Author's Note: This is an old challenge response that I forgot to upload here :)

THEME: Any Analogies
TYPE: Any: Poem, Short Story or Fanfiction
INFO: Write something inspired by and using at least ONE of The Best and the Worst Analogies Written by High School Students (which can be found on imgur). Be creative and have fun ;D

Challenge by Kaly - on Shadowplay

Analogy

He didn't want to be drawn to her. Didn't want to feel so attracted to her. Not here, in a place where life was precarious, where the death of friends was a certainty rather than something you could hope never happened.

Yet he was drawn to her … a lot. So much that he found it hard to ignore the pull, the desire to stride into the circle of her notice and demand she give him all the things he shouldn't want.

It got so bad he had to manufacture reasons to turn away from her … create flaws to counter the perfection he saw whenever he let himself look at her for too long.

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the centre.

They weren't. Sure, they were brown and she had the requisite pupil at each centre. The brown wasn't just brown though – it was warm chocolate stirred through with a mysterious ingredient that lured him to lose himself in her gaze in an effort to discover her secrets. When you took in the entirety of her eyes, the teasing tilt and the arch of her brows, she was mischief and fun and so full of vive that sometimes he wished for nothing more than to send her somewhere safe with no risk that life would crush the spirit from her.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

Again true, and yet so inadequate a description. Her face was more oval than any other shape but that one word was unfit to summarise her beauty. Hell, who was he kidding? At the mention of Thigh Masters, the last thing he was considering was her face. No, his mind went immediately to the rest of her body. She was strong, athletic and capable, and anyone taking in her figure and the confident way she held herself would think the same. She was small, enough inches shorter than his own five foot nine that he felt tall in comparison. He didn't want to admit how much he liked that ... the lack of an admission didn't make it any less true.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

As he listened to her laugh at the punch line to a joke he wasn't interested in, her open amusement so not the sound a dog makes under any circumstances, he wanted to laugh at himself and how desperate he was becoming if his mind was conjuring up so poor an analogy. Her laugh was pure and genuine and guaranteed to raise an answering smile from anyone blessed to be included in her joy. His own lips turned upwards, just a small amount, so subtle that only those who knew him well would realise that he was amused by what he saw before him.

His feet moved without his conscious volition, just a step forward, in the wrong direction. He was in so much trouble here … so much in need of a distraction before he did something he couldn't take back.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

He laughed aloud, ignoring the looks he got from those who wondered what the silent man, standing alone, could possibly find funny. Now that one wasn't wrong! She was like an illness, something alien that had invaded his blood stream. Something his defences didn't want to fight off, not if it meant losing the buzz he got whenever he was near her. His eyes shifted to the floor in front of him as he let that realisation flood his mind. He felt more – a heightened awareness and of all things an inexplicable hope for the future – because of her. The allure … the feeling of destiny catching up to him was so strong he wondered how he'd ever been able to deny the truth to himself. That one step he'd taken hadn't been in the wrong direction. All he had to do was take another step and then another, and another, until he convinced everyone he knew the right direction.

"Major?"

Startled, his eyes shot up, his gaze locking immediately to hers. He blinked, disorientated to see her so close when moments before she'd been across the room.

"Join us," she invited. It wasn't the first time she'd asked - it shamed him to think how many times he'd turned her down. That never stopped her - she was hesitant but always hopeful this would be the time he'd say yes. "Please," she added softly.

"Ah … sure, okay," he was moving forward before his mind caught up with the rest of him.

"Really?" those chocolate brown eyes widened, her lips lifting into the kind of smile he hadn't seen before, one he hoped would always be just for him, one that said she was both touched and intrigued by him alone.

"Really," he confirmed, offering her an elbow in a gallant gesture.

She took it, her smiling shifting to delighted, her hand warm against his skin.

He glanced down at her as they walked back towards their friends.

She was like an unexpected rescue just at the moment when you were sure that all was lost.