And Sometimes, Against All Odds, Against All Logic, We Still Have Hope

“Oh my god, LyLy, come here, you have to meet this guy I was telling you about, he’s totally gorg and has an accent to die for,” her, very clearly tipsy, friend says, her voice rising and dropping with her excitement. 

A few people around turn in question, the louder parts of her sentences breaking over the barrier of the music. If Lyanna had one wish at the moment, she would wish to disappear. She technically could try to make a quick escape, it wouldn’t be the first time she left a party early and hastily, but Melody’s grip on her arm is tight enough to leave marks, four tiny crescent shaped indents on the underside of her wrist, just above the cursive inscribed just below where her hand starts. Melody continues pulling, weaving the two of them through the crowded room, Lyanna offering apologetic glances to anyone they pass. 

Melody comes to an abrupt stop, Lyanna crashing in the back of the person in front of them, some liquid from his cup splashing onto the ground around their feet. Melody’s lips start moving a mile a minute, all her words rushing together, Lyanna only capable of making out key words here and there, including her name. The exceedingly small part of her that had wanted to stay at the party all but up and disappears, just as she had wished to, the second her green eyes meeting dark brown ones, so dark they could be mistaken for black, as black as the uncoated eyelashes that frame them.

The dark brown eyes stare at her expectantly, the head they belong to tilting slightly. Melody bumps her elbow into Lyanna’s side, widening her eyes, non-verbally begging her to speak. She knows that this introduction means a lot to Melody, as she considers herself a matchmaker, even trying to make a career out of it. Lyanna doesn’t like to speak or even think ill of anybody, most of all people she cares about, but if she’s honest with herself, she finds Melody’s obsession with true love, soulmates, and all that rather childish, for lack of a better word. She’s been on this planet for thirty four years, and in all those years she has yet to find a single ounce of proof that there is some greater power, let alone one concerned with something as finicky as love. She only knows one couple who have been together for more than twenty years and that’s her grandparents, which she contributes completely to sheer stubbornness.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?” she asks, gesturing to the space around them, blaming the noise for her silence.

A genuine smile graces his plump lips, not a teasing or malicious one, a genuine smile, apparently unbothered by her, and Lyanna’s eyes can’t help but be drawn to them as his tongue darts out to lick them, collecting the bit of his drink that had been resting in the slight curve of the bottom one, fuller than the top one, but not by much. “Your name?” he repeats, bringing his drink up to his face and taking a long sip. For some strange reason, she wishes that he wasn’t using a plastic cup, the red obscuring the liquid within. If she had to guess, she’d put money on whiskey, or bourbon, something amber in color, to compliment the highlights in his hair.

She returns his smile, only slightly forced. “Lyanna,” she says, wishing she could leave it at, but her nervousness gets the better of her, her rapid heart rate pounding within her ears, “but people rarely call me that, either Ly or Anna, but for some reason, never Lyanna,” she rambles, forcing herself to take a deep breath, her chin gravitating towards her chest. She sticks her hands in the pocket of her dress, fiddling with her ring in the privacy of the fabric compartment, sure that now she’s properly introduced herself, he or Melody will carry on the conversation, only needing a nod from her every once in a while.

His feet come into view, his body suddenly closer than it had been. “Which do you prefer?”

Lyanna’s head snaps up, her eyes meeting his once again, finding his face mere inches from his. “What?” she asks, surprised to hear him still addressing her. He holds his eyebrows up, silently asking for her to answer his question. “Oh, I’ve always been partial to Lyanna, I was named after my late aunt,” she says, mentally scolding herself for bringing up death in a perfectly normal conversation. Although as she thinks about it, death is the most normal thing there is, along with the most morbid.

Not missing a beat, he extends his hand the short distance between them, clasping her shaky hand in his steady one. “Well, Lyanna, I’m Thomas, Thom, my choice, not others,” he explains. A light laugh escapes her lips, out of both amusement and surprise by his quick thinking, and also his compassion. Most people, especially men, at least the ones she’s personally met, usually didn’t care enough to take into other’s feelings into consideration, and those who do were the ones who were too sensitive for this world, putting everyone else before themselves, but standing in front of her, she call tell Thom isn’t either one. He was a good balance. Selfishly, part of her wonders if he could help balance her, always seemingly one step away from falling over the line, one way or the other. Too much or not enough, too loud or too quiet, too friendly or too standoffish, too one way or another, her entire life she’d never been able to find the right balance, maybe there isn’t one, but if she had to name someone, gun to her head, she would answer that Thom is as close as one could get.

