When Clyde Parker, the wayward son and the rotten-apple of the Parker family-tree, storms his way back into Avery Fields, he sets out a flurry of butterfly effect in Dawn Marshal's life.
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THE ELVIS PRESLEY SONG blurred out in the background, the lyrics dwindling out and her thoughts overlapping one another. Silent filled in the spaces between them but none of them were too keen to disrupt it.
Drunk on nostalgia and tipsy on her mother's fancy red wine, they played footsie under the side table, the last slice of pizza sat in between waiting to be devoured. Both of their eyes kaleidoscopes of frenzied emotions.
They had forgotten to turn the faucet off and now the unsaid words were pouring out of their souls, and they were drowning in the entirety of it.
It was in that fleeting moment, Dawn Marshal realized that love wasn't just dipping ones tippy toes in the shallow waters and expect not to fall in. The ocean tides dragged her legs and cradled her body plunging her right in the midst of it.
She had fallen in and now staying afloat came to be a struggle battering against the furious ocean waves, she was too tired to battle the tide and the wind behind her sail had long abandoned her. She realized she was drowning and it was too late. The ocean had already devoured her.
An ineffable expression crossed her features. He couldn't read her anymore. He parted his lips but his mouth ran dry and he swallowed the words that laid on the tip of his tongue. Clyde Parker couldn't think.
He remembered the streetlights filtering through the cracks of her blinds and dancing on her ceiling, he remembered the stars jumping out of the night sky and falling into her eyes, he remembered the fairy lights on her headstand flickering like fireflies in the bushes and melting into her porcelain skin.
And she was beautiful, he couldn't sculpt her out in twisted metaphors, he couldn't compare her to dancing lights of aurora borealis, to a night twinkling with a thousand stars, to a deserted city at five a.m, to the cracking of dawn or the first day of spring, to a city covered in a blanket of snow, the sunset from the seashore or the sand between his feet.
He couldn't compare her to Paris in rain or running through the sunflower fields in midsummer, to Times Square on New Year's Eve or the London eye basking in the city lights. She was beautiful in the way she just was.
He thought the shadows of his past had killed his light and then he saw her. With her, the world could fall apart around him and he would still be alright.
She remembered the city lights fleeting through her blinds and drenching his face in Technicolor, she remembered the way he looked at her. He looked at her in a way no one had looked at her before and under the thicket of her lashes, she shyly gazed at him. His face was always devoid of any emotions, but his deep-set blue eyes they were a raging storm of emotions, like a glacier melting from the mountain tops.
She nervously gulped and scarfed down the last slice of pepperoni pizza, tormented under his fiery gaze. He cleared his throat and extended his hand as a familiar song shuffled on the stereo, "Do you want to maybe...?" She choked on her pizza.
