All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 85

85

“You’re late,” Misty said.

Patch turned. “I…”

“I was worried you wouldn’t show.”

“What did you get for your birthday?”

They stood side by side and looked back at the hall as the music slowed and pairs were made.

“You think it’ll always be this hard?” she said.

He saw her parents, her father with his back straight and his arms stiff, and her mother elegant in her long dress and heavy pearls. He wondered what it was to have your future painted just so, to have your perfect world so closed. Maybe he already knew. Just in a different way.

“I worry I’ll never find her,” he said, and could almost not bear to speak such a truth.

“You can keep looking,” she said. “But you might miss what’s right in

front of you.”

He would not look up.

“Maybe what happened to you…you’re not like them, Patch. Everyone is…no one knows you. Not really.”

“This song,” he said, in that moment, beneath that perfect sky in their small and perfect town. Though she took his hand his feet would not move, and so they stayed rooted there.

“You think it’s true, only love can break your heart?” she asked.

The moon was too bright. There were too many stars above. Sometimes he wanted to blot them all.

“If your world should fall apart,” she spoke.

She slipped his arm around her waist and placed her own on his shoulder. And gently kicked off her heels and let her bare feet sink into the grass.

It was not the first time he had danced with a girl.

He breathed her in. “You didn’t tell me what you got?” he said.

She looked up at him with eyes so blue and deep he knew he would

likely drown. “Exactly what I wanted.”

“And what was that?”

In barely a whisper, “I got to dance with the boy who saved my life.”

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