Chapter 21 #2
Someone snatched the three sheets of paper with the poem from the table, causing my pen to slide across the page and smudge the last line.
I flinched as laughter erupted around me. My eyes widened and I looked up to find myself staring into my father's face.
A Different Story
Paul Leonard-Morgan
No.
He couldn't just give himself away like that. He couldn't suddenly not care. Unless...
Something about him was different. It was as if he was hiding his anger. His face was tense, but there was scorn in his eyes.
“The girl who draws on her hands like an ill-mannered toddler,” he announced with desperately controlled aggression, which he hid behind a disdainful smile, and again everyone around me laughed.
My cheeks turned red. My knees slipped into a trembling paralysis. My heartbeat was a single drumbeat that made my entire body tremble.
He held my poem up in the air.
My paper heart between his fingers of dynamite. In this explosion, only ink would flow.
He waved the pages in the air.
“Do you see that?” He turned away from me to look down the hall at those sitting around. “A cute little poem.”
The entire hall laughed, and he did something he had never done before when he took me emotionally into his grasp. He... laughed.
“No...”
My voice was completely drowned out by the laughter of my fellow students.
Now, in addition to all the shock in my chest, anxiety joined in.
At school, teachers had often read aloud to the whole class what I had written before giving it to my father at parent-teacher conferences.
He had never read them. Never. And yet it gnawed at my mind whether he knew that I wrote all this because of him. Whether he suspected it and therefore decided to take it with him downstairs behind his desk.
At some point as a little girl, I had started not to get too emotionally attached to my writing because I never knew if he would find it. But this poem...
I stared in horror at the sheets of paper he was still holding in both hands.
He looked at me. His smile turned into a razor-sharp stare. And then, he tore up all three sheets.
No...
Instantly, it became quieter, so that I could now hear my heart pounding uncontrollably.
I hadn't felt so powerless in a long time.
I was close to tears, wanted to get up, rush forward and grab my poem, but he pushed the sheets together only to tear them in half again.
Why couldn't I move, damn it?! Why was I so helpless?!
“Let this be a lesson to you.” He held up the torn sheets and looked around. “Any distraction from this career, from the success you are striving to achieve here, is the beginning of a slow death of your future.”
No one laughed anymore. Their eyes showed respect. Respect for a man who had just made an example of their fellow student.
“You want to be lawyers. Nothing else should be your priority. Absolutely nothing.”
He strode to the trash can in the corner, threw away the pieces of my poem with a hasty hand movement, before walking back to the blackboard with an iron gaze and continuing the lecture as if none of this had just happened.
Close Your Eyes
Carlos Rafael Rivera
After half an hour, tears were still streaming down my face.
I let it happen, broke down a little more, as I did every day, and pulled my knees up to my chest before leaning my head back against the wall and looking out through the large semicircular window with the scale decoration in the middle into the main park.
Right after the lecture here on the third floor of the large main building of the law faculty, I had simply run up a staircase at random to put as much distance as possible between myself and this man.
However, this staircase curved upward only once, where it seemed to lead to a locked attic door.
And so I had let myself sink down against the wall in the corner of the landing – where the staircase curved and where no one could see me – and pressed my hand over my mouth.
In my other hand I held the white tulip that I had picked during my lunch break and slipped into my bag.
Meanwhile, other lectures were taking place and the students who were on break were enjoying the unusually sunny weather for mid-September, which meant that the corridors were empty and I no longer even tried to stifle my quiet sobs.
Part of me wanted to go back to the main lecture hall, get the poem back, glue it back together, but I wouldn't be able to ignore the tears in the paper, would forever feel that he had held a fragile part of me in his hands and abused it without hesitation.
I sobbed again and squeezed my eyes shut to clear my vision of all the water.
“Quill?”
Flinching, I opened my eyes and stared at Davian, who was standing on the stairs.
My last hope.
Atlas, Eyes
Illuminine, Will Samson
He seemed just as overwhelmed as my heartbeat, which immediately quickened.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and pushed my hair from my sticky face, even though I knew that nothing could change the fact that I probably looked like a scarecrow once again and that he had seen me with tears in my eyes countless times before.
