When Clyde Parker, the wayward son and the rotten-apple of the Parker family-tree, storms his way back into Avery Fields, he sets out a flurry of butterfly effect in Dawn Marshal's life.
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CLYDE PARKER WASN'T THE kind of guy you date—he's the kind of guy you kiss once and never forget.
As soon as his lips landed on hers, all those irrational thoughts she had been unknowingly accumulating in her mind, flew right out of the window. With the setting sun dipping below the horizon and merging into the fleeting colors of the sky, she too melted into him.
It was as if they were two separate colors in an artist's palate but as the artist dunked his paint into a tub of water and blended them, the two very different shades overlapped, morphing into a whole new shade. Becoming one. Together, they were two binary stars orbiting around a common barycenter—there was no other way to explain this.
If Dawn Marshal let herself wear those rose-colored glasses, she would freeze this moment—the sunset, the boy and the stars in her eyes—in a slow globe and spin the wheel of her luck over and over again with a Frank Sinatra song playing softly in the back ground. But moments are all but eternal. So for a short span of time, she let herself be swept away in his arms and even when the sky was burning above their heads; it was okay. They were okay.
They parted their lips, and the spell was broken.
"Why?" Dawn Marshal struggled to find the words to voice her question.
"Why what? Why is the Earth round?" Clyde chuckled, regaining his composure, "You need to be a bit more specific than that."
"I...I th-the sky on my ceiling, why?" Dawn Marshal suddenly acquired the linguistics of a broken record-player from the 1900s.
Because I wanted to give you something to remember me by. Because it would hurt to not exist in your mind, so much more than not existing at all. Because if I disappear from your mind, I disappear from all the places I have ever been. Instead, Clyde Parker just shrugged and said, "Because I ran out of canvases to paint on."
If Dawn's heart sank by his answer, she didn't show it.
"So..."
"So..."
Once again, in a different frame of time they were both caught in each other's ellipses. With Clyde Parker, it was always one step forward and two steps backward.
Both of their eyes connected and they shared a look. It was like time-travelling to the past, flipping through an album of all their memories—3 a. m. conversations on her rooftop, the night at the cliff, laying under a blanket of stars, a tower of pillows in between them, long fingers strumming the guitar, tricolored morning skies, the crackling fire, the last dance and the kiss on Thanksgiving night.
Sometimes, a millennium can pass in mere three seconds.
"This," Dawn Marshal gestured between them, "thing between us, whatever it is, it sure as hell crazy!"
"It might be a bit crazy, but it's not like we didn't see it coming. Did we?" he asked, his eyes glimmering with hope.
