If I Stay✔️

96: part 1| ELEO

I'd bribed Enzo to buy them for me that afternoon since Mama refused to give me anything sugary as a kid, claiming I was "hyper" enough without the additional help of refined sugars and E numbers. She wasn't wrong and it wasn't often I'd defy her rules, but for this day to be perfect, I had to have everything possible for me to get my hands on that I knew Leo would both love and appreciate.

He was lost in his own talent; beautiful blue eyes entrapped by the beauty of the world around us whilst I was enamoured by the sheer beauty of him. His painting, I hoped, would reflect everything beautiful he could see, everything I'd hoped he deemed as perfect as I did.

I kept him further entertained with my R-rated jokes, busying my hands as I made two identical daisy chains. One for him, one for me.

As always.

On the small, previously white canvas, Leo got busy with the whites and yellows and blues and soft purples with undertones of red, capturing the cloudless sky and the blinding sun behind me, as well as the way the gentle wind blew the feather-like tops away from the dandelion stems as they floated in the air around us.

It was perfect. Just... perfect.

"Finished," he'd said, staring at me with those big blue eyes that stopped my heart with just one glance, lips lifted into a smile that stole all my breath away from my lungs. "What do you think?" He asked, tapping the top corner of the canvas.

I wanted to look, there was something about Leo's artwork that always left me gobsmacked by the sheer realism he could add to something so simplistic. But right there and then, I couldn't, even if I wanted to, which I didn't, pry my eyes away from him. Away from those eyes and that smile.

"Emmmmmy," he sang, enunciating every syllable of the nickname only he could ever call me, voice coated with hints of laughter and maybe love.

"Sorry, amore," I'd said, mildly snapping out of my Leo induced daze and forcefully dragging my eyes away from his plush pink cheeks (the nickname always had the same effect, even back then) to his painting.

"Wow." That one three letter word came out breathlessly.

"This," he tapped the centre of the picture — my face, my freaking face — gently, as not to disrupt the wet paint and smiled at me shyly. "Is the focal point of everything."

I never knew what that meant, not at the time. It was hours later; after I'd gotten home and stolen my father's laptop that I searched up the meaning on the internet.

It was then, in that very moment, with those very words. My crush on my best friend escalated to something more.

And I wouldn't change those feelings. Not in a million years.

—

"Enzo, I'm saying please!"

"Aww, you have manners? that's nice... I'm still saying no."

"It's our car!" I huffed in frustration as I followed my idiot of an older brother down the hallway, dragging my feet along the carpet like a stroppy toddler. "You can't use it all the time."

"No." Enzo turned to face me, arrogantly twisting the car keys between his fingers in an effort to annoy me further, lips lifted in a lazy grin. "It's my car therefore I can use it whenever I want and right now I want to use it." He said, voice was coated in smugness.