Keys To My Heart

"Danielle," one of them said as they waved their hand in front of my face, pulling me out of the memories I was reliving of when I had first fallen in love with each Staal boy.

"Yeah?"

"Are you okay?" Marc asked me.

"Yeah, fine. Why?" I said through a bit of nervous laughter. I picked up my coffee, taking a sip as I glanced at the rain that had begun to fall right outside of the Tim Horton's we were currently sitting in.

"You just kind of.. spaced out there for a few minutes or something," Eric explained.

"Oh, there's just some stuff going on with work, that's all," I lied. Well, it wasn't actually a lie. There was stuff going on at work.. Like which pieces I was going to use for my art gallery coming up in two weeks, and how I was going to arrange everything--things like that. My favorite piece consisted of what looked like hundreds of little bulls-eyes in all different colors painted on top of a black background. Little lights, similar to the ones you would decorate your house with at Christmas time, were going to be in the center of quite a few of the circles. It sort of reminded me of glowing fireflies at night.

"Is it cool if we crash this little party of yours?" Jordan questioned, an evil smirk etched onto his lips.

"You wouldn't dare," I challenged him, all five of us knowing full well that he would never do something like that. "Besides, there isn't going to be any alcohol there."

"Well, that's no fun," he responded. "Can we play laser tag or something since it's going to be in the dark?"

I laughed at the little kid inside of him. "What do you think?"

"Yes?"

"No," I said, causing him to put on a fake pout. "So, when do you guys go back for the season?" I asked the four of them.

"September fifth or sixth, I can't remember," Eric announced.

"We go back the fifth," Jared confirmed. I frowned, that was too early.

"What about you, Marc?" I questioned, looking over to him.

He finished taking a sip of his drink then placed it on the table. "The eighth."

"I'm leaving a few days after he is," Jordan told me, jerking his thumb in Marc's direction. "I'm not exactly sure what day, though."

I always hated when they had to go back to the States. It wasn't like it used to be when we were kids, when we would spend every day together in the summer and we weren't separated by hundreds of miles come the beginning of September. Now, when they came back home, they did a lot of nothing. We would get together as much as we could, but they had places to be, like golf tournaments and award shows, and I had a full time job. Whatever the case, it limited our time even more, and it made me sad to think about.

"That's only like..," I paused, trying to think of what today's date was--August sixteenth. "Less than a month away," I finished, frowning.

"Stop dwelling on the fact that your won't get to see our gorgeous faces-"

"And perfect hair," Jared said, interrupting Jordan, brushing his right hand against his hair like he was modeling or something.

Jordan shot his younger brother a look before turning back to me. "As I was saying, stop dwelling on not being able to ogle at our good looks, and finish your coffee so we can go back and play Monopoly."

I finished the rest of my drink within a minute, practically chugging it, before the five of us stood up from our chairs.

"I refuse to be the thimble this time. It's bad luck," Jordan whined.

"It's bad luck because you flat out suck at Monopoly. Besides, we always use the same pieces. You get the thimble, I get the dog, Jared gets the shoe, Marc gets the ship and Dani gets the car. I would say that you could trade your piece, but all of the other ones are lost," the oldest Staal said as we followed him out the door and into the pouring down rain.

"Yeah, well.. I'm going to kick all of your asses, you just wait! You'll want that damn thimble."

No, I'll just want you, any of you, to see me as more than a friend.