He looked down at her. She was staring at the water, but glanced up. Her eyes were soft and calm. Her shirt was slightly rumpled, though he wasn’t sure if it was from him or the breeze.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes. I apologize. Nothing like that has ever occurred before.” He licked his lips, searching for an explanation.
“Please, there’s no need to apologize. Panic attacks happen.”
“Not to me.” He rubbed his chest. “Never. Especially out of nowhere like that.”
“Nothing triggered it?”
“No. I was simply looking at the swing and remembering the swing my family had when I was a child.”
“Do you think that did it?”
The muscles in his jaw worked. “I suppose.” He should move away, but he didn’t want to. The warmth that had filled him when she’d hugged him had come back. He hadn’t realized how cold he’d been.
“That’s natural, to miss them.”
“I miss my parents. I...” His greatest shame. “I don’t think I miss my brother as much as I should. I told you we weren’t close.” Sometimes it felt as though strangers had mourned Rohan more than he had.
“You don’t have to be close to someone to miss them. Or miss what they used to mean to you. It’s part of being alive, I suppose. To miss people, or to even miss missing people. Grief is like that sometimes. Like a bubble that gets big and small.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. Miss missing people. Yes. That was exactly how he felt about his brother, and even his grandfather, to an extent. He missed the idea of a loving grandfather. He missed the brother he’d pushed on a swing. “I blamed Rohan.”
“For what?”
His words came fast, spilling over one another. “For adapting so easily to life with our grandparents, after ourparents passed. He was so happy with the attention and, later, the fame. With the industry. With our last name greasing wheels, with our grandfather’s bullshit and money. Meanwhile, I would have traded all of that for our life with our parents, and I didn’t think he would have. It felt like he betrayed them and me, and that’s absurd.”
“Why is it absurd?”
“He was a child.”
“So were you.”
His chest tightened. “No, I was older. At the very least, I should have mended bridges with him when I was a grown adult.”
“You could have. He could have, too.” She paused. “Please don’t think it’s my anger over the catfishing driving me to bash him or anything, but it sounds like there was some resentment on both sides. Don’t take all the blame on yourself. It’s okay to have complicated feelings about someone after they pass away.”
He huffed out a breath. “I don’t like these feelings.”
“Oh, no one likes feelings.” Jia rubbed his arm. “Don’t you think we would all choose to be robots if we could?”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “You wouldn’t.”
“True. I do like pouring my emotions out on everyone. But I imagine those people wish I’d be a robot, sometimes.”
“I would not,” he said, gruffly.
She pressed slightly closer. “That’s nice to hear.”
Dev didn’t know how long they sat there, only that he was startled by how close her face was when he looked down at her. They were real freckles, he realized, charmed. Just acouple, over her nose.
He wanted to kiss them, trace every single one.
And it was that realization, coupled with the fact that they were sitting like lovers, that made him stiffen and lean away from her. “Should we...?” His voice was hoarse to the point of unintelligible. “Shall we head out?”
“You want to see the rest of the place?”
