The Gilded Butterfly by Sergei Selivanov (the two towers ebook txt) 📕

The Gilded Butterfly
By Sergei Selivanov

We passed through the alley to concrete stairs that descended to the sandy beach. She stopped and took off her shoes.
“You’d better take your shoes off too.” She glanced at me with a smile.
I took off my shoes and rolled up my pants. I hadn’t been to the beach for more than a week, but before there hadn’t been a single day that I didn’t spend a few hours there.
At first, the sand seemed cold, but after a couple of steps, it remembered me. “Welcome back,” it said. “You’ve been missed, old friend.” And then the sand was warm and as soft as fluff.
Megan was walking ahead of me. Waves gently wrapped around her slender legs, and the moon created a silver outline of her figure. My eyes stayed fixed on her, and I realized my heart had stopped beating.
I watched in slow motion as she turned to me—the moon lighting her face. And I heard her alluring voice. “Tyler, are you coming with me?”
The silence stretched on as I struggled to wrap my mind around her question. “Yes, of course.” I smiled wistfully, returning from my numbness into a magic world and trying to find myself there. I didn’t want to wake up from this dream.
Megan waited for me to go to her, and we walked slowly along the ocean.
Walking beside her, I felt calm, but at the same time I was afraid. I was rarely fearful. But now fear seemed to orchestrate a chaos within my being, a chaos ready to burst from the seams of my conscious and rip reality in half.
“You like to swim at night?” she suddenly asked.
“Hmmm.” I mused. “It’s unusual, not like in the daytime.”
“I like it so much,” she said, a little mysteriously.
“I think…me too.” I frowned as I spoke, not sure of my answer.
“But I don’t often swim at night.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Not everybody likes to swim at night. I don’t like to do it by myself,” she said glumly, staring away.
“You’re right,” I answered. “I remember when my friends and I went to Kauai—” I stopped and turned my face toward her. “By the way, have you been there?”
“No,” she smiled sheepishly.
“You have to go. It is very beautiful.”
Megan listened to me very carefully as we continued to walk along the ocean.
Her beautiful eyes held mine, and I again lost my train of thoughts. I stared at her till she smiled and looked away.
I went back to my story. “Um, one night we all went swimming. But then after a little while everybody went back to the fire, and only I and one of my friends stayed there.”
“The rest were afraid of all the fish?” she asked. “Or maybe they just got cold?”
“Probably not,” I objected gently. “The water was very warm.”
Megan smiled shyly and looked down at her legs, wrapped by waves.
“Here’s the really good part,” I said. “I was just standing there, waist deep in the water, while all these strong waves were splashing around me and making me feel like I was going to fall. I’m used to that kind of thing, I guess, but this time when the waves finally stopped, something felt odd. I looked all around me, and I finally gazed down at the water for some reason. And there they were—shining lights. Some were underwater and some were just sort of floating around, and there were tons of them. They were glistening like hundreds of tiny diamonds. They seemed to fade away, but then they’d pop up somewhere else again like new; it was a dance of lights all around me.”
“What were they?” Megan asked.
I shrugged. “Still don’t know.” My voice was almost a whisper. “Then I looked at Oliver; he stood not far from me. The same lights shone around him. I remember it so clearly, as if it were yesterday.” I sighed.
“I exclaimed, pointing to the water: ‘Oliver! Do you see this?!’ He was like, ‘Whoa!’ and he looking at all the lights. And I asked him if he knew what they were.
“He said, ‘I think it’s some kind of algae that lights up when you touch it.’ Crazy.”
“What a strange theory,” Meagan said with one eyebrow raised.
“Yes, but I couldn’t find any other explanation.” I smiled again, and then I changed the subject. “Can we stop here?” We were on a beach next to a well-known, large, Royal Hawaiian hotel, painted in pink. During the day, there were always many tourists there, but that night only three people sat quietly on the shore.

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In the dark of the night and the still of the evening you'll find Sergei Selivanov writing furiously to exercise his dark muse to the delight of his fans. Specializing in Drama and Young Adult romances, he refers to himself as a loner, haunted by the stories he pens and driven to push the boundaries until all lovers of the genres have no choice but to sleep with one eye open. Sergei explores the dark side of humanity and turns the stories of some of the most depraved into literature you'll have no choice but to read with one eye on the door and every light in the house on. Grab a sample if you dare...
Learn more at http://thegildedbutterflypage.com.

Publication Date: 12-13-2012

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