Behind Hazel Eyes
Behind Hazel EyesOne night when I couldn't sleep, I was wondering, what if someone asked me if I met my husband in a slow-burn romance novel, and I had to tell the story around the fire, what story would I tell?
Behind Hazel Eyesby Van LaCar
The trail to the falls had been cold that morning. The kind of cold that bit through fleece and settled in the bones, making her question why she'd set her alarm for four a.m., why she'd driven an hour in the dark with only gas station coffee and the promise of blue hour to keep her company. But she'd learned years ago that the best light never came easy. Beauty demanded sacrifice. A willing pilgrimage into discomfort.
By the time she reached the overlook, her thighs burned and her breath came in white clouds that dissipated like ghosts. Worth it. Always worth it. The falls cascaded silver against black rock, and the sky was doing that thing it did. That impossible gradient from indigo to rose that lasted maybe ten minutes if you were lucky, five if you weren't.
She set up her tripod with practiced efficiency, fingers moving through the familiar ritual. Level the base. Extend the legs. Mount the camera. Check the bubble level. Frame the shot. The world narrowed to aperture and shutter speed, ISO and composition. Everything else, the bills waiting on her kitchen counter, the job interview she'd bombed last week, the way her mother's voice had gone tight on the phone when she'd said still freelancing, then?, all of it dissolved into irrelevance.
One. Two. Three. Four. Hold.
The shutter opened. Time stretched. The camera drank light in slow, reverent gulps, turning motion into silk, chaos into something almost holy.
When the exposure finished, she checked the LCD screen, already mentally cataloging what she'd need to adjust for the next shot. Her thumb brushed the zoom button—accidental, thoughtless, the kind of mistake that happened when your hands knew the camera better than you knew yourself.
The image expanded.
And there, in the blur of background tourists she'd meant to avoid, a pair of eyes came into sharp, sudden focus.
Hazel. The kind of hazel that wasn't really one color at all. Gold on the outer rim bleeding into green at the center, like autumn leaves caught in the exact moment between living and dying.
Eyes that were looking directly at her.
Not past her, not through her. At her.
Her breath caught. She stood frozen, thumb hovering over the zoom button, trying to understand what she was seeing. The eyes in the frame were utterly still. The only point of stillness in a crowd of motion, which meant they'd been watching her long enough to become a fixed point while the shutter was open. Four seconds, maybe five. An eternity in photographic time.
She looked up from the screen, heart suddenly loud in her ears.
The overlook was crowded with the sunrise faithful. Couples huddled together for warmth, solo hikers with their backs to the falls checking phones they'd hiked all this way to escape, a family with small children who were too young to appreciate what they were seeing but would treasure the photos someday when memory had softened the cold and the complaining into something golden and perfect.
Too many people. Too many faces turned the wrong direction, eyes on the falls or the sky or each other.
Whoever owned those hazel eyes had already looked away. Or maybe they'd never existed outside the frame at all. Maybe just a trick of light and long exposure making her loneliness manifesting as attention she'd never actually received.
She looked at the image one more time. Let herself study those eyes the way she'd study any beautiful thing she'd captured. Carefully, hungrily, knowing it was hers now in the only way anything ever really belonged to anyone. Then she burned it into memory, filed it away in the dark archives behind her own eyes where she kept all the moments that mattered and none of the ones that didn't.
The hike down was easier. Always was. Gravity did half the work.
She was nearly back to the trailhead when she heard them. Voices carried on wind that had turned warm as the sun climbed higher. Male voices, multiple, layered over each other in the particular cadence of men who'd known each other long enough that conversation had become a kind of shorthand.
The trail widened and she saw them up ahead. Four, maybe five men clustered near a scenic overlook, tall enough that they blocked the view marker. They had the same build. Broad shoulders, long limbs, and the kind of casual athletic grace that came from genetics rather than gym memberships. Brothers, she thought. Or cousins who'd grown up in adjacent houses, sharing summers and secrets.
Their conversation had an edge to it. Not quite argument, but the body language was too loose for that, too familiar. But it was something with weight. The kind of discussion where words mattered, where what you said would be remembered later and possibly used against you.