“What are you doing here?”
His gaze gradually filled with an emotion that overwhelmed me every time and warmed something inside me that this man should be the last to warm. Worry.
An exhausted smile stole across my lips.
“Waiting for another author to find me.”
Something in his expression relaxed, but only until two more tears ran unhindered down my cheeks.
He looked back, down the stairs, before turning back to me and stepping out of the field of vision of potential observers.
He was wearing black pants and a loose, tailored white shirt that looked incredibly good on him, especially with the sleeves rolled up halfway.
I had really tried to see him only as my best friend's father, but every time I saw this man walking across campus, I couldn't help my thoughts from running wild.
Sorry, Lara. I'm a bad friend.
Davian sank down next to me against the wall, not even thinking about leaving a safe distance between our bodies, and so an unexpected wave of heat washed over me and flooded my entire body uncontrollably when our arms touched.
He pulled his left knee up, rested an arm on it, and took his left hand in his right.
Don't stare at his veins, Quill. Pull yourself together.
“Could it be that my tears are drawing you in?” I said quickly, trying to distract myself from his artfully decorated skin.
If this was a test of friendship for Lara and me, sent by the universe, it certainly hated me, because in a life where I couldn't predict when I would end up on a bridge again, a man like Davian was the last thing I wanted to stay away from.
The mere fact that he sat down next to this fragile shipwreck without hesitation, even though it could collapse on him...
Just having him next to me made me feel safe. He radiated warmth that immediately wrapped around me, consuming me. But instead of devouring me voraciously, his words and his touch made flowers sprout from barren ground.
“Ink tears probably have that effect on me.”
Only when I turned my head toward him did I realize how close he actually was to me.
He seemed to notice it too, because his gaze wandered from my wet eyes to my salty lips for a split second.
Then he pressed his own lips together and looked away, as if my closeness made him uncomfortable since the incident in his dining room.
A torturous heaviness settled in my stomach and I looked away too.
“Tell me what's worth your tears.”
He stared out the window, so I did the same.
“My father.”
I didn't even think about lying. To Davian Rydell, I would always be an open book.
“No matter how many times I try to show this cold-hearted man that he can't break me, he always manages to prove me wrong. Over and over again…”
More tears.
“Are you financially dependent on him?”
No. No, definitely not. And yet I was living off his money instead of choosing the streets or a hard job. Because I knew, as the coward that I was, that two jobs, even a single 9-5, would completely break me and rob my creative self of all its last strength.
I was dependent on this man. Because I was too weak for this life. And I hated everything about it.
“Someday I'll take all his money and burn it.” I sounded crazy, probably scaring Davian. “At least in my books…”
I felt his gaze on me, but as tempting as it was, I decided to cling to the little I was allowed to enjoy of his existence and looked outside.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for existing.
“If you need money... I've saved up way too much.”
“I would never take money from a...”
I bit my tongue.
Shit.
What were we?
“...friend.”
The tension between us was impossible to ignore.
Why had I said that?
“You consider me your friend?”
Caught out, I looked at him, noticing curiosity in his eyes.
Eyes in which a drop of blue ink had gotten lost ages ago.
“I meant... If you don't...” A smile played around his lips. And there was something else. Relief. Even though the tension still crackled between us. “I mean, you don't have to...”
“I would gladly be a friend to the author I would have needed in my life twenty years ago.”
Prelude: The Atlas March
Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, MDR Rundfunkchor,
MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kristjan J?rvi
Heat exploded in my cheeks.
However innocent that statement sounded, what he implied with it hit me at that point where Davian liked to subconsciously brush along.
My cheeks were much too warm to think clearly.
Friends. We are friends.
That label was the safest thing I could have stamped on us, and at the same time, it was a death sentence for the real connection that had pulsed between us from the beginning.
But Davian had grabbed that lifeline, and now we both seemed to be clinging to it.
Friends. If that meant I didn't have to let him go so soon.
“Where were you twenty years ago?”
He seemed lost in thought again, staring past me out the window.
“Not even here,” I laughed quietly, exhausted.