Timeline/World: Atheria 3rd Generation
Characters: Agathe Taylor
Race: Human – Meta – Water
Age: 33, physically about 20
Final Word Count: 538 words
I’m certainly not the most outgoing person, looking at the rest of my siblings and my cousins, I’d have to think this is a partial family trait because some of us are this way and some of us aren’t, though maybe it’s just a natural on and off trait in people, I don’t know. I’ve just never been really big on going to others to talk about myself or to try and befriend them. I did still have a friend or three growing up but they’d been the one to approach me and I had let them.
Things changed a bit when it was Callias who came my way. I don’t even really understand how it all worked out or what he ever saw in me before we did start talking but I guess that is just one of those things. The friends I’d had at that point, I’d warmed up to them, you could say, it was easy to talk to them and smile and be outgoing but with Callias? I froze; I don’t really have any other way of looking at it, other than I froze. I’m stumbling over my words, not quite stammering but still being unable to really formulate anything overly coherent, it was mortifying.
Though, it wasn’t really that way at first. At first, it was closer to the way I’d been with my other friends. It was when this whole… dating thing started happening that my body and especially my brain started to do its thing. I can’t tell if it was because it was new or if it was because I did want to be with him in that way but my brain was somehow wired differently?
I’m over that now, of course, things are smooth and perfect at this point in our lives but the first couple of years were mortifying, at least to me. He was so patient it was different but… so often I had these thoughts that all of this word-fumbling and head ducking and uncertainty would drive him away. I’m glad it didn’t and that he stayed through it all, I would have been really lonely on my own but I would have handled it, I figure that if he hadn’t loved me to the point of staying with me all along, we wouldn’t have been meant and that’d just have been it, no arguing the point, in the end, a fact is a fact and you can’t force someone to love you, that’s just crazy.
The fumbling and word stumbling didn’t just disappear one day, though. Oh no, furthest from. It just got better, little by little. My heart wouldn’t constrict and then gallop away when he’d take my hand, instead it would just speed up a little in a fluttering motion and settle again, my words starting coming out in a much smoother fashion, my reactions became slowly more natural and less uncertain. I guess this is like getting used to a new thing that never was there in your life. Some people take to these new things with finesse and act like they’ve always had it and some, like me, just need a little—okay, a lot!—of getting used to it.
Works of JD Beckett 