[b][i]Chapter Two: Ruby[/i][/b]

They had met, Elena and Jake, when they were very young. She couldn’t remember anymore, and he chose not to. In middle school, they became rivals. In high school, tentative friends or close acquaintances.

It was senior year that things started to change. Elena, who had once been plain to look at, was somehow beautiful. Not that straight forward beauty, but beautiful all the same. The red waves that had always been pulled into a ponytail, now found themselves loose and free to bounce on her shoulders. Those eyes which had started out watery and gray were now a dark green that seemed to stare into the soul.

And then there was the attitude. Elena couldn’t care less what anyone thought of her and somehow this drew people to her all the more. She hadn’t noticed it happening. Her life had just been going on.

One boy in particular watched her closely. Jake would never say he was in love, but he was certainly fascinated. She still wasn’t anything special, he thought, and he could not understand how she drew people in like moths to a flame. The more he watched, the less he understood.

He watched her push away every single person who tried to get close. He watched her walk away from every love sick boy. He watched her brush off every jealous girl. It was as if she lived on a plane all herself. One where no one was around to bother her.

That was when the thought took root. He would do it. He would be the one who broke through. Why? For the challenge of course.

It took him two years to break down that last wall, to become her lover.

"I don’t love you. I never will," he told her. He did not know why, but he felt the need to warn her.

The girl who had left her heart so guarded responded, “Likewise,” but she knew it was already too late for her. That she had fallen so deep that she didn’t think she’d ever be able to crawl to the surface again.

He kept true to his word and never fell for her. Never even hinted at it. She was only a challenge he had conquered, and he would enjoy her until she ran out of use. He was cruel and a user and she found that she could not even bring herself to care. The girl who had been lonely her whole life was lonely no longer.

What she would never learn, what he would never tell her, was there was a separate reason that he had taken the challenge. Jake had barriers of his own. Barriers so thick he could not even pretend to feel his heart beating beneath them. If he could break the armor that encased her soul, could someone break through to his heart? He wondered about that.

He would never tell her that he was fascinated with her. That she frightened him beyond belief. That he thought she might be the one to free him. He would never even tell her that he knew she loved him.

Before long, another year had passed and, without him noticing, the barriers had come down. It all seemed normal, unchanging until he found himself staring at a ruby and wondering why he was so tempted to purchase it. The answer that came to him was so unexpected, so [i]shocking[/i] that he had run from it, physically and literally.

Somehow, the girl who let no one close, had wormed her way through the cracks in the barriers and latched herself onto his heart. The moment he realized this, the fear drove him into a panic. He had to rip her from his life and never look back. Never.

The next day, he met her at the park and locked his heart away once more cursing the small gemstone that had held such significance. The ruby that had reminded him so much of her. She would never know that later he went back and bought that gem, that the necklace sat in a drawer in his apartment. It would be his secret. The chink in his armor.