Coffee & Flowers ✓

two | a thousand suns

two | a thousand suns

          There were a thousand suns out there in the universe, just waiting to be born, and out of all of them, Nicholas was the only one burning her alive.

          It was the middle of the night, and the stars were a ghostly ball of gas in the sky, drifting in and out of darkness, and blinking in and out of existence. All a pretty picture, she could admit, but not as pretty as the twinkle in Nicholas's eyes- a blazing inferno of light and heat, flushing the crowd of people in red as their souls burned with something unidentifiable. He was a melody in the stillness of quiet, and where there was no one to idolize in the small town of Nincut, North Carolina, Nicholas strutted around with his guitar strapped to his back in his dark clothes and with his dark eyes.

          Some would describe him as a white canvas, just waiting for someone to come along and color him over in paint, because as teenage boys went, Nicholas didn't have an ounce of personality inside of him. Stone cold, acetic to the touch, corrupt. But the only thing corrupt about Nicholas was his sense of humor, the purple fabricated skin under his eyes, and his music. And all of that which made him up into some untouchable creature, drew her to him, as stars usually did.

          He didn't play in a band, but rather he was the band. With his sultry look and bed hazy voice, he had this aura that captured people and froze them in the seconds that ticked by, a metronome of notes and lyrical symbols that eased audiences into a hush, bodies swaying side to side in the evening breeze of the town's Park Square. It was all quite beautiful, but he was more than that, and she could testify to that having grown up alongside of him -the boy that carried a nail file in his back pocket because he didn't believe in biting his nails. The boy who often wore headphones in his ears with nothing playing just because it meant people left him alone. The boy who repeated outfits, back to back, sometimes pushing the same jeans and t-shirt to an extra day, and the boy who wore his baby blanket stitched to his sweater in bits of frayed fabric because it made him feel safe.

         He was magnificent with his yellow fingernails aching with every chord he played, his voice hoarse in the microphone that amplified in the near deserted town, children splashing in the fountain behind her back despite the chill, grandparents lounging in lawn chairs, and couples huddling under blankets against the frosty air that felt like needles to the skin, biting at the backs of their necks and chilling their bodies till they were numb. From Nicholas's singing or the actual temperature, she couldn't tell. All she knew, and all she could feel was him, burning her inside and out despite the fact that it was the dead of winter.