Chapter 8 Across The Glassy Window
Facing each other and standing on opposite sides of the doorway, they seemingly resembled a picture in a frame to each other’s eyes, a vague portrait with a deep but sad history, capturing what was once upon a time that had passed. Prudence broke the stillness by poking her head up to meet Oliver’s height, and his glazed and murky eyes became her entire vision against a starry background of flashing thunder reflecting off the walls, but it was as if the connection was shared by accident. The backward step she took to break the connection made her look like she had metal springs under her heels.
“Hey, Oliver. Sorry to bug you this late at night, but I…” Prudence panted with a hoarse voice that was more alto than usual. Although she sounded like she had rehearsed this speech countless times, it still came out with a trailing stutter, running out of breath just before she could finish. It didn’t matter; the reply she received was his wordlessness. All she could hear were faint noises of spindrifts, his familiar rain chains and wind chime singing distantly from his bedroom in between the bolts of thunder, mixed with his erratic breaths, elements that reminded her time had not stood still, contrary to what she had originally assumed.
She could sense something was wrong with him. His sturdy outline was quivering. Once the shadow of her own voice dissipated into the empty common corridor, her eyes carefully approached his feet. The ghostly white umbrella illuminated like a lantern of light beside him, pulling her attention to it.
“Oliver, you’re… heading out this late in the night? It’s… way past midnight already,” she checked her watch briefly before stopping her queries, realizing his whereabouts and intentions were not for her to question. After all, she was only his neighbor.
Prudence’s hard alto voice that carried with it the current time stamp was circling around Oliver’s head, and it managed to wake him up from what felt like a space of dizzying hallucinations. He swallowed abruptly and checked his watch too, quickly gluing the pieces of his head back together. She was right; time had sped ahead to the next day, while he was reading.
She guided her eyes down to her palm, sensing the need to fully explain why she was lingering by his door this late at night. Inadvertently, she crept closer to him, giving him no choice but to move back. He could see something glimmering magically in her hand.
“Zoe had no right to jostle this beautiful compass away from you and give you so much trouble tonight.”
“Jostle? We didn’t jostle…” Oliver tipped his body aside absentmindedly, letting Prudence inside. Her clothes were slightly wet, most likely from the pouring rain, and he could smell the scent of water in the air that hugged her path.
“I was sure she pried it out of your hands, that troublemaker,” said Prudence before she winced at another roar of thunder cascading along the walls of his flat.
Oliver’s reaction to the thunder, however, was meaningfully different. Seeing her wince, he just wanted to hold her, but since he couldn’t explain his reasons why, he refrained from doing so.
“Not at all. Zoe was good… the entire time. I was reading to her, and I… wanted to… you know… continue reading the story, because I was getting to the good part… so she offered to exchange the book for my…” he skipped to a pause before inserting gingerly, “my compass.”
“You gave this up for a fairy tale book?” Prudence quipped as if she was talking to a child.
“What’s wrong with me reading fairy tales?” he glanced at the book’s cover lying on the pile of newspapers, gladly seeing the girl in the illustration had settled back to reality.
“Absolutely nothing wrong, Oliver,” smiled Prudence regrettably, with the weight of the air between them slowly shifting inexplicably.
“But… I think Zoe wasted no time breaking it.”
“No. It was broken before I gave it to her,” he blurted.
“Oh, so that’s why the needle keeps getting stuck, always pointing in one direction,” Prudence innocently snapped it open in front of Oliver. “There it is again! Stuck! But that certainly can’t be north!”
“Pointing… in one direction?” Oliver stared at her hand in disbelief to register what she had just said. The expression on his face contorted as if she had just hammered his head with a nutcracker
“Yes, look!” Prudence pointed smoothly as she focused on the compass, unsure why Oliver was suddenly so worked up.
Without thinking, Oliver leaned towards her, breathing in her scent of rain that was her temporary accessory. The sight was something he was evidently not ready to see. The sight came with consequences, and he knew it, but it was too late. He had seen it. Inside Prudence’s hand, the needle of the Amoré was pointing straight at him. There was no mistake. There was no doubt. A small adjustment by him to the left was enough to move the needle slightly to the left too.
