A/N: Um.. You guys are gonna wanna kill me again. I’m posting another new one. Sorry, but it’s not my fault! The ideas just keep popping outta me! And if I don’t write them, or at least elaborate on them in the quiet (and somewhat empty, I’ll admit) sanctity of my mind, I’ll forget them, what with my five-second memory. Really, it’s a miracle that I remember to roll out of bed and go to school every morning.

So yeah. Enough of my babbling. Get on with the story. One last thing to be aware of first: this little bit is a preface, so it kinda takes place in the future, after the story has taken place. Anyhoot... Enjoy!

Not Quite

Preface: At First Glance

Dylan

At first glance, things can be wonderfully, delightfully and blissfully simple. You can take a single glance at someone and instantly deduce their qualities, be they good or bad. So-and-So could be an egotistical, scornful jackass, and Such-and-Such could be a whiny, sniveling kissass. But then what happens is you get to know that person, and then you find out that they have actual, real, valid reasons for acting the way they do. Your whole take on them is shot and you have to readjust your views on that person and maybe even your whole life, depending on how it affects you. So while things can be so utterly simple at first, they never stay that way, trust me. Life complicates things, as it always does, and next thing you know, you’re smack dab in the middle of a situation you’d sworn to avoid at all costs.

So it was when I met Keeley O’Shea. Keeley moved into the apartment below mine about a year ago, and things have never been the same since, nor will they ever be the same again. The apartments are big, mainly because they’re not apartments in the true sense of the word. The house is a triplex, a house divided into three sections. One entire side, the main portion, is devoted to the landlord and his family, and the remaining small segment is divided into the upper apartment – mine – and the basement one – Keeley’s.

Meeting Keeley would change me forever, although of course, I didn’t know that at the time. At first glance, Keeley was just a new neighbour, maybe a friend, and that’s all I saw in her, I swear.

But as time went on, life and fate complicated things, as inevitably happens, and in the end, I came to see that she was in fact so much more.

-x-

Keeley

You know that warning you see on your car’s right mirror? The whole “objects in mirror are closer than they appear” thing that we all had such a great time laughing at when we were kids? I think we need something similar in life. “People in life are more than they appear.”

Or something like that.

When I met Dylan Llywelyn, I instantly put him down as a dark-haired, dark-eyed womanizer who was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it, and without the slightest bit of hesitation. I say this because with his looks, there was zero doubt in my mind – or in the mind of any other living, breathing woman above the age of thirteen, for that matter – that he was used to getting plenty of the horizontal cha-cha, if you catch my drift. I mean, come on. It was totally unfair for any man to look so good: inky black, curly hair falling into eyes so dark you felt you could easily stare at them forever trying to discern their actual colour, contrasting with creamy-looking, so-healthy-you-wanna-pinch-it-to-see-if-it’s-real skin. On top of that, the dark clothing Dylan always seemed to be wearing only served to heighten the contrast.

Anyways. Needless to say, my original opinion of Dylan Llywelyn wasn’t exactly stellar. But as I look back now in that wonderful rearview mirror of life that the poets, writers and other similarly educated people call hindsight, I could laugh at myself for being so ridiculously off the mark. I found out eventually that under the cool, distant expression Dylan aimed at all strangers there was a living, breathing person.

Who knew?

Of course, I didn’t know this when I first met him, so naturally enough, it made for some pretty interesting confrontations...