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He wasn't looking at me.

I missed having the pleasure of taking my mind off of my work to see his soft blue eyes watching me with a quiet adoration. He smiled, like that was all he cared to do. Watch me, watch us, together for the rest of our lives.

Huh.

My life had become too wrapped up in him in recent months. If I wasn't with Philip, then by God, I wasn't living. What was so entrancing to me, I think, about him, was the nature of our love. We were friends before we were anything else. He was the boy with the bad haircut I consoled on the school bus on our first day of school and the first day I ever spoke to a boy. He was also the boy who chased me on the playground, when tackling a girl was still the number one way to show her how much you liked her. He was the brooding, awkward teenager who worried about his grandparents, who were quite frankly, getting weaker and getting old. He didn't want to grow up alone, taking care of himself. I asked him just where he thought I was going and his smile lit up the classroom. I don't know, Gracie, he said, granting me the nickname that followed me to high school. I just don't know.

He didn't know a lot of things. He was the personification of fear; every time I looked at him when he was shivering quietly in his thoughts, I saw the sweet little boy with the big worries, ones too big for a kid four times his size. His parents were dead—his mother killed in a car crash, his father by the grief that gripped him until he jumped off the roof of their apartment building to meet his wife with a sickening thud and the blare of a car alarm. They had spawned in him a fear of life, because life had taken so much away on a whim. He wondered what would happen next, when it really got down to business. I would always say, But I'm here, aren't I? He patted my hand, as if those words meant something to him that only he understood.

For awhile they did mean something to him. It meant that I was the only one besides his grandmother who could make him smile. It meant that if he had a problem, he went to Gracie first. It meant that if he was unhappy, he wanted to be near me, to have me ruffle his hair and tell him the stories I made up about his parents, the charming banker and his lovely homemaker wife.

What I didn't know was that he saved the special smile for me because it was one of admiration. He told me his fears because he wanted me to know everything about him, even his weaker parts. He wanted me close by because he wanted to feel the callused skin of my palm on his head and hear the fluid sound of my voice in his ear until he was calm and sure of the love that was growing in him, the love he had for me. When he related this to me, by way of that special smile, I was elated and shocked to discover that I felt the same way. Philip became my Philip and I became his Grace.

Now all of that meant nothing.

When we stood by their graves those six months ago and I saw his tears, he scared me for the first time in my life. My Philip did not give into emotion and weep like weaker men. He hated when people cried, he hated it so much, he swore he never had before, not once in his life. The same person was now on his knees, his fists dragging in the dirt, his breathing labored and wracked with sobs. I put my hand out to touch him but he swatted it away. Just go. I had been dismissed.

It should have been my warning sign that things were going to start changing between us.--

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A/N: I love the tragedy that is Grace and Philip's love. It has an eternal feel to it, the 'quiet adoration' they share. Their emotions of defeat are mingled with the sweetness of victory through unity.... Whoops, I got all serious on you, didn't I? :3 It's prolly because I had just finished watching 'The Fountain' when I wrote this. Very thought-provoking stuff.

This is going to be quite sentimental--just a warning--because I think of them as that one in a million couple, who find each other in their childhood and get to spend their entire lives together, discovering what love is. Prooty cool, when you think about it...