bitter/sweet

By: Provocative Envy

OOO

before and after

We fell in love slowly.

I had not realized—not for days, weeks, months—that he had changed, that I had changed, that the rough—rotten—derision I had spent so long reserving just for him—it had dissipated, evaporated, drifted up and up and away like the steam from a particularly scalding shower.

("Why weren't your grades better when we were in school?" I asked him one afternoon.

He shrugged.

"I hate reading."

"What?"

He looked amused.

"I grew up with magic," he explained. "It made things easy. Books always felt like an awful lot of work in comparison."

We were fundamentally different.

It had ceased to bother me at some point.)

He never apologized for what had happened to me in his parents' house. After a while, I had stopped expecting him to, of course; and it was that, of all things, that forced me to wonder when I had come to understand him so well. All of the observations I had made of him over the years had been surface deep—he was selfish and he was spoiled and he was cruel, casually, easily, and even though he had grown up to have rather distractingly pretty eyes, he was still inherently loathsome, wasn't he?

(He was not, as it turned out.)

What he was, though, was clever. Clever and obstinate and damaged, almost irreparably, like a crumpled, balled-up sheet of paper that would never be able to iron itself out, never be as crisp or cold or flat as it once was. And his voice—the polished, aristocratic cadence of it had been left unaffected by everything that had gone wrong—was always tinged with a fierce sort of resentment whenever he spoke of his family.

(He told me, once, that he felt that they had manipulated him.

I did not disagree.)

He wrote letters to his mother every Sunday afternoon, however, like clockwork, the scrape of a pen roving across parchment overloud in the tense, bizarrely charged silence of his sitting room. I never asked to read them, was eager to respect the last shred of privacy the Ministry afforded him, and he was always quiet when he came back from putting them in the mailbox.

(I really should have read them.)

OOO