“What is it?” Prudence swallowed the expanding lump grinding in her throat that was formed as a response to his skin closing in on her in the dark. She fidgeted slightly, but eventually summoned the courage to look at him, only to see him respond to her question with his brown eyes that seemingly started to tremble without command. It was all it took to make her realize that she had forgotten to put up her guard of nonchalance tonight, and something she had been trying so hard to avoid might have unfortunately started right before her eyes as a result.
The air between them thickened with emotions too complicated to explain, and both could detect the volatile changing chemicals underneath their skin reacting to it. The lightning continued to brighten his flat at regular intervals, as if it was making sure both could recognize each other’s feelings permeating through their eyes, signaling the change in the dynamics of their platonic relationship.
“Prudence… I…” his lips stopped functioning as his windpipe lost its supply of oxygen because of the thickening air. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t shut his leaking gaze; he wasn’t even trying to search for answers through her eyes because the Amoré already managed to provide it for him.
She took a step back and broke off his gaze, one she was determined to not allow herself to be captured by, even though her heart was complaining loudly in her ears. It was asking her for reasons why, the familiar metal clanking sounds again, except she could not blame the intruding sounds on the door keys this time, because tonight, she carried no key chain across her chest.
“Oliver, I’m… I have to go,” Prudence burst scratchily, turning her head down to conceal the shades of red dotting across her cheeks.
“Goodnight,” she closed the locket and dumped it into his hand before rushing out to the common corridor, her feet reluctantly following her instructions to move.
“Pru, wait!” Oliver tailed her clumsily, but what to do next was a blank in his mind. Standing outside, he knew he had to say something, but all he could do was to watch her soundlessly as she trudged towards her flat with her face down the entire time. Without looking at his direction, she disappeared inside.
Oliver’s mind was not functioning anymore. His entire body was tingling moistly with so much sweat he thought he might soon be electrocuted by the flashes of lightning thundering outside. It was unclear how long he stood motionless in the corridor, studying the gray tile where Prudence last stood, but his reckoning was when Yuriko and Prudence’s faces appeared to have overlapped into one.
Mysteriously, Prudence’s unexpected visit suddenly made him lose the urgency to run outside to meet the rainstorm with the white umbrella and simulate what happened to Sen and the celestial beings in the story. Thinking back, it was indeed a foolish thing to consider, even by wizardry standards. Instead, he could see his feet heading back indoors, guiding his troubled form carefully to his bedroom to recover, and fully return to reality.
The thunderstorm had passed without incident, leaving no traces of it behind. Sleep ought to be the next thing Oliver should do. His bed was enticing because he was very tired, but something else attracted his attention once inside his bedroom. Despite the fluttering echoes of the wind chime and rain chains seemingly fighting for his focus, it was the view through his window, a light the shape of a square not too far away that caught his eyes. Examining it with saddened interest as if he was witnessing this for the first time, he was admiring the glowing light beaming across at a distance. It was Prudence’s bedroom window. Within the light, he could spot a blurry motionless image shining through the curtains, triggering the beginnings of a slight twist at the core of his heart.
“Prudence…” he sighed guiltily as he marched to the window and pushed his curtains aside, hoping to see his neighbor, but her room immediately turned dark to a perfect timing.
Watching agonizingly at Oliver’s window from her room, Prudence quickly stepped away from her bedroom window and switched off her lights as soon as she caught his curtains starting to move. If only her heart had a switch too, and feelings could be switched off so easily like her lamp, she cried silently to herself.
She didn’t want him to catch her looking at his direction. She didn’t want to make the same mistake she made moments ago, when she suspected she had inadvertently revealed her feelings through her eyes and cracking voice. In return though, she was awarded with a gaze she had wished to see from him in her many dreams.
