Welcome to Gaia! ::

Okay, I don't know if I'm supposed to do this here or what, but I wanted some critique on a story I wrote. Sorry it's long, but if you feel like reading it and can give me some feedback, that would be awesome.

It was the summer before her junior year. She’d gotten her license in May, a week after turning sixteen. Thankfully due to a precedent set by lazy older siblings (and to a local reluctance to hire those below eighteen) her parents hadn’t made her get a job. So she spent her summer hanging out without friends when she could, reading, or sketching. Now that she could drive, she reveled in spending her days somewhere other than sitting around the house, even if she didn't have anything specific to go out and do. She loved to sit in public places, clear her mind, and sketch whatever she thought of. She would sit in the mall’s food court, on a bench by the river, at her favorite bookstore in the aisle between sci-fi and fantasy (in her opinion one of the most amazing spots in literature), or in the over-sized chairs at the public library. The last was her favorite spot. Mostly, she admitted only to herself, because of him.
She never spoke to him. Sometimes she thought about it. Considered saying hi. Starting a conversation. But she worried about breaking his solitude or about creeping him out and scaring him away. Or about having a conversation with him and finding him to be just as brain-dead as most of the zombies she went to school with.
She first saw him a couple of weeks into summer, perusing the fantasy section. Not sure why he stood out to her (apart from the relative emptiness of the library, and his apparent good taste in authors), she grabbed the book she was looking for- an old favorite she hadn’t read in a couple of years. She headed to the seating area, the best place to hang out in the library and sketch, read, or on busy days, people watch. It was a lowered area towards the back, that had a few sets of tables and chairs, a few rows of computers along the wall, and a circle of large, well-worn old chairs to sink into with a good book. A few minutes after having reached this area and collapsed into her favorite seat (from which she could see the entrance of the area and get a good look at anyone coming in from the bookshelves before they could notice her), he followed.
He was holding a quite large novel; she recognized it as one in a very long series, which she had tried to read last summer. About half way through the fourth of fifteen books, she’d forgotten most of what had happened in the first book and gave up. In the following few weeks she watched him tear through the books at a speed that amazed even her, who had long been hailed for reading novels with prodigious speed.
She found that she enjoyed watching him. He usually bore a particularly neutral expression, and she never heard him speak to anyone. But every now and then, as he assumedly read an amusing part of his book, he would crack a smile and chuckle a little to himself. Once or twice she’d observed him play games of chess against himself, triumphing alternately as one color then the other. From the first day she noticed him, with growing frequency as time went by, she would settle down to start a new sketch, clear her mind for an image to work on, and see his face.
He had a fascinating face. A lot of people have a good angle to their nose, jaw line, cheekbones, something that she found cried out to her to be drawn. So her sketchbook held a myriad of random pictures of strangers she’d seen in public and tried to reproduce (With varying levels of success. Often the pictures were good, but didn’t necessarily resemble the original inspiration). But his face didn’t just have a few good lines: all of it was good. Somehow he just formed good profiles, and three-quarter angles, and shadows, and just good pictures. So more and more her sketchie became filled with pictures of him. Even of expressions she’d never seen on him, grins, mischievous winks, sinister glares.
She was a little creeped out by herself at first, kind of passive aggressively stalking some stranger. But she never followed him, or threatened him, or even approached him. She just came to the library about the same time on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And saw him there a lot of the time.
She decided he was her muse. If great Renaissance artists could see beautiful women once and be inspired to make great works in their name, she could see some kid at the library and be inspired to draw his face. Some of her best work were sketches of him.
She was wary of showing her sketchie to her friends for a while, worried they’d tease her about her muse. Once she displayed the sketches they did, but it was all in good fun. Her friends admired the new levels of skill she began to acquire in representing him, strange angles she’d never attacked, new kinds of shading, things that translated to the rest of her work as well.
One day, towards the end of summer, she’d shown up later then usual, and found he wasn’t in the reading area yet. Disappointed, she figured he wasn’t showing up that day. He didn’t always. So, with a sigh, she settled down and pulled out her sketchie, quashing her irrational urge to turn and leave since he wasn’t there. He wasn’t the only reason she came to the library about this time on this day, she told herself, and almost believed it.
She tried to work on a sketch of the view at her grandparent’s lake house, but found she couldn’t focus on the image. With a bit of internal chiding and a feeling of indulging in a guilty pleasure, she turned to a recent sketch of him. This sketch had a view of him, to a bit below the waist, standing next to a table on which a vague human figure was emerging from clay. He had stepped back to consider the figure, and had a look of intense concentration on his face. She’d seen dried ceramic clay under his fingernails and on his clothes at various points, and had sort of a private imagining that he found the same sort of escape she did in expressing himself, but through sculpture rather than drawing. Somehow she just couldn’t get his hands right. One was raised to his face as he thought and planned, but the other was just being extended toward his creation, and she couldn’t quite get the fingers into the proper gesture, half between plotting and realizing what he wanted to do next. As she rubbed her eyes and prepared to erase another failed attempt at outlining the hand, considering giving up on that entire gesture and allowing this arm to join it’s mate in pure pondering, she noticed a shadow that hadn’t always been looming to her right side.
Looking back, startled, she realized she’d been concentrating on the sketch so much she hadn’t noticed that he had arrived to stand beside her, with a clear view of her work. Terrified that he’d somehow know from that one picture the extent of her passive stalking of him, that she kept drawing him, that she smiled to herself whenever she saw him, that she looked at the books he’d read when he was done, that she talked about him with her friends, she couldn’t find words to speak to him.
His expression was sort of… muddled as he looked down at her work, as though trapped between confusion and some other emotion she couldn’t quite read yet. He reached into his bag, rummaged a bit, and, without looking away from her sketchbook, or freeing her from the nameless social terror that held her frozen, pulled out a digital camera. He turned it on, fiddled with the buttons, and held it out her. The screen showed a photo of a ceramic sculpture. As he pushed a button mechanically, it cycled through various stages of the sculptures’ production, as well as other works, of the same subject- her.
Tearing her eyes away from the camera, she looked up to meet his eyes, for the first time. The emotion there was clear. Along with some embarrassment, it was amusement. Lowering the proffered camera and shoving it back into his bag, he offered his other hand to her.
“Hi. I’m Declan.”
“Hey. I’m Selene.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
“You want to go get some coffee or something?”
“That would be great.”

I really like it! The only thing I can think of "wrong" is prob just like undacuva _druid, waist and not waste, but, I mean wow ;o! Fantastic ;D, do you have other stories?

sry im too lazy but man thts a lot of words... yeh sry sweatdrop

lrl mrgreen

i think is it has more than one paraghraph u wont even read it....ur so lame...lol....lol...lmao

i think ur right