"Professor Dean?"
A familiar voice called out to Tawny as she locked the door of her office. She looked up and smiled, not taking long to recognize the only person who could be calling her like that.
"Mr. Stevens." Tawny walked up to Louis and kissed him gently on the lips. "What brings you here today?" She held his hand in hers, which he then took with both of his. He delicately felt her hand, gently running his fingers across it until the matching rings on their fingers met. He looked somewhat hesitantly into her eyes and finally let his lips turn into his characteristically boyish smile, but not before having betrayed the look of consternation etched into his face.
"I came to pick you up, Tawny," he finally said. "Shuttle service for my favorite comp lit scholar." Tawny let out a slight chuckle as they began walking, their hands held. She clutched his hand tightly, taking in the feeling of delight that Louis could always make her feel as if for the first time. It was always the same voice, the same warmth, the same unmistakable touch she had come to know and love many years ago, back in much simpler times. Louis had changed so much since then, and yet it was somehow the same Louis who had made her fall in love with him, who had made her believe so much in someone like never before. Louis could make every step that they took together, every day of life on this earth, every breath of air feel like such a miracle. Just the fact that she was here, and that they were here, was proof enough.
They made their way in silence through the empty halls and toward the exit. The hallway had the familiar drab smell of nothing particular, with the slightest scent of cork and paperwork mixed in. The walls were pockmarked with bulletin boards that had most of the fliers ripped out, leaving behind only scraps of paper that left the casual passer-by guessing as to all the messages that hadn't reached their destinations. Oh, if only they knew, Tawny thought to herself. She could feel herself resisting the urge to just close her eyes and let some kind of automatism take over, as if her legs could start walking on their own and her mind could shut itself off from the reality around her. And the reality was that the two of them had come all this way to find themselves in a country on the verge of breaking point.
The last year or two almost felt like a blur. It was the kind of nightmare that kicked in just when the dreams felt so close to turning into reality, the dreams of all those years of activism ever since childhood. All those hours spent on picket lines, in general assemblies, in teach-ins, in editorial board meetings, and all it took was a few months to change everything. All it took was the right mix of civil strife, environmental catastrophe, gun violence, and false-flag operations for the president to invoke emergency powers and assume direct federal control over the state of California, promising to do "whatever it takes" to restore order. Just the right dose of confusion, shock, and the disorientation of not knowing what was genuine protest as opposed to manufactured provocation, civil resistance as opposed to anonymous terror. It was such an easy path to tyranny, as if staged straight out of a playbook, and yet everything about it was so real, all the ailments that had been eating away at this country for years and years on end now morphing into one giant, shapeless danger that couldn't just be debunked as easily as it could be invoked at will. It was all it took to bring the media into line, suppress activism on university campuses, denounce all dissent as unpatriotic and make nobody want to hear it. Neither the much-touted "two-thirds" that came out in every opinion poll in support of the government nor the passive minority that seemed determined to believe in the resilience of democratic institutions to the bitter end, certain that the emergency measures were only a passing anomaly.
Tawny let her eyes wander across the deserted campus as they walked out in the direction of the parking lot. The fact that she was here, and that they were here, was somehow all part of the same reality, one long chain of events. The same reality in which she had completed a PhD in just four years and gotten tenure before even turning 30, the same reality that felt like such a miracle with every step. A chain of events going back at least to 2003, the year she got together with Louis for good, but also the year the Iraq War started and pulled the country into the quagmire it still hadn't gotten out of. Even before then, she had been an activist with her one-person pickets and peace marches, back in much simpler times. She had been in this business for as long as she could remember, and now surely wasn't the time to hold back. She had bet on herself by applying for tenure after just four years, and the executive order that came into effect not much later with all the faculty turnover in the state universities that soon followed made it look like the best possible decision. It couldn't be clearer what had to be done in this situation. Up to a point, that is. She clutched Louis's hand more tightly, her thoughts now giving way to empty silence.
Tawny looked over to Louis as he drove, discreetly studying the look on his face. There was a look of blank intensity in his eyes, trying to focus on the road ahead. This was how Louis always was, all in. If he set his mind on something, there was nothing else he thought about, even if it was the same road they had taken back home so many times.
"Is something the matter, Louis?" Tawny finally asked, ever so calmly.
Louis didn't react at first, but his non-reaction already gave away the answer. "Another death threat came in," he answered, just about maintaining the stoic evenness in his voice. This was already the fourth in the past month, one in each week. The surest reminder of the start of a new week was another anonymous threat in the mail.
