then I lift my arm out from under his, and I lift his chin up, and I kiss him.

As our lips meet, it clicks. Why I've always been so attracted to him. Why he's so powerful. Why he's so timid.

He's the most beautiful Chosen One. But he's never been chosen by anyone.

I break apart from him, hug him in close, and whisper in his ear, "Simon Snow, you're beautiful, and I love you, and I chose you, and I would choose you again. You mean the world to me, and I would give it up to have you."