Henry Winter hated the colour pink.

It irritated him like a flaw in a perfect equation. It broke the symmetry; it was an eyesore full of frivolity. But now he watched it slowly fill the library: your bag, your nail polish, the glitter on your jumper, even the binding of the notebook you insisted on calling your (verbatim) mushy-gushy girly notebook, teehee. You sat with your legs tucked under you in white knee socks, lazily twirling a lock of hair around a pencil. The blonde hair wasn't real, of course—those highlights looked like a haphazard graph Henry might have drawn in a fit of despair. But whenever a ray of sunlight touched your head, it flared up like a supernova, and he forgot how to breathe.

He explained logarithms, and you nodded stupidly, your bow-shaped hair clip bobbing in time. Your eyes, heavily lined with eyeliner and shaded with mother-of-pearl, followed his hands, and your lips, glossy as if smeared with jam, formed an astonished 'O' time after time. Sometimes you gasped, covering your mouth with a hand covered in heart stickers; sometimes you just froze, looking at him with the same delight a little girl showed when watching fireworks.

Henry found himself drawing out his explanations just so your gaze didn't drift out the window. You didn't ask questions, didn't argue, didn't try to seem clever.

But damn, you were clingy; he often compared you to a marshmallow. And Henry was fine with that.

There was something so captivating about you, full of seemingly meaningless treasures: a teddy bear, a tube of glitter glue, three kinds of watermelon lip balm. When you rummaged through your things, spilling stickers on the table, he caught himself counting the freckles on your neck—seven of them, arranged in the shape of the Little Dipper. He knew he should have been annoyed. Instead, his fingers shook and he was no longer writing integrals in a notebook but drawing your portraits.

Of course, Henry knew what others would say: a doll, a misunderstanding, a dummy. But when you, once again tripping on your inappropriately high heels, scattered your textbooks and, giggling, gathered them up in an armful with the air of a girl who had just saved a kitten, Henry understood: your stupidity was complete. Sort of an axiom that didn't require proof.

Obviously, you didn't fit into his world of logic and sharp angles but you made it crumble from the inside. Your perfume smelled like cherry lemonade, and he was drawn to you with an almost physical force. He leaned in to be closer, to carefully examine your manicured fluttering fingers.

He wished you'd pissed him off just once, he really did. But you just shrugged when you didn't understand, clutched at his sleeve to ask him to repeat himself, and there was such genuine ignorance in it that it took his breath away. A blank slate.

Henry, who had worshipped complexity all his life, now worshipped this simplicity. And when you smiled and wrote "thank you, I love you!" in the margins of his notes, circled a heart, and kissed the page (leaving a pink lipstick stain) it blew his mind.

Bimbo girl. This had to be some kind of joke. You weren't exactly his type. He liked austerity, clean lines, women who quoted Kafka over tea. And you fucking confused Archimedes with Aristotle but could recite the prices of every cocktail at the corner bar.

The library was emptying, but you both stayed until dark. Henry turned on the desk lamp, and under its light, you looked impossible. And radiant.

"Are you listening, my sweet girl?" he coughed into a tense fist but leaned closer anyway. And yet, your hair was unbearably soft. The sleeve of your sweater had slipped down, revealing a shoulder with a heart-shaped birthmark. Henry reached up to adjust his glasses, although they sat perfectly. "If you're tired, we can stop… unless you'd rather I tempted you with a coffee. Or something sweet. Come on, let me treat you—just this once."

To touch your shoulder with his lips… how badly he wanted to.