Tawny turned and looked blankly out the windshield. "Well, what did it say?" she asked, almost nonchalantly.
Louis turned momentarily to meet her eyes, giving her a slightly incredulous look. "Don't you ever get afraid of anything?" he asked back, as gently as he could.
Tawny let out a sigh, trying to show him that she was taking this as seriously as he was. There used to be a time when she wasn't the one who felt the need to do this. Back in much simpler times.
"Well," she began. "Was it addressed to me or both of us?"
A pained expression flashed across Louis's face. "So that's how it is, is it. The only way you'd be worried is if I'm in danger too?"
"We've had this conversation before, Louis," Tawny said patiently, but with a weariness that held her voice down. "You know where I've drawn my line in the sand."
"But does it have to be the only one?"
Tawny locked her eyes onto Louis's as they looked straight ahead, reflecting on the absurdity of both of them responding to each other's questions with another question. The answers were all so obvious, and yet they weren't the ones they were looking for.
"So is this why you came to pick me up?" she finally asked.
"Well, yeah," he answered, more tamely this time. "But you don't have to worry, I haven't been driving except to come pick you up today."
Tawny turned again and stared discreetly down at the ground, not quite knowing what to say. She stared at nothing particular, just contemplating the delicate resting of her feet on the car floor. It was a little game she used to play by herself when she was little, staring long enough until her mind started playing tricks on her, convincing her that the ground beneath her could open up and dissolve at any moment. It was a sensation she had long internalized without any kind of fear or disquiet, as if she could accept the possibility that such a thing could happen, even if it never did, as part of the natural order of things. But now, she found herself struggling to keep out certain thoughts creeping into her head, as much as she tried to take comfort in the knowledge that she and Louis were together, in one place.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She knew it was cliché, going through the same routine that her psychologist parents had taught her back in the day. For a moment, she could feel everything give way to light. It was always the same ray of light that shined through ever since that day, when she saw Louis smiling up at her on the school lawn, the morning sun shining down brightly on both of them. After all these years, it was still the same sun in the sky, the same green earth, the same boyish smile, the same unyielding love holding her world together, no matter what new disasters unfolded around them. The same ray of light never stopped shining even while wrapped inside one long catastrophe, a storm piling one piece of wreckage after another along their path and racing to reach the future ahead of them. And it was somehow the same storm that was driving them onward and upward onto new heights, into a future that threatened to engulf them and overturn everything at any moment.
Tawny opened her eyes as the car slowed down. They had arrived at their destination. She looked over at Louis as he finished parking, knowing that he had been glancing over at her the whole time. She smiled slightly and gently placed her hand on his wrist as he raised the handbrake.
"My turn to cook tonight?"
Louis looked somewhat nervously down at her hand. "Um... Don't you have that article you have to finish tonight?"
Tawny's smile widened. "So?"
"So I decided to do some cooking before picking you up. I got out of work a bit earlier today, so..." He let his voice trail off and just smiled back at her.
Tawny kept looking into Louis's eyes, the smile on her face giving way to seriousness. "You're amazing, Louis." She kissed him gently on the lips. "Thank you."
"It's been a long week," Louis finally said, breaking the silence.
Tawny smiled ever so slightly, as if snapping out of her thoughts and back to where the two of them were, seated next to each other on the park bench. She turned and looked absently toward him, as if to appreciate just the fact that he was there. He returned the look, the fatigued but undimmed sparkle in his eyes mirroring hers.
"So we're going to do it just like last year?" he asked. "If we both aced all our midterms, we're doing a weekend trip during spring break, just you and me?"
Tawny let out a slight chuckle. "Let's hope I can keep up with you again," she said, placing her arm over his shoulder and leaning her head gently against his. "My genius."
Louis said nothing. She could feel his concentrated gaze next to her, lending the silence an oddly pleasant intensity. Then the words came out softly from next to her and into her ear.
"Where would I be without you, Tawny?"
Tawny smiled again. "I like to think you'd still be up on that flagpole, if it wasn't for my magnetic attraction bringing you back down to earth."
"Those were crazy times," Louis reminisced. "Life was one big riot. Me putting together ridiculous schemes, pulling pranks on everybody. And it just went on and on. They could have made a sitcom based on my life and it would have made people laugh."