Prudence knew from the beginning Oliver was always going to be a casual friend and nothing more, because he was deeply in love with someone else, despite all the obstacles. She was determined to keep it this way. This was exactly what she shouted at her mother earlier when they left the house, hoping this explanation would silence her mother’s matchmaking tactics once and for all.
For her, she always held by the belief she would be content as a single mother, focusing all her energy on raising her daughter. She thought her fires were extinguished when Zoe’s father abandoned her years ago. Keeping her heart locked, she didn’t want to be burned again, and become the extra card in a game of Bridge, to be sacrificed, discarded, auctioned, and traded. It was her way to put it to her mother bluntly in the only context she seemed to appreciate.
At the gallery this evening, her paintbrush was acutely active for some reason. She found herself painting nothing but an archway resembling a moon gate. It was a whispering voice in her head that guided her to do so. It was Oliver’s voice. She had accidentally painted Oliver’s childish dream:
“…a huge magnificent crystal white gate as tall as a building… constructed somewhat like an archway, sitting atop… a mountain…
“The place is sort of… decorated by… a deep effervescent horizon, the color of… cream tomato soup…
“The mountain… like dark chocolate pudding… cotton clouds shaped like… a potato…”
It had been a long time since her canvas had color other than white. She didn’t understand why it fell silent this past summer, and she couldn’t remember when was the last time she had to employ so much color on one canvas.
“And as for the sun… it’s shaped like… the egg in this salad…”
Prudence laughed feebly. She couldn’t believe she had actually used Oliver’s dream as her inspiration. He was certainly not very sophisticated with his colors and words, but she was adamant with keeping the picture to his description as much as possible. Between Yuriko and Oliver, it was evident Yuriko was the poetic one, but Prudence was always convinced it was these differences that made them the perfect couple in her eyes.
After finishing the final touches of the portrait at the gallery, bittersweet emotions characterized Prudence’s mind. On the one hand, her head was telling her she accomplished a beautiful picture, enough to submit for the competition. Yet on the other hand, her heart was telling her she had lost an important battle; her lock had become undone.
She shook her head in frustration, wondering when and how Oliver managed to override all her defenses and sneaked inside her without detection, covering her heart with his arrows. The alarms that signaled his entry never sounded. Nothing alerted her. She certainly didn’t invite him in. After all, he was in love with someone else. It happened too quickly.
As much as she tried to not admit, her instincts had already asserted themselves recklessly in full force, like wanting to see him earlier, using the excuse of returning the locket to him, only to find herself lingering by his door too long to remember, debating whether she should ring, until he surprised her by opening his door.
Even though Prudence was in darkness, it was unable to make her feel sleepy. Deep inside, she knew sleep would not cure her illness. In time, she had forgotten how long she had been gazing at her window from a safe distance, thinking about her neighbor, and how she really wanted to let him know...
“He must be asleep,” she muttered helplessly. A small piece of pearly hope glided down her cheek from the corner of her eyes, and it lingered on her chin. It was hanging on, wishing to see its owner receive a much needed reply from the person sleeping across the window.
Unbeknownst to Prudence, Oliver was not asleep. He was gazing out his window the entire time too, looking at her direction and thinking about her with his eyes. Clutching the Amoré with one hand, he made sure it was closed, knowing he was not prepared to see any potential new answers, if there was one. The ghostly white umbrella in his other hand had fallen out of his radar, as the background notes from the wind chime and rain chains gradually stopped playing their familiar melody, after noticing him closing his window.
“She must be asleep,” he muttered silently, watching his breath form a blanket of mist on his window, covering his view of her dark motionless bedroom.
“Sweet dreams, Prudence,” said Oliver as he closed his eyes.
“Sweet dreams, Oliver,” Prudence whimpered from her room as her pearl finally fell to the ground.
Moongate Beckons When The Canvas Sleeps by gossipweaver
Chapter Notes: Standing between them is always going to be something that divides them… the door in a frame, the light from a lamp, or the curtain on a window, that takes at least one person to open… but does this automatically mean the other person is also ready for its opening?