MORTAL ✰ ISAAC LAHEY

[CHAPTER 1]

HER SINGLE MOMENT

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HER DROWSY EYES REMAINED UNFOCUSED―the bright red lights of the car in front of them were blurry and her racing mind was quickly slowing down.

The song Teenage Dream was playing once more on the radio, as Skylar McCall buried herself deeper into her seat, clutching her jacket like a blanket for a little extra warmth and wriggling her body to make the seat belt around her shoulders less uncomfortable.

If she wasn't so tired, she would've pulled her phone out to scroll down her new Instagram account, but her eyes were burning and pleading for her relief. Of course, she only had herself to blame for her tiredness, as she had finally crawled into bed at around 3 am, and she spent the entire school day with her eyes drooping at the most unfortunate moments.

Her day had consisted of entirely too many accidental naps and awkward occurrences that she couldn't help but recall as her eyelashes threatened to flutter shut once more.

After falling asleep in her class for a few minutes, she had lifted her head from its place on the desk beside her test, circled several answers, and simply scrawled her name atop the test as she got up to hand the test back to her teacher. Out of frustration, she had run her hands through her hair, unintentionally ruffling it up as she tried to keep it parted to her right and as she tried to blink the sleep from her eyes.

She let a small smile grace her lips as she stared sheepishly at her teacher―she had been one of the last to turn in her test and she knew she was destined to fail when she had didn't even try to read the chapter and was still awake by 3 am. She wasn't surprised at her actions: she had given up on passing the AP Biology exam at the end of the year, and she knew that she would frantically study to no avail.

As she dragged herself back to her desk, her eyes had glanced out the window, and she watched as he stared off lazily in the classroom across the hall.

One of his eyes had darkened as a black eye formed around it, but he held his head up with his palm as he failed to focus on the teacher. His head was in the clouds and he had never looked so perfect―an angel among the clouds above her, completely otherworldly and not at all as mortal as she would find herself to be―and she was entranced once again. He was always beyond ethereal, outshining even the brightest of stars and carved into perfection by Prometheus himself; the problem was that she was nothing special, even if she radiated it, and he was something special, even if he didn't radiate it.

In the moments in which she forced her eyelids open in order to force the images from her mind, trying desperately to stare blankly at the car in front of her, rather than thinking of him, she found no safe haven from her mind. Her mangled mind was tortured with the flashes of him in all his glory—soft waves of almost amber hair, sharpened eyes pooling like the ocean, jagged and shattering cheekbones, hidden secrets on his skin, and entangled horrors haunting his mind.

She merely tormented herself with the images of him that ran through her head. As she pictured his smile reaching his eyes as he tilted his head back in laughter before glancing into her eyes, she felt the ache in her heart; as she nearly felt her fingers running through his soft and curly locks in another world, in another life, she could do nothing but wish that his arms held her close, even if only once; as she narrowed her gaze upon the pools of emotion she could practically stare into forever, she found that she wanted his icy blue eyes to stare into hers and make her less invisible; as she fell into the swirling web of her desires, she felt like a fly caught in amber, a statue chiseled into a decaying monument for eternity, a fleeting memory making the slightest mark on earth; as she thought of him, she realized that she wanted nothing more than to be seen.

He was among the last thoughts in her mind as it all happened, as the brief whispers of life were clouded by the heaviness of death.

She could never comprehend what happened next; how she could go from dwelling on her desires to clinging onto them as she clung onto life,  and watching them slip away as she slipped away.

In that moment, she longed for him, for anyone―she wanted someone to love her and someone to care; she wanted to finish the book she had picked up, Falling Into Place, to picture the exact situation in which a person could forgo a life of potential for a moment of weakness, to imagine her own hands clutching the wheel, clutching fate itself, before jerking it to the side and changing everything in a single moment; she wanted to decipher the motive behind it all, behind life itself; she wanted to cheer her brother on at his lacrosse game with such fervor it would embarrass him; she wanted to lay on her bed with her best friends and laugh carelessly once more; she wanted to rewind it all and go back; she wanted to live.

But her single moment was different; in her single moment, her old friend in the seat beside her had barreled his mom's car into some creature that seemed set on racing head on into a collision. In her single moment, her seatbelt caught her fragile case of bones, and it started to tear into the skin of her neck and collarbone. In her single moment, the jacket covering her body had drifted towards the floor where her backpack was, and her phone felt from her limp fingers as the fragility of life her mind. In her single moment, glass sharps rained down onto her skin and the impact of the crash had inspired fate into injuring her. In her single moment, she was not in control and as her head hit the dashboard, he flashed across her mind, and the thought of him never knowing how she felt about him hurt more than the numbness she felt right before her vision faded.

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[EDITED] APRIL 9, 2017
[EDITED AGAIN] AUGUST 30, 2017
yes i'm editing this again because i have no inspo for the story currently