Microwaved Love

20 |

The air is whizzing out accompanied by a high pitched squeak.

"No you are, to me you are everything. So what if you have some flaws? We all do. I love every single one of them. Seth, to me you are perfection." I say quietly.

"No Sage. I'm not." he says back in an almost gentle tone.

Then he pulls away completely and let my arms around him drop to my sides.

Whoosh and all the air escapes.

"I'll hurt you without realising it." he whispers. "I lose interest in things so quickly, and you know how love is. It just comes and goes. Isn't it better if we just stay friends?"

Maybe I am being selfish, but in my mind I see him, and I see me, and we are together and happy and I want that so badly to be reality.

I shake my head.

He actually chuckles at this and reaches a hand out to touch my cheek or something before he stops himself.

"Don't be ridiculous." he sighs.

"Seth, I really really like you." I reply, my heart aching with my very words.

He stares at me with his liquid brown eyes and I stare back until he murmurs, "I don't want to lose you."

I want to protest. I want to tell him he won't. I want to get up and hit him in the head about ten hundred times so that maybe he can start seeing things clearly. But despite how distraught I feel now, the stubborn line of his clenched jaw and the hard, determined light in his eyes tell me that I currently have just about a one in a trillion chance of swaying him.

"Okay. Just friends then." I say softly, managing to avoid my voice from cracking.

I understand what he is thinking. I get that he prefers friendship over the possibility of a break up and broken hearts and the bitter relationship of exes. I get that, and I am almost completely persuaded that this is the right course of action because I do not want to lose him either, except I look at Seth again as we walk together to his car. His face is closed off and his posture is stiff, but when he sees my gaze he smiles this gentle, brilliant smile, the kind of smile a returning soldier gives his sweetheart when seeing her in the distance after years of separation.

It makes me want to kiss him.

I am not so sure what the best way our relationship should head is anymore.

On the way back to my house, Seth draws me into a conversation. It is casual and familiar, and he makes me smile effortlessly and reply without thought, and I realise how much I do not want to lose what we have now. But as he speaks about the funny things his chemistry partner says, my eyes wander down to his mouth and I let myself dream.

His mouth is a masterpiece. I love it.

In the next few weeks, things go back to the way they were since the days Seth began talking to me at school. He begins to sit with us again and glues himself to my side whenever the chance arises, not that I am complaining. But most of the time, he acts like my confession did not even happen, which manages to twist my stupid heart in the slightest of ways.

How he does this I will never know. It takes me a lifetime to start breathing normally whenever we speak, not to even mention attempting to erase any signs of the flush threatening to explode across my face whenever he so much as looks at me.