“Thom,” she greets, shaking his hand.

“Lyanna,” he returns, and suddenly all of this feels much too formal. She breaks their contact, retracting her hand to her side. Lyanna can’t see it, but she can feel that Melody is beaming, giddy with having introduced another perfect match as far as she is concerned. 

She suddenly exclaims, an inhuman noise escaping her throat. Heads whip around to see what type of creature could possibly make the noise that had just cut through the music and chatter, unsurprised looks when they see Melody, known by most at the party despite it not being hers in any way, shape, or form. She quickly moves away from Lyanna and Thom, pushing past others and throwing her arms around a couple, probably one she’d introduced, if Lyanna had to put money on it. Lyanna looks past Thom, surveying the quickly thinning crowd. She checks her watch, the time nearing four in the morning. She hadn’t wanted to come out tonight at all, let alone stay out until daylight, but Melody can be very persuasive, and if all else fails, she resorts to light blackmail, like earlier tonight, or rather last night, when Melody threatened to tell Lyanna’s sister that she in fact doesn’t have plans for the holidays, she just simply doesn’t want to make the trek home, just to suffer in silence for a week while everyone else chatters mindlessly about their jobs and kids, neither of which she has at the moment.

Thom leans in, his hair tickling Lyanna’s ear. “Want to put her out of misery and tell her we’re perfect for each other?” he chuckles. 

She shakes her head, lightly bumping into Thom’s face in the process, his lips just barely touching the skin of her cheek, both of hers suddenly growing hot under the simple act, not even really an act, but just a mishap. “We don’t even know each other,” she mockingly scolds, “wouldn’t want to get her hopes up, it’d just break her heart when we inevitably end on bad terms on opposite ends of the world.”

“Dibs on Europe,” he teases, his eyes watching her intently. 

“Australia,” she counters, set on visiting the remaining one of six continents on her list before dying.

He shrugs in acceptance, a smirk growing to cover most of the lower half of his face. “I’d like visiting rights to the US, family and all, plus can’t find barbecue like you can in the south.”

“I think we can work out a schedule,” Lyanna says, teasing him as he had done to her not seconds ago. 

Silence fills the air between them, along with an unspoken tension, one she was intimately familiar with and knows is usually better off left that way, but she’s dying to build it up, just to knock it down the second she’s ready. “We have met you know,” he says, breaking the silence, but only fueling the tension. She raises her eyebrows, giddiness pulling at the corners of her lips, finding all nervousness she had felt upon seeing him completely dissipated. “A bar on the corner of Bedford and Strand in London,” he says, waiting, watching for a moment of recognition, hoping he’s not mistaken, although he doubts it, but there’s always a chance for everything, he’d be a fool to think otherwise. Her eyes remain on him, but unchanged by emotion, only by the lights that reflect off them every few seconds, highlighting streaks of brown within them. To accompany her warm eyes, she also is dawning a slight smile, but nothing to reveal she has any idea what he’s talking about, so he continues, “I was fresh from the embassy-”

“And I had ditched my school group to grab my first legal drink,” she says, putting him out of his misery, the desperation for acknowledgement that he’s right, that she’s the girl he hit on all those years ago, fresh eyed and excited beyond belief for the chance to see something beyond the town she’d grown up in, leaving his eyes, only to be replaced by joy. He opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off before he can get any words out. “The way I consider it, we technically don’t know each other, I mean it’s been eight years, and I can’t speak for you, but I’ve changed in those past eight years,” she says, watching the change in his expression, relief if she had to put a word to it.

Thom tosses back the rest of his drink, setting the cup down on a spare table beside them. “Well, then, to meeting for the first time,” he says, stretching out his hand to her for the second time in a matter of minutes. “Tell me, Lyanna, how’d you end up in New York?”

“You first,” she counters, a mischievous smirk on her lips because for the first time in a while she was questioning her own beliefs, maybe the universe does have something bigger in mind for each little soul.