Royally Kissed | ✓

02; the pauper

—two—

the pauper

BUT SOMEONE SAID that there are no strangers in this world. Just friends you haven't met.

Paige was rather cavalier about the things that had happened around her surroundings. Not that she entirely ignored it but−it wasn't only later that she fathomed how small, fleeting moments could turn into something grand. Moments that she thought were insignificant but would actually matter in months or years to come.

Like that day, as Paige scuttled towards a pharmacy right after she'd left Manor Hotel and then helped herself with some medicines for her aching stomach. She had no business at the hotel whatsoever, add the fact that she'd wanted to keep Owen around within the distance of between Vietnam and Canada.

She was about to head out of the pharmacy after having paid the bottles and pads of pills she got; but that was the thing about chanced encounters−they were strategically placed from one dot to the other.

"I don't have much but," an old man trailed off, woefully giving a cursory glance at the few bills in his palm, "I hope you reconsider, Ma'am. It's not about me. It's my children, please."

The woman behind the counter shot the man a look, clearly unamused at his presence alone. Paige had never been one to intervene but her humanity had always, always, won out in the end.

She passed the bottled water in her left hand to the other, pacing towards where the man was standing. "Hi," there was hesitation in her voice, but she'd smiled at him when he turned anyway. "I'm not sure if I should get involved, but I'm curious of what seems to be problem."

The man gauged her as though calculating if she was being serious enough to even care. She prompted an answer from him by nodding her head, but the man simply fell silent. He blinked back a tear and Paige would've missed it had she not actually been staring at him in concern.

When she casually gazed down to somehow ease the awkwardness between them, her eyes landed down on his worn shoes instead, a toe poking out of one. Her chest began to clench tight at the irony to have encountered two different people living thoroughly different lives in less than twenty-four hours.

People were saying she was lucky to be brought into existence with already a golden spoon in her mouth. Her parents were unrelentingly ready to provide her all the riches in the world and yet she still believed that something was missing.

Something like there was a void living inside her.

It was then she realized how incredibly lucky she was, and with this, her heart burned with sadness for thinking how there were unfortunate people living in the same world as hers but wasn't given what she had.

It didn't take her long to figure out that the man was perhaps ashamed of his current situation, hence the reluctance. She rounded to the woman behind the counter, who then had her eyebrow arose up her forehead.

"Just give him everything he needs, please."

The lady was unmistakably rude, if only because she threw her a skeptical look as if she'd grown two heads. There was a hint of uncertainty flooding down her face and gave her a once-over.

Perhaps it might be attributed to the fact that she looked like a regular college student with a heap of student loans attached to her name, working on three side jobs, all of which barely had helped her to scrape up for her education, let alone pay for someone's medicines that probably would cost an unfortunate student a handsome amount of money.