Capture My Heart (BK3: Niall Horan)

-Ch 18: Sunlit life.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Sunlit life.

-Niall Horan-

 

A content smile spread over my face, mirroring Ashley’s own as she smiled up at the sky. She looked so happy it was pretty uncontainable for me how proud and satisfied I felt that I had put that happiness there. Some of my recent actions in our last argument were not even like me at all, and it was not hard to admit I could still feel the guilt now. But I deserved the guilt, of course I did, I probably deserved more than that. I couldn’t even decide whether it was a good thing or not that Ashley forgave me so easily, I could tell her things that only teenage girls with a whole lot of twitter hate for her would, and all I would have to do is say sorry and she’d lean up, tell me it was okay and kiss me. I didn’t even know if it was because she was so scared of losing people or because she was just a forgiving person, but it probably wasn’t the best thing on both of our parts.

It also made it ridiculously easy for me to take advantage of that – although I tried not to – sometimes in the heat of the argument it was hard, or maybe even the coldness of the aftermath. I probably beat myself up about wrong doings more than she did me, and I didn’t think I would ever figure that out, or form any opinion, because I didn’t understand.

I watched with my smile still widely spread across my features as Ashley cradled the camera in her palms, fiddling with the dials and buttons, her expression still full of a lot of the happiness she had been drained of lately. I couldn’t help but feel that was partially my fault too, a lot of things seemed to turn out to be my fault lately, maybe I was just on an impeccably bad timed bad streak, I hoped it was that, just a faze.

“These pictures are going to be so pretty.” She gushed, and I shifted my gaze to her as she squatted down onto the arid ground that was cluttered prettily with orange and golden leaves, gleaming in the autumnal sunlight.

 I watched as she took two fingers and carefully spun the second dial while squinting her left eye through the glass cube, her eye-brows knitting together in concentration. Her finger carefully positioned itself on the blue button, and after she readjusted everything about ten times she caught a snapshot of the trees towering above her. And that would be forever, the lens capturing the moment that could never be recreated physically; only a series of jets of ink fed by the film of the camera, punched onto glossy paper and handed to her in an envelope, all delicately creating a perfect picture.

“They might not even come out, you know,” I chimed in; later realising I was slightly dampening the whole ordeal. It was solely quite amazing how enticed and overly happy she was with this one small camera, and it didn’t know if it was the fact that it was painted so carefully in pastel colours, or the fact that she would have to wait for the pictures to be developed from negatives. Or the fact that she was a sucker for pretty antiques, but I wasn’t complaining, seeing her happy was enough.

I was expecting her to tell me to stop being a pessimist, and I was planning to argue that I was just a realist, but then she looked up at me, rising slowly from the ground. She smiled, the pale skin of her cheeks catching in the bright sunlight, it tumbled it’s buttery haze over her, highlighting all the fly-away’s of her hair and the structure of her face in it’s luminous light. Then she said, “I know, I think that’s the beauty of it.”

After smiling at me for a few more seconds, she then turned away, tracing her way carefully through the thick blankets of leaves that were spread over the ground. Her words lingered lightly in the air, and I debated how this was so Ashley, and so not Ashley at the same time. She liked to know things; she didn’t like to be left in the dark, so I didn’t really understand how she was so happy with not knowing if those pictures would even come out or not. Although she seemed to have a way of picking out the pretty in everything but herself. It was strange and I wasn’t going to pretend I understood.