Glad you all liked the prologue! Chapter 1...total fluff, but necessary fluff.

"Yet man was born to trouble like sparks fly upwards innocent..."

Clare's eyes were easily the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Cliché, I know, that her eyes would be the first thing I talk about. If you knew her, though, you would understand that her eyes were like these tiny little portals to happiness. The bluest blue in the world could not out-blue her eyes. They were bright and beautiful. I could go on forever about how much I loved them. About how much I loved her.

I wasn't normally this cheesy. Clare brought out every 'Casablanca'-esque line in me, and I caught myself wanting to recite Walt Whitman to her. It was a little pathetic, to be honest. I could be the kid in the street fight one second, but bring Clare into the equation and I was about as threatening as a baby hamster.

She turned to me, head tilted, a curl in front of her face. I brushed it away and saw her smile. It was perfect, as usual, and a smile appeared on my face in reciprocation.

"You never answered my question," she said, raising her eyebrows at me.

To be honest, I didn't even realize she had asked me anything. I was too busy focusing on the sunlight in her hair, the flush of her cheeks, the curve of her hips…

"Uh…sorry. What was that…uh, question, again?" I asked blinking.

"Were you even listening, Eli?" She sounded annoyed. Great. It took all of three seconds for me to get her pissed off.

"I asked what you want to do when you get older," she repeated.

I thought about it for a second, but nothing really popped up. There was no one career I could picture myself settling into. I didn't really contemplate my future all that much. My dad was on the radio, but there was no way in hell I was going to follow in his footsteps. No fucking way.

"I don't know, Clare…what do you want to do?" I figured I'd change the subject. It was a whole lot easier to remain in the present than stress myself out with future plans. Unless they were future plans that involved a certain virginal church girl...then I was all ears.

"That's not an answer!" She giggled and playfully smacked me on my shoulder. My gray dead hand tee provided no armor to protect me from the wrath of my beautiful girlfriend, and her punch left a light pink mark. Damn, she actually had a good arm…

"You know what I want to do right now, Clare?" I spoke softly as I inched my face closer to hers. Her pupils dilated and her eyelashes fluttered and her cheeks flushed. She was breath taking.

I was winning her over. I could just tell. Her resolve about me actually answering her question started to dissipate and all that was left was passion.

Pure and innocent, she exhaled, "What?"

"This," I whispered before softly pressing my lips against hers. Her hands found their way to my head and she played with my hair as a placed my hands on those hips that had teased me so much before.

Kissing Clare was like kissing crystal. The brightest, most wonderful thing in the world. All the visuals that surrounded us were multiplied and everything else disappeared into the white light. It was blinding, in fact. Everything became irrelevant except for her and I. We were all that needed to exist. I let her light surround me, and any sort of darkness that seemed to constantly and consistently hang over me flickered and burned out.

XXX

"She sounds great, Eli," Ms. Carroll said as she finished a note and looked up at me.

"She is," I mumbled. She was the greatest thing in my life.

My black subsistence could only attract someone so perfectly light for so long, though. Someone so blinding was not meant to be wrapped up in the cynical, hateful, and threatening world of Elijah Goldsworthy. She was always too good for me, anyway.

I fidgeted with my ring again, trying to find some sort of a place of comfort in this sea of soreness.

That's the thing about reliving pain. You have to open yourself back up, stitch by stitch. There's no way to just, 'rip the bandage off,' as Adam had once instructed Clare. I had to do this excruciatingly slow, allowing each separate pain to settle into the greater wound that my soul had become.

"Do you want to continue?" Ms. Carroll asked carefully. She clearly knew that this story was headed for a fall from grace, and fast. I wouldn't be sitting here, in this room with carpets on the fucking walls, if something extremely messed-up hadn't happened to me.

The tips of my fingers froze and began going numb as I began to remember what had happened after that. I placed them in my pockets and frowned. A short pause, and a few pen-taps later, I continued the epic of my absolute ruin in a voice slightly hoarser than before.

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