Once Upon a You | A Beauty and the Beast Retelling ✔️

18 | Monochrome (Ross)

I hadn't been prepared for the pain. 

After Dad died, I had forgotten what it meant, to care about people. To let them have the power to hurt you. I'd let Bea in, I'd given her the keys to my heart, and she'd tossed them carelessly over her shoulder and walked away.

I screwed my eyes shut. Maybe I'd misunderstood. Maybe I'd let myself feel so deeply but to Bea, it had always been a shallow dalliance?

Somehow a week passed, and the eve of the Snowball Dance has arrived.

Each day feels like a cold, flat copy of the one before it. I have an image of colorless ice cubes in endless white trays and blinked it away.

A fly buzzes lazy figures of eight. After ten pages I feel Nietzsche is reading me, not I him, and I toss the bearded man aside. Books don't offer real escape but they can try and stop the mind from scratching itself raw.

"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair." I can almost hear her voice inside my head.

It storms me with a crowd of emotions, memories and mental movie clips and I turn to my sketches.

Every face I try to draw comes out as her. Once her face was burned into my idiotic eyes, I saw her everywhere, in everyone.

In this particular drawing, she is wearing a sun hat, which hides the earlets she hates so much, and makes her look carefree and ethereal. I realize I'm staring at my own creation, wanting to reach out and touch one of her hair strands. Essencebea is too shy to show her pretty head. The face we only wear when we feel safe. She seems to have a personality for every life occasion. Untamed, uncivilized and uncut, she was at her most natural. She has big eyes and wields them with perfection. There is no girl similar to her.

I try to tease figures of Bea out of the letters. That crooked "a," that curly "d," the way her handwriting leans to the right —that was Bea. She is every letter in this book and every smudge on my glasses, hidden among the creases on my shirt.

But what if all this time, for the past month, she was merely tolerating me? Just letting me tag along?

Yet, then I remember the way our legs intertwined when we cuddled in the tent. How we rubbed our noses together to combat the cold, and how her eyelashes gave my cheek a butterfly kiss. For the briefest moment, she looked like a little girl. I felt like a little boy.

"I don't matter, Ross," she says. "My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean."

"Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

"The game is more important than the player, Ross. Remember that. Players come and go, but the game of life remains."

To me, every drop matters. Humanity is a nevending ocean and each life that began and ended plays a part in the history of our time. But her droplet plays a part in my heart.

"We are like fireworks. We are meant to fly up, and shine and spark. And be the best version of ourselves," says Bea.

But my best version of myself was BeaRoss, just like Z said. My best version of myself was by her side.

I love books and stories, but what I would love more than reading about other people's stories is creating our own. I am not sure I can be in a world where Beatrice Laurent and me do not have a story to tell.

I can never sit with her in Lu's kitchen again as Z and Lu cook dinner. I can never walk into her mansion library again. I can never run my fingers along the aged spines of hundreds of books. I can never look up the expanse of stairs to the second floor and see Bea at the top of them again. I can never read that book on shapeshifting while lounging on a sofa, or read Gormenghast to her, or have her read to me in that distinctly silky voice.