She was the girl who was afraid of love. Terrified of it. It isn't permanent, she believed, it leaves you and it leaves you broken.
He was the boy who desperately needed it. Love--the only thing that could've rooted him to this world.
Ophelia and...
"I loved him as I fell to sleep, and each morning as I woke; I loved him with all my wayward heart-- until the day it broke."
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I tried scrambling back, and then a little more, but the wall was right behind me. My wide eyes were glued to him. And there was just this foot of distance between us. I couldn't back away any further. I couldn't escape.
He seemed surprised too. I think. How was I supposed to know when I just--when I was freaking out?
"Oh God." A barely-there whisper escaped my lips and I pressed my other hand flat against the concrete wall behind me.
Alastair.
No. No. No.
"Hey," I saw him stepping a little towards me and he seemed cautious. But his voice was soft. His voice was just as soft as I remembered, just as soft as I sometimes heard in my head--telling me to let go. But he was right here, right in front of me. My Alastair. He was standing right in front of me. And he looked so much like Alastair. The eyes. The hair. The face.
I didn't feel the panic settling in, not until I felt my hands pressing flat, so tightly against my ears, and I was sliding down on the ground just because my knees couldn't keep me up. My knees were pulled up against my chest. And my eyes were closed shut.
It was suffocating.
"No, no, no," I murmured again and again. And it hurt, the way my heart was thudding so loudly in my chest, the way I had my eyes closed so painfully shut, the way I couldn't breathe past the heavy lump in my throat. "Not again. Not again, please."
I couldn't, even in this drunken haze I was in, believe that this was happening to me again. That I was making him up in my head again, making up Alastair in my head, so much so that he looked so awfully real. I was doing it again. Like that time at Maria's New Year's Eve party. When I told him that I loved him. Love him. Did that even matter?
I was doing it again.
I was making him up, thinking that I could see him when he wasn't even real. I was making myself think he was here when he wasn't. He wasn't here. He would go away and it would hurt and it would hurt so so much.
Maybe this is what I get for kissing Noah.
Maybe this is what I get for being so miserable all the time.
"Ophelia." So soft. His voice was so soft near me. Why could I still hear him? Why was he still here? "Hey, hey, it's all right. Hey, look at me."
Not real. Not real.
I was crying. God, I was drunk out of my mind, seconds away from throwing up, and here I was sobbing out on this empty street, making up fake things in my head. If Steph came out and saw me--
