Be a bright red rose come bursting the concrete.
Be a cartoon heart
She stood out of a crowd, although she did not have any distinctive features. Thin blonde hair, pink lips, not anything special, at least not in Adrian’s mind. She hid her too-pink lips, staining them with bright red lipstick, thickened her hair, wore clothes that made the boys look at her twice. But that was not why she stood out.
She wasn’t like most girls Adrian had met. She didn’t want to be held, but she wanted to hold onto him with every fragment of her being. And even though he could not think of leaving her, she acted, every moment, as if she could leave him without thinking twice.
In the deep of night, he would call out her name, Daphne, and then wish that he hadn’t because he was supposed to be the stronger one. But she held on to his heart, so he stayed, because her razor-sharp nails could rip it into shreds in an instant.
Adrian remembered meeting her. He hadn’t liked her, at first. He wasn’t sure if he even liked her now. But he could not stop staring at the way she threw her head back when she laughed, the way that she put her hand on his thigh in thatis too-flirtatious way. He could not stop staring.
He could call out her name, Daphne, but she would not come running. She would make him wait while she walked, trailing her hands on other boys’ thighs while he stood. He wouldn’t leave, because he needed her more than she needed him.
Adrian did not know how exactly he had fallen for her. She didn’t love him, he was sure of that. He was just a chesspiece in her games, he knew that, too, but for some reason, he didn’t care. She was always in his life, had been for the last year, although you could never tell what mood she would be in, what she would be doing, she was a flurry of movement and it overwhelmed him.
He could have done better, he knew that. He could have had anyone and he chose the girl who did not have anyway.
(He knew that, of course. She could pretend, she could laugh, she could click her heels and tap her fingernails, but she didn’t have anyone. Not really.)
Well, he thought to himself, trying to convince himself that maybe she could want him, really want him, one day, she has me.
Daphne didn’t care that she had him. He knew that. It was surprising how much she didn’t care that she didn’t have anything. It was surprising that he knew so much about a person who curled up into a shell and did not speak when anything went wrong.
Until one day when something went wrong and he called out her name, Daphne, and she did not answer. Until he realised that she was gone. Until he realised that she might not come back.
Adrian didn’t know why she’d left, but he did know that she hadn’t found anyone else. She was perfectly content to be alone (or maybe not content, but good enough. All she ever wanted was good enough.) He’d thought he was good enough.
But he didn’t know what she thought of him. Their relationship, he wanted to say, was purely sexual. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t only sexual. It was sometimes raw, sometimes closed, sometimes Daphne rocking back and forth on his bed Not Crying. She didn’t cry. She thought, sometimes she would speak (though this wasn’t as common), but she did not cry.
When she did speak, she almost always regretted it, because Adrian, for once, would hold her instead.
Their relationship was raw and full and Adrian didn’t think he particularly liked it, but he sure as hell missed it.
He wanted her back but she wasn’t one for big romantic gestures. She wasn’t one for roses or chocolates or even just love.
(Daphne had told him once that she didn’t want to fall in love. That she’d never been in love. Adrian, the naïve person that he’d once been, had thought that he could show her how to fall in love. This was before he had to call her name and wait for her. This was while she was still thinking of coming to him.)
So Adrian waited for her, but she never came.
–Come out,†his friends said, Miles in particular, but they all did, nearly in unison. –You don’t need her.†They didn’t quite understand how he’d fallen for her in the first place. They hadn’t been in the same year together. They weren’t anything alike, not really, but the fact remained that Daphne was the only person that Adrian had ever really loved.
–She won’t be there,†they said, and so, finally, Adrian went.
She was there.
She was drinking heavily, and Adrian doubted that she really noticed that he was there. His friends tried to distract him, once they noticed, but Adrian was first to see her, of course. She looked different (not on the outside, of course, but on the inside, which was something that only Adrian could tell.)
Daphne didn’t notice he was there at first but of course she did later on and decisively didn’t look at him. Until.
Until he needed a break from the loud atmosphere and went out for a smoke and she followed him. Until she did to him what she used to do to all the others (while he watched): put a hand on the wall, twirl her hair around her finger, look up from underneath her eyelashes. Until he fell for it.
(He knew, of course, that this was not real. That she would walk away. He didn’t care.)
Her mouth was flush against his, his arms twined against hers, and at that moment he didn’t care that she had broken his heart. Because here they were again, and once again, he didn’t know how the hell he had gotten there.
He thought about waiting for her again. He’d thought, at the very beginning, that she would come back. That this was not forever. Nothing Daphne did was forever. She was always moving, always changing, and Adrian was always running to catch up. Except this time, for some reason, he didn’t chase her.