"I guess they really got the best of us,

didn't they?

They said that love was enough,

but it wasn't"

✦

Harry stood up and outstretched an arm to help me up off the curb. The last thing he had said was "stop waiting" and I didn't know how to stop yet, so I didn't answer.

"What's your favorite song?"

His inquisition made me think of the no-name lady I had met earlier at the arid cemetery. She felt like the kind of person you come across one day and then never again. A part of me wished I would see her again so I could tell her I did it. That I sort of faced Leonora Papilio. But another part of me knows she wouldn't really care, so I wished more so that our encounter was the first and the last.

I favored Harry's questions anyways and I may not have had a favorite movie but I did have a favorite song. "'The End of the World.'"

"Sing it," he demanded. It wasn't much of a request.

My eyebrows furrowed. "Um. No."

"Sing it."

I huffed and walked to the middle of the street and looked up. I tried to find Olenska and Newland.

"Evdoxia, c'mon," he urged, coming over to meet me.

"No. I sound like chickens being plucked of their feathers." I attempted to illustrate how awful of a singer I was but he wasn't convinced.

"So what!"

"Why are you screaming?"

"To show you that no ones listening. It's me and you, and maybe the moon too, but she's not judgmental either." Harry's cheeks mimicked the moon, craters and all.

I poked one of his dimples and stuck my tongue out. His jaw dropped, his skin stretched and sans dimples.

"For that you must sing for me," he declared, arms akimbo.

I pulled my lips to the side and made a high pitched sound of faux contemplation. "The moon has sensitive hearing which would make me singing very insensitive."

He rolled his eyes and blew a raspberry.

"I wouldn't want to have to apologize to her, would I?" I taunted, snickering as I ambled backwards away from him.

Mimicking my speed, he followed me, keeping a short distance between us. "You wouldn't use my own words against me, would you?"

"Am I willing to sing to you?"

"For me? Apparently not."

My heels hit a curb, disheveling me in surprise. Harry reached out to me in case I fell. I stepped over it semi-gracefully and kept on my path.

"Well, I'm about as willing to not use your words against you as I am to sing to you." I smirked.

He tsked, smirking too. "Oh, Evdoxia. That's not true."

"What would make you think that?"

"Because I'm always right, as we've gone over. I know you'll sing for me and you'd never seriously use my words against me. You like me." His face said prove me wrong! and my face said I can't!

I'm not sure how he knew it, or how he probably knew everything. He just did because he's Harry. He's made up of colors only butterflies could see and knows everything and nothing at the same time.

He knows me, paper thin skin, and therefore he knows nothing. He knew everything about my nothing whereas I knew nothing about his everything.

He waved a hand in front of my face before both rested on my shoulders. I had stopped, taking in what he said, completely leaving reality. His thumbs traced circles, making whirlpools out of the fabric there.

"It's okay to like me Evdoxia."

Liking people means the possibility of becoming attached. When you're attached, that person has the opportunity to leave. My attachment had a habit of warding people off. So no, Harry, it wasn't okay.

"It's okay to like me because I like you too." That doesn't mean you always will.

My back was to the moon so it's light was absorbed completely by the front of Harry. And by the oak wood curl hanging over his forehead and wispy stems of stubble on his cheeks and his eyes and their cohesive range of leafy lime and olive pigments that on paper would be a mess but worked on Harry because he was Harry. Because he was growth and life and consumed light so the rest of us could breath.

"I do like you Harry." Even though I'm sorry for it. Even though I know you'll leave.

His lips brushed a kiss on the top of my head. "I know."

Turning around, I walked out of his hold and in the direction of the park to which he joined.

"I guess you were right," I bantered.

"It's a habit."

⊹ ⊹ ⊹

Once we arrived to the park, Harry and I found ourselves on the swings. We swayed slowly with our elbows around the rusty metal chains and hands fiddling in our laps, him moving forward as I moved back and vice versus.

"Harry, what do you think about when you're with me?"

