the SEVEN-FIVE project

2005-07-15 - 1:23 p.m.

"I will leave you two to talk." Nikki moved out of his way and he went down the ladder silently.

"I take it you heard all that?" I lowered my head and stared at my shoes.
"Yeah, I've known for a while though." She came closer to me, not in my range of vision, but closer.
"Dare I ask, but what have you known for a while?" One of us had to say it out loud, and it wasn't going to be me.
"Well I suppose one of us has to say it out loud. I've known that you like me; actually it's more than that. You may not know it but for the four days you were unconscious after Vlad choked you out you were throwing off all kinds of thoughts. That's why I took you into Dreamspace; to try and control your thoughts. If I hadn't then someone with any amount of psychic or magical ability would have been able to pick up on them. You were giving off some pretty strong feelings about me and Amy, but nothing but confusion about Mary." She sat down in front of me and pulled me to the ground.
"I'm sorry." That was all I could muster. At heart I'm pretty much a coward and this just kind of proved it to me.
"You have nothing to be sorry for. I feel the same way, but at the moment our feelings are the least of our worries."
"I'm not sorry for having these feelings; I'm sorry for not being able to understand them. The last time I had any kind of feelings for anyone it ended poorly, so I've kind of sheltered myself from them for a while and all of this is taking me by surprise."
"This ring was a gift from my boyfriend Matt," She pulled a black ring off of her left ring finger and handed it to me, "Two weeks after he gave it to me he died in a car accident. He had just dropped me off and was on his way home when a drunk driver hit him head on; neither of them survived. I promised not to feel anything about anyone after that happened, but you can't control what your heart does; it just does what it wants to."
I slid the ring back on her finger, "Come on, I need to show you something inside."
She went down the ladder first and we both went inside; The Priest was going back outside as we were going in. I guided her into the living area and sat down next to her on the couch with my guitar case in front of us.
"Are you finally going to show me what's in that thing?" She nudged the case with her foot.
"Yeah, but you have to promise to wait for the explanation before you ask any questions."
"I promise." She said as I leaned forward to open it.
A pile of pictured fell out as I opened the case, when it was finally open all the way she gasped and started digging through the piles. "These are all the pictures and letters and momentos from the people who matter the most to me. Originally it was all in a lunchbox, then a shoebox, but eventually there were too many and I just put them in here. That's why this case is so important to me." I sat back while she sifted through pictures.
"Who are all these people?"
"Family and friends and people I've met along the way. There are a lot of pictures of Amy, Mary, and I, I know that. There should be some of my parents near the right side."
She picked a few pictures of my parents, Natalie and I and flipped through them, "You look a lot like your dad and Natalie looks almost exactly like your mom, that's kind of creepy. Hey, what's this?"
She grabbed a key that was hanging from the top of the case and had fallen into the pictures. Rather than having a normal round end to it this key was remolded into heart shape. "That is what I wanted to show you. When Mary and I started getting serious I gave her that key, it goes to this lock." I pulled the lock out from under my shirt; it had the same heart painted on it. "It was, at the time, the key to my heart. When I found her and Amy together I locked up the lock in here before my incident. When I woke up in the hospital Amy brought me the key and said she was sorry. I've worn the lock since then, but kept the key hidden in here so no one could fine it ever again.
"Mary never visited you in the hospital?" She was still flipping through pictures and had found some sketches.
"No, she said she couldn't believe that I would do something like that to her. That's kind of why I stopped hanging around with that group."
"So you're really not doing this to save Mary like you've been saying, you're doing this because Amy asked you to?" She sat back and looked at my face.
"Yeah, Mary has always found me when I moved, but Amy has always been there for me. She's one of the best friends I have; hell she's one of the few friends I have. She wanted help with this, so I'm here to help her, too bad it seems to have backfired."

previous - next