Free Playing With My Heartstrings by Chloe Brewster

-"
     
    "And what was so wrong about you did? Kissing me was a mistake?" I asked out loud, several people seated across the cafe open-mouthed at my bold statement.
     
    "No, no, it wasn't like that -"
     
    "Explain, then!"
     
    I wasn't messing around with Joel anymore. Not for a single second. For days, I'd been psychically sick with dread about the meeting up with him which would inevitably occur - and my reliable gut instincts had proved me right, much to my bitter disappointment. I wished that Joel could say the words that my ears longed to hear - that he'd accidently forgotten to bring some necessary medicine in his camouflaged, army-style camping bag or he'd actually gotten lost during a late-night walk in the middle of the domineering forest, which, having regained my use of common sense, seemed too unrealistic.
     
    Anything other than what I was certain that he was on the verge of saying.
     
    "Sadie, I want to let you know that I think you're an amazing girl - lots of guys dream of going out with you -" as if I'd wanted to be given a rollercoaster-soaring compliment before the heart-sinking, pleasantly-worded insult - "- and I had a great time with you during the weekend, but it was wrong for me to k-kiss you," Joel said, his voice wobbling towards the end of the sentence.
     
    "Why?" I wondered. "Surely you'd have to be lying if you didn't feel anything back?"
     
    A second-long flush of guilt flashed across Joel's stony-faced expression, once again proving my suspicions to be precise. He closed his eyes, rocking back and forward in his chair, creating an irritable creak which made my blood boil ferociously.
     
    "Tell me!" I pleaded. "Are you going to admit the truth or not?"
     
    As if he'd been stuck in a paralysing daze, Joel was brought back to life and his eyes flashed open, a blazing fire carefully concealed behind his pupils. "What is there to say?" he asked, his whisper barely audible. I leaned further across the table - my feet almost falling out of my pillar-box red Parisian-style kitten heels - and listened to Joel's next words, my heart literally inside my mouth.
     
    "Sadie," Joel breathed, "I had a great time with you. And before you interrupt me again -" noticing my half-open lips spilling with a sarcastic comment, Joel raised his hand in protest and I lazily sank back down into my chair with the unmistakable aura of an oh-so-disappointed cat, who'd just missed out on the last of the fish "- I need to say that I like you as a friend."
     
    My just-plucked bush of eyebrows raised, temptation nearly lead me to an unstoppable fit of laughter because I couldn't believe the words that my ears were hearing. Joel liked me as a friend? That couldn't have been the truth in the slightest sense. Not at all. A so-called friend (thinking about it, he didn't even deserve to be called a friend) wouldn't offer you a kiss which tasted of all the greatest things in the world - undeniable passion, which set my body alight with a heat that only love could give; sweet, romantic roses that any lover could wish of having; and, most important of all, the pure essence of love, which I genuinely believed that Joel and I shared together. As if.
     
     
    "You didn't answer my question," I coolly pointed out. "Did you feel the slightest hint of emotion when you kissed me?"
     
    Joel went silent and for all I cared, he looked like he'd stopped breathing, though perhaps that was my imagination trying to find something interesting to focus on. The city workers, whose confident strides in their black, I-mean-business power suits and four, or even six inch killer heels consistently turned heads across town, had left the stunned-into-silence cafe, only leaving aging pensioners and one or two teenagers of my age squeezed into the miniscule tables, staring sadly at their half-cold cups of tea and bottles of fizzy drinks. As far as I was concerned, I was all alone in a deep, black sea with no way of getting out fully intact.
     
    Unless