Winter had come quickly that year, just as I had supposed it would. Things always happen that way, one bad thing after another. I would never have suspected how quickly my life would change, and how wrong I really was.

“Why such a long face?” his voice was oddly amused as he spoke, he always seemed that way. But maybe that was just a mask, after all I used the same one on occasion, few people would question a smile.

“Maybe I just have a long one.” I responded shortly. While most others had been intimidated by my somewhat frosty disposition, he'd hardly batted an eye.

“Well as that might be…why don’t you come to class?” he questioned as I looked up. His eyes where dark, a muddled color of black and brown, not normally something I would find in any way attractive.

On him it was.

He was taller than I was, but maybe that is just because nearly everyone is.

To me it seemed as if he was the wisest man that had ever lived, that showed in moments like these. Its why I never went to his class, always avoided him during school, and even after. I didn’t want to be proven wrong, I desired to be left alone, so that I could watch him from a distance. That way I would never have to see the cracks in his personality, the imperfections that would take the angel that I viewed, and turn him to a demon before my eyes.

“I don’t want to go.” I spoke looking up at him, he didn’t falter under the scolding glare that I had sent his way.

“Why? You always liked my class before, Rei, why the change?” he tucked his long fingered hands into his coats jacket; it was a bland color of green, worn through so that the shoulders nearly had to be patched regularly.

Or that is what I had always guessed.

“I just can’t stand it, I can’t.” I spoke looking away, my own blue eyes focusing on the road in the distance.

We lived in the middle of nowhere, the city that had long ago been filled with countless opportunities. But that world had been laid to waste with the falling of the age of oil, for some reason that never seemed to bother me, until I had met him.

Some part of me hated him, but more than that I feared him, I feared the feelings that he raised inside me. The way that I remembered nearly every word he spoke, though many where pointless and held no real meaning to me at all.

“What can’t you stand?” he asked, tilting his head back so that he could look up to the blue sky above us.

His hair fell back a bit; it was gold, brightly reflective in the cold day’s sun.

“The way they look at you…I can’t stand it.” I spoke then, afraid, and nearly shivering with that radiating fear. It spread through my chest as if a heaving spider, long limbs curling around my heart.

I tucked my hands into my own jacket, one of the leather ones that I wore for soccer.

“I thought so.” He sighed and looked down, I didn’t look at his face, maybe I should have

. I was far too afraid that it would show pity; I did not want his sympathy. No. I would rather that he hated me. Just as I was learning to hate myself, just as the world desired to hate me.

“There is something you need to understand Rei.” He spoke softly, tenor voice nearly breaking as he took a gulp of air. He was not my teacher at the moment, but the man that had stolen my heart from beneath my fingertips.

My heart filled with indecisive flutters, it was to me the opening of an unseen door to my future.

“I am your teacher, and you are for now my student. Whatever you might feel, or even…what I might feel cannot be. “ I nearly interrupted him, but luckily I did not.

“ Time Rei please just give me time. And I promise that I will tell you, maybe not in a month, or even a year. But I promise that I will.”

I smiled at him then and nodded, for my young heart that was enough.

Maybe that was all he wanted he needed to know that I was mature enough to accept no.

That day the cold did not seem as biting, nor was the frigid wind as I walked home from school after attending the rest of my classes. Something had bloomed in me that day, the acceptance that I was not a monster. I was not evil or tainted with sin, as the church and family, had taught me. When it came down to it I had a change.

You’d be surprised, what a chance can do for someone.

It took the world that I had known, and threw open each and every one of its gilded chained doors. Allowing me with a new hopeful mind, to make my life what it is today.

For all the waiting, he was worth it.