I was exhausted when I boarded the jet at two in the morning. There was a chair and a sofa in the plane. I took the sofa, and Richard took the chair. For an hour I wrote a report based on a stupid graph Gene had given me the day before. And then I slept the rest of the entire plane ride.
My eyes fluttered open, and I checked the clock on the wall. We had one more hour left. I was red with embarrassment all of a sudden. I could just imagine myself snoring for nine hours. Oh God, what if I had been sleep talking? I turned even redder. My hair was mangled, and I saw Richard chuckling silently to himself as he sat in his chair.
"I wouldn't be laughing, you know. Your bed head is almost as bad as mine," I snapped impatiently.
It was true. His black hair stuck up on the right of his head, with little patches going in the other direction.
He laughed, either at my impatience or what I had just said. Maybe it was both. Soon I found myself laughing with him.
"You haven't changed a bit. You still talk in your sleep, huh?" he said as the plane tilted sideways.
I groaned inwardly and outwardly. Sleep talking was one of the things I frequently did whenever I was worn out. And I was wiped out this morning.
"No way." I slapped my hand to my forehead. "Are you serious? What was I saying?"
He smirked as the jet slowly began to descend. "You don't wanna know."
"No, seriously, tell me." I looked at him like I was challenging him.
"You said my name. And then you said Roy's name." He looked kind of irritated about that last part.
I laughed, because of how embarrassed I was about saying his name when he was in clear hearing distance and because of how Roy's name annoyed him so easily. I almost couldn't believe it. He was jealous!
But I pushed the subject matter aside. "Can you still read minds?"
"Yeah. But I have more control over it now."
I remembered how he used to talk about his talent four years ago. He used to describe it as noisy, annoying, and how he used to just hear random thoughts and whines of people. I smiled inside.
"Do you think you can read mine now?" I asked.
"I don't know. Let me try." He concentrated his eyes into mine and paused. I sat up straight on the sofa.
His eyes spelled out pure awkwardness at first. But then they became beautiful. His eyes were dark blue before, but now they were slowly turning into a nice, icy blue. I could have sworn I was under some kind of spell.
My eyes began to widen when I realized what we were doing. What would this look like to other people? I think we both realized the same thing. We looked away at the same moment.
"I still can't read you," he mumbled.
He spun the chair in the opposite direction with his feet, and I lay back down on the couch, putting the blanket over my head.
As soon as we landed, we were sent straight to the Bordeaux Building of Commerce.
The meeting took place the two hundred story building in the bustling city of Paris. When Richard and I reached the top floor, we met with the doorman, who bowed and opened the ten-feet tall double doors, revealing a very large circular table that sat about twenty. I was ordered not to sit next to Richard, as we had planned; instead I sat directly across from him. The meeting was to last for six hours, or as long as it took all of the leaders to come to a decision.
The Meeting of Circle Internationals was not lived up to its name. It was just a bunch of fat, middle-aged men consumed with their money and had no lives. There were a few slim men, some just a little bit older than Richard and me. They all seemed to give me a certain thirsty look, as if they had all been cooped up in their offices for too long.
I sat still for five minutes and already found myself bored. Was I really supposed to sit here for seven hours?
But I realized a strange but comforting fact of life: You could get used to almost anything if you were exposed to it for at least one minute. You could get used to sitting in a big room full of the richest men in the world. You could even do that if one of those men happened to be your ex boyfriend and you happened to get closer than you wanted to him the night before.
For the first hour, I agonized.
Sometime in the second hour, my muscles began to feel less tight, one at a time un-kinking.
In the third hour, something else happened. I began to watch Richard. I watched him talk. I watched him get slightly angry, slam his fist down lightly on the table, and then cool off. And then I watched him watch me. I saw how he looked at the different aspects of my face, my skin, my body.
As much as I ordinarily dreaded being looked at, this felt different. It was a different way of looking. He looked at me like he was trying to decipher every part of me. His intensity built, and surprisingly, I began to relax. I began to realize that business was his job, his life. He was really good at it. This freed my mind to wander all around the big room. Were all relationships this way, to some extent? I wasn't even sure if we had established a new one, or mended our previous one at the least.
