Author’s Note: The point of this rewrite is that I am no longer happy with the way the original came out. It is broken in character and the plot has been twisted around into something that I don’t care much for. I know several of you are going to kill me for just stopping Once Upon A Time like this, but there is so much more to the story than what I have written. If you just have patience I believe you will be happy with how this one came out as opposed to the other.

Chapter One

She was like a piece of ice, so cold her touch could burn. People felt that arctic chill when they passed her in the hallways. Some even said that they got a slight shiver down the center of the back just by looking at her. She was cold hearted and she spoke with shards of ice lacing beneath her voice. Her eyes were such a bright blue that it was painful to look into them. Everything about her was frigid. That was the piece of work that Dan Brogan was supposed to kiss.

Dan wasn’t exactly thrilled by this prospect. Nobody, and he meant nobody, would want to suck lips with this blonde. Sure, she was beautiful. Yet that beauty was a two edged sword. If anything Patience Dempsey reminded Dan of a rose bush with vicious thorns that drew the blood of the innocent passerby.

Needless to say, Dan was extremely nervous as he walked through her neighborhood. It was pretty quiet. There were a lot of birds chirping and squirrels running around chasing each other through the autumn leaves littering the ground. For a split second Dan felt as if he had wandered out of reality and somehow landed in a Disney movie staring Bambi and all of his little animal friends. It was enough to make Dan wearier. Why the hell was he even in this place?

Ah, yes. His friends. They had come up to him with this brilliant plan that afternoon. They wanted to play truth or dare. Dan agreed readily enough. He thought to himself there was no harm in going back a few years and doing something he hadn’t done since he was in the fifth grade. He was about to graduate and leave school life forever, why not step back and enjoy the simpler days before college and 24 hour studying?

That’s when they decided to dare Dan to kiss Patience. They didn’t just stop at saying that he had to kiss Patience. They actually all piled in Dan’s beat up red pick up and drove to the entrance of Patience’s neighborhood. Then, they hauled Dan out of the truck, threw him in the middle of nowhere, and drove off. They later called him, when he was kicking an old oak tree viciously and imagining it was his friends faces, and told him that he was not getting a ride home until he sucked face with the school ice bitch. Dan stared at his cell phone in complete disbelief for about five minuets before he snapped and cursed out the whole lot of them from his stranded position on the side of the road. He was literally screwed if he didn’t complete the dare.

He was going to kick all of their asses when he was picked up.

Sulking he played with a stray leaf with his worn tennis shoes. They just didn’t match, his ratty tennis shoes against the newly paved road that he was walking on. He felt out of place and he hated that feeling. Dan was one of those in between people. He was popular enough in school, but he wasn’t exactly high-class material. He worked himself to death just to keep his sisters from going through what he did. The fact hadn’t really bothered him until he stood in the middle of the alien world of rich kid land.

He was really going to kick his friends asses now.

Then, he saw it. He had just rounded the corner contemplating in what murderess way would he punish his friends when a speck of gray brown brick caught his eye. He stopped dead and nearly dropped his cell phone. Absent-mindedly he shoved the phone into his side pocket and gaped at the fortress before him. His mind couldn’t really calculate just how high the mansion/fortress actually was, but it was high enough to block the descending sun. The whole thing was mostly made of nothing but glass and it reflected all of its surroundings back twice. Dan was disoriented for a good minuet before his mind could discern the reflection from the tangible surroundings. The gargantuan structure looked very dull and unanimated. He could see the inside of the house near the living room area and even that showed nothing of interest. A lot of modern furniture that probably cost more than anything a person with a normal salary could own, but that was all. It looked like a house that Patience’s undead heart would love.

As Dan’s eyes roamed over the fortress he saw at the very top a room with a small bit of color. It was a splash of baby blue. Interesting. That couldn’t possibly be Patience’s room. Yet, it was. For as Dan stood and gazed up at the blue walls Patience walked by the window in a pair of shorts that showed a lot of leg. He couldn’t see her face but he got a good picture of her lower body. Yeah, that rose sure was beautiful, but he couldn’t forget those thorns.

Reluctantly, Dan moved away from the view of her room and walked toward the front walk. A sinking feeling was beginning to fill his abdomen, and mix with the nachos he had lunch. He was a man damnit! He could do this. Slightly trembling he drummed his knuckles against the glass door. The feeling of doom only increased as the minutes ticked by and no sound was heard from inside the house. A neighbor’s dog barked in the distance. A bird had the guts to chirp once.

