Mistakenly Eaten

58. The Scrutiny of Love

Althea stretched her arms, as she sat up and straightened her back as well, smiling out ear to ear, feeling beyond happy and excited to witness a new day in her life, as a contestant at the Secret Chef Hunter’s society.

She rushed towards the closet and picked out a plain white dress. She stood in front of the mirror, matching the outfit to her body, wondering if she would look good or not.

She also wondered if she should let her hair flow freely over her back and also if she should go for a sleeveless dress, pondering whether she would look good in it or not.

She bit her lower lip in excitement, as she felt an insurmountable amount of joy pumping through her veins.

She whirled around, placing the dress on top of her body, letting her hair flow down her back and dance along with her.

On the other hand, Nicholas lifted yet another set of a hundred kilos, applying some front chest exercise, making sure to look as jacked up as possible.

In the recent few months, the one thing that he had stopped caring about the least was his looks and the way he carried himself.

He was obviously never a match to his look-alike brother, Lucas. Who was a studded bloke, also a self proclaimed god in the world of fashion, who never donned a t shirt and rather suited himself in dress shirts, even when he went to bed.

Nicholas, on the other hand, casually wore t shirts and occasionally and in his primitively professional affairs wore suits and dress shirts.

But in the last six months, he had lost the sense of what to wear and when to wear. He hated going to the gym or lifting a single weight.

His body got leaner and his mind became feeble. Or at least that’s how he felt and had started recognizing his potential troubles.

The first thing he decided to do was to step out of his lazy zone. A zone that he felt, he had pushed himself in after his one sided, humiliated break up with Cheryl.

One day, he had decided to propose the woman who broke him after tasting a heavenly delicious pasta.

But then once again, his very stupid taste buds, brought him back to life.

One day he felt, cutting himself off and away from the entire world, losing all hopes in life and deciding to move to a secluded island, where he had thought that he would spend the rest of his life, on his own but then yet again, on that very island, he found a new hope and new jest to be excited about.

After completing his set of exercise, he moved on to, another machine, where he laid down and began lifting weight with his legs.

He realized that he had missed on a lot of exercise and fallen behind and that’s why he wanted to catch up with everything just within a day.

But deep down, all he had in his heart, was to make sure that he looked good enough to impress someone.

He might have fallen out of the world of dating when he fell in to depression but he was no stranger to the notes that one always keeps in mind, while trying to woe their crush.

Wait!

Nicholas paused in the midst of his exercise, hanging his legs against a two hundred kilos of weight, with his knees pressed up against his chest.

Did he just mentally admitted that Althea was his crush?

He snorted a weak laughter to his own self and shook his head, going back to completing his set.

Well, it wasn’t a crime to declare someone as a crush and Nicholas was obviously happy with his decision that he had a crush on Althea and was looking forward to impress her.

He definitely felt the need to look better for her and hence, he was going to try his best to put that effort.

Althea took a long shower, making sure to scrub, shave and rinse.

And so did Nicholas at the same time.

After the shower, the two stood in their respective rooms, wearing their best clothes, applying the perfumes on their vanity, putting their very best effort to smell floral or musky, fruity or spicey. Each aiming for the appropriate scent for their gender.

As the two walked out of their rooms, each had a sense of anxiety yet at the same time, there was an enveloping feeling of being joyful.

There’s always this scrutiny that your mind puts your through when you start liking someone.

You are happy that your heart is finally going to taste love. You are excited that spontaneous things are about to happen. Your body is eager to feel the touch and skin of the person that you like. Your mind and body both suddenly become inclined to their presence.

And yet, at the same time, there are fears inside you.

Fears, if you have had a bad past – then those experiences might be repeated and you might get hurt again.

Fears, that you don’t want to ruin the mental space of peace that you single mind has.

Fears, that the person might not love you, as much you love them and you might end up tiring yourself in that unbalanced relationship after getting hurt and burned for loving too much and never receiving the same amount of care and affection.

But all of that was something that Nicholas and Althea had decided not to concern themselves with.

For the moment, they wanted to enjoy the bliss, where someone just tries their best to look as much impressive to their crush’s likings.

As the two walked towards the kitchen, they finally came face to face, colliding in the main foyer, standing only a few feet away from each other.

Althea noticed, how sharp and strikingly handsome Nicholas looked, reflecting the sunrays off his radiating, clean shaved face. strong male musk, flowed off his body and reached and touched Althea’s senses, making her insides churn and flow down in fluids in between her feminine folds, structured between her legs.

There was just something about the way Nicholas looked so clean and sharp, that made her heart flutter and her sexuality burst in to pieces.

Nicholas on the other hand, peculiarly liked the way Althea looked. So soft and so feminine yet there was a sense of burdened responsibility and strength that the girl carried in a subtle way, never showing off her true tires. And it was something that truly made Nicholas respect her.

He had never seen a woman, more than and beyond her beauty and status but it was not the same case with Althea.

He saw her for who she was.

A true hardworking and a devoted woman.

“I have to be the in kitchen.”

She told Nicholas, turning on her heels and walking away from him and Nicholas simply followed after her, as if he was a moth to the flame and she was holding the matches to that very burning luminance.

Althea began cooking through her competition and Nicholas watched from afar, excited that soon he would get to taste whatever she would prepare for him.

