reckless // jai brooks

ᴛʜʀᴇᴇ

    JAI TOOK HER TO AN abandoned building, close to the Starbucks she had been studying in. At first sight, it didn't really look like something Aubrey would want to enter; she even thought her decision was stupid and she would have been much better studying calmly like she had been doing before. Jai noticed her hesitation, but that only made his smirk bigger. The building had three stories and ended in a triangular roof -which could be counted as a fourth floor- and it looked pretty old. All the windows were either broken or completely covered in graffiti. The inside was different, though. Instead of completely empty floors, Aubrey noticed that these were actually furnished. She was getting really creeped out by the whole experience, but she wanted to keep going. Vintage armchairs covered by filthy sheets that used to be white someday where placed facing an empty fireplace, with a destroyed coffee table -it was missing a leg-in front of them. Rugs were rolled up and piled on top of each other on the other side of the room. Jai walked up the stairs and she tagged along behind him. She didn't see much of the second or the third floor since they didn't stop there but kept going up the stairs. She only noticed that they were much brighter than the ground floor, since there were more windows and half of them were broken so light easily filled the rooms. They also appeared quite empty, but she wasn't sure about that since she hadn't seen them whole. But the fourth and last floor, the roof, was pretty much what made her stay, and not walk down the stairs, sprint to Starbucks and spend her whole day studying again. What would have normally been a very dark, small attic with no windows was actually quite different than that. As they climbed the stairs up to that floor, Aubrey immediately saw that she was facing a huge hole. The whole back side of the triangular roof what'd been destroyed completely and in its place was now a huge hole. Aubrey hadn't seen that from the outside, since she had only seen the front side of the house.

The place was magical because the view from the fourth floor of that building was stunning. She could see the whole city and the sun setting behind the mountains. The sky was painted red, orange, yellow and different shades of pink and it was all so peaceful and quiet, she wanted to stay there forever. Aubrey sat down and stared outside the hole, admiring the beautiful scenery. Jai sat down next to her, and pulled out of his backpack a Nutella sandwich. He cut that in half using his hands and handed one of the two halves to her. She slowly ate it, her eyes fixed on the beautiful sunset. Nobody was saying a word, no sound was heard. Only the peaceful quietness of that beautiful place.

Soon, they started chatting silently, afraid that they'd disturb the sun, or scare the clouds and the colors away.

"This world can be so beautiful" Aubrey mumbled, more to herself than to the boy sitting next to her "...yet we choose to destroy its beauty." she didn't take her eyes off the sunset once "soon, it'll fade away, it will wither and it will die. And then, all the money on Earth won't be able to bring its beauty back"

"Beauty can't be bought" Jai added.

"Beauty can't be bought" Aubrey repeated, slightly nodding her head in agreement.

They talked about all kinds of things as the sun set, until there was no light left and the room was filled with darkness.

"We should do something to remember this!" Aubrey said excitingly. She took a permanent marker out of her backpack but before she could open it, Jai took it from her hand.

"here you got a taste of life
J & A"

He wrote on the wall, and Aubrey couldn't agree more with what he had written. But she wanted to add a message from her too. Above his message she added

"here you showed me what life really means"

Satisfied, she stuffed her marker in her backpack and turned to Jai.

"I should be going now" she said, and he just shrugged.

"Goodbye, Jai" she said, heading for the staircase.

He stayed quite quiet, but as she started walking down the stairs, he called her name.

"Hey Aubrey," he yelled and she turned her head to look at him. "Enjoy life from now on, okay?"

She only smiled, and he smiled back, well, he kind of smirked but, for her, it was the same thing. Then Aubrey walked down the stairs and out of the building.

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