𝐖𝐀𝐘 𝐁𝐀𝐂𝐊 - 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐚 (𝐢𝐢𝐢) | ✔

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 𝒙𝒊𝒊𝒊. 𝐚𝐥𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭

𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐧
━━ 𝒂𝒍𝒎𝒐𝒔𝒕

     "What do you mean you 'almost kissed Reagan'?" Lucy exclaimed, looking at his brother. "She has a boyfriend, you know?"

     "Don't you think I know that? That is precisely why I don't know what to do," he muttered, lowering his head in the process. 

     After finishing their work, Reagan and Thomas had invited Edmund to stay for dinner and he had regretted it immediately. He saw the couple cook together, the small gestures they had with each other, how they knew exactly what the other liked, and he could not wish but to be him instead of Thomas.

     It is not that he didn't like the boy; in fact, he thought he was very friendly and they had had some very good conversations together, but he could not avoid clenching his jaw seeing how he was as close to her as Edmund himself used to be once. All the way back to his house, he had been unable to stop thinking about Reagan's lips and glistening eyes, about the moments they had shared those past weeks,

     "And what do you plan on doing? I know that you like her, Ed, you always have but... she is in a relationship already."

     "I don't know, Lu," he admitted, sighing, "I don't know what I am going to do. I would never hurt her or her relationship but..."

—

     In her apartment, Reagan sat in silence in the living room. Thomas was already asleep and she had an open notebook in front of her. If someone had seen it, they would have definitely thrown it away, for it was the oldest and most beaten notebook Reagan had ever seen. It had been her father's and he had taken it with him to war, he had just kept it in his pocket and took it everywhere he went, scribbling down little notes whenever he could. 

     Reagan and her father shared that love for writing and, since not all of the pages were full, he had gifted it to Reagan and asked her to fill it with her thoughts, with stories, with drawings... with whatever she wanted. And that was exactly what she was doing at the moment. 

     She put her pen to the paper and began writing, not even caring about the quality of her words nor the visuality of her handwriting, she just needed to let out everything that had been piling up in her heart. As she wrote, however, she became distracted by an image coming to her mind, an image of a pair of brown eyes full of golden specks, eyes that she had seen reflect the sea and the glisten of the swords. An image of thin lips that tasted like peppermint and tea. An image of soft black hair—

     "Reagan? Is everything okay?" she heard a voice approaching her. When she looked up, she found Thomas before her, with half-closed eyes and messy hair. Thomas's eyes, nonetheless, were in her notebook.

     It was then that Reagan looked down at what she had written and she found that her pen was still delineating a small 'E' in the middle of the page. She couldn't even remember when she had stopped writing and when she had started drawing that letter, but that did not matter at the time. What mattered was that Thomas's eyes were full of pain and disappointment, although he would be lying if he said that he had not thought about it some time.

     "You two go way back, right?"