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Victor Anderson Network Solutions | ||||
4102 13th Ave Apt D6 | ||||
Brooklyn, NY 11219-1333 | ||||
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In two days, Nidhi would write the most important exam of her life. Fifteen years old with a long future at hand, how she performed would seal her fate. She would compete with thousands of people her age. Unless she came off doing better than most, she was ruined.
The sound of crickets chirping filled the night, interrupted by the occasional howl of stray wolves. Cool breeze rustled grass and leaves, blowing away traces of the approaching summer. The moon, round and pale yellow, played a game of hide-and-seek behind wisps of grey clouds that skirted across the vast skies.
She sat by the window, bent over her voluminous Physics textbook, oblivious to the beauty of the night. The light shining over her desk was her moon, and the formulas and voices floating around in her head were the crickets. The clock hanging by her wall read '1:34'.
She checked the number of pages left. The '65' that danced in front of her did not look exciting.
"You're silly," she told herself, a frown on her forehead, "You had the entire year, and you kept this waiting till the last day? How could you be so careless?"
She longed to close the book and sink into bed once again, without a million things to remember. She wanted to read the latest novel her favourite author had released. She wanted to call her friends and hang out with them like she used to so many days ago. She wanted to tuck herself with ice cream melting on her tongue.
How long had it been since she'd done any of those things? Five months? Six? She'd lost count. She couldn't read novels because her parents told her it would distract her. She couldn't hang out with her friends because it would be a waste of time while she could be studying, and she certainly couldn't eat ice cream. What would she do if she caught a cold?
Her eyes zoned in and out of focus as she ran them over the scores of words and terminologies that barely made any sense to her. Once upon a time, Nidhi loved reading facts from her textbook, but as time passed, she realized that people cared only if you got marks. And that was the sad part. It didn't matter whether you understood your subjects or not. You only had to score well.
Right then, Nidhi was essentially memorizing her book cover to cover.
She shuddered when she thought what her parents would say if she didn't do well. She could imagine their disappointed faces and harsh words already.
"We didn't raise you for this." They would say, "Look how well your friends did. They prepared ahead in time- you didn't. We're disappointed in you, Nidhi."
Her teachers and classmates would look at her as if she had done something monstrous. She would have her marks etched onto her identity forever.
She shook her head and trained her gaze on the book again. She tried her best to take in all the information she could. She moved on to a chapter on Astronomy and began conquering its hefty pages. Sixty remaining pages turned to fifty and fifty turned to forty. Yet, was it any surprising that at the end of it, she didn't feel like she'd gained any information? She could repeat lines and lines without stammering, but what good was it if she was only going to forget everything after the exam?
She sighed and let her eyes wander to the garden outside her window. The moon peeked at her, craters adorning its surface. Something in it made Nidhi stare at it transfixed, her breath held.
"We can see only one side of the moon." She whispered to herself.
She gazed at all the stars ? the millions of stars that glimmered in the sky like tiny sequins plastered to the heavens. They looked so minute, yet, their real sizes were beyond comprehension.
?There are a billion trillion stars in the observable universe.? Nidhi said, her voice a little louder, ?A billion trillion.? For the first time, the meaning of that sentence dawned on her. She found herself closing her book and getting up from her window-side seat. Something drew her towards the gardens.
Before she knew it, she was out in the open, under the dome of the sky. Her exhaustion fled as she stood in the darkness, with the company of loneliness and solitude.
?Did you know,? she told herself, ?Looking at the stars is like time travel. If anyone could see the Earth from there, they would see the dinosaurs.?
That sent shivers down her spine. She gazed at the thousands of little twinkling stars, her neck craned up. Something caught her eye: it was one of the smallest stars, with a barely inscrutable line running across it horizontally.
?Saturn,? she said, ?we can see Saturn without a telescope.?
Being out here felt so wonderful and heavenly. Nidhi longed to stand staring up at the stars and sky forever. A tiny, silly part of her imagined staying in the gardens, unaffected by time and watching the world whizz past.