He made his way towards his office and soon after, Serena brought in Althea’s prepared plate.

Nicholas dug in, smiling sheepishly and foolishly throughout the entire meal.

The sun sat on the island and Nicholas decided to wrap his work and went out of his office, only to find a female figure standing in the small terrace, which was an extension of the mansion out in the open, forming a boundary of the back of the mansion.

Enjoying the cool breeze, hitting her face, with an old worn out copy of Candide in her hands.

Her hair gathered on to a single side of her face, exposing the other shoulder, through her sleeveless strap dress that she still wore from the morning.

He watched at first, from afar, noticing how engrossed the girl was in her book, with no worries of the world.

He sighed, remembering that she was someone who had given up on her ambitions and dreams, only become a slave in order to fulfill her sister’s dreams. He couldn’t help band admire her strength and at the same time, he also noticed that she was someone of a good and soft poetically inclined literary touch, a blue stocking to be labeled, indeed.

He gently walked up towards her, making sure to make his footsteps loud and clear.

Hearing certain footsteps approach her, Althea turned her face away from the book and watched the open glass door, from where Nicholas entered in to the terrace.

“Permission to join?” he asked whimsically and she snorted a small laughter.

“As if I own this land!” she snorted and shrugged.

Nicholas walked ahead and stood next to Althea, perhaps at an arm’s length. His face was turned completely towards the sea, watching the sun set slowly and hiding away shyly from the rest of the world, leaving an orange imprint on the sky, that slowly turned darkish purple, promising to turn grey and black soon.

Nicholas didn’t remember the last time, he had enjoyed a sunset in such a pleasant weather.

“Have the read the book before?” Nicholas inquired from Althea, as a moment silence passed through them and Althea straightened up, turning in the opposite direction from Nicholas, resting her hands parallel to her, on the cement railing, up against which she rested her back.

She kept the book aside, on the railing and turned her entire attention towards Nicholas, making him, her center of attention.

“No, actually! But I heard that its actually quite good and I found an old copy, so decided, why not give it a read.”

Nicholas hummed back in response, “That actually is mine!”

“Really? You know how to read in French?”

Nicholas clicked his tongue, shaking his head in embarrassment, “Actually that belongs to my mother. I just borrowed it, to add to the library.”

“Your Mom, seems like a very intellectually inclined woman.”

Nicholas shrugged, “She actually is. Nothing like my father, after whom my brother takes and my sister, she takes after my mother.”

“So, who do you take after?” Althea requested and Nicholas went silent for a moment.

He actually never searched the answer to that question.

Who did he take after?

“Hmm, I guess I am a mixture of both?” he suggested making Althea smile.

“Well, the same goes for me. I am part my mother, in looks as everyone says and mostly part my father, as everyone who knows him says. Saying that I am just as courageous as him, when it comes to stepping for the ones that I love.”

“Then I bet, those that your dad loved… I mean loves, must be very lucky.”

Nicholas immediately corrected the sense of his sentence, making sure to not to use any past tense, to address her father and let Althea know that he knew that the man was deceased.

Althea hummed silently, “Well, my Mom was very lucky for a good part of her life, until Dad was there with her and even though, I try my best to never let her feel his absence but you can never make a lover feel filled without their true companion.”

“What if one day they start feeling full?” Nicholas asked, very timidly and mindlessly, not putting much thought to his question.

Althea shrugged, “I guess that’s the time when they have started to move on or have found better things to fill that void carved in them by the departure of their lover or simply that person was not their true love.”

“How do you know what true love is?” he asked, once again, suddenly feeling that Althea was an acumen, a beacon of wisdom, from whom he might find all the answers to his questions that had been disturbing his silly little mind lately.

“Well, I am know expert in this topic either. I spent years, waiting and hoping upon a guy, giving him chances again and again, thinking that this time, he would understand that I really love him and that he wouldn’t hurt me but each time, he found even worst and vile ways to hurt me and even if he didn’t do anything, his mere presence in my life became a burden and just the sense of the fact that the guy had access to me became a pain to me. And then, I actually realized that love is not when someone we love disappoints us but when we feel mad at ourselves for loving the wrong person and that’s alright, we can never tell who is going to turn in to what. It is only after a moment of companionship when we start to see them for who they really are and sometimes, to give value to our own feelings, we try our best to only see their best side and we would create these scenarios in our mind, in order to justify their actions that hurt us.

And we do all of this only to make sure that we are putting our values in the wrong pool but that’s the only thing that we can do because the other person is used to letting us down or wants to hurt us and they would eventually do it. If we don’t leave them because our feelings have developed that much, the other person does, tired that their hurtful means are just not reaching us but that would also dissipate because at the end we just end up realizing that if we loved the wrong person so much, we just need to hang in there and wait to find the right one, for whom no matter how much love we pour, it will never run out and they would be worthy for all the love that we carry and not just that, they would also make us feel that they love us just as much as we do or perhaps even more.

Isn’t that just exciting? To find someone, who loves us so much, especially after knowing that there are no bounds or limits to the magnitude of love that we carry?”

Althea turned towards Nicholas, who was attentively listening to each and every single word that poured out of her mouth.

“It is! It really feels exciting!”

--------------------------------

Do you agree with Althea's words about finding true love?

Thank you for always reading and supporting my work <3