She kept her eyes down as she approached, the universal hiker courtesy of I see you but I'm not really seeing you, we're all just people sharing a trail. But something made her glance up at the last second.
One of them held a camera.
Vintage. Film. The kind with actual dials and no LCD screen, no digital safety net. The kind that required you to know what you were doing, that punished mistakes and rewarded patience. She felt a flicker of kinship—one of us—and let her gaze linger on it a moment longer than she should have.
Then her eyes traveled up to the man holding it.
And everything stopped.
Hazel eyes. Gold bleeding to green, exactly as her camera had promised hours ago when the world was still dark and possible.
But they weren't looking at her.
They were squeezed shut behind laughter. The kind of full-body laughter that crinkled the corners and showed teeth, that made his shoulders shake and his head tilt back. He was laughing at something one of the others had said, caught in a moment of pure, unselfconscious joy.
She felt the disappointment settle in her chest like sediment sinking to the bottom of still water. Heavy. Expected. The same disappointment she'd been carrying since middle school, since the first time she'd realized that boys looked through her rather than at her, that she existed in some invisible frequency just outside the range of male attention.
She'd never been the kind of girl who turned heads. Never learned the particular alchemy of makeup and posture and confidence that made other women magnetic. She'd made peace with it, mostly. Built a life around being the observer rather than the observed, the one behind the camera instead of in front of it.
Still. She'd hoped. Just for a second. Just long enough to see those eyes up close and real, to confirm they were as beautiful as her camera had suggested.
Oh well.
She walked past them. None of them looked up. Why would they?
~~~
The bookstore was her church.
She came here when the freelance work dried up, when the rejection emails piled up, when the walls of her apartment started closing in. Came here to disappear into aisles that smelled like paper and possibility, to run her fingers over spines that promised to teach her things she didn't know yet, to remember that the world was bigger than her failures.
The photography section was in the back corner, naturally. Tucked away where only the faithful would find it. She drifted toward it the way she always did, without conscious decision, just following the invisible thread that connected her to images and light.
She was studying a book on long exposure techniques, trying to decide if it would teach her anything she hadn't already learned through trial and error, when she sensed someone else enter the aisle.
She didn't look up. Bookstore etiquette demanded a careful pretense of solitude even in shared spaces.
But then she caught his scent.
Warm wood. Cedar, maybe, or sandalwood. Something green underneath like pine or vetiver. And cologne, expensive but not aggressive, the kind that whispered rather than announced. It hit her low in the stomach, that scent. Made something ancient and animal wake up in her hindbrain and pay attention.
She glanced up.
And her heart stopped.
The hazel-eyed man stood three feet away, his attention locked on the shelf above his head, utterly unaware that he'd been haunting her thoughts for three days like a ghost she'd accidentally photographed.
He looked different here. Softer. The harsh trail sunlight had carved sharp shadows across his face, but the bookstore's warm lighting gentled him. Made him look approachable. Human. His hair was slightly messed, like he'd run his hands through it recently, and he wore a canvas jacket over a henley that had seen better days.
She needed to move. Needed to say something, do something, before the moment calcified into awkwardness.
"Excuse me." The words came out barely above a whisper, so soft they were almost absorbed by the carpeting and book-lined walls before they reached him.
He stepped aside without looking at her—automatic courtesy—and she slipped past him into the narrow space between his body and the shelf.
The scent intensified. Wrapped around her like smoke, like something she could taste. She felt lightheaded with it, with the sudden proximity to someone who'd existed until this moment only as pixels and memory. Her shoulder nearly brushed his chest as she reached for a book she didn't actually want, just needed an excuse to be here, to exist in his orbit for a few more seconds.
At the edge of her vision, she saw his hands reach up toward a book on the top shelf. Long fingers. Elegant knuckles. Clean nails. The kind of hands that would know how to hold a camera steady, how to adjust aperture without looking, how to—
Heat crawled up her neck, sudden and mortifying. She was thinking about his hands. Actually thinking about them. Imagining how they'd feel wrapped around hers, what they'd look like against her skin, whether they'd be warm or cool, rough or smooth.
