i thought this was going to be something lighthearted, but it’s not. i find that i’m not all that apologetic, this time.

“Hey.”

He turned around, hands rubbing over the front of his jeans. A small, but hugely relieved smile spread over his face at her arrival.

“Hi.”

She smiled back, biting her lip. After a moment, she leaned her head down and rocked back and forth on her heels. “You asked me here?” It sounded like a question, and he sighed.

“Yeah. I did.” He reached into his pocket to grasp a silver box in his hand. It was square, no bigger than the size of his palm, and decorated with a small black bow. Glancing down at it, he fingered the ribbon of the bow; lifting his head, he held it out to her with a bated breath.

She went to take it, but, brushing against his skin, flinched. His shoulders fell, yet he kept in the heavy sigh and sea of anguish. Stepping closer, she touched it with her thumb and middle finger, lifting it slightly from his hand.

“What is it, Vincent?”

He tried and failed to meet her gaze, but she was focused more on the box in his hand than what he was showing her with his eyes. “Open it and see,” he whispered. Please, Roni, please.

She stepped back with a grim frown. “I won’t fall for your dreamy tricks again, Vincent.” Rolling her eyes, she turned to the side and toed the ground with a scuffed shoe, looking down at the ground. “Not anymore.”

His fingers closed around the box, gentle but frustrated.

“I’m not making tricks, anymore, Veronica. What I’m trying to do is apologize and ask for your forgiveness because... Because--”

“Because why, Merriwether?” she cut in. “Because you decide that the girl you turned away from me for isn’t as great as you thought she was? Why should you be trying to apologize and why should you be trying to ask for forgiveness with what's probably some weird jewelery when all I wanted to know was that I wasn’t just someone to be thrown away, not like everyone else in the school thinks of me?” Her voice was cracking, shaking, and she was shaking a finger at him. She was angry and she had reason to be, certainly, - he had made a mistake - but she was wrong.

“First of all, not everyone thinks of you that way, Veronica - you’re wrong. I may be able to count the amount of true and actual friends you have on all of my ten fingers, but they are good, honest, and true friends. Who care about you! Who love you! I understand that quite a few people hated you and still do, but you have actual friends, now, and we aren’t going to leave. Jesse and Andrew and Marla aren’t going to leave. Samantha and Haylee and Quentin aren’t going to leave.”

He stepped closer to her, hands hovering just over her shaking shoulders. “And I won’t leave, Roni, not unless you tell me to. They love you.” He paused, meeting her watering blue eyes. ”I love you, Veronica. It’s not going to change, not even because I made a mistake that I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry - I really, really am.”

“Okay.”

Confused, his brows pulled together. “Okay?”

She sighed, closing her eyes for a long moment before opening them again to stare at him with a trembling lip. “You say that I... That you won’t leave, not unless I tell you to, yes?”

He hesitated, shifting. If he was right, he knew what would happen next.

“Yes,” he said.

Veronica moved away from him, putting distance between the two. “Then I’m asking you to leave me be, Vincent Merriwether.”

He flinched. A myriad of emotions must have played over his face in those moments, he felt. “I...,” he whispered. Swallowing, he chose his next words carefully, from their favorite movie. “As you wish, then.” The anguish and tearing sadness made his voice low and even, yet a breathless, choking sob escaped his lips as Veronica turned from him. He watched through a wave of tears as she walked from him briskly; her form distorted through the salty sorrow.

Sniffling, he fell to a crouch, and then to his knees, sagging to a position in which his elbows scraped along the ground through his undershirt sleeves, his untrimmed black hair brushing against the ground. His eyes shut tightly against the flow of tears and his body shook with soundless sobs.