Smoke of His Breath // Ethan Torchio

lesson 77: love her even if you don't love yourself

Heyyy, do you remember I had a surprise. Yeah, here it is.

Enjoy,

And I know that you don't
But if I ask you if you love me
I hope you li-li-li-lie
Lie to me

(Lie to me-5 seconds of summer)

*

Perspective of Victoria de Angelis:

"Stop running away from me!" I shouted. She was walking fast in front of me and it was hard to catch up. I hoped my voice would stop her. It didn't.

"Why are you doing this to me." I shouted. This made her tremble a little bit. Getting advantage of that, I got closer to her immediately.

"I don't want to talk." she said weakly. I held her arm and felt her flinch. I looked at her eyes but she broke the eye contact.

"You came next to me not more than 10 minutes ago saying we needed to talk. What changed?" I asked.

After I kissed her and ran away, she had came to see me. When she did that, I had thought maybe she wasn't angry at me for kissing her without a permission but before I could open my mouth, she had left back the room before non of us could say a word.

"You ran away first." was her response. "It was clear that you thought you made a mistake. So I did one back. Coming to talk to you was a mistake."

I in deed had thought I had made a mistake. My mistake was not kissing her earlier. Because that moment, it was the only thing which felt right even though we were surrounded by all the wrongs. My mistake was kissing her because Damiano had asked me to. I was afraid of her to think that I didn't want to kiss her and what I was afraid of had came into life. She really was thinking that I hadn't wanted to kiss her.

"I ran away because I thought you were mad at me," I said. This wasn't a time to be scared of feelings. We both had hid them for so long. I felt vulnerable opening up to her like this but I was lucky it was her that I had to be vulnerable with. 

"Why?" she asked. I looked at her almond shaped brown eyes. As always, it was hard to read any feelings. She was the master of hiding her feelings from her eyes. But she had no idea I could see more than what she had in her eyes.  She would play with her hair when excited, she would tap her feet on the ground when nervous. She would bit inside her cheeks not to laugh when happy because she wouldn't want to share her happiness with everyone.

And now, she was holding her elbow with her hand. 

She would do this when she was sad. 

No one would know she is sad. No one would never ask. So, she would face her sadness alone. She would hug herself because no one else did.

"I didn't want you to think the kiss was forced." I said. I saw a spark come and pass quickly in her eyes.

"What difference would it make if it was forced," she said shrugging. She tried to look as careless as possible but she failed at it.

"Bruco, don't do this," I said. "Don't pretend like we don't have something going on."

She looked into my eyes. I felt naked. I felt she could read through my soul. And probably she could. I just wished if she could read, she would see what I felt for her.