There wasn't a lot of space.
Well, no, that was a lie. The park was huge, one of the biggest she had been to. But, where she was now... it was rather cramped.
He sat on the platform, back to the metal slide that was the only other means of exit aside from the steps behind her. As it was, she was standing on the top step rather than the platform itself, looking down at him and his crossed legs. He was in her spot; her brows furrowed as she attempted to come up with a remedy for this particular problem.
She didn't like bringing boys to this park – her park. It wasn't even a territorial thing; they'd always come here as a couple eventually, and they'd always break up not long after. It was a sort of strange phenomenon really, when this was her favorite place to be, the thing closest to her heart, and as soon as she showed it to a 'special someone' things would inevitably go downhill.
“You'll be different.”
She crouched down and looked at the boy, her brown eyes meeting his blue. “I mean it.”
Before he had a chance to question her bizarre but matter-of-fact statements, he found himself shoved, propelled backwards, arms flailing for the blue-painted safety rails far too late for the action to do any good.
He landed on his back in the woodchips, converse still kicked up on the bottom edge of the slide, and stared up at the circle of sky visible through the treetops to regain his bearings. After a moment of lying in the less-than-comfortable position, he pulled his sneaker-clad feet back under his torso and propped himself up against the no-longer-shiny metal, ignoring the girl leaning over the safety-railing who was intently gazing down at him and preoccupying himself with the study of an illegible piece of graffiti scrawled in black sharpie across the side of the structure instead.
Finally, having gathered his wits and what was left of his pride, he looked up to face the usurper of his claim.
She quirked an eyebrow and tilted her head slightly, running a hand through her over-bleached bangs in a silent taunt. It felt like straw to her, a grand culmination of split ends and heat and chemical damage, but he didn't seem to mind particularly much when he took a piece of flawlessly flat-ironed hair she had woken up at five in the morning to perfect and twirled it around his finger while he murmured into her ear about nothing in particular. She rested her elbows on the blue piping, leaning down slightly and resting her chin on the palm of one hand.
He shook his head a little, accepting the silent challenge with an overly-grim face. But, she had the high ground, and if there was one thing Star Wars had ever taught him that carried over surprisingly well into real life, it was that attacking against the high position was never an easy move to execute. If he came around from behind and used the steps, she would probably just slide away; it could be argued that they were too old for the playground slides as it was without adding an impromptu round of tag to the mix.
He narrowed his eyes from under his mop of shaggy hair and in a swift movement hopped over the edge of the slide, running up the not-so-slippery surface. Luckily for him, the converse were new enough that the rubber traction hadn't been entirely stripped away from the bottom as was wont to happen to overly-worn pairs. And, even though he had been too busy ignoring the pushy wannabe music snob seated on his left passing judgment on the contents of his green iPod mini (back when when iPod minis were still somewhat new and no one realized that companies besides Apple actually made decent mp3 players) to actually pay any attention to the lesson in Freshman science, friction was on his side.
He snatched at the waist-high railing with his fingers. His gravity-defying stunt had successfully surprised the cocky girl and he smirked at her, feet perched on the apex of the slide's curve. His expression stayed that way for a moment before fading into a true smile as he took a good look at her face while the setting sun illuminated it from over his shoulder, his hands creeping from cold metal to warm skin and wrapping themselves around the smaller, feminine pair.
“I don't think Romeo was supposed to climb the balcony.” A set of fingers with not-quite-perfectly-manicured nails wriggled from his grasp, pulled a woodchip out of his hair, and flicked it over the edge.
“Does it look like I care?”
“No, I suppose not.”
~~~
A random drabble I wrote almost a year ago. Complete.
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