Vitality (Vitality Series #1)

Chapter 23 Come Back pt.1

"Is that your painting?" someone asked Ava, snapping her out of her daydream. Her mind had been foggy all day, as though she was still with Layton when she was not. The entire night she'd spent with him was surreal in her memory, and all of what she'd told him, and how it felt afterwards, how it felt now: vulnerable and compromised. What was she going to do about this?

What could she do?

"Excuse me, miss?" the guy said charmingly, with a growing grin because Ava was now staring at him with her head tilted curiously. He looked so much like Ella from her psychology class. They both had the exact same wide, heart-shaped lips that curved up, bewitching violet eyes, and black hair that almost had a tone of blue, although Ella's was long with beach waves, and his was a careless and lofty shag. The dark curves of it around his features only accentuated them more.

"You okay?" He laughed.

The sun scattering through the trees trickled around them, soft like tawny diamonds. The canopies moving in the afternoon wind sheltered the tables out in front of the Cat's Cradle Café.

Ava nodded. She was still looking at him oddly. "Are you related to an Ella?"

He pulled out a chair at her table, smirking. "That's my twin sister. Why? Do we look alike?" he asked sarcastically.

"Shockingly. She might be the better looking one though." If that were possible.

"Well," he scoffed, resting his arm on the back of the other chair, which pulled his beige cotton button-down further open. The three top buttons were left undone to show his smooth, tanned and well-manicured chest. "We can't have it all." He reached out his other hand to her. "I'm Christian."

Ava looked down at his necklace as she shook his hand, a pentagram that rested at the heart of his collarbone, the same pendant as Ella's. "Ava."

His eyes calculated her. "I've seen you before, at Ella's school, when I picked her up once. You were having lunch on the lawn."

"You don't go there?"

"No." He gazed around. "I've already done the college thing."

"But you're twins, and this is her first year."

"I have a gift," he grinned. "Jumped grades in high school."

Ava sat back in her chair and looked upstairs, right above the café where someone was playing "Layla" by Eric Clapton. Through the screen window, she could see a man and a woman dancing. It didn't take long for those two to turn into her and Layton dancing in her mind, and that was just getting out of hand. She almost sighed.

When Christian saw that the conversation between them was clearly at an end, he tried to push it into more. "Ella, she wants to work in the health field; she's still trying to figure out if she wants to leave for medical school though, because she doesn't want to limit it only to modern medicine."

"Modern medicine? As opposed to what?" Ava asked, curious, even though her eyes held only a small regard.

"Well, traditional, and knowing every medicine made from the earth there is, of course. See, my sister shoots for the stars and likes to go beyond, and I shoot for the ground, steady and nomadic. And that statement is ironic too, if you knew us well enough."

She gave him an odd look, and he laughed. "I do landscape design. I like to work outside where I can be under the skies, creating with nature, and I travel wherever that takes me. It's lovely."

He was just about to go on about more when a barefoot little girl came running out of the café, almost running into Ava as she came to a halt to circle around the table. Her dirty flimsy legs almost buckled under her, but with a flash of excitement when she saw Ava, she was running perfectly back wherever she came from.