The first time he saw her she was wearing a blue dress. Her long dark hair was pulled away from her face with a matching blue ribbon and her long dark curls swished down her back. He noticed her because it was clear she didn't want to be noticed. She had the looks of someone who could accomplish anything she wanted. She looked like she should be the life of the party, the girl who sat in the center of the room, all eyes staring at her in rapt attention, calling onlookers with her loud laugh, daring them to question her authority. But instead, she stood at the back of the crowd, watching everyone with those big brown eyes of hers.
The first time he heard her talk was during play rehearsal. They were doing a Shakespearian rendition. She was an extra but the leading lady had not shown up and she volunteered as a stand in. It was clear within a few stanzas that she would never be an unnamed extra again. Her voice seduced all the members of the troop and she blushed in response to their expressions of bewilderment.
The first time she spoke to him was in the library. There was a stack of books at her table and she looked exhausted. Her hair was pulled back into a messy braid and she was working furiously into a notebook, her handwriting was so messy he couldn't even begin to decipher it. She caught him watching her and she smiled in response. "You're the poet, aren't you? Lemony? I'm Beatrice." And that was the start of it.
She loved his poetry. He loved her voice. They shared the same taste in classic literature and love of sonnets. She loved solving puzzles and he loved creating them. He would write pages of encrypted codes and hide them all over, daring her to discover his true feelings. She would laugh every time she deciphered something incorrectly and playfully shove him until he told her the correct solution.
She had an unabashed passion for doing the right thing. She was passionate, fiercely loyal, and made all of her decisions based on her feelings. He was calculative. He thought about his safety, her safety. He wanted them to live forever. He wanted them to be safe. He wanted her to love him back as much as he loved her. When she returned his wedding ring and told him it wouldn't work he wanted to slap her. When she cried over his false obituary, he wanted to comfort her. When she married another man and had his children, he wanted to hate her. And when she died, her beautiful entity rising up to the heaven with the flames that engulfed her, he wanted to follow, to live immortally in the wisps of smoke that remained.