What's wrong with me? Stop it. He's not—
"Excuse me?"
His voice cut through her spiral, low, textured, with an uptick at the end that suggested genuine question rather than dismissal.
Hope stopped in her throat. Got lodged there like something she'd swallowed wrong, too big to go down, too precious to cough up. She turned her head slowly, so slowly, giving herself time to prepare for disappointment.
But he was looking at her.
Those hazel eyes were locked on hers with the same intensity her camera had captured, and up close they were even more devastating. She could see the individual striations of color now—amber and gold and green all fractured together like stained glass. Could see the dark ring around the iris, the slight asymmetry that made them human rather than perfect.
"Yes?" The word came out smaller than she'd meant. Uncertain.
His gaze dropped—traveled down from her face to her torso—and panic bloomed cold and immediate in her chest.
What am I wearing? Is it the flannel with the hole in the elbow? Did I forget to zip my jacket? Is there something on my shirt? Did I not notice toilet paper stuck to my shoe in the bathroom?
"Your camera."
Relief flooded through her so forcefully she almost laughed. "Right." She looked down at the Canon hanging from her neck. She'd done a shoot that morning, some senior portraits for the daughter of a friend of a friend, and hadn't bothered putting it away before coming here. "My camera. I guess I forgot I had it on me."
It was a lie. She never forgot. The camera was an extension of her body, as familiar as her own hands. But he didn't need to know that.
"What is it?" he asked. "If you don't mind me asking."
His interest kindled something warm behind her ribs. "It's a Canon RP. I really love it."
"Full frame?"
"Yeah."
"Mirrorless?"
"Mhmm."
"How do you find the autofocus? I've heard mixed things about Canon's mirrorless systems."
They fell into it then. The particular conversation that only happened between people who understood cameras not as tools but as extensions of vision, as ways of interacting with the world that civilians would never quite understand. He asked questions that revealed actual knowledge rather than polite curiosity. She answered with the ease of someone finally getting to talk about the thing she loved most to someone who actually cared.
Minutes passed. The bookstore's ambient noise, distant register beeps, hushed conversations, the whisper of pages turning, all faded into background static.
"Can I see?" he asked finally. "The photos you took?"
"Sure." She pulled up the gallery, hyper-aware of his proximity as he leaned in to look at the screen.
His scent surrounded her again. Stronger now. Warm and green and safe. She had the sudden, irrational urge to lean into it, to close the remaining inches between them and just breathe.
He scrolled through her images slowly, actually looking at them rather than the cursory glance most people gave. She watched his face as he looked, watched his eyes track across the frame, watched the slight tightening at the corners that meant he was thinking, considering, actually seeing what she'd captured.
"These are beautiful," he said finally, and his voice had gone quieter. More serious. "Really beautiful. You have an incredible eye."
The compliment hit differently than the usual polite praise. He meant it. She could tell.
"Thank you." Her voice had gone small again, uncertain how to hold this moment without crushing it.
He looked up from the camera and the weight of that gaze made her feel suddenly, terrifyingly visible.
"There's a coffee shop," he said. "In the store. It's not great coffee, but it's not terrible either." He paused, and she watched him choose his words carefully. "If I bought you a cup, would you tell me more about your camera? Maybe let me look at it more closely? I'm trying to decide between the RP and the M200, but talking to you is making me think I've been looking at the wrong models entirely."
"I'd love that." The words escaped before she could stop them. Far too fast, too eager, desperation bleeding through at the edges like watercolor on wet paper.
She tried to recover. "I mean, if you have the time. I don't want to—"
He leaned closer. Not by much, just an inch, maybe two, but enough that she could see the individual lashes framing those impossible eyes, could feel the warmth radiating from his body in the bookstore's climate-controlled air.
"If it's you," he said, voice low enough that it felt like a secret, "I have all the time in the world."
Art by: Pupinoko
So? What did you think?
Could you picture this? Pun intended!
More importantly, did it make you feel something? 
