The Forest of Adventures (#1 of The Knight Trilogy) by Katie M John Page B

exhausting,
especially when it’s against your will. There’s a theory that love
is nothing but a seven week chemical reaction based on primitive
animal instincts. If this is to be believed, it means you could
fall in love with someone new every seven weeks and we’d all be as
free and easy as a lion on the savannah. We wouldn’t have cities,
universities, shopping malls or families – we’d all be too busy
indulging our raging hormones with virtual strangers - but we would
be free.
    Thankfully, for the sake of
human civilisation, some bright spark way back in history, invented
two wondrously interconnecting ideas called love and marriage,
designed to stabilise humanity. For me this was Sam and it was wonderful, a dream full of cottages, children, happiness
and safety.
    Blake Beldevier was nothing
more than my seven week chemical reaction. The madness would pass.
Love and sense would win through.
    At long last the Easter
holidays arrived, I had no reason to see Blake and he had no reason
to seek me out. By the time the holidays ended we would be well
into week ten and I’d be completely safe. I proposed to structure
my holidays with a strict schedule of study, coffee with Daisy at
the bookshop, long runs in the woods and hospital visits. In this
way I would be safe from thinking of Blake.
    My holiday passed according to
plan, except for the not thinking of Blake bit. Sometimes thinking
isn’t voluntary, and at least once an hour either in sleep or
awake, a thought of him would slip in silently and when I was least
suspecting it, jump out and shout in my face. By the end of the
holiday, I got more effective at wrestling this type of thought
back into its box. But now it was the last day of the holiday and
tomorrow I’d have to see him face to face, worse still I’d have to
sit next to him in English; feeling the heat of his body, smelling
his warm spiced scent and catching the slight movement of his hand
out of the corner of my eye – our naked hands that had held each
other in the darkness of the woods.
    I rang Daisy, distraction being
needed and arranged to meet for an afternoon shopping trip in town.
She had a few things she wanted for college and needed to debrief
me on her first official date with Joe. It wasn’t until I hung up
that I realised I’d left a great dangerous space of unplanned time
throughout the morning. The rain put me off a run and ’d noticed
that running was a weak spot in the whole not thinking about
B defences. So with no other distractions available, I
reluctantly returned to finishing off my Biology coursework which
I’d been putting to the bottom of the pile. After all there’s a
limited amount of interest attached to woodlice colonies.
    Whilst the laptop wound itself
up on its elastic band, I went downstairs to make myself the
zillionth coffee of the fairly new day and to nose through the post
that I’d just heard come through the letterbox. I sifted through
the envelopes of which there were several bills, a letter from
Mum’s publisher and a small violet envelope addressed to me by
hand. The script was beautiful and elegant, written in a dark
purple ink and where the rain had caught it on its short journey
from mailbag to letterbox, small purple blooms hung off the
letters. I knew as soon as I held it in my hand who’d penned it
having watched that same purple ink spread itself across Blake’s
English book for the last couple of months.
    I tried to act calm, to dismiss
it but my heart pounded in my chest and I knew that if I opened it
I was another step closer to fulfilling Vivien’s prophecy and
heading back into the chaos I’d made a firm decision to leave
behind. I stuffed the letter into the back pocket of my jeans
determined not to open it even though curiosity clawed at my
temptation like a hungry cat. I’d survived two long weeks without
Blake and I was certain I could survive one day longer.
    I stomped up the stairs, angry
that Blake’s world had yet again