The palpable silence was hung thickly in the cold air.
“Chloe, you can’t change how you feel, you can’t—”
But Chloe whipped around, placing her frigid hands on Alex’s cheeks.
“Are you sure?” she asked with intense emotion smoldering in her quicksilver eyes, “Are you positive that if someone else can change the way I feel, that I can’t?”
With those words, Chloe summoned up the courage to make it happen; the scene that had been playing over and over in her mind for days. She stood on her toes, pulled Alex’s face down to hers and kissed him. Standing on a street corner, as the sigh of encroaching winter spun eddies of leaves wildly across the pavement, Alex wrapped his arms around the girl he loved and kissed her back like the world was crashing down around them.
When they parted, breathless, they leaned into one another, holding each other up in the face of change. Something was different; a long forgotten sprout was blossoming.
“I was wrong,” Chloe whispered, “I can’t change the way I feel. But you did.”