Art by: Pupinoko
Until next time! Keep wondering, keep creating, and let the night light burn a little longer.
Van LaCar
Follow my journey through the Bound Series and beyond on my Instagram: @vanlacar
New stories are stirring in the dark.
Stay tunned for Bound by Secrets coming February 2026
The trail to the falls had been cold that morning. The kind of cold that bit through fleece and settled in the bones, making her question why she'd set her alarm for four a.m., why she'd driven an hour in the dark with only gas station coffee and the promise of blue hour to keep her company. But she'd learned years ago that the best light never came easy. Beauty demanded sacrifice. A willing pilgrimage into discomfort.
By the time she reached the overlook, her thighs burned and her breath came in white clouds that dissipated like ghosts. Worth it. Always worth it. The falls cascaded silver against black rock, and the sky was doing that thing it did. That impossible gradient from indigo to rose that lasted maybe ten minutes if you were lucky, five if you weren't.
She set up her tripod with practiced efficiency, fingers moving through the familiar ritual. Level the base. Extend the legs. Mount the camera. Check the bubble level. Frame the shot. The world narrowed to aperture and shutter speed, ISO and composition. Everything else, the bills waiting on her kitchen counter, the job interview she'd bombed last week, the way her mother's voice had gone tight on the phone when she'd said still freelancing, then?, all of it dissolved into irrelevance.
One. Two. Three. Four. Hold.
The shutter opened. Time stretched. The camera drank light in slow, reverent gulps, turning motion into silk, chaos into something almost holy.
When the exposure finished, she checked the LCD screen, already mentally cataloging what she'd need to adjust for the next shot. Her thumb brushed the zoom button—accidental, thoughtless, the kind of mistake that happened when your hands knew the camera better than you knew yourself.
The image expanded.
And there, in the blur of background tourists she'd meant to avoid, a pair of eyes came into sharp, sudden focus.
Hazel. The kind of hazel that wasn't really one color at all. Gold on the outer rim bleeding into green at the center, like autumn leaves caught in the exact moment between living and dying.
Eyes that were looking directly at her.
Not past her, not through her. At her.
Her breath caught. She stood frozen, thumb hovering over the zoom button, trying to understand what she was seeing. The eyes in the frame were utterly still. The only point of stillness in a crowd of motion, which meant they'd been watching her long enough to become a fixed point while the shutter was open. Four seconds, maybe five. An eternity in photographic time.
She looked up from the screen, heart suddenly loud in her ears.
The overlook was crowded with the sunrise faithful. Couples huddled together for warmth, solo hikers with their backs to the falls checking phones they'd hiked all this way to escape, a family with small children who were too young to appreciate what they were seeing but would treasure the photos someday when memory had softened the cold and the complaining into something golden and perfect.
Too many people. Too many faces turned the wrong direction, eyes on the falls or the sky or each other.
Whoever owned those hazel eyes had already looked away. Or maybe they'd never existed outside the frame at all. Maybe just a trick of light and long exposure making her loneliness manifesting as attention she'd never actually received.
She looked at the image one more time. Let herself study those eyes the way she'd study any beautiful thing she'd captured. Carefully, hungrily, knowing it was hers now in the only way anything ever really belonged to anyone. Then she burned it into memory, filed it away in the dark archives behind her own eyes where she kept all the moments that mattered and none of the ones that didn't.
The hike down was easier. Always was. Gravity did half the work.
She was nearly back to the trailhead when she heard them. Voices carried on wind that had turned warm as the sun climbed higher. Male voices, multiple, layered over each other in the particular cadence of men who'd known each other long enough that conversation had become a kind of shorthand.
The trail widened and she saw them up ahead. Four, maybe five men clustered near a scenic overlook, tall enough that they blocked the view marker. They had the same build. Broad shoulders, long limbs, and the kind of casual athletic grace that came from genetics rather than gym memberships. Brothers, she thought. Or cousins who'd grown up in adjacent houses, sharing summers and secrets.
Their conversation had an edge to it. Not quite argument, but the body language was too loose for that, too familiar. But it was something with weight. The kind of discussion where words mattered, where what you said would be remembered later and possibly used against you.