He caught my glance as we crossed each other in the middle.

"Everything."

I bit my lip and analyzed the shiny plastic slide on the playground in front of us. It looked slippery and headed straight into the prickly mulch.

"What do you think of with me?" He rebutted.

"Nothing."

Nothing important or critical. Nothing of the Matt matter anymore. The subject of Harry and him didn't correlate anymore. Nothing correlated with Harry anymore.

He hummed. "You define the universe Evdoxia."

"What?" I giggled, making him blush.

"Stop laughing at me!" He yelped, ironically laughing as well.

"I don't understand," I defended, smiling.

Having calmed down, I stopped swinging, kicking my feet in the air instead.

"I see you but only to a certain extent. It's impossible to discover if you really end or where you would begin. You're an infinity within yourself." He dug his feet into the ground and looked up. "Look."

I did, seeing the warm gleam of the moon reflected on surrounding clouds.

"You only see so much. A flat plane of an entire never ending pocket of the unknown. Space. I can't wrap my head around it. Like you."

"Oh."

"It contains everything; it swallows the earth and every other planet and star and meteor and galaxy. It's fascinating and frustrating at the same time because you can never fully understand it. So people ignore it, they don't know how to just appreciate it and it's beauty without having the science behind it."

How didn't he just see I was nothing more the than the wife to Matthew Miller? I was nothing more than a woman who was never enough. Especially by the only person she had, the last person to love her. I was paper thin skin and nothing else. How didn't he didn't see that?

"Harry," I whimpered, shifting my eyes from the moon to him. He was already staring at me.

"I don't like when it's overcast and every inch of the sky is splotched with a cloud. You can't see the sun or the moon or anything at all." He pushed the chain of my swing, making me drift away. "Don't get bogged down in clouds, angel."

Matt was like a big heavy grey cloud. Thunder and lightening and storm. The screech of energy and light as it whips the ground. If I really was the sky, Matt was the splotches of clouds that made me look grey. But the thing was that I really was entirely grey underneath and maybe he was too. And if I were the universe—if I was everything—what would that make Harry?

"Harry if I were the universe then you are life. The thing born to cultivate it and learn it and give it reason for existing. What is the universe if we weren't here to observe it? It's just matter and mass and whatever makes it up, but life, you, make the universe more than just thing."

The swing screeched as he twisted for his body to face me.

"Evdoxia."

I rested my cheek on the chain. "Harry."

"You are the kind of girl people daydream about."

Harry was the kind of boy people only meet in their dreams.

He watched as I got up and climbed to the top of the plastic slide. I sat on it and like I had thought, it was slippery and I was too grown for it to be a long ride. My feet dug sharply into the mulch within a second of sitting on it. I laid back onto the slide.

I didn't know what to say so instead I sung. "Why does the sun go on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don't they know it's the end of the world? Cause you don't love me any more."

"Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars glow above? Don't they know it's the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love." I continued the whole song to the final verse, "Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry? Don't they know it's the end of the world? It ended when you said goodbye."

When I had finished, Harry came over to me. He knocked my bent knee with his. I slid into the mulch and he sat beside me.

"Pretty song."

"It's much prettier when Julie London sings it," I tittered. "Sorry, moon."

"Now that's an apology I can accept," he bubbled.

I elbowed him. "It wasn't for you. You asked for that mess."

"I know." He smiled all cheesy like so I scrunched up my nose.

He cleared his throat. "Besides the performance, the song lyrics were pretty," he began and I elbowed him again, "but in a sad way."

His lips fell into a frown and I wanted to push them back up and poke his dimples into place. I liked the song because it was sad. I liked Harry because he was anything but it.

"Why do you like it?" He asked.

Because it was the end of the world. "It's pretty. It's soft. It sounds like a love song even though it isn't at all, it's sad. I like sad songs; the ones that are sung like a lullaby, quietly and gently."

"It's grey," he said solemnly like he was talking to himself, realizing things.

