Swimming In Cokes

She’d done it. She’d said it. After months of dreaming about it, she finally showed him her heart.



There it was. All her thoughts and feelings finally escaped – scattered through the atmosphere, across the dinner table, tangled in her hair, swimming in their cokes. Still the girl refused to look away from the chocolate eyes she adored, slightly clouded by the glasses she hated. Not because they made the man look ugly…no, never. Because it was harder to judge his expression when he wore them.



Five seconds. Ten seconds. A minute. An hour. A day. No response. All she got was a blank stare, the eyes telling her nothing, the mouth slightly open. Stubbornly, resolutely, she held his gaze. She knew deep in her heart what he was thinking and it made her heart sink. But the one naïve part of her that always clings to hope managed to hold back the tears.



Until he began to speak.



“I…” The boy stuttered, and faltered. His hesitation did its damage. The girl finally looked away, down at her hands still lying on the table. Immediately her subconscious criticized her uneven nails with their chipped polish, moving on to the dark hair on her forearms giving her the look of a primate, and her ungodly, crooked toes and her monstrous thighs and her chapped lips.



She was imperfect. So was he, but his imperfections were more like perks. His impulsive determination. His inability to focus on one subject at a time. The way his hair fell in his eyes when he removed his glasses, and the way he lazily blew it back out of his face. And his density, the density that put her into this situation in the first place.



The girl gathered what little hints of something that might be strength she had left and looked up again. But he was gone. Her heart fell farther, until she felt his hand on top of hers.



She turned to face him. Wordlessly, he pulled her hand off the table. The rest of her body followed, and the boy wrapped his arm around her waist and leaned in to kiss her, still awkwardly holding her hand behind him.



Coherent thought evaporated instantly. For a lifetime, or several centuries, or maybe even millennia, there was just the two of them. When they finally broke apart for air, they discovered their arms had found out where they were supposed to be.



It felt like another century or so before reality caught up with the girl. She blinked, then blinked again as she realized what must have happened. “I…” The girl stuttered, and faltered. Then she laughed, remembering her reaction when her companion did the same.

The boy laughed too, a soft chuckle that the girl felt in his chest. On an impulse, he kissed the top of her head and finally said the four words that were waiting to be uttered.



“I love you, too.”