?There was something about wormholes in space.? She said, ?I don't remember what it is, but there definitely was something.?
Within moments, she had rushed in and brought her book out with her to the gardens. The moonlight shone on the pages and she squinted at the words.
?There,? she said, ?Wormholes connect two places in any space or time.? She looked up at the sky. ?So that means we can potentially travel to any place or time, even to the future or the past, huh? But it's a one-way ticket.? She continued reading, the absence of proper light not fazing her at all. There were pictures of everything from actual snaps of planets to computer-generated possibilities of black holes.
?And,? Nidhi said, ?Neuron stars spin at 70,000 kilometres per second, and each spoonful weighs at least a billion tons.? She squinted up, just in case she could see anything of that sort, but obviously, it wasn't possible.
Nidhi imagined the skies watching her leaf through the pages, and it felt strangely comforting. A young girl standing in a loose cotton dress reading from her textbook at three in the morning? That didn't happen every day.
?Funny, isn't it?? she spoke to the skies, ?Just a while ago, I was trying to memorize this holed up in my room, when all the while, I had it right in my backyard. Did you ever think Quasars and nebulas and dark matter could be so interesting??
And for a while, time didn't pass, at least for Nidhi. She literally dove into her book neck-deep and took everything in like a young child learning the ways of the world. She read the same things she'd read an hour or two ago, but this time, it felt like someone had opened her eyes. She didn't merely see facts and information. She felt them.
The dome of the sky over her shifted slowly, rippling westwards as the night progressed. No one saw or heard Nidhi's midnight revising, and she carried on like she was on fire. For the first time, her textbook was not just something else to be afraid of.
She no longer saw blocks of unconquerable text.
She saw stars in between the pages of her book.
I Was lying on my bed trying to get some sleep, but I couldn't after what happened today at the cafeteria. That's when there was a sudden and unexpected knock on my window. Thinking it's a thief I grabbed the baseball bat from under the bed and put curtains aside The bat dropped from my hand, followed by me covering my mouth with my hands. It was Axel, the person I least accepted to see ever again in my life.
"Open the window Gia, I can't hold much longer"
"What are you doing here," I say with surprise in my voice.
"I'll tell you, first let me in please" I can see he's trying not to fall.
I let him in.
"Care to explain what's all this?"
"Look GIA, I can explain whatever Gloria told you, just hear me out okay?"
I let him explain because I love him and I need an explanation.
"Okay" I say simply.
"Okay so, for starters I never touched her while dancing, she's the one who fell and tripped over me and I didn't even know if it was her who's falling in the first place."
I knew I was overthinking, see he's not the bad guy here she is except she is a girl, not a guy. I agreed with him.
"Okay, natural reflex. But how would you explain having dinner with her at your house? And later dropping her at her apartment. You want me to believe nothing happened between you two And not to forget, all of this happened while we were dating each other."
He raked his hand over his hair and he looked incredibly sexy.
"I know, you have this feeling about me that I would cheat on you somewhere in the back of your mind and I don't blame you because that's how I was before I met you."
"Then explain this" I held out my hands in anger and annoyance.
He sighed " this Friday night was supposed to be a family dinner with Gloria's parents to discuss business, I didn't know she was coming too. Her parents got a call out of nowhere, they said it was urgent so they left. My parents asked Gloria to stay, and seeing the opportunity she did. I tried to convince my mom that she doesn't have to but my mom neither let me leave nor her and by the time she was finished talking with my mom it was eleven, so my mom asked me to drop her off at her house. I know we both hate her but I also know we would not want her or any girl to not be safe. And.."