The nachos were just beginning to churn uncomfortably in his stomach when the door was thrown open so suddenly that Dan had to jump out of the way of the glass and right into the path of a human body. Patience’s body. Yelping, Dan skidded away and slammed his back into the hard, unyielding brick behind him. 5’ 6” of ice-cold female stood before him. Dan’s nachos nearly came up. She was glowering at him with such ferocity he was almost sure it was not humanly possible to twist her face up like that. Her long blonde hair, golden in the fading sunlight, was twisted up at the top of her head in a strict ponytail. She had her half moon glasses perched at the top of her head among the streaks of gold. Her trademark ice blue eyes froze over with the non-disguised glance up and down his tall and wary frame. Her pink lips scrunched up in a thin line of pure loathing. She placed her cream hands on her milky hips.

“What the hell are youdoing here?” She asked her voice dripping in malice.

Dan tore his eyes away from her slim body, housed in nothing but a pink silk thing half hidden in a thrown on housecoat. There was no trace of those shorts to be found. Despite the fact that Patience looked like a female model in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, Dan found his voice. “I’m uh… um…”

Well that was a wonderful display of masculinity. This was proving far more difficult than he thought it would be.

Patience smirked, leering at him. “You uh… uh…what?” she mocked.

In a sudden rush of, what can only be described as impulsion and stupidity, Dan grabbed her by the shoulders, and yanked her onto the porch. With his hands securing her back, he jerked her into his embrace, and laid one on her right there in front of the entire world. A gasp was ripped from Patience’s throat and Dan’s heart, which had been pretty much flying, sped up as he slipped his tongue past her pretty pink lips. Dan half expected her to, at the very least, pound him to a bloody pulp, but no, she didn’t. She sighed, and leaned into him allowing him to deepen his kiss. As she did so, he was briefly aware of something brushing against his leg and fluttering down to his ankle finally resting on his shoe. His mind played with thoughts of exactly what that something had been until his body called his mind back to the main attraction. He realized too late that he had unintentionally fully wrapped her so close up against his body that he felt every beat of her heart up against his.

Funny, but at that moment there was nothing icy about her. She was all warmth, so familiar and yet so foreign. Her breath, her body, her lips, all of it was so invitingly warm Dan had to mentally kick himself to get his lips to detach themselves from her mouth. It was the hardest thing Dan ever had to do.

He had liked it. No, he hadn’t just liked it; he yearned for it even now. Throughout the kiss Patience had said nothing. She had kissed him back, in a soft, tantalizing way. She had kissed him like she was savoring the last bit of her favorite ice cream. Dan wanted to savor her back. God, did he want to savor her.

That was when reality intervened. Patience’s eyes fluttered open. They were still close to each other that he could see the change that went over her. At first Dan could hardly believe his eyes but as he watched he saw her hazed deep blue eyes turn increasingly colder, until they blazed a bright blue. Her lips tightened and her face grew to look more pinched. It was almost as if she had cast a glamour over herself. Pure, unrestrained rage was boiling in her eyes. Her body language screamed that she was ready to do battle.

He was a dead man.

Patience backed up away from him clutching her fists at her sides. Dan dived down to the ground and covered the back of his head, and just as he expected to feel fist connect with bone, a loud bang brought him back to the present. She had slammed the door in his face, just like that. And just like that, he was alone on her doorstep.

Slightly shaking Dan got up from the crouch feeling completely ridicules and childish. Sure she was mad, but she wasn’t that mad. She wasn’t mad enough to beat him up for kissing her. Was she?

Dan stood rooted to her porch for a long time just staring up at her cold impersonal house. The windows to her room were now covered with a star speckled translucent drape. He could no longer see the princess at the top of her tower amongst her books and dreams.

Dan felt as if he had lost something. The warmth she had cast was gone.

The wind picked up and rattled through the covered walkway Dan stood under. Something flapped against his pants. Glancing down Dan caught sight of a little girl’s stationary paper. It was bent in several places and held a worn look. It had to be several years old. At the very top of the paper was a single sentence written in purple marker so faded he could hardly read what was written.

“What I Wish For”

Slightly confused Dan shoved the paper in his pocket next to his cell phone and promptly forgot about it. The only thing he couldn’t forget was Patience or the heat that her body cast and glowed with, so completely against her icy nature.