This turned out very different than it started. Also, to the person who requested an all dialogue chapter, yes, I will do that! I will listen to suggestions for chapters if people have them, though I can't always guarantee anything.
People always said that you never got it right on the first try.
They had always told her that her first love, or first crush, would never be the one for her. Everyone always made a mistake the first time around, they said. It was how you knew you were right the second, or the third, or the fourth, or the fiftieth time. When you finally found what you were truly searching for, you could be certain because you would know it was different than anything you'd ever felt before.
That was one of the things that worried her.
The sound of his voice trickled across the muscles of her shoulders, drawing the tension out before she had even turned the corner. A steady thud of rubber against pavement met her ears and she looked up from her shoes to see him standing alone in the middle of the sunlit court, the basketball volleying back and forth between his hands and the ground. She paused, drawing to a halt with the grocery bag dangling from her hand, simply watching him. He was talking to himself, but she couldn't quite hear what he was saying, only making out the low timbre of his voice.
People always said that you couldn't fall in love when you were young, that you didn't know what it meant, that you weren't old enough, or mature enough, to understand.
That was why she didn't know what to think of times like this.
Because sometimes when she watched the movement of his body, the stretch and pull of his lanky frame, even when he was doing nothing more than playing basketball or stirring spaghetti, she found herself slowing down, focusing all of her attention on tracing his form with her gaze, as if she could make her eyes become her hands. Sometimes when he looked at her, she felt something clench deep in her chest, something flare behind her eyes, like a sun igniting inside her. Sometimes when she was with him, even just relaxing, doing nothing at all, she felt such a happiness rise in her that it almost blocked her throat, almost choked her.
And she couldn't tell herself that it was just a crush, a first infatuation to prepare her for whatever future true love she would find. Because when tears beat at her fists as she stood in a hospital room next to his bed, and when she heard him hiss in pain even as he assured her that "I'm FINE, Maka, just focus on the fight", and when she watched his fingers dance over the keys of a piano, she couldn't ever imagine not feeling this, not loving him. There was something completely inconceivable about a future without him, a future where she did not fight with him and come home with him everyday.
This was something she knew. This was bone-deep. This was a certainty that filled her up and terrified her more than anything in the world.
Somehow, the world must've been wrong. Because she'd gotten it right on the first try. For her, there would be no more.