Black and Blue

3 - Being Alone Is So Much Harder When You're Actually Trying

I was leaning to one side of the bench, as usual, with a book open in one hand while I tried getting comfortable. As usual. My weather app, which had only steered me wrong about 10 times since I'd downloaded it, claimed that it would be a fairly chilly day, which I was okay with. It was time for my fall clothes to shine. And by "fall clothes," I meant one hoodie I liked particularly better than the others. A bunch of people, most of them couples, were rushing this time of day, cutting across the grass of the park as they made their daily commutes. Fine by me. At least I was being left alone.

Well, I was for about thirty minutes. Then somebody tapped me on the shoulder, a lot harder than one would ever need to.

"Hey."

I looked up from my book to see a lanky man dressed in all white, with fiery hair in a messy undercut and stubble growing wild on his chin. His face was already about three feet deep into my personal bubble, and he was pissed.

"Can I help you...?" I asked, shifting back towards the other side of the bench. He narrowed his eyes and grabbed one of my arms faster than I could blink, starting to drag me away towards one of the forest paths. I snapped my book shut and attempted to knock him over the head with it, but he caught my other wrist as well and moved both of my hands to one of his so he could properly shush me.

"How many times do I have to say, meet me at the park, but don't sit down?!" He began loudly, as if he were putting on a show. The anger on his face didn't fade, but he clearly hadn't mistaken me for someone else. And all this clearly wasn't about errors in rendezvous communication. I glared at him right back.

"You made me close my book! Now how am I gonna remember where I left—"

"You do this every time. Don't tell me I have to write it on your arm next!"

I looked around the square for help, but everyone had turned away with an expression of schadenfreude. Apparently, nobody wanted to get involved with what they could only assume was some couple's petty argument.

He kept dragging me into the forest, then down some remote pathway that looked relatively fake. A single bench, almost identical to the one that I'd been sitting on before, rested ten feet from where he decided to let go of one of my hands. I tried to break the other free, but he just held on tighter and looked at me through tired, sunken eyes as if this were the last thing he wanted to do today. Something about the angle of his nose, the eyelids that stretched just a little too wide, and his lean figure lit a spark in my brain. He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration.

"Okay, listen up here, because I'm getting really tired of explaining these things—"

"Do I know you? You seem familiar, I just can't remember where I could've met you before..."

"Of course you know me."

"Then why did you drag me to this secluded part of the woods?! Couldn't you have, oh, I don't know, said who you are back there and asked me if I had a couple of minutes to spare?"

"Nah. Crowded areas like that don't take kindly to a young lady screaming for help."

I flinched away from him at those words, though he still had an iron grip on my hand. Is this dude seriously threatening me?!

"W-why would I scream, if you don't mind telling me...?"

He sighed, though I could tell he was satisfied with himself for making me afraid. He waved a hand over his face, and suddenly it changed. Not completely, but his hair's redness washed out to a faded brown color, his skin was now chipped and dark gray, and his eyes...