"Hey Juri, what's going on with you today?"
Even in the crowded, jostling of the ship's dining room mostly used by the ship's staff, Juri could hear Selene's voice perfectly. Along with her easy, outgoing demeanor, Selene had a strong, audible voice that always seemed to carry.
Juri heaved an inward sigh, careful not to let Selene see a sign that anything was amiss. Selene was still her friend. She had done nothing in the world wrong. It wasn't like Juri had offered up some kind of grand confession of love for Adam Haynes.
Yet, somewhere deep inside she couldn't hide the hurt she felt. This bitter aftertaste of betrayal lingered despite her best efforts to wash it all away with a few sips of the best liquor this ship had to offer.
Juri would never have been the type to willingly admit that she found Adam attractive, let alone hint about it to anyone else. Looking back on it now, she wasn't sure she knew there was anything to confess.
She may have been lying to herself but she never had an inkling of just how deep her crush ran. Not until seeing him with somebody else, and her friend, no less, it felt like a sad way for Juri to realize that there was more than simple attraction despite Adam's obliviousness.
In the time she'd been on the ship, with almost zero one on one interaction, Juri had started to develop feelings for the guy. Now that she understood how completely he was off limits, she wasn't sure where those feelings were supposed to go.
She couldn't keep them, and she didn't know how to get rid of them, which left her approximately nowhere at all. And had she allowed this to show in the week since her accidental spying?
Had she said something, done something, to clue Selene into the fact that things with Juri weren't as right as they had once been? She hadn't thought so, but now she saw that she was wrong.
Selene's brow was furrowed with concern and possibly a little confusion thrown into the mix.
"Juri? Are you still here with me?" Selene pressed, setting her plate and a glass of wine on the table and plopping down in the seat directly to Juri's right.
"I'm here," Juri answered sheepishly, picking at the salad before her in a most unconvincing manner.
"Seriously, girl, what's going on with you? You've been sort of off this week if you don't mind my saying. You just don't seem like yourself," Selene said gently.
It briefly crossed Juri's mind to say that Selene had no way of knowing what herself was, and then instantly felt sorry for it. Selene had no idea, after all. There was no way that Juri could tell her, either. She knew this and mourned the erecting of a wall in her new friendship, one she doubted she would ever be able to take back down again completely.
"I know," she said simply, bottling up all of the chaotic thoughts swirling in her head, "I'm sorry."
"Please, Juri, don't be sorry! Sorry is not what this conversation is about. I honestly just want to know if anything is good with you. I hate to see my friends looking down in the dumps," Selene proclaimed, taking a long, deep gulp of her wine to serve as her punctuation point.
"It'll pass, I promise. I just have little slumps sometimes, you know? Little bouts of melancholy, my mom liked to call them. They don't usually last for all that long," Juri assured Selene as best she could.
For a wonder, it seemed to do the trick. Not that Juri should be surprised. People were funny like that. They wanted to make sure the people in their lives were all doing okay, but they didn't want to know, not really.
They didn't want to know the deep, dark fears and unhappiness lurking inside of a person. They only wanted to be reassured. It was something Juri had learned from dealing with her mother, and it was a skill she was happy to put to use now.
There was no sense in diving into an issue there was no climbing back out of. Better to lick her wounds and wait to get over her little crush in private.
"Well, that's good to hear!" Selene cried with obvious relief, "I was starting to think I might have to do with-"
When she thought about it later, Juri would never be quite sure which happened first; the widening of Selene's eyes or the enormous clap of thunder that seemed to split the sky above them in two. In the end, she supposed it didn't matter.
Whichever it was, Selene broke off in mid-sentence. Juri would never find out what Selene might have to do if Juri didn't manage to cheer herself up. Without thinking, she reached out and grasped Selene's hand tight enough for her knuckles to turn white.
"Woah! That hurts, missy!" Selene cried. She sounded upset, but Juri thought she was probably more upset about the noise than any pain she might be suffering.
"What was that?" Juri gasped, her eyes never leaving Selene's face. Selene had worked on the ship plenty of times, and she was used to all kinds of things happening at sea. If Selene said everything was alright, Juri would believe her.
In her secret heart of hearts, she willed Selene to do that very thing. She willed her to return the favor of telling a lie for the benefit of another.
"It sounds like a storm. A bad one," Selene answered. Her voice sounded far away and contained not a single iota of confidence. So much for false cheer, she thought miserably but did not say.
"But it was sunny outside. When I came here, it was sunny. I mean, twilight but no sign of a storm," Juri pressed.
She sounded foolish, and she knew it, but it couldn't be helped. There was a part of her brain that couldn't process this new information. Things just didn't go from entirely serene to the brink of a cataclysmic storm in a matter of moments.
It simply wasn't the way the world worked and, at the moment, Juri did not yet know that there were ways in which the world worked that most people would never do more than dream about.
"Come on, let's get a look at the sky. Maybe you're right, Juri. Maybe it's something else," Selene said matter-of-factly.
Finally, the reassurance Juri had been looking for, although a little too late to do much of any good. Still, she was thankful for the feeling of Selene's strong, soft hand intertwining fingers through her own smaller, trembling hand.
Juri even managed to smile when Selene stopped and grabbed her glass of wine before they went anywhere. She followed dutifully after Selene and onto the ship's deck. Without understanding why her entire body was wracked with fear. It was almost paralyzing, this fear, and unlike anything, she had felt before.
Except, perhaps, maybe in that dream she kept trying so hard not to remember. There was no use in thinking about that; dreams were dreams, and they didn't matter a bit when it came to real life. This was a fact Juri still knew to be true. When she tilted her face to the sky, that sense of truth began to falter.
"What is it?" She whispered, squeezing Selene's hand tighter.
"It's a storm. It's one hell of a storm," Selene answered, her voice every bit as shocked as Juri's.
It was a storm, alright, but there was nothing ordinary about it. The sky was a sickly green with patches of ominously purple clouds interspersed. As the two girls watched, a bolt of lightning cut those clouds into jagged pieces and sped down to the water's surface.
"Oh!" Selene shrieked in a strangled voice, "It's too close! I'm telling you, Juri, it's too close!"