Chapter Six - One Way Trip
Racing through breakfast the next day, I flew out the door the first thing once I had dropped my knife and fork, thinking to head for the rose bushes, or the lily pond.
"Sir, is your family's luggage all here?"
"Saa..."
I skidded to a stop.
"Not quite. There's this one suitcase missing. My brother's. It's brown with 'Fuji Yuuta' written on it."
As the porter left, I approached the boy slowly. "Good morning. You're..."
"Leaving, yes," he confirmed. "I'll be sorry to go," he assured, sounding genuinely so.
"Is this the one, sir?" The porter returned.
"Yes, it's the right one."
We both watched it being loaded onto a bus on the road.
The boy turned to me. "It's been nice meeting you."
"The pleasure's all mine."
Pleasure? I felt ready to cry. "Good bye," I said. Hastily waving, I hurried back towards the hotel before he could see my lower lip trembling.
"Good bye..." his voice carried to me in the wind. Already it was faint, as though he was slowly ceasing to exist.
Once inside the building, I collapsed against a wall, my chest heaving, and my nose stinging. I closed my eyes, feeling the cool marble behind my back and head. I missed him. He hadn't even gone yet and I missed him...
Would he miss me?
"It's been nice meeting you."
"The pleasure's all mine."
Maybe I had been right. Maybe the pleasure had really all been mine. Here I was, choking and gasping for breath, while he, totally unbothered by the fact that all the time we had spent together during the last day had boiled down to five seconds of 'good bye', was boarding a bus, going on a one way trip from which he would never return.
Well, maybe he would one day return to this resort.
But never to me.
I let out a long, rattling sigh.
Well, if you take a wrong turn and go down the wrong path, you either retrace your steps or swing into a back alley and hope that it goes in the same general direction as your intended destination. Simple.
The thing was, there is no retracing your steps in time. Or your memory.
Shoving hard against the wall, I broke into a run, flying out the door and down the path towards the bus. Its engine started. I ran, and prayed.
His email. His cell-phone number. His name. Anything.
I reached the pavement as the bus accelerated. "Wait!" I choked, but my voice was drowned by the roar of tires against gravel. I could only watch. I could only helplessly watch, as the vehicle drove down and road, and out of sight.
He was gone.
After a long while, I lifted my feet wearily back up to my room.
My heart felt like lead, but my eyes were dry.
And to think that it had even been love at first sight...
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I know it was kind of abrupt, the ending. And I suppose everyone expected it to be a get together story too. But the point that I'm trying to make here, before you all kill me for this, is that it doesn't HAVE to be a get together story, even if it looks like one. It's just, you know most fanfiction tells you about how the regular meets the girl and they fall in love and all, but it just doesn't happen that way, or shouldn't, in real life. Ok, so you could argue that the point of reading fanfiction is that it doesn't reflect real life. Then let's just say that I got bored with the norm. Where, you know, it really is love at first sight.