The room was like a sunroom. Instead of normal plain white walls, the walls and roof were made of glass. I liked the way the sun felt on my skin. It was probably sometime in the early afternoon when I looked out the window. Paris was different than Gotham. In Gotham, things were always busy, as if life was going by too fast. There were always too many things to do in one day; it always seemed like one moment you opened your eyes to wake up in the morning, and when you blinked the moon was already out. Paris seemed more peaceful, more serene. I always imagined the most graceful people to live in such a lovely city. It was true when they called it the city of romance. I saw at least ten couples cuddling every time I stepped out of the hotel.
He called on me once. It's true. Miss Anders, please give them the evidence, he had requested. There was a slight twinkle in his eyes telling me to give my report. I flipped through my folder and read the report I wrote. I saw him glance at me for a second. I began to feel self-conscious.
An intense pressure between us began to build. It was one that had begun to build a long time ago, four years back.
In the fourth hour, he looked back at my face at the same moment I was looking at his. We were both surprised at first and then looked away. Then, at the same moment, we both looked back. And then we looked away. Again. He had been paying some attention to what was being discussed and then stopped. He lost his way. He looked confused and then found his way back into the conversation.
The intensity continued to build.
In the fifth hour, I thought about him touching me. Just when I didn't think my cheeks could get any redder, more blood came to my face. I wanted to crawl underneath the table and hide there the entire meeting, and at the same time I felt bold enough to stay.
There was a pressure between us.
I hadn't been paying attention to the discussion until he looked up at me suddenly with questioning eyes. "Do you agree Miss Anders?"
I suddenly realized that he was talking to me. I nodded my head slowly, unaware of what I was agreeing to. "Yes…yes, I believe so."
I got a soft nudge to my arm from the man sitting next to me. He sensed my confusion. "You know, it would help if you paid more attention."
What had he really meant by that? Was I really that obvious? I looked at Richard again. I was under a spell. He was under a spell too. We were under different spells.
It still kept on building.
And for the next hour, the sixth hour, he looked at me and I looked at him back. And it was like a staring contest, the stakes seemed to rise and rise until it was almost unbearable. The intensity was still building. But neither of us looked away. My eyes began to hurt, and I could feel my skin burning hotly.
And then it was too much. The intensity exploded.
I stood up abruptly from my chair, pushing it back and making it hit the glass wall roughly. The room was silent. I had interrupted a big argument between two sides of the table. "I'm sorry…please excuse me," I said in a frustrated yet smooth voice.
I didn't even bother to look at Richard. He was probably still wearing those stupid sunglasses, as if he needed a reason to hide eyes as beautiful as his. I stormed out of the room hotly and out the doors. It was too much for me to handle. The intensity, that is. I walked out to the other side of the hall, away from the guards.
I didn't want anybody to see me like this. I couldn't even tell what I was feeling right now. Desire was just the dumbest thing. You wanted what you wanted until it was yours. And then you didn't want anymore. What was happening to me? Was this normal for most people?
And then out of the blue, I heard footsteps out in the hall. They were soft and light and reckless and uncertain. But they were coming down from the room and into my direction. I saw Richard, and Richard saw me. He walked towards me, slowly and carefully, as if I was a ticking bomb that might go off any second.
The halls were silent.
'Stop! Stop! Run away now!' I was giving myself a headache from mentally yelling at myself.
He came closer and closer until he was about only two feet away from me. I stayed frozen against the wall. I could almost imagine what expression I had on my face. Probably a doomed look, a confused and frightened look. I was scared of what was about to happen. My eyes kept on staring into his. My brain was thinking so many thoughts.
When he finally took off his sunglasses, his cheeks were as flushed as mine. He was as breathless as me. His eyes were the lightest blue I could ever imagine them to be, and he stared at my green ones as if they were the most beautiful things on Earth. We were under the same spell.
And then time suddenly seemed to move out of Paris's graceful, slow timing. It was fast, bolting. I didn't have control over my body anymore. I felt the need to run far away from him suddenly. But I stayed still, waiting.
He came over to me, still not breaking eye contact. He put his hand lightly around my waist and leaned down and kissed me.
A//N: Please review! All reviews are loved and appreciated. :
-sTaRfIrExrObIn