He now turned to face her, making her eyes meet his. "And it just took one day to change everything, you know that? That day when I discovered, just by silly accident, that you love me just as much as I love you, I knew things could never be the same. It was too great a miracle. To think that we almost lost each other forever, without ever finding out..."
His voice trailed off as he let his eyes wander into space. She looked at him patiently, thinking of how many times they had taken this walk down memory lane together, their hands grasping each other tightly, as if just to make sure they wouldn't lose each other along the way.
"That flagpole incident," he continued. "First day of junior high. That was the first thing we both remembered. And you know what happened after I fell off the flagpole?" They both smiled, knowing the answer. "I explained to Wexler that it was about me announcing myself, the misfit kid brother looking for something to be good at. And guess what? It all worked out in the end. That was how I ended up meeting you. And soon enough, I found my greatest passion, the only one that mattered. It was you. Falling for you is the best thing I've ever done, Tawny. Even when we were just friends, I learned more from you about life than I could ever have from my parents and teachers. Ever since that day, you've always inspired me to be the best I can be. Nothing that I've accomplished would have been possible without you."
Tawny looked deeply into his eyes, seeing the deep sparkle in them give way to a burning intensity, and took his hands into hers, ever so naturally and inconspicuously.
"None of it would have been possible without you, Louis," she finally said. "You're the one who made it all happen. I was just a normal kid passing by, and you decided to turn me into the most special person. That moment, when you smiled up at me after falling off the flagpole... I was there only as a spectator, but you pulled me into your universe and turned me into someone who was so valued and whose opinion so cherished, no matter what kind of scheme you cooked up. You made me an inseparable part of you."
"And you understood me," he completed for her. "You understood me like nobody else could. You finally had someone to unleash all your wisdom on. And it took a while at first, but... in the end, you worked your magic. You single-handedly changed the course of my life, Tawny. I... I would be nothing without you."
Tawny bit her lip. It was that burning intensity in his eyes, so full of conviction and incertitude at the same time. It was somehow all too much. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She opened them again and could see the look on Louis's face softening ever so slightly, waiting expectantly for whatever it was that she was going to say.
"Louis," she began, shifting both her hands onto his wrists. "What you've shown me all these years is just the opposite. You're capable of so much. And you had it in you the whole time, even if you didn't know it. And I just happen to be the person you chose to discover it with together. It's an incredibly empowering feeling, isn't it?"
The look in his eyes remained unchanged, but she knew, behind that look of sincere intensity, that he understood. She smiled, taking in the feeling she knew so well and cherished so much. How he could understand her so easily, better than he could anybody else, all because of what little that she had to do to understand him.
"That's my deepest wish, Louis," she went on. "That you'll always let that feeling empower you, whenever you're faced with doubt. And that you'll always be able to rely on it for strength. Even if I'm no longer there someday."
Louis just stared for a few seconds, the intensity in his eyes undiminished. Tawny thought for a moment if she should have just left that last part out. But she was only trying to be truthful with him, as much as she could.
"What are you saying, Tawny?" he finally asked, an uneasy softness in his voice.
She quietly let out a deep breath. "All I'm saying is life is full of contingencies," she began. "Remember when we were making our video tapes? I remember exactly what I was feeling when I made that tape for you. The idea of losing you, forever, made me look for strength in all the things you meant to me. It gave me the strength to say those three words that I had never said to anyone before, apart from my parents. And everything I said in that video was true, Louis. As long as I live... I was never going to forget what you meant to me, never going to stop drawing strength and inspiration from it."
She smiled again, looking confidently into his eyes to find the uneasiness dissipating, little by little. "It was like I had to go through that feeling of lack in order to overcome it," she continued. "Because lack is always going to be a part of life. And we both overcame it that day, together, because we weren't going to let it make us give up on each other."
Louis kept staring back into her eyes. His lips opened ever so slightly and then closed again, turning ever so slightly into a smile that made the silence that much more delightful.
"And then contingency gave back with mom losing that election and our video messages reaching their destinations," he finally said. "And there's nothing it can do now to come between us. Nothing." The look in his eyes now seemed to overflow with assurance. "I believe in it, Tawny, as strongly as I could believe in anything. You're going to do great things someday, and I'm always going to be right there at your side. I promise you."
Tawny said nothing. Instead, she pulled Louis into a kiss and held him tightly to her lips, before either of them could say anything else. Almost as if the words were too much, overshooting their intended meaning with imaginations of a future that was too far away, a future that their present moment, the air they were breathing and the words they exchanged, could not hope to identify with. She just held him in that embrace, trying to capture this moment for as long as possible, not wanting to let go.
