Souls Entwined (boyxboy) (On Hold)

Chapter 8

Please don't forget to vote :D I will dedicate this chapter to the first person to both comment AND vote <33

Chapter 8

    I stood in utter contentment as the ocean continued its wave song. Each crashing wave sang to me, made me smile, and chased away the darkness from my mind. When I finally turned around, I found Matthew back to his normality. He and Sarah were sitting in the sand while chatting and laughing about something I couldn’t quite hear. Occasionally, Matthew would lift his eyes, and even through the harsh shadows crated by the dancing flames, our stares would lock.

    The slightest moments felt like little eternities, and I could nearly feel the electricity humming through the air.

    With an unbreakable smile still pulling at the corners of my lips, I finally joined my best friend. I stared down at them and hesitated briefly; I didn’t know whether to sit down beside Sarah or Matthew. In a moment as quick as a heartbeat, I chose to sit in front of them both.

    “What are we talking about?” I asked them both.

    Sarah fell on her back, pressing her head against Matthew’s chest. Almost instantly, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. I felt a ping of the usual jealousy, but it faded just as quickly as it appeared.

    I didn’t have anything to be jealous about.

    Matthew kissed me; I kissed him. We kissed.

    “I’m trying to get Matthew here,” Sarah nudged him in his ribs with her elbow, “to divulge a little bit about himself, but he’s locked up tighter than a bank vault.”

    Wincing and nursing his ribs playfully, Matthew rolled his eyes. “Guys, there isn’t much to know. My mother is a nurse here at the hospital; she basically leaves me alone for most of the day, but likes to keep me locked up in that vault.” Almost if he forgot where he was for a moment, the southern boy sighed deeply and let his grey eyes drop.

    Matthew quickly blinked his eyes and smiled everything off. “She’s just real protective of me; I’m all she has left,” he elaborated.

    Sarah and I shared a glance that obviously glowed with the hunger for more information about the mysterious southern boy because Matthew sighed deeper than before, pulled loose from Sarah’s grasp, and pushed himself to his feet.

    He paced around the fire, and both Sarah and me followed him with our eyes. “My father divorced my mom about five years ago; it completely devastated us both because it came so suddenly. He refused to talk about it or give any other option more than a glance.” Matthew stopped pacing and ran his fingers through his ashen air before continuing. “It turns out the man lived a double life. He already had another woman and children with her. I guess he chose that family over ours.”

    Matthew faced the dark ocean now, seemingly oblivious to the world.

    I wanted to stand and wrap him in an embrace, but I resisted the temptation. “We all come from screwed up backgrounds,” I began as I spoke to his back. Automatically, my mind traveled from the image of my broken family to Sarah’s equally but differently broken family. “We’re like the poster children for broken homes, but we all stumbled onto each other out of dumb luck; we might as well enjoy each other’s company, right?” I closed my eyes as more words formed in my mind and trickled to my tongue; I couldn’t believe what I said, but they felt so right, so fitting. “When the three of us are together, it makes it easier to deal the things that used to weigh me down.”

    Elizabeth’s face formed in my memory; the way her eyes wrinkled when she smiled, and for a moment, I wondered if I looked the same when I smiled; however, I knew my words were true. Matthew and Sarah possessed the ability to give me hope, to make everything around me suck just a little less, to give me hope for a future.