James glanced at Asia out of the corner of his eye while she walked Stephen through his half of the sword routine. She didn’t know, and he would never tell her, that he’d been waiting for her all his life.
When he was eight, he’d started having a dream - the same dream, over and over again - of himself, crying and hungry, tearing through the forest with a bow and arrows, desperate to catch something for supper lest he, someone be angry. Halfway through the chase he ran into a man whose face was fuzzy, just out of focus, and at the man’s side was a cloaked figure, and James knew that underneath the cloak she was Asia.
When he was fifteen, he dreamed again and again of sitting in an ancient little Christian church, staring at the altar in which was buried to the hilt a sword, while a maid sat beside him and told him stories of golden deserts and foreign lands. In the dream he was no longer afraid and hungry, and she was no longer wearing a cloak, and he knew her face.
When he was twenty and getting ready for drama school, he dreamed he was dying, and she was crying as she held him.
And then he walked into his dorm room and met his new roommate’s sister...and she’d looked at him with nothing more than polite blankness.
James had never expected to see her in real life, had thought she was little more than a dream. To her, he was little more than an acquaintance, and every time her indifferent gaze passed over him, it was a solid blow to the chest, so hard he was robbed of breath for just a moment.
One day James would make her smile at him.
One day.
Until then...
“Hey James, you’re wanted on set!”
(309 words)
No comments:
Post a Comment