4. Come Closer

Days went by, weeks following. Scarlett saw Dalton a couple of times, and a couple thousand more in her mind. His face became distorted in her imagination, his figure more personified. That was okay, though, because she was prettier in her own mind as well. The two of them never talked in reality.
Sometimes, texts would be sent one way.
“Dalton?”
No reply.
“Hey, you. How’ve you been?”
No reply.
Sometimes she would ponder calling, just to see if his number still worked. If he answered, she could say she called the wrong contact, or that she pocket dialed him, any number of excuses because she didn’t have anything direct to say.
She was just too afraid of inconveniencing him. Too set in the notion that he didn’t want to bother with her. For the time, she may have been right, but things would change.
Scarlett was never superstitious, but she wished her life away as a passive approach to getting what she wanted. Every time something to wish upon came up, she would wish for Dalton to be hers at last.
11:11. “I wish Dalton would ask me out before the end of the year.”
11:11 again. “I still wish that.”
And on every shooting star, and every time she drove under a bridge and held her breath, and on every penny thrown into a fountain.
Yet she still received no replies.
So Scarlett would wash away in solitude, trying to fill her time with various affairs. She tried a cigarette, and another and another until she reached seven in a row and felt nothing beyond regret over the smell she had tainted herself with. She would sit alone on the swing and listen to music, let her thoughts carry her into an alternate universe where Dalton was perfect and she was perfect with him.
She built him up in her solitude, allowing her loneliness to glorify his image, because this made everything feel worse for her.
-
Dalton was a reasonable man. He never meant any harm to anyone, his interest was just held in the possession of another woman. Someone prettier than Scarlett, someone whom he had known longer, and someone who didn’t return the feeling. It was just a question of who would change, and when.
Dalton would wave hello to Scarlett, and he would consider her a friend of his. She just made him uncomfortable was all, a kind of feeling that occurs with a rather high frequency in such a situation. So nothing happened, as was the story days before, and weeks before that, and months before that.