LOVE, INC. ♥

Chapter Three

Acknowledgements: This chapter is dedicated to amesco for encouraging me to continue writing when I felt disheartened about “Love, Inc.” I felt a bit dejected because I didn’t realize how difficult it was to get people to read your story, and even more so, to comment sincerely. But I will keep on going. Anyway, if you love science fiction and fantasy, check out amesco’s stories!

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♥ Chapter Three

 Soap bubbles fluttered in the air during a warm summer afternoon. Laughter rang in the orange sky, and the shadows of two children riding tricycles dipped over the road under the sunset. A tire squealed, and a little girl’s body flung over the pavement and landed on the grassy yard. She erupted into high-pitched crying.

“Don’t cry, Daisy,” the boy yelled and screeched his tricycle to a stop. Tears continued pouring down her cheeks as she pointed at the green stain on her skirt.

The boy fell on his knees and dug his fingers in the soil. After a minute, he reached for her head.

The girl almost exploded into another fit of shrieks for dirtying her hair, but stopped when the boy sat back and showed his gap tooth in a smile.

“See, you’re a princess. And princesses don’t cry.”

The girl grazed her fingers over her hair and felt the blades of grass that were entwined in a crown. Her face beamed even though her cheeks were drenched wet. She grabbed a twig and tapped the boy on his shoulder with it.

“Then I will call you Prince William!” He bowed his head. “And that will be our royal pet!” Her wand pointed to the basketball sitting in the yard. “And you must promise to be loyal to your princess forever.”

“I promise,” the boy said, and they shook their pinkies together.

She remembered gazing into the horizon that afternoon before the sun disappeared into the earth. The light had glowed such a bright orange that it would always burn in the back of her mind.

“Daisy?”

Daisy lifted her chin up from her palm and glanced at the seat next to hers. The roar of the cheering crowd returned, along with the deafening buzzer that hurt her ears and the annoying squeaks of sneakers on the floor. Heath stared at her.

“For a game you were insistent on attending, you don’t seem to be paying much attention to it,” he said. “Then again, I never imagined you as a basketball fan.”

Pulling the corners of her lips up felt like her muscles were pulling the biggest weights in the world. Daisy rested her head on Heath’s shoulder, and her fingers entwined themselves with the tie on his dress shirt.

“You and I are a lot alike, you know," she murmured. "We’re both rich. We’re both beautiful. And we date people every week, until we get bored and move onto the next person." The pad of her thumb rubbed over the silky cloth of his tie. “What I want to know is why you do it, Heath.”

Heath didn’t respond for a while, leaving the honks of the buzzer and the pounding of the basketball against the floor to fill the air. He curled his fingers over Daisy’s palm, taking her hand and placing it back on the armrest between them.

“A player never tells a girl his real intentions,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “But I’ll tell you what I don’t do it for. I don’t date a bunch of people in the hopes of gaining one person’s attention. I don’t do it so that a special someone will look at me.”

Daisy lifted her head from Heath’s shoulder and stared at him. She could see her reflection in his blue eyes, a girl that wasn’t really smiling at all.