Tawny sat in front of her computer, trying to put the finishing touches on her article. She had gone through the entire text again for a third time, having proofread everything, with only the concluding paragraph left to write. The hardest part was always the ending, whether it was an academic paper or an op-ed piece like this one. The hardest part was giving the sense of a conclusion to the staged encounter between the writer and her imagined audience, however fanciful. Being on the writers' collective of one of the few leftist online magazines left meant operating on the margins of the public space, with no room for illusions about how many people were actually being reached. In recent weeks especially, every article felt like the proverbial message in a bottle, a cry of desperation whose message was not least to communicate the mere fact of the sender's existence. Occasionally, an article or two got wider attention, especially when she dialed up the provocation; that's when the death threats and, more rarely, the e-mails of support started coming.
Tawny ran her hand across her forehead and looked down at the bony fingers of her other hand spread across the keyboard. Occasionally, a part of her tried to imagine herself just living a quiet, settled-down life with a family and getting on with her academic career. In a way, she was doing most of that. She had already come a long way in academia, and most importantly, she had Louis. If there was ever going to be a reason to dial down her activist work and go for the quiet, settled-down life, Louis would have to be it. But he didn't want that, and that was good enough for her.
She started typing again. The words began to flow in one of those short, random bursts that always seemed to come just when her thoughts had started wandering aimlessly. She stopped and looked at the paragraph she had just written, speed-reading through it over and over. This was going to have to do, at least for tonight. She scrolled through the text one more time and then pressed "Post."
Just then, Louis walked discreetly into the study, holding a cup of tea in his hand. Tawny turned and looked toward him as he walked ever so gingerly toward her with the cup in hand, letting her enjoy watching him a bit longer. He then placed the cup on her desk and knelt down next to her chair, putting his hand on top of hers on the armrest.
"How's it going with the article?" he asked.
"I just posted it," Tawny replied, feeling the weight being lifted from her shoulders with those words. She looked down at the teacup. It was jasmine tea, her favorite. "Thank you, Louis," she said softly. She took a sip and then looked again into his eyes with a renewed fortitude.
"You're the best, Tawn," Louis just said. "You're amazing." The softness in his voice echoed hers and gave his words a touch of intimacy, as if he didn't want them to leave this room even though he would have felt no shame in announcing it to the world. "And to think that I, of all people, ended up with you..." His voice trailed off. He looked down at their hands and then cautiously back up at her eyes.
"Our anniversary's coming up, you know that?"
Tawny let out a tired chuckle. "We never celebrate our anniversaries," she gently reminded him.
"I know," Louis just replied, letting his eyes wander. "It's just..." He stopped again as his eyes met squarely again with hers. "The whole situation now, it makes you think about a lot of things. Like the decision to put off having children. Thinking about it now, it really was the best decision we could have made."
Tawny looked into Louis's eyes a little longer, then down at their interlocking hands. She then gently lifted their hands from the armrest and lowered herself from the chair onto her knees, facing him eye to eye, and took both of his hands in hers.
"Louis," she began. "We're going to have children eventually. Don't forget we're fighting for them, too. For a future they can grow up in."
Louis nodded slightly, his eyes flickering again between their hands and her eyes. It wasn't so much uncertainty showing on his face, but something else.
"The truth is," he said. "It's not really in our hands at this point, is it? Who knows when this madness is going to end. And honestly, it doesn't matter to me so much if we get to have kids or not. Nothing matters to me as much as you do, Tawny. Nothing and nobody."
Tawny kept her eyes locked onto his, not quite knowing what to say. It was that burning intensity in his eyes, as embattled and determined as ever.
Louis let out a sigh, as if trying to rein in the magnitude of what he was saying. "My parents are retired, Ren and Donnie are all settled down with their families," he went on. "They're all going to be fine. They've always been fine without me. But the two of us, we've relied on each other for everything since day one. And I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. I can't imagine having kids to be afraid for, on top of everything else going on right now."
"So that's what it is," Tawny interjected, as gently as possible. "It's fear."
Louis nodded again, even though the look in his eyes kept suggesting otherwise. "I wish I wasn't afraid all the time," he just went on, calmly. "And you make me not want to be afraid. You're the kind of person I would trust with the fate of the entire world in your hands. But you're also everything I'm afraid of losing. The only thing and everything. You're everything to me and more."
