Her eyes try to pop out of her head. “All those people?” She’s incredulous. “Jesus, I have like two friends who might share with me if I asked. Maybe.”
I tap a few buttons, and her phone vibrates. “Well, now you’ve got another,” I tell her, those doe-eyes all soft on me. “It’s what all our friends do.” Give her a shrug.
“Oh,” she breathes, checking the notification, tapping something on her screen, and then mine tells me I can now see her location, too. God, she’s cute.
I smile at her, put the phone back in airplane mode, and settle into the couch with my water.
“So what do you wanna know, Ellie? Ask me anything.”
“Question for a question?” she proposes, looking up from under her lashes.
“We’re good at making deals, you and me,” I tell her, and she smiles at me.
“Okay, I don’t even know where to start, but I guess something I’m dying to understand about you is how you’re this mature.” She waves a hand down my frame, as if illustrating. A montage of images from my life of me being anything but plays on the movie screen in my mind, and I fight to keep a straight face.
“Maybe you can elaborate?” I nudge her, not wanting to mislead her, but not sure what she wants me to say.
“I dunno, I thought guys your age laugh about crop dusting, or Dutch-ovening their girlfriends. You seem to be a lot further ahead than most twenty-somethings I’ve been around, like you’ve seen some shit, been through it.” Her head falls to one shoulder, hair swaying with the motion, and I want to live inside of the look she’s giving me. Interest. So much fucking interest, curiosity, purity in that gaze.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong.” I hold up my hands in front of me, palms up. “My friends are super fucking immature, and I definitely have my moments. A few weeks ago, my roommate punched me in the face with a dildo when I wasn’t looking, so please don’t go thinking that me and all of my friends are responsible, upstanding citizens. I’m sure a bunch of them would crop dust or Dutch oven their girlfriends, if they could get one.” She laughs at that, and I grin at her.
“Look, they’re still maturing, they’re still a bunch of assholes. But they have their moments.”
I take a swig of water, look down at the couch, run my hand over the material for a second, finding the words.
“As for me, I kind of went through my rebellious phase pretty young. My dad left when I was twelve, and by thirteen I was partying pretty hard, doing some dumb shit. My mom gave me an ultimatum, and I left the house instead of get my act together. That was when I was fourteen.” Her whole face softens, something like disbelief embedded in all of it. “Bounced from friend’s house to friend’s house for a long fucking time. Eventually Mark’s parents let me stay with them long-term. They made sure I went to school, but outside of that, they kinda let me do my thing. Let me crash in one of the guest rooms. I started selling my designs for money, making enough to support what I needed to get by otherwise, and by sixteen I’d kinda cleaned up, gotten my shit together. Made good with my mom, my brothers again, but never went back home.” Pause there, pursing my mouth, looking off into this time in the distant past. “If life is supposed to be a collection of all you’ve learned from your mistakes…well, I feel like I made an awful lot of 'em by the time I was an adult. A lifetime’s worth, probably,” I admit. “Spent the last few years trying to be less of a fuck-up.”
Her empty hand reaches out, grabs mine, and our eyes catch. “You’re not a fuck-up, Ash,” she tells me.
“Oh, I definitely was,” I tell her, full of conviction.
“Well you definitelyaren’tone now,” she tells me, just as sure.
“Thanks,” I say quietly, giving her a small smile. I sit up, change the vibe with the action. “My turn! Where do I start? Hmm...” My eyes bounce around the room, looking for a hint that won’t be there. An idea hits me. “I know!” I say suddenly. “What ended up being the final straw with you and David? What took you from happy in a long-term relationship to done with it and single in a few weeks or months, or whatever it was?” That might have been a little quick to drop such a fat question, but I’m dying to know what she wasn’t getting from him and take notes.
She folds her lips in over her teeth, eyes all wide, and then she looks around the room, like the answer on what to say might be hiding there. It’s not, I just checked.
“Actually,” she starts off, an awkward strain to her voice. “Don’t take this the wrong way.” Her fingers squeeze mine where our hands are still connected. “But thefinalstraw was probably the texts you sent me about Schrodinger’s rat.”
My jawdrops, and I even pull my hand back to make aimless gestures. “W-w-w-w-wait,” I stammer the word. “Me?” My hand comes to my chest. “I fucked it up?”
“No!” She rushes to shut me down, shaking her head adamantly. “The final straw. There were lots, and lots, andlotsof straws before that. The camel was struggling for alongtime,” she assures me. It’s not quite enough for me to breathe normally again, panic having overridden my lungs and vital organs.
“Please go on,” I tell her in the highest voice I’ve heard out of my own mouth in about ten years.
She laughs at me, pulling my hand back in hers. “Listen to me, Asher. You didn’t cause our breakup. What you did was help bring me back to who I used to be. Who I am when I’m not being crushed by the weight of other people’s expectations. Even people that I love,” she says sadly. “You brought out this side of me that I forgot existed. I forgot how much I loved her, how much fun I had when she was around.”
My panic is completely forgotten. I’m fucking smitten with this girl, the light shining from her as she tells me how I helped her come back to herself.
“So that text…?” I prompt her.
“It absolutelykilledme.” She starts laughing, remembering it. “I laughed so hard I fell off the couch, and was crying on the floor. David couldn’t understand what had come over me, and when I tried to explain the jokes to him, he thought it was stupid.”
IknewI hated that guy.
“There were a lot of straws before that, believe me.” She stresses the words with her facial expression, but doesn’t take her hand away from mine, and I run my thumb across the back of her hand softly as she talks. Watch her relax in front of my eyes as I do. “But him refusing to see the humor in that, to let loose and laugh with me, just once… I dunno, for some reason, that ended up being it for me. I couldn’t look past all the other stuff after that.” Her eyes lose focus, staring off into the distance, then come back to me. “I’d been trying to kind of fix the relationship for a long time, get the points that weren’t what I wanted them to be to a better place, but I think that was when I realized we were never going to be right for each other.”
My admiration for her shoots up to a whole new level in this moment. Hearing how she put in work into her relationship, tried to salvage it, to make it what she wanted, rather than just writing him off when things weren’t perfect. I respect the shit out of her for it.
