La puerta del bosque

In that moment, I wondered when the last time was that I'd made eye contact with someone for this long.

We looked at each other in the warm library light. His eyes were brown and guileless.

You know what I mean. It's the eyes, I think. You look like you've got a million things going through your mind, but you're not saying them.

I looked back at her face. Hers was the kind of liquid loveliness that held a secret: you look at it again and again, trying to catch it.

His eyes registered curiosity before melting into that easy going expression. The one he wore like armor.

He liked saying names, I noticed. First of last of both at once. Maybe in real life it was meant to be friendly, but names were dangerous in a fairy tale

And it made me wonder if we weren't a little bit alike. Behaving the way we had to to get by, while hiding a core that was a mystery even to ourselves.

Is that all there is? The thought come to me on a scrap of song. The thing between us, the weird growing thing that looked like nothing head-on but sometimes glowed in the corners of my vision, like a secret. Was it just a crush, something as stupid as that? Would we get coffee now? Would he try to hold my hand?

She believed me, because we didn't lie to each other. Except when we did.

I had...something with him. I'd never quite decided what that might be, but there was this skin of meaning that had attached itself to him. Maybe it was [...] the way our paths kept crossing like we were skaters spinning in a figure eight. Or maybe it was wanting to see that light in his eyes again, a possibility that made my skin flutter with heat rash.