"Light grey," I specified.

"What shade of grey were you?"

"Dark. I'm charcoal grey."

"Why?" Why? Why? Why?

I sighed and twisted the ring. "Change."

"Do you believe people can change?"

"Yeah, I know they do. I've witnessed it, a real black and white change. And when they change from black to white they carry you with them and leave you in the grey."

"What if it's just who they actually are, ya' know? Like who you think they were was just a facade?"

I pursed my lips. "When things happen they affect you. They alter the way you feel and therefore how you act." Like Matt meeting Melly. Like Leonora—

He nodded. "Agreed."

We got off the mulch and laid down in the nearby grass. My right ear was to his right ear, so our heads were next to one another but bodies spread in opposite directions.

"I wanted to ask you about your ring," he said.

I stopped breathing for a moment, my head stuck in wet cement.

"Mhm," I managed to squeak.

"If you don't mind me asking, if you're married why do you only have the one?"

"Matthew didn't propose to me with a ring."

"Oh."

I could tell he wanted to hear more and the masochist in me wanted to take myself back to when there was a Matt and Ev.

"We met when neither of us had anything. Then all we had were one another," I began, a longing, and faraway lilt to my voice. Matt and I used to both be nothing but we found everything in each other.

"My father never liked him because of his father, who didn't like me either. But we were hellbent on proving them wrong. Proving we loved each other. So we got married as soon as I turned 18 with not much more than pennies."

"What'd they think?"

"My dad kicked me out. Matt had no place of his own. So, we lived out of his car for a while."

The car was a beat down yellow rusty truck. It was an old thing that didn't run for very long after we moved in but we pushed it and pushed it as long as possible, denying its death for it'd been nothing more than scrap metal.

We did so because it was home, the coziest home I'd ever had. Even when the heater stopped working and it only blew cold air it was home because Matt was there and he was all the warmth I needed. Because he used to be the sun before he was a storm cloud.

I couldn't resist a tiny smile at all the memories we shared when it was just him, me, and that crappy truck. We were free and we were in love and we were happy. I'd never been so full; so much more than paper thin skin.

"For how long?"

"Till the car broke down and winter had come."

"What'd you do then?"

"Matt had no choice but to ask his dad for work. He still works there now, at his dads company." With the secretary. Melly-mellifluous.

I bet his father would be happy to see Matthew with Melly. With a real woman, not a girl people may daydream about. With gold, not silver.

"Evdoxia?"

"Harry."

"Is Matthew, your husband," ouch, "is he one of the people who changed?"

"Yes. He is."

There was no purpose in lying, not with a lone tear rolling down from the corner of my eye despite how hard I clutched them both closed. He could hear my labored breaths and sense the shift in atmosphere.

I wasn't charcoal grey, I was a shadow's grey. Matt's shadow. The lingering translucent dark that follows and hides behind him from the light. He forgets I'm there when he avoids the light himself. I've always been there and I always would and he knows that, it's just a matter of where he stands that he'll see me.

Amidst my thoughts, I was encapsulated by heat. As if every shut down artery and organ had thawed, I relaxed and felt as though the communication between heart and vein had been reset. This sudden release of built up, dormant energy escaped me.

Harry had scooped me up, sheltering me in his arms where I sought refuge from the cold and from the empty. But even with everything wrapped around me, there was still nothing but echoes inside.

"There's a difference between you and the universe Evdoxia," he whispered into my hair.

"What?" I exhaled into his neck, my chapped lips grazing the skin.

"The universe waits for no one." Stop waiting.

"What day is it tomorrow?"

"Friday."

"Are you busy?"

"Why?"

I drew my head out from his neck, our faces so close we could feel each other's breath on our mouths.

"I want you to come somewhere with me." Matt's work. "Can you, please?"

"Always."

⇢ ⇢ ⇢

sorry for the confusion

Evdoxia only has one ring not twoanywhooo drama is comin :/

peace out ☺