original fic/ Balance
Maya has back hair, and her skin is of a light shade of brown. Jack has always thought that it seems the colour of milk chocolate, and he has always liked it.
It may seem stupid but it’s for this reason that they met, when they were little kids their parents used to bring them out for a little bit of air, a four years old Jack had smiled at her and shouted that her skin must have been sweet.
Maya and Jack were born in the same month, with just few days of difference. First came Jack and then came Maya. Their houses were attached so that their bedrooms had one wall in common. It was like being brother and sister. When they grew up they understood that the word that most people would have used was “neighbours” but by that time that single word couldn’t explain what there was and there had been between them.
When Maya couldn’t sleep because of a nightmare she used to knock a few times on the wall, and soon would come Jack’s knocks, a light answer in the night. Maya would just lay there, close to the wall, not caring if it was cold against her forehead and imagined that Jack’s forehead was pressed against the same spot.
They went to school together from elementary school till high school, when they started to attend different schools. And yet they had their afternoons together, studying or just sitting in the small backyard that their families shared. It was Jack the first one to know about Maya’s first kiss and it was Maya the first one to know about Jack’s first time with a girl.
Everything has always been balanced between the two of them, even when they happened to kiss under the lamp post in front of their houses, the same lamp post they used to imagine was a star descended on earth when they were just kids. Everything remained balanced even when they happened to play together among the blankets, like overgrown puppies.
Even now that Maya’s stomach has grown bigger, her skin tensed, and Jack can feel a little kick from inside her now and then. Even now they are perfectly balanced, like two halves of a circle, like the two kids knocking at the wall at night not to be alone.