chapter image made by tina.loves @ TDA
The cool autumn wind blew through her strawberry blonde hair tangling the messy curls. Dom ignored it and instead concentrated on the steady crunch of the colorful leaves beneath her feet that seemed to be right in time to the rhythm of her heart. Then she smiled bitterly. That was something that Chris would have said. He believed that music was everywhere. He would cover Dom’s sky blue eyes with his warm hands and tell her to listen to the music of life. Sometimes she thought Chris was crazy and other times she thought she could almost hear the music he was talking about.
She met him when she was eighteen. She was angry at her sister, Victoire, for being the perfect daughter and always pointing out all of Dom’s flaws and mistakes. She hadn’t been watching where she was going and ran into Chris. Dom lost her balance and fell backwards at the force of the impact. Papers went flying out of his hands and fell to the ground scattered around them.
“I’m sorry,” Dom apologized. She brushed a stray curl out of her eyes in annoyance. Her hair didn’t stay in the perfect little curls that Victoire’s did and her hair wasn’t Victoire’s perfect shade of light blonde. Dom’s hair was stuck somewhere between her mother’s blonde and her father’s bright red.
“You really should watch where you’re going,” he suggested playfully. Dom rolled her eyes at him in annoyance and said nothing back. “You should also learn how to take a joke,” he added with a smile as he bent down to gather up his scattered papers.
Dom didn’t answer him. Instead she helped him gather up the papers that she had knocked out of his hands. She glanced at them and noticed that all of the papers were sheets of music.
“I’m a musician,” he told her when he noticed Dom looking at the sheet music. “My name is Chris.” He smiled kindly at her.
She again pushed her hair out of her face. “Dom,” she finally replied. She handed him back the music.
“Walk with me, Dom.” He gently commanded. “It’s the least you can do for getting dirt all over my music.” He smiled a smiled that touched his dark brown eyes.
“I can’t, I have somewhere to be,” she answered.
He smiled. “Liar,” her eyes widened slightly at being caught in her lie by a stranger. “Come on. Walk with me. I’m not going to bite, I promise.”
He grabbed her hand and dragged her after him. She tried to wiggle away but when she looked into his kind eyes she found herself not wanting to leave. If she was being honest, she was intrigued by the kind stranger.
Dom shook her head to clear the memories from her mind and took a shaky breath. She remembered every detail of that day, the day she first met him. The memory was burned inside her mind and she wished it wasn’t. Every thought of him made it hard to breath but breath she did for she had no choice but to keep going forward. She thought that maybe if she just kept breathing the pain would go away, the ache in her chest would slowly die away and the gashes on her heart would heal if only she kept breathing.
That first day she met him she had no clue that he would become her whole world. He opened her eyes and made her feel good about herself. He said that she had a fire in her that burned brighter than the sun; she just had to open her eyes and see it for herself.
She never believed in love, it wasn’t logical. She saw the way that love tore her friends’ hearts out at Hogwarts and she promised herself that she would never become that dependant on someone else but she did.
She tried to push Chris away but he had a way of pulling her back to him. He was just so easy to talk to. He listened to her when nobody else did and actually cared about what she had to say. He introduced her to the world of music and taught her how to play the piano. She loved to see the pure joy on his face when he played. Since he had showed her his world she showed him her world of magic. He was amazed and loved to watch Dom perform spells.
Exactly two year after the day Dom and Chris first met, they were married. Dom couldn’t have been happier. She had everything she could ever want and more. For the first time in her life she didn’t envy Victoire, she was truly happy and all because of Chris.
She took another shaky breath. Breathe, she told herself, just breathe. Her footsteps slowed and disrupted the erratic rhythm of her heart pounding in her chest. Slowly and carefully she lowered herself to the ground. She fought back the tears and searched for t he right words to say.
“I brought this for you,” she eventually said. With shaking hands she laid three sheets of handwritten music on his grave, on Chris’s grave. “I wrote it for you. It’s not as good as anything you ever wrote but I tried.” She couldn’t stop the tears from sliding down her cheeks. “I tried so hard to make it beautiful for you.” Her strawberry hair clung to her wet cheeks and she didn’t bother brushing it away.
“I miss you,” she choked out. “Why did you have to leave me? You promised you’d always be with me but you’re not and I don’t know why. You didn’t deserve this.” She was sobbing. She couldn’t make the heavy tears stop pouring from her broken eyes. “There’s a hole in my heart and I don’t know how to make it stop hurting. It just won’t go away. You taught me how to love, Chris, but you never told me how to stop and now the pain won’t go away. The more I think about you the more it hurts,” her fingers lightly touched his name engraved in the cold, unfeeling stone marking Chris’s grave. “But I can’t stop thinking about you. I’m terrified of forgetting your smile and your laugh and the feel of your arms around my waist and your hot breath against my cheek. I don’t want to lose you but I can’t bear to remember what we had together.” She bowed her head and the thick tears slid off of the tip of her nose landing with a gently splash on a deep red colored leaf.
Dom placed a hand on her pregnant stomach and sad smile slid across her chapped lips. “I’m going to name her Christy after you. She’s going to be a musician like you, I can just feel it. I’ll tell her about you, I promise. I’ll make sure that she knows her daddy. She’ll know you through your music and I’ll teach her how to love just like you taught me.” she nodded to herself and wiped the tears away. Her voice grew stronger with each word she said and she slowly pushed herself to her feet. “I’m going to keep breathing. I need to be strong for our Christy but I won’t forget you. I will always love you no matter how much it hurts me to.”
She stood for several long minutes just staring at his name before slowly turning and walking away with her hand on her large stomach. She was going to be okay, maybe a little broken, but okay.
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