He let out another sigh. "People involved in activism are getting killed, Tawny. On the way to work and right in front of their homes. And then the police doesn't even want to know who did it. The point is, it can get even worse and we don't know what's coming next."
Tawny looked downward and shifted her hands onto his wrists. "You're right," she began. "It's the uncertainty of it all. We know what this state is capable of, we just don't know how much further they'll go." She quietly let out a deep breath. "People like us have been privileged for long enough to not have to deal with actual repression. All those years of activism, and the worst that's happened to me is the occasional pushing and shoving at demonstrations."
"We haven't exactly lived in the hotspots of unrest, in all fairness," Louis gently interjected. "You've always done what you could."
Tawny let her eyes wander again. "The truth is," she went on. "I don't know what's coming any better than you do. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to do what I'm doing now. I can't say how well I'd put up if they were to lock me up one day and torture me. There's just no way of knowing, though I've thought about it at times."
She looked into his eyes a little longer. They spoke back to hers with a blank intensity, just waiting expectantly for whatever it was she was going to say next.
"But one thing I do know is there's nothing they can do to take you away from me, Louis. You're an inseparable part of me that nobody can rip out, not even by cutting me up into pieces. No matter what happens to me, I know you're always going to be there."
Louis closed his eyes as they welled up with tears. Tawny put her arms around him and held him tightly, her cheek placed firmly against his and soaking up any of the tears that flowed out. She drew slowly back and looked into his eyes, trying to draw strength from the burning intensity in them.
"Louis," she went on, almost in a whisper. "Remember back when we were in junior high? Remember all those times we were so close to losing each other, because of some silly conflict, or me going away to art school, or you moving to DC?" Her lips turned into an affectionate smile. "It sometimes felt like a corny soap opera, and it might sound corny that I'm saying it now. But in the midst of all that, you made me understand, Louis. You made me understand what it is to love and stay true to that love, through all the highs and lows. You made me understand what it is to identify with something greater than myself. I was a peace activist before I became your companion, but there's nothing that made me into what I am now as much as you did. And it's an incredibly liberating feeling, knowing that because of what you mean to me, there's nothing to be afraid of. They can take me away, but they can't take away the most precious part of me."
Louis closed his eyes shut and drew her into an embrace, as if the words were too much. But she knew, deep down, that he felt the same way. They always felt the same way. She drew back, looking into his eyes with their interlocking hands between them, right back where they started.
"It's true," Louis said softly, but with conviction. "It's true, as much as it hurts to even think about it. No matter what happens to either of us... We'll always have each other."
Tawny smiled again, letting the words just sink in. She then gently extricated her hands from Louis's and reached toward her desk, opening one of the drawers to find an old photo album that she had been keeping there in recent weeks, browsing through it occasionally during breaks from work. She shifted over on her knees next to Louis so that he could see it, and then opened the album to reveal an old picture of the two of them together at an anti-war demonstration in 2003, at the height of the Iraq War, shortly after they had gotten together. She slowly flipped through the pages, showing photos from one demonstration after another, from one year to the next. The photos had all the aura of a past era, with the old camera quality and the date imprints at the bottom corner.
"I can't believe we're only 14, 15 in these pictures," Louis mused. "I can't believe you're only 14 years old and you're at these protests. All I'm doing there is accompanying you." He fell silent, the thoughts slowly translating themselves into words.
"We wouldn't be in such a mess as a country right now if... if only we were all like you."
Tawny let out a tired chuckle, still looking down at the pictures. "We would be in a different kind of mess then, wouldn't we."
Louis turned to look at her, his eyes speaking to her with a dead seriousness. "Maybe it's just silly," he went on, with the same thoughtful evenness in his voice. "But to me, you stand for a different kind of America that never was. Everything that could have been, the stuff that lives on only in our dreams. And I still try to believe there's a little bit of you in all of us. Even if we don't know it yet." His lips turned ever so slightly into a smile, in between the intensity of his gaze. "Who knows, maybe we will someday."
Tawny looked searchingly into his eyes, not knowing what to say. It was the same sparkle in them, the same something that could always spawn such crazy feelings, as if for the first time all over again. He was making her sound more important than she was, of course, but she didn't want to tell him that. It was somehow all too much, and yet it was this very excess that she felt the urge to embrace and envelop, before it would dissipate into the darkness of the night. All she wanted to do was capture this moment for as long as possible, like no camera could. She put her arms around Louis and closed her eyes, holding him in a tight embrace, not wanting to let go.
