‘Thanks, I guess. Yeah, I’m the one who’ll marry her, but you guys apparently still know her way better than I do.’  She sighed in defeat.

‘I’d say that we’re only more aware of her taste in clothes.’ Marina corrected. ‘And your bond to Dana is more intimate, more romantic. You get to explore a side of her that we, mere mortals, will never even glance at.’

‘You must be right…’ Tonya nodded, while Alice had trouble keeping to herself a sigh of regret.

Even though they’d promised to never sleep with each other, an oath done on a fateful evening a few months ago, Al had been experiencing a growing urge, a lovingly warm infatuation towards Ms. Fairbanks. At first she’d laughed at it, blamed this reaction on a mixture of being single and overworking.

However, somewhere between the tennis player breaking up with Lara and meeting Tonya, there was a point that Ms. Pieszecky could no longer deny such feelings, brush them aside as if it were nothing more than headstrong insects.

The intensity of her attraction had doubled. It blossomed from her heart, a blood-red rose that had been nourished by Alba’s and Marina’s sad performance the previous dawn.

The forlorn part of it? She’d had her chance to seduce Dana and hit it off. And had carefully held back, waited to see if her infatuation would pass – because it had been only a moment of weakness, right?

And thus the opportunity was wasted.

Now the girl Alice truly loved (yes, she could admit it), the one her heart beat for, was a few weeks away from pledging herself to another.

Remorse corroded Al’s soul. Why had she been such a fool?! Why hadn’t she acted on her impulses, screw their promise, instead of stepping aside so as to ponder over what every pore of her being already knew?   

What was there to be done, then? She’d have to suffer the consequences of waiting for too long. Her heart would break – it already was, cracking slowly into a million tiny pieces.

Love wasn’t always sweetness and flowers and walks under the full moon. It could be cruel enough to slowly torture one to a state of constant woe. A gift and a curse, warm and destructively cold, able to both uplift and break down the human it affected.