She kept her eyes down as she approached, the universal hiker courtesy of I see you but I'm not really seeing you, we're all just people sharing a trail. But something made her glance up at the last second.
One of them held a camera.
Vintage. Film. The kind with actual dials and no LCD screen, no digital safety net. The kind that required you to know what you were doing, that punished mistakes and rewarded patience. She felt a flicker of kinship—one of us—and let her gaze linger on it a moment longer than she should have.
Then her eyes traveled up to the man holding it.
And everything stopped.
Hazel eyes. Gold bleeding to green, exactly as her camera had promised hours ago when the world was still dark and possible.
But they weren't looking at her.
They were squeezed shut behind laughter. The kind of full-body laughter that crinkled the corners and showed teeth, that made his shoulders shake and his head tilt back. He was laughing at something one of the others had said, caught in a moment of pure, unselfconscious joy.
She felt the disappointment settle in her chest like sediment sinking to the bottom of still water. Heavy. Expected. The same disappointment she'd been carrying since middle school, since the first time she'd realized that boys looked through her rather than at her, that she existed in some invisible frequency just outside the range of male attention.
She'd never been the kind of girl who turned heads. Never learned the particular alchemy of makeup and posture and confidence that made other women magnetic. She'd made peace with it, mostly. Built a life around being the observer rather than the observed, the one behind the camera instead of in front of it.
Still. She'd hoped. Just for a second. Just long enough to see those eyes up close and real, to confirm they were as beautiful as her camera had suggested.
Oh well.
She walked past them. None of them looked up. Why would they?
~~~
The bookstore was her church.
She came here when the freelance work dried up, when the rejection emails piled up, when the walls of her apartment started closing in. Came here to disappear into aisles that smelled like paper and possibility, to run her fingers over spines that promised to teach her things she didn't know yet, to remember that the world was bigger than her failures.
The photography section was in the back corner, naturally. Tucked away where only the faithful would find it. She drifted toward it the way she always did, without conscious decision, just following the invisible thread that connected her to images and light.
She was studying a book on long exposure techniques, trying to decide if it would teach her anything she hadn't already learned through trial and error, when she sensed someone else enter the aisle.
She didn't look up. Bookstore etiquette demanded a careful pretense of solitude even in shared spaces.
But then she caught his scent.
Warm wood. Cedar, maybe, or sandalwood. Something green underneath like pine or vetiver. And cologne, expensive but not aggressive, the kind that whispered rather than announced. It hit her low in the stomach, that scent. Made something ancient and animal wake up in her hindbrain and pay attention.
She glanced up.
And her heart stopped.
The hazel-eyed man stood three feet away, his attention locked on the shelf above his head, utterly unaware that he'd been haunting her thoughts for three days like a ghost she'd accidentally photographed.
He looked different here. Softer. The harsh trail sunlight had carved sharp shadows across his face, but the bookstore's warm lighting gentled him. Made him look approachable. Human. His hair was slightly messed, like he'd run his hands through it recently, and he wore a canvas jacket over a henley that had seen better days.
She needed to move. Needed to say something, do something, before the moment calcified into awkwardness.
"Excuse me." The words came out barely above a whisper, so soft they were almost absorbed by the carpeting and book-lined walls before they reached him.
He stepped aside without looking at her—automatic courtesy—and she slipped past him into the narrow space between his body and the shelf.
The scent intensified. Wrapped around her like smoke, like something she could taste. She felt lightheaded with it, with the sudden proximity to someone who'd existed until this moment only as pixels and memory. Her shoulder nearly brushed his chest as she reached for a book she didn't actually want, just needed an excuse to be here, to exist in his orbit for a few more seconds.
At the edge of her vision, she saw his hands reach up toward a book on the top shelf. Long fingers. Elegant knuckles. Clean nails. The kind of hands that would know how to hold a camera steady, how to adjust aperture without looking, how to—
Heat crawled up her neck, sudden and mortifying. She was thinking about his hands. Actually thinking about them. Imagining how they'd feel wrapped around hers, what they'd look like against her skin, whether they'd be warm or cool, rough or smooth.