I know he has a bad image from his past but I was convinced that he was changing for me, I see it in his actions. Because the Axel everyone knew before would never drop her ex-girlfriend, even if God himself ordered him to do so. But I see how Gloria played me. I cut him off and said
" Stop, It's alright I can figure out the rest of the story. So basically, she tricked me and lied to me just so I would stop trusting you. I'm so sorry Axel, I should have confided in you and not her, it's just you guys have history and I got scared. I promise you this will never happen again. And it's so sweet of you to come all the way here especially at this hour. How did you reach my window anyway?"
He held my hand and with a smile he said
"By climbing up the pipe. And hey listen to me, trust is not something that comes in handy, it has to be earned and see I'm earning it day by day. You have changed me, Gia. I wanna be good for you, for us. I want to have a future with you, I want to live every second of my life with you and only you. Yes, we had history but she and I never really connected as we do and besides, it can never outweigh our future. I like you way too much to lose it all. So are we good now, because I want to kiss your lips the second I come here."
He made me blush, hard. I bit my lower lip, breaking eye contact.
"I feel the same way about you. I don't think I have ever liked someone this much."
He cups my face with both of his hands and steps closer, our faces mere inches apart.
" You know what happens when you blush like that and bite your lips, but you like me when I'm out of control with you, don't you?"
I looked straight into his serine deep blue eyes because I found myself guilty. After all, I do like him out of control. Although we never did more than make out, I can tell he's rough and strong.
"Yes, I like?"
With a jolt, He cuts me off and his lips are already on mine. His lips are soft and he tastes like strawberries. our tongues touching and battling each other. Our rough kiss got rougher and rougher and his hands held my waist tightly and mine was automatically locked in his hairs. But suddenly I felt cold air on my lips and he was no longer kissing me. I opened my eyes and saw him standing far away.
"Gia, I want to tell you something"
Oh please not now, I am on fire and so is he, I can see it.
"What? now ?"
"Yeah, it's important."
How important can it be that he has to stop us from igniting?
"Okay"
" I'm not going to make love to you until we get married."
What! Why! Is he not attracted to me? Am I not pretty enough? He's getting nervous and I'm anxious.
He continued " it's not like I am not intrigued by your beauty, trust me I am. But after Gloria, I was always sleeping around and nothing else mattered to me I want to give you the satisfaction that I am not with you just for sex because I never was and never will be. I am with you because I love you and I want you in my future and this will only increase your trust for me and besides you mean so much more than just sex to me."
He breaks eye contact and mutters "you're my everything"
He shocked me. I didn't know he loved me this much and his Confession was so sudden. I was shocked and happy at the same time.
He has won me over. I Love Him. I love Axel. And this decision just proved how important I am to him, how important our relationship is to him. how badly he wants us to work and how he said that he wanted to make love and not sex. I am His and He is mine. I'm never letting him go.
I closed the distance between us.
"Did you just say, you love me?" I say in shock
" yeah as a matter of fact I do love you, I have been feeling that way for a very long time but I was too scared to say it out loud. And I understand if you don't feel the same because I don't want to force you into loving me." He enlightened me while smiling and holding my hands.
Never breaking eye contact I say in a low voice.
"I love you too, Axel " and I kissed him softly for a second. The kiss was not rough, it was sweet and full of love. I kissed him as lovers do.
His lips curved into a very sweet smile, the one I have never seen before. All of a sudden He held me by my waist up in the air, our bodies were touching and he started spinning us, I have never seen him this happy.
I giggled " don't make me fall" and clutched him tighter by his shoulders.
"Don't worry, I'll never let you fall" After a minute or so
He put me onto the ground, still standing so close. I ask him
"Would you like to stay with me tonight? I'll lock my door and nobody will find out."
He answered happily "I would love to watch you sleep in my arms"
We slept in each other's arms, holding each other close and tight. I was never loved like this by anybody. What more could I ever ask for?
I have the perfect boyfriend in the world who loves me at a whole new level. I never knew that I would be lucky to ever experience a love so pure.
And If Disney could make another fairytale movie then it would be based on ours. He's the one for me and I'm the one for him, that's what matters.
And Sleeping in his embrace, I'm Home.
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