My heart deflates. I know he is just putting up his walls and trying to stop me from getting close to him but a stuck, broken feeling starts to well inside of me. I can feel tears pressuring my tear ducts but I choke them down. We continue to walk for a bit in silence, the only sound being our footsteps and random bird and animal sounds coming from beyond the forest.
I abruptly turn to him and grab his shirt with both of my hands, without hesitation I smash my lips onto his. His face is so shocked and confused. My heart is fluttering and beating so chaotically that I start to worry. I am going to play this off like it means nothing but right now I am savouring every second. He kisses back very passionately to my surprise. We stood there for a bit holding each other close and tightly.
I pull away suddenly and continue to walk, my stomach is a mess of anxiety and butterflies which seem to be fighting each other and somehow combining into one nervous messy emotion, love? No surely that has a much more pleasant sensation. Well it's not love, I guess it can be an unlabelled feeling. Miles is still standing where we had stopped to basically make out. He is looking at me, almost a look of amazement and shock, good to know he hasn't come to terms with what just happened as well because I am confused as fuck and I'm the one who made the first move. Not going to lie, he was a good kisser, Harley was better. Should I tell him that? No that's way too cold and too soon. I smirk to myself.
He jogs up to me and looks at me for a bit. I have seen him kiss people all of the time and he has never acted like this afterwards so he definitely likes me back, it's kinda obvious now. I mean he looks absolutely shell shocked and I'm not even good at kissing, I mean I rarely do it anyway, that's a lie but still.
"So we nearly there?" I ask cheerily but not in a try hard to act cool way.
Miles clears his throat before replying "Uh, yeah."
"Sweet," I say casually. Miles is looking at the ground and basically everywhere but at me at this point which I find quite entertaining.
I follow him as he turns at a random little path that leads into the forest, before I turn down it I look behind me and can see Samson who is chilling and eating something on the ground near him.
"He isn't going to escape and get lost or anything right?" I say, worried since I am starting to warm up to the grumpy fucker and I do wish to ride him home rather than walk back.
"No it's completely fine I come here all the time and leave him there for hours, he doesn't mind," Miles says looking back at the horse with a soft fondness.
I look up at the trees which seem far above our heads, again HOW is this inside the property this place is humongous.
I feel a hand grab a handful of the back of my jumper aggressively in an effort to forcefully tug me backwards. I look around startled and quickly notice that I had literally been centimetres away from stepping into a lake with fountains and statues shooting out from it in an artistic fashion. My eyes go wide as I look at my surroundings in awe. I look back at Miles who was still holding my jumper and smiling at something in the distance. It's a statue of a spider with its spindly legs fully extended around its small body which hovered tall and strongly supported above the nearly clear water. It's a lot cleaner than the koi pond and even the pool. I notice suddenly that all of the statues have some sort of dark twist to them, the spider one for example (the one Miles is looking at specifically since there are many) has a little human head made of stone resting atop of it. I look at another which has a swan with its neck snapped back towards its wings in a disturbing jagged manner.
"Do you have a favourite?" He asks me quietly, not wanting to disrupt the eerie calm around us.
"I like the swan statue closest to the little water fountain, the one with all the fallen leaves gathered at the base," I say pointing at it until he finally nods.
"That was my Mom's favourite," He remarks before taking a sharp intake of air. Without looking, I grab his arm and hold it in an act of consolation. He freezes, arm stiff and seemingly unable to bend. I snake my hand down to his and hold it. I know that some may find it cute to hold hands but to me it is one of my top least favourite things to do with someone but with Miles I felt ok with it and I honestly have no idea why.
"Thanks," Miles mutters.
I smile at him and sit down on a dry mossy rock, bringing him down with me. We sit side by side and stare at the lake and all it contains. I rest my head on his shoulder and for a moment I feel like we both forget that we are holding hands. The intense summer sun melts away at the clear body of water as the light reflects and the shadows casted twirl into shapes projected on the surface.
I act on impulse and lean forward to skim the top of the water with my fingertips. Gentle ripples slowly explode from where my hand makes contact with the icy water. Miles does the same but after a while he gets bored and starts to lightly slap the water so that it engulfs his hand whole before spraying little droplets. He started directing the water at me and before I knew it I was doing the same to him. We ended up splashing each other so much that his sweater and pants became soaked and my pants and hair became drenched. We laugh hysterically as a bird swoops across the lake and sprays us even more with the freezing water.
