Spades

t e n : malady, her carriage, & 21 jump street

"It's just..." Eira began. "I want the kind of friendship–relationship–where even though it's...hard to forget everything that's been said...you just...you just try. Even though it's hard. You don't give up on each other. You don't...hold it against each other...You just don't."

Her voice had taken on a wistful, soft tone that hinted at more than she was saying, even with its vagueness. Isaiah's heart squeezed.

"I think it's perfectly okay to want that." Isaiah told her, squeezing her hand in his larger, warmer ones. It was scary how he felt like his hand was meant to hold hers. "I think wanting that just makes you human, Eira. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting someone to never give up on you."

"Really?" She asked him, leaning closer with anticipation and giddiness, like she was glad that he understood. "If there's nothing wrong with that, why don't people do it? Why do people give up on other's? I never would. I never would."

Isaiah couldn't parrot what she said, because he knew that if worse came to worst in a trying situation, he could decide to walk and never look back. He has, almost had, and he probably will. And he hated himself a little more because of that realisation.

"Would you?" Eira asked the question he didn't know he'd been dreading.

After a few moments of a thick, pregnant silence, he said; "I would try not to. But I'm not perfect."

Eira smiled, a watery smile. She squeezed his hand and scooted closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder. "That's all you can do. I know you'd try. It's written all over your face. God made people like you special, Isaiah Matthews. Special and rare." She whispered, completely unaware that Isaiah's throat felt like an army and a village of frog's had made a home inside it. "I think there's another person out there like you. Just one more. God made only few of you in the world, Isaiah."

He couldn't even ask why. He couldn't speak. Eira was leaning on him, he could smell her hair, flowery and enticing, her skin, fruity, and because she was still holding his hand. What she was saying was too much for him to bear. Wisps of her hair was brushing his cheek and his arms.

"People like you deserve people like you." She said softly.

"People like-"

"Good people. People with big hearts and bigger smiles. Someone who can stand the sight of blood so that you don't need to, at least. And lucky for you, I don't faint at the sight of blood." She said cheekily.

Isaiah could have choked. Instead, he just squeezed her hand. The schoolboy giddiness he felt should be outlawed nationwide.

After moments of a silence that Isaiah wasn't sure of, Eira, seemingly in a chatty mood, inderectly asked him a question that he never liked hearing, or answering.

"Why were you in a bad mood earlier? When we were in the corridor?" She asked him suddenly.

Her voice wasn't carefree or casual, it was careful and hesitant, like she was afraid she was stepping over a line of an unexplored rumoured hostile territory. And put like that, it wasn't so far off. It was a wonder how their roles had reversed so easily. He wasn't the hesitant one, but she was.

Isaiah's smile slipped off his face like mud being hosed away, and suddenly he didn't find Jonah Hill so funny anymore, and there weren't anything akin to those (damn) butterflies flying around his tummy anymore. He looked away from Eira's eyes, because they were so deep and so beautiful and so understanding and so coaxing, that he actually almost felt like telling her why he was so upset before she had unknowingly cheered him up.