Sage || l.h.

chapter 1

Cold hands grasped my wrist, fingers clenching desperately around the soft skin. I gasped, searching for something to connect the ice like feeling to. Looking up, I was met with two beautiful eyes, seemingly the color of an endless blue. Mesmerizing as they were the look in them was what captured my attention. Worried, lost, scared.

Then, just like that, everything went black.

I sat up, gasping for air and rubbing my once cold wrists, or that's what it had seemed like anyways. Sighing, I wiped my hand across my now thick with sweat forhead and placed my feet on the ground.

The dream had come and gone nearly everyday this week, Monday, Wednesday, and now Friday. Always a different beginning, yet always the same ending. Those eyes. Looking into those blue eyes that seemed to make my heart ache. The eyes that were hardly even human let alone the eyes of someone I knew. The eyes that now seemed to haunt me.

It's really kind of funny, this dream. I had always been fascinated by them, how your brain could just think up things, whole stories, inside of a mind that was supposedly at rest. Hell, some people have been said to even control their dreams, or crazily enough, to have them predict the future, and now here I was having reoccurring dreams about someone who didn't even exsist. Someone who's only identity I had to go off on was eyes bluer than the damn ocean itself. Talk about the bad apple on the tree.

Rubbing my eyes, I glanced over at the glowing red numbers on my bedside table.

3:15

Groaning, I flopped back down on my bed, staring up at the plastered ceiling, thanking my lucky stars I had called off work the day before.

I smiled, thinking of the cute florist shop just a mile or so from my apartment. I had originally gotten the job when I first turned 18, having just left my train wreck of a home and finally being on my own. I knew when I first walked into the carved wooden door and felt the sweet aroma of petunias and azayleas surrounding me that this is where I was meant to be. The shop was owned by a sweet older woman by the name of Serena, someone who I had become very close with over the past year or so. She had shared with me that a few years before her husbands passing they had bought the shop with their retirement funds, sprouting the passion that was her husbands love for gardening. She herself had always had a green thumb, but Rowan, her husband, had a way with the flowers, she would always tell me with a gleam in her wise eyes. She would always speak of him in a hushed whisper of fascination, a new story everyday of how the plants seemed to gravitate towards him, and bloom at his will, although I knew it was just her old age talking. This wasn't fern gully, no one could control plants and flowers and when they bloomed, that in itself was mother nature. Still, I never interjected or corrected her, her memories kept her alive and young, and to take that away would be sinister.

I made my way to the bathroom, my feet softly padding along the smooth hardwood floors. My apartment was nice for the price that I got it. It wasn't in the safest part of Chicago but not necessarily the worst part either. Plants were hung from the ceilings and on every corner, making the small space look more like a miniature greenhouse rather than a place to live. Not that I was complaining anyways.