"Shit!" Miles groans as he looks at his sweater which is practically two shades darker due to the wool being heavily drowned in lake water.
"It'll dry," I laugh.
"At least we have our own personal refreshment from the sun," I reason when he gives me a sceptical look. Miles starts to roll up parts of his sweater and squeeze it like it's a dishcloth, little droplets of water stream down his fingers. After about five more minutes we get up and make our way back to Samson who has been waiting for us patiently. Miles walks up to his horse and strokes his nose before walking over to something and picking it up from the ground. It's some yellow flower that Samson was too far away to eat. Miles feeds him the flower and then helps me get on the horse.
We arrive at the stables and walk back to the surprisingly cold interior of the castle-like mansion. Flora is finished with her lessons by now and has come up with a list of games she wants to play. We ended up choosing hopscotch tag which is something I had never heard of before.
"Basically we just draw three hopscotch diagrams and then all try to make it to the end at the same time but whoever is the slowest has to be the tagger," Flora explains as she lugs a box of chalk out to the big concrete driveway where we are going to draw the hopscotch tiles.
"Sounds fun," I say. She hands me a big stick of green chalk and gives Miles a red one as she draws hers in yellow. We both copy what hers looks like and then step back to look at them when we are done.
"I'm practically Picasso," I say looking at how uneven and wonky mine is.
"Yeah Picasso if he was drawing a d-"
"Miles!" I cut him off, laughing nervously as Flora looked at us innocently smiling.
"Ok ready," Flora says as we each stand at the start of our hopscotch diagram.
"Yep," I reply.
"3 2 1...GO!" Flora yells. I finish second and Flora finishes first, Miles is the tagger. He quickly starts to run after us, jogging slowly after Flora who is running as fast as she can with her little legs. I sprint in a random direction to find a place to hide so that I don't have to continuously run. I watch from afar as Miles grabs Flora and hugs her to him as he falls down on the grass with her securely in his arms, they are both giggling and smiling. Miles gets up and yells "FLORA'S IT," before running away. Flora chases him for a while and they go around a corner. I can't see either of them, I wait for about a minute.
"I lost her," Miles says as he comes up behind me. I scream since I didn't hear him coming. It was more of a strangled shout than a scream but either way it was embarrassing.
"Sh," Miles says, putting a finger to his lips.
"What do you mean you LOST her," I say quieter, panic rising in my voice.
"I MEAN I lost her, as in we should hide before she finds us again," Miles replies.
Miles looks at me in the eyes intensely before asking seriously,
"Do you like running?"
I hear Flora giggle and then look back at Miles who tapped my shoulder and ran away, crap he was it. I started chasing after them, my lungs dying as I run towards the stables since I could see them running in that direction. I slowly creep around the back of the stables and see Flora and Miles huddled together behind a stack of hay. Somehow they hadn't seen me. I creep behind them cautiously and squat down behind them.
"So what are we looking at guys?" I ask casually as I lean both my hands on Flora and Miles' shoulders.
"AHH," Flora screams and then erupts into a fit of cute little giggles as she jumps into the air and wraps me in a tight hug which somehow takes me to the ground. In a way it felt like pay back for scaring her. We both fall on the grass and Miles just stares at us laughing to himself.
"I'm bored. Can we do something else now?" Flora whines after our third game of Hopscotch tag.
"Why don't you play with Miss Jessel for a bit, I remember her saying she was in the mood to play chess with you," Miles smiles as he grabs her hand and holds it in his much bigger one. I really want to hold his hand again.
"Ok!" Flora says, skipping all the way back to the house, Miles takes his normal big steps and somehow manages to keep up with her even at his normal pace. I know why Miles wanted Flora to play with Miss Jessel, he wants to go to the Icebox. Well I'm not going to stop him, I mean it's not like he cares about me enough to listen. I know he cares about me in some way but The Icebox is like his defence mechanism or something, well more the alcohol and the girls are. He is just trying to avoid his feelings and I can't bear to go there and see him, even if it's not genuine, kissing another girl. I still haven't gotten over kissing him today, the way he held me tightly as If he never wanted me to stop...but I did, somehow I did.