Story# 4 Smoke

“We’re not bad people. We just have bad habits. Everyone has something dark inside them. In my case, it’s smoke residue.”

She gazed away at the horizon, “If somebody knew the true you, they would judge you. If somebody knew the real me, they’d laugh at me.”

“I’m not laughing and I know you better than you know yourself. Look at me,” he said, his face an incomprehensible mask. Sometimes she wished she could look at him the way he looked at the world. All heart, no soul. There was that passion in his eyes, it burned her skin just looking into those caramel irises. But his soul was a deep abyss, and thus the mask. He lured her with that look, but she couldn’t make that leap. Because if she fell, just this once, there would be nowhere to land.

And she wasn’t...normal. She couldn’t feel. So she pushed him away and didn’t look back as he fell. Deeper and deeper into the ocean beneath.  

I turned the page but it was blank.

‘Huh! It’s like you sit down for coffee and drink all the book and the coffee stays there, cold and unbothered,” I mused with a sigh.