Memory

Sometimes he watches her as she watches him.

Her eyes glaze over as they do when catching the slightest glimpse of the one she adores, and he can empathize.

All at once his thoughts are swirled in a prism of memory and he is back to the one time where he was hers and she was his. Or, at least, the one time where everything seemed to be so.

A time where his arms were around her waist, an angle at which they had never felt more right. And he talked to her and she looked at him and he couldn't see the others around them. They simply were not there.

Maybe there was an ulterior motive for a dance such as this, but in any case, he was thanking his father at that moment more than ever before.

Because now, for all that his father had put his son through over the years, he had finally done something worth his gratitude- he had given his son the opportunity to hold the beauty in front of him, to stare into her deep brown eyes with intensity. Just as he had always dreamed. Did she feel the chemistry that he felt? How could she not, if he could? Shouldn't it take two to create a magic such as that?

But then, in the depth of his memory, she is pulling away, until he looks up from his trip back in time and discovers that not only is he in her presence just as he was in his flashback, but that she is moving steadily in…the opposite direction. Further from his sight.

He finds her hand and guides her, only to discover that his cheeks are wet and she wraps her arms around him as he sobs and he wonders why he can't travel back in time literally, when he so often does so in reminiscence.

He is the one to pull away this time.

Nostalgia is evident in the atmosphere, in the very air they breathe, and the bloodsucker is not there anymore. He simply is not there. And her eyes meet his and he gives her a bittersweet smile.

As he prepares to walk, he realizes his hatred for that word. Bittersweet. Why can't everything just be sweet, and that's final, and that's it?

And with a step, he wills himself to forget. His back turns.

She runs her brown eyes up and down his figure for the last time, savoring the feel of his warmth until a new sensation fills her. Goosebumps that occur when cold arms meet warm skin.

Sometimes she dearly wishes that those arms were warm.

But most of the time, she doesn't.

He needs someone who wishes for his arms most of the time, she decides. So she watches his retreat.