“You are the light of my world,” he says, his face beaming and his eyes aglow.

She scoffs and continues combing her hair as he watches from the doorway. He’s like a child in a candy shop, eyes wide and a innocent smile. Handsome beyond belief, she pulls her eyes from his blond hair, tanned chest, and clear blue eyes back to her reflection.

Her heart sinks.

“You don’t need makeup,” he says, his voice a husky whisper. “You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

She snorts distaste at his clichés, but her heart warms. Chelsea knows he believes what he says, his eyes clouded by love, endorphins playing tricks on his brain. He is naïve and so innocent, a treasure in a world of cold hearted players, men who say all the right things to get what they want. The difference between him and them is he believes what he says.

That is why her eyes mist as she gazes at him, having finished before the mirror. He could easily capture a younger woman, a prettier woman, and when the magic endorphin rush of love wears out, he will see her as she really is: a middle aged plain woman.

“I love it when you look at me like that,” he says misunderstanding her misting eyes. “I can see the love in your eyes.”

She smiles and dabs her eyes with tissue, checks to make sure her mascara isn’t smeared—it isn’t—then smiles sadly.

“What?” he asks. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing lasts forever, baby,” she says.

She brushes past him and he follows her into the living room, her puppy on a leash, and she knows he’ll come with her to California if she but asks.

“When’s your plane leave?” he asks hopeful.

“Tonight. I’ll call you when I land.”

“And then I can come to California?” he asks. “We can discuss me moving out there… permanently?”

He wraps his arms around her from behind, presses against her, and before she realizes it she cradles his muscular forearms against her breasts. Her breathing speeds as her heart thumps louder. She can hear her pulse in her ears. Miraculously she is wet—no man has ever had that effect on her, not with but a touch.

It’s his words, she knows, that has this effect on her—his innocence capped with belief in everlasting love. He believes in love while she doesn’t. She feels love for him, but it’s just a chemical reaction that will burn itself out in a couple years.

“Can I?” he asks again, his words a hot breath against her neck.

How can she tell him? She cannot bear watching his heart break, his innocent heart which believes in love. This beautiful man half her age doesn’t understand that things break down, nothing lasts forever, entropy claims us all, and at the end life happens. And life is about death as much as it is about living.

“I’ll call you tonight,” she lies.

Ten hours later, as her plane touches down, she calls her cell phone company.

“I want my number changed.”

Their relationship was over before it began. He is young and a dreamer—he will learn to love again because he believes.

And her?

She catches her reflection in glass as she nears the terminal, pulling her carryon luggage, and she frowns. Beneath the window grass shoots through cracks, green trying to flourish like her young dreamer—grass that will be gone tomorrow as more cracks entropy across the pavement.

“Miss?”

She starts as she realizes she lost herself in her reflection, blocking access to the walkway tunnel. A line of people wait for her to move while others hurry past. Her reflection turns to a shadow among shadows on concrete as she joins the others in the procession toward the end of their journey.

Inside she sits with the others, waiting for their luggage. They are just like her, she knows, dying, moving ceaselessly closer to the end of their journey. She reads the doctor’s report again for the hundredth time. When the luggage arrives on the conveyer belts, she puts the paper back into her purse and joins the others standing around the conveyer that moves the bulky suitcases along.

Soon, she thinks, she will be opened up like a suitcase at the end of its journey, and all her contents—her soul and memories and sins (and the love she secretly holds for her young and idealistic lover)—will empty into… what? Some cosmic dresser in the skies?

She chuckles until her cell phone rings. Her cell phone company hasn’t changed her number yet.

“You didn’t call,” he says hurt.

“We need to talk,” she says as she spies her suitcase.

“About what?”

“About suitcases,” she says impulsively. “Have you ever been to France?”

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...