The Cobalt Virus-Natalie & Beau
She's just a child, really. A nineteen-year-old child, yes, but a child nonetheless. She's never left the state, barely even made it past Birmingham. Even then, she couldn't help the restless sensation sweeping through her.
Most people her age have a job, a car, a boyfriend.
She had none of the above. A job was too difficult to keep while going to college and taking care of her mother. A car? Well, that whole lack of a job thing probably explains that. But, she has a bike. It has a cute little basket on the front, long-forgotten pink and white tassels sitting on the dusty shelf at the top of her closet.
The last part- the boyfriend. That made her laugh. Not a petite giggle that might come from someone most called a child; it was a loud, throaty laugh that began in her chest and erupted from her full lips. Tears fell freely, sliding down the arch of her cheeks until they relinquished their grip on her face and splashed to the ground.
And then she was actually crying.
No, she didn't have a boyfriend. Didn't have someone to play with her long brown hair that stood out amongst a family of blondes. Didn't have a partner in crime, someone to leave the house with after dark and venture out into the world with wide, naive eyes full of wonder.
That didn't mean she wasn't in love, however.
Beau was a simple man, by all accounts. Attractive, or so the women at the bar told him when they ran their hands across taut, jean covered thighs. But he was far from a boy scout- The coarse nearly ginger facial hair and scowl that typically accompanied it quickly reminded people of that fact.
It wasn't that he was rude, per se. In fact, once you got past the rough exterior, he could be a kind man. Not loveable or sweet or any of those other things that disarm people, but kind? He could manage that.
Most people didn't stick around long enough to find that out, though. The one-night stands who he shared beds with were just that- one-night stands. Words shouted in the heat of passion didn't count, after all.
The closest thing he had to a friend is Joseph, his greasy colleague that works with him at the bar, Lamarck's. But their friendship was little more than Joseph attempting to skip out on cleaning up and Beau calling him out on it. So, yeah, friendship wasn't a part of the Beau Gleeson package.
Unless, of course, you counted Natalie, his neighbor. He wasn't sure if she qualified. She was just a kid, even if her driver's license told him otherwise. Didn't know horse shit about the world around her, somehow looking at everything with a nice little rosy tint. When something does happen to slip past her hazy gaze, infiltrating the walls she built by hand, brick by brick, the girl merely scrunches her nose. Never yells, doesn't cry much.
Beau didn't know why or how, but that short little kid left him defenseless against her careless charm. Yeah, that 'disarming' thing he mentioned earlier? She had that in spades.
Between the two of them, Natalie was by far the strongest. When they spoke, his powerful frame towering over her by nearly a foot, she would peer up at him with the confidence of a thousand men. Natalie wasn't afraid of him. Didn't look at him like he might beat her bloody if she spoke wrong. Ever so often, he thought he might even see her look at him with a bit of adoration.
Yeah, right.
In the end, when all the blood has dried into a flakey brown and both of them are only recognizable by the names given to them in an old life, maybe they'll tell each other the truth.