I fell in love
"Ah, yes, many a beautiful woman has fallen for the endless woes of treacherous men."
"I never said he was treacherous," Casey remarked simply.
"Oh, no? So I am wrong then?" His voice held serious doubt that he was, along with the smug certainty that he wasn't wrong.
"Well, I might have implied it a bit. You certainly are intuitive too," she responded quickly to cover up how easily he had figured it out.
"I have many gifts. Besides, many people lose someone special in their lives. It is not too far-fetched to assume that you have." He shrugged as if putting the whole thing off.
"Ah, modesty is one of your many gifts… I can tell." She grinned like a happy cat.
He smirked, then downed his drink easily. "Well, Tobias doesn't keep me on for my accounting skills."
"You lost someone close to you as well? Did they leave you too?" she asked, trying to keep her teeth from chattering slightly because of the cold.
"In a way, I suppose I did." His voice was sad and distant as if her innocent question had dredged up a past he didn't want to recall. Nobody wants to recall the past, she reminded herself.
He looked into the sky for a moment, then proceeded slowly toward her, his footsteps echoing on the patio stone floor. She turned towards him, curious as to what had made him close the distance he had been purposefully keeping between them the whole conversation.
She looked up into his green eyes and again felt that lurching anxiety clutch at her chest. She watched as he moved his arms slowly and deliberately, taking his jacket off and wrapping it around her shoulders lightly. "Thank you," she said, stunned by the sweet gesture. Her voice was genuine, but her head was confused at this point. Cyrus, who are you? What do you mean to this company and inevitably to my future inside it?
"So what happened with your man?" he asked softly.
"What didn't happen… I fell in love, or rather I believe I did. I thought those feelings were reciprocated, but I suppose they never were." She responded lightly, snuggling into the softness of his jacket.
"You sound so sure he didn't?" His reply seemed like a question, but it felt more like an observation on her feelings. She cocked her head slightly to avoid the breeze that blew quickly like a knife through the air. A knife she felt resounded deep in her soul and almost jabbed her in the heart. No one likes the past.
"How quickly we fall in love does not change no matter the age we become. A single moment, a few months… It's all the same. The difference is we change. As we become older, we learn…" She paused to see if he was listening. She felt stupid lecturing him on love. I'm sure he gets loved by the dozens.
"We learn the things that we never knew as a child. We learn our instincts are wrong, that the whole world is vying against you. What's worse than having our very innocence ripped from our souls is because of our distrusting nature." She paused again as he pursed his lips and his brow furrowed slightly. "You have something to say?" she asked.
"Maybe… More of an observation, really. Our very nature is this way because of the experiences we have gone through. They make us what we are." She looked at him, thinking he didn't understand what she was saying.
"Yes, but we believe it, without fact or lie, we take these bits as absolute. We do nothing to preserve ourselves from the very world in which we survive. We become cautious, distrustful, liars, looking for the bad in anything good. It is our human nature to condemn even the greatest of possibilities in our lives. And we do it purely out of fear." She pointed out rather matter-of-factly.