She kept her eyes shut, thinking of earlier times.
Tawny sat on the edge of her bed, dressed in her long white nightgown, looking into the mirror. Louis had come over to her place for one of their Friday sleepovers to mark the end of midterms week. Another evening of watching Twilight Zone episodes and philosophizing about life had come to an end. Louis had gone out for a shower, leaving her alone in her room.
She stared at herself in the mirror, studying the little details of her face, following her own eyes as they wandered. From an early age, she had spent a lot of time staring at the mirror, the piercing gaze of her blue eyes trying to pull apart the image that appeared so whole on the glass surface. Sometimes, she could feel her mind playing tricks on her if she stared long enough, making her see parts of her face moving when they actually weren't. She had come to take an odd liking to it, as if it made palpable for her the invisible gap between herself and that image, that object that was somehow closer than it appeared and yet never quite reachable. And on nights like this one, after spending an entire evening with Louis, that gap seemed to dissolve in the trail of delight that he left behind, only for her to put it back together again, little by little.
She rose from the bed and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain to the side. She looked up at the clear night sky, the deep black interspersed with the faraway light of the stars. The sky always had this magnetic attraction, making her turn toward it and look for the stars even though they could never gaze back at her. There was something about the feeling of being an insignificant little speck in the grand scheme of things, a grand scheme that was always so elusive, fluid and yet to be written, embedded in the infinitude of a sky stretched out in all possible directions like an endless canvas.
She pulled the curtain back over the window and looked down at the ground, staring at nothing particular, just contemplating the delicate resting of her feet on the floor. She then lowered herself to her knees and joined her hands on her lap, one hand clutching the other. She closed her eyes and looked up toward the sky, the darkness in front of her merging into the infinitude of the night. A stream of half-images rushed through her head, whizzing by before they could be pinned down into thoughts. She could feel the blood in her interlocking hands running in unison, with a combined force that overflowed the vessels containing them. The walls of her heart gave way and spilled out its contents, gushing out like milk into the rest of her body. As her leg muscles went numb, the ground beneath it seemed to dissolve, her body floating in a state of suspension, held up only by the interlocking of the two hands. For a moment, she could feel everything give way to light, a light that shone right through the night sky and never went out, especially on nights like this one.
"Tawny?"
A familiar voice sounded, leaving a trail of echoes inside her head. The voice breathed flesh back into her bones and formed her lips into an instinctive smile, restoring with it her bodily senses, one after another. Her arms and legs fell back into place and rushed everything back to where it came from, the tight interlocking of both hands guiding it along its way.
She rose to her feet and turned around, just in time for the door to open, with Louis standing there in the doorway. He was dressed in his pyjamas, his hair still slightly wet from the shower. He had that adorable lost-dog kind of look on his face, as if contemplating where he had just landed.
Tawny suppressed a chuckle, her lips turning instead into an ever so slight smile. "Ready to go to bed?" she asked innocently, but with a depth she herself couldn't fathom.
Louis smiled slightly back and strolled casually into the room, climbing onto the bed. Tawny lied down onto her side and took hold of Louis's hand as he lay next to her, his face turned toward hers.
"Were you busy admiring your beautiful self in the mirror?" he asked, with the most natural straight face he could muster.
She smiled. "Not quite." She gently extricated her hand from his and ran her fingers through the strands of his curly hair protruding outward, looking intently into his eyes.
"You're the one who taught me that love is narcissistic," he went on. "Isn't that right?"
She said nothing, still gently playing with his hair. Those eyes always had the same deep sparkle in them, the same little something that could make her feel such crazy things and think such crazy thoughts. Like the knowledge that she could trust this rascal with her life, that it was somehow the one thing she always knew she could trust him with, even back in his days as a class clown. And it was the most liberating feeling in the world.
"In a way, it is." She put her hand right back where his was, grasping it firmly. "But that doesn't mean it's inaccurate. It doesn't mean you're not actually a beautiful person, Louis. On the contrary." She gave him a meaningful smile.
Louis was looking intently into her eyes. It was that look of intensity that only she could induce from him, the look that told her so many things at once through the delightful silence.
"That's deep," he finally said. "I'll think about it on my way to dreamland, okay?"
"Good night, my love."
"Sweet dreams."