Knocking on Heaven's Door | 𝐒𝐀𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑

5 - INVITATIONS

Bellona's heart was raging. A frenzied bundle of tissue and flesh, it pummeled the inside of her chest, demanding it be set free from its confinement lest it break through her sternum on its own accord. Thus, puncturing her skin, the only thing that seemed to hold her together anymore since her emotional brawn had checked out. Leaving her gasping for a breath that would never come.

God. She was about to throw up, wasn't she?

And all because of a stupid boy.

Though, not quite so stupid as the way he made her feel. Sam was profusely intelligent. Bellona could tell that much by the studious flecks that embedded themselves in his irises, by the way he always seemed to be absorbing the input his environment provided. A sponge in an ocean of law students. But the way her throat swelled when their eyes met? The way her heart leapt into her throat, beating against her tongue until it was swollen and all she could do was stutter? The moments in which that happened were not among her brightest.

Stupid. That was the only word for it. Sam Winchester made her stupid.

The very thought of it painted a smile on her lips. She pressed them together, trying and failing to repress the grin that refused to dissolve.

The universe had a way of giving back, it seemed. Though the flowers of her life had shriveled beneath the heat of the devil's sun, though her pores no longer budded with glee and mirth, her footsteps were providing compost to the soil in front of her. To the path she was destined to follow. And it was a soil more rich than she'd seen in a while, one that would nurture the germination of whatever was blossoming between her and Sam. Where the universe had riddled her soul with anxieties and unwelcome diagnoses, it had given her Sam. An appeasement for the death that lingered.

Because compared to her, Sam was life. He was a boy fabricated with strands of sunlight, warming the cold, desolate bodies that wandered into his reach. Warmth. That's who he was.

And he was walking towards her.

His boots mimicked the rivalry between sandpaper and wood as he ambled across the parking lot, the soles scraping against the pavement. He'd inserted his hands in the pockets of his blue jeans, had tilted his head down, and the way he was sheepishly peeking up at her from beneath his eyelids made her chest wreathe. The coy glance of his baby blue eyes - the ones she could've sworn had been tainted with an emerald hue just that morning - had coiled around her insides. Squirming, twisting around her inner chest until it was a spiral around her larynx. Until her breath had been stolen by a six-foot garrote.

The same six feet that was standing beside her now, clothed in flannel and denim and settled beneath the archway of the library's entrance. There was nothing unordinary about the cloth on his back. Nothing extravagantly formal, nothing so exquisite that a stranger would wonder if he was a member of the upper class. Even so, positioned in the shadows of his presence, she couldn't help but feel overwhelmingly underdressed.