The girl was lying on the boys lap, her hair starkly bright in the contrast of his dark trousers. She silently sketched on the pages of the sketchbook propped up on her knees, while the boy silently read an old thick volume. The boys gaze was captured in rapt attention over his glasses at the small typed words bound in the hardcover book. The girl sighed a rather theatrical sigh and looked up at the boy.
"I don't understand how you can read for that long," she said.
"I don't understand how you can sketch for so long," he answered, putting his finger on the line he would read next.
"What are you reading?" She asked, hoisting herself up.
"Il Principe," he told her. "The Prince," he elaborated at her elevated eyebrows.
"What's it about?" She peered over his shoulder at the typed font. "A prince who has to rescue a princess? No, that's an awful story. The princess has to rescue the prince. That sounds better."
He laughed at her enthusiasm for fantastical stories. "No, liebe. It's about government."
"Ugh." Her face fell, and the girl threw herself back onto the grass. The blades of grass tickled her bare neck and weaved itself between her hair. "Why must you always read books about politics and war?"
The boy folded the corner of the page he was on and put the book on the grass before easing himself down to his elbows. "Because I've already lived the fairytale liebe." And so he kissed her. In the middle of the meadow, under the dying sunlight, in the middle of the first of many summers they would kiss in.