AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Athena? Piper? Mei-Ling?”
“For the last time, I am not telling you!” he yelled at me as we walked.
Ignoring him I tried to remember the names of my female co-workers…snapping my fingers I turned back to him. “Chioma, from sales.”
He sighed. “Yes. Chioma, from sales. That’s her. My long lost love.”
“It’s no fun when you give up.” I frowned as I stuck my hands into my vest pocket and inhaled the cool, fresh air.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re immature?”
“Yep.” I paused turning back to him. “I tried growing up but no one told me how terrible it would be so I decided to stop aging after my twenty-third birthday.”
I laughed as I hopped over the fallen moss covered tree and dusted off my hands. He hopped over it too though he did it more easily and gracefully than me which was kind of irritating. I mean yesterday he was hunched over in pain and now here he was leaping over things better than me.
“How exactly do you plan to do that?” he asked as he bent down to tie my boots while I stood there in shock. “That’s been annoying me for the last ten minutes.”
“Thank you…”
“So your plan is to stay in your twenties?”
I grinned and pointed at him.
“What?”
“You’ve lived nine hundred and ninety-nine times, right? Any chance you came across the fountain of youth in any of them?”
He’d looked genuinely interested in my plan until I said it aloud, it was then that he turned away from me and continued walking. “You’re a lunatic.”
“I’m a lunatic?” He couldn’t be serious. “You are the one who claims to be living—”
“Claims? And here I thought you believed! You’re all talk, Ms. Noëlle.”
I wanted to kick him in the back of his knees but I glared at the back of his head instead, before I realized something.
“You don’t even know where we’re going, so why are you leading me?” I rushed to keep up with his pace but he stopped so suddenly that I nearly ran into him.
Turning slightly, his blue eyes narrowed at me. “I thought we were just walking so you could talk my ears off.”
“Nope we are taking a shortcut, come on.” I moved off the path and pushed the branches to the left and right of me carefully, while Mr. Giant fumbled through.
“You just got here, how do you have shortcuts…?” His voice trailed off as he stood at the edge of the forest clearing, and there, under the protection of the towering green trees, was a magenta lake of flowers that was so thick you couldn’t see a single gap between them and so deep that they grew to my knees. It didn’t matter the season, or even the weather, the magenta flowers which carpeted the ground stood high, bright, and proud.
“Esther?”
Upon hearing my name, I looked up with a smile towards the old couple who were standing on the other side of the lake of flowers.
“Mrs. Yamauchi!” I waved, watching as she turned and pushed her husband’s wheelchair towards the only break in the lake, a path she’d created so that she could take her husband in whenever she could. Turning to Malachi, who was now looking at them confused, I grabbed his arm and pulled him. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
Without a word he allowed me to drag him over. I prayed he wasn’t about to collapse again. Please…he needed this more than anyone. The path Mrs. Yamauchi had created through the flowers only ran from her side of the field towards the center, meaning that Malachi and I had to walk through the knee-high magenta flowers, sadly damaging and messing up the field as we did. Mr. Yamauchi sat quietly as she pushed him forward. His white face was wrinkled as much as hers, though he wore a few more age spots on his face and hands, which he kept folded in his lap. His pinstriped brown golf cap covered his silver-gray hair. Mrs. Yamauchi’s matching pair was on her head too, her salt and pepper hair pulled into a bun.
Letting go of Malachi I clasped my hands together as I bowed in greeting. “Ohayo!”
“Ohayo!” Mrs. Yamauchi laughed as she moved around her husband’s chair to give me a hug. She broke away from me after a few seconds to look at Malachi. “And hello to you, handsome.”
I panicked hoping he wouldn’t be his normal rude self, but to my surprise he clasped his hands like I did and bowed. “Ohayo gozaimasu.”
He knows Japanese? Most people I’d met who didn’t know the language either repeated what I said or said ‘Konnichiwa,’ even though that was more for saying good evening. Ohayo or Ohayo gozaimasu was for greeting people in the morning. She greeted him back, smiling kindly as she brought her husband closer towards us.
