one

"Don't you want to love her?" she asks me one day and the tone of her voice implies that it's just so easy to fall in love with someone you know you just can't love.

The sun is beating on my face and the slide is hot against my back, and the silence in the air is scary. It's Saturday and the playground is empty and it's me and it's her and it's us. It's hot and my skin is sticking to my shirt, and the smell of her perfume is making me dizzy and I'm sweating buckets.

She's dressed in a pair of jean shorts and an orange tank top and she's sitting against the end of the slide, pulling apart a daisy with her fingers. I can feel her against my side, safe and familiar, and her body heat is extreme and I shrink away from her for a minute. I feel guilty, but then I don't.

I run my tongue over the inside of my teeth, trying to find the words somewhere in the jumbled up mess of my mind. They're not there, so I breathe out a reply of, "Maybe."

She sits up and her blonde curls fall around her face and she pushes them back with the hand not destroying the flower. "You can't 'maybe' want to love someone. You either do or you don't."

I shut my eyes so I can block her out. I stare up at the sun through my orange-tinted eyelids and say, "It's not that easy. I can't just… wake up one day and fall in love with someone. It's never that easy."

"Of course it is," she says, like I'm a little child asking her why the grass is green or why vegetables taste bad. "You just… try. You have to try for everything, and love is something you have to attempt. It doesn't just… y'know, happen. You have to work for it. It involves effort. I don't care what your stupid bullshit Hollywood movies say; life is nothing like that. Stuff doesn't just fall in your lap. You make things happen. You just need to stop being a pansy and attempt something for once in your damn life."

I open my eyes and the Sun blinds me for a minute, so I throw my arm over my eyes, but she grabs my hand and holds it in hers for a minute before lying it against my side. I can feel her ribs through her shirt and I want to ask her when she became an expert on love, but I don't because I know that she would get all philosophical. I don't want to hear her mumble on and on about the universe and the world and the afterlife and our humanity.

She's looking at me like I'm a puzzle, so I turn my head to the side so she can't look at me with those big green eyes and read every ill-kept secret. "What can go wrong?"

I don't answer so she takes my hand, presses a kiss to my open palm, folds the broken bits of flower into my hand, looks at me for a long minute. I try not to blink or back down, but I can't have her looking at me like that, like I'm such a dissapointment to her and she just wants to fix everything for me but she can't.

She looks at me for another second before kicking off the slide and landing gracefully like a bird. She starts to walk towards the street before she turns around and looks at me like I'm an afterthought and asks, "What are you so afraid of?"

By the time I find the answer to that question ("Everything."), she is nothing more than a speck of a girl in the field of my vision. I turn back to the slide and shut my eyes against the blinding sun, counting the spots behind my eyes.