What's wrong with me? Stop it. He's not—
"Excuse me?"
His voice cut through her spiral, low, textured, with an uptick at the end that suggested genuine question rather than dismissal.
Hope stopped in her throat. Got lodged there like something she'd swallowed wrong, too big to go down, too precious to cough up. She turned her head slowly, so slowly, giving herself time to prepare for disappointment.
But he was looking at her.
Those hazel eyes were locked on hers with the same intensity her camera had captured, and up close they were even more devastating. She could see the individual striations of color now—amber and gold and green all fractured together like stained glass. Could see the dark ring around the iris, the slight asymmetry that made them human rather than perfect.
"Yes?" The word came out smaller than she'd meant. Uncertain.
His gaze dropped—traveled down from her face to her torso—and panic bloomed cold and immediate in her chest.
What am I wearing? Is it the flannel with the hole in the elbow? Did I forget to zip my jacket? Is there something on my shirt? Did I not notice toilet paper stuck to my shoe in the bathroom?
"Your camera."
Relief flooded through her so forcefully she almost laughed. "Right." She looked down at the Canon hanging from her neck. She'd done a shoot that morning, some senior portraits for the daughter of a friend of a friend, and hadn't bothered putting it away before coming here. "My camera. I guess I forgot I had it on me."
It was a lie. She never forgot. The camera was an extension of her body, as familiar as her own hands. But he didn't need to know that.
"What is it?" he asked. "If you don't mind me asking."
His interest kindled something warm behind her ribs. "It's a Canon RP. I really love it."
"Full frame?"
"Yeah."
"Mirrorless?"
"Mhmm."
"How do you find the autofocus? I've heard mixed things about Canon's mirrorless systems."
They fell into it then. The particular conversation that only happened between people who understood cameras not as tools but as extensions of vision, as ways of interacting with the world that civilians would never quite understand. He asked questions that revealed actual knowledge rather than polite curiosity. She answered with the ease of someone finally getting to talk about the thing she loved most to someone who actually cared.
Minutes passed. The bookstore's ambient noise, distant register beeps, hushed conversations, the whisper of pages turning, all faded into background static.
"Can I see?" he asked finally. "The photos you took?"
"Sure." She pulled up the gallery, hyper-aware of his proximity as he leaned in to look at the screen.
His scent surrounded her again. Stronger now. Warm and green and safe. She had the sudden, irrational urge to lean into it, to close the remaining inches between them and just breathe.
He scrolled through her images slowly, actually looking at them rather than the cursory glance most people gave. She watched his face as he looked, watched his eyes track across the frame, watched the slight tightening at the corners that meant he was thinking, considering, actually seeing what she'd captured.
"These are beautiful," he said finally, and his voice had gone quieter. More serious. "Really beautiful. You have an incredible eye."
The compliment hit differently than the usual polite praise. He meant it. She could tell.
"Thank you." Her voice had gone small again, uncertain how to hold this moment without crushing it.
He looked up from the camera and the weight of that gaze made her feel suddenly, terrifyingly visible.
"There's a coffee shop," he said. "In the store. It's not great coffee, but it's not terrible either." He paused, and she watched him choose his words carefully. "If I bought you a cup, would you tell me more about your camera? Maybe let me look at it more closely? I'm trying to decide between the RP and the M200, but talking to you is making me think I've been looking at the wrong models entirely."
"I'd love that." The words escaped before she could stop them. Far too fast, too eager, desperation bleeding through at the edges like watercolor on wet paper.
She tried to recover. "I mean, if you have the time. I don't want to—"
He leaned closer. Not by much, just an inch, maybe two, but enough that she could see the individual lashes framing those impossible eyes, could feel the warmth radiating from his body in the bookstore's climate-controlled air.
"If it's you," he said, voice low enough that it felt like a secret, "I have all the time in the world."
More importantly, did it make you feel something?
Van LaCar
New stories are stirring in the dark.
Stay tunned for Bound by Secrets coming February 2026
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