He looked into her eyes. He had always liked looking into them, whenever he got the chance. It was not as if she didn’t let him, it was just that she was very shy, terribly shy. He would coax her for hours to let him look into his eyes for a minute. And then she would. Like she always did. He always won with her. She could never resist him. She, of the iron will, just melted whenever he was around. She had weathered a lot of storms in life. She said that's what had made her strong. He said, I don’t think so. You were not meant to be strong. God didn’t create you that way. He created you with a soft core and then he sent me take care of you. To guard you, shield you, hold you close and tight. Hold you in my arms and look into your eyes.

He held her close that night. He looked into her eyes. It had again taken coaxing since the morning for her to finally agree to meet him in the evening, after work and let him look into her yes.

He had parked the car under the streetlight, two lanes away from her house. The yellow light cast a warm glow on her face. It made her look breathtakingly beautiful. But then he never looked at her face. He looked into her eyes. They always looked like pools of a thousand myriad whirring emotions. But today was different; He could see that something was amiss. That her eyes had one predominant emotion, which drowned out all the rest of them. And what killed him was he didn’t know what it was. Or maybe he did and he didn’t want to face it. It was in that very moment, he could actually feel his heart turn into a deadweight. He could feel it turning into a drowning mass of stone. He could feel it choking him. He could feel life slipping out of his lungs. He started grasping for air. She sat there paralyzed. She just kept looking at him. It was guilt now. He saw it. And he knew the time had come for him to die. The time when all he had ever dreamt of, all the dreams he had ever seen, the very reason of his existence would come crashing down and would take him down with them. He kept looking into her eyes still, it was the last thing he wanted to d before he closed his. And then he smiled. After all, this is how he wanted to die, looking into her eyes.