Page 46 of Yearning Difficulties

We stared at each other for a few seconds. For once, despite everyone around us, I could only see him. This confusing, complex person who leaned into cynicism and made fun of his own twin for being romantic on the radio.

But who sometimes looked at me like the world couldn’t keep turning for him unless I was there.

But that was the kind of thought other people were allowed to have, not me.

I wasn’t the kind of girl people looked at like that.

‘Don’t go there,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Wherever it is you go. In your head. Don’t do that right now.’

I winced. I couldn’t help it. ‘I don’t know where I go. But . . .’

‘But?’

‘But I know that if people’s minds are like gardens, mine doesn’t grow the way it’s supposed to, not the way other people’s do. I catch myself looking over the wall to see what they’re doing with theirs. Everything they plant seems to come out fine. Roses. Fine-smelling herbs. Daffodils. Mine? Mine just seems to get overrun. Vines start sprouting and I can’t control them. People tell me to get a handle on all of it, but I can’t. And no one helps me. They just watch the vines reach and pull and they wonder why I can’t just grow daisies like everyone else.’

He was regarding me with such heartbreaking understanding, like he’d known all of this was inside me somehow. His eyes were full of patience, and it felt so intimate I had to look away.

‘It’s weird,’ I added loftily, ‘wearing that princess dress and doing the damsel act. . . I’ve never felt like a princess. I’m the vines that rope around her tower. I’m the weed. The garden that grew all wrong.’

I was trying to sound self-deprecating but it just sounded hollow.

‘I think,’ Killian said softly, ‘that some people are sick of hothouse flowers. They can smell the sour scent of sameness on them. They want something wild, something natural, something that grows from the earth without help from anybody. Something that’s only strange to people who’ve been told and made to believe there’s only one way to exist in nature. I think those are the kind of things that matter more, in the end.’

When I was finally able to look at him, I had to fight the urge to shrink away. Because he was really looking at me. No one ever really looked at me

Killian looked at me with something that scared me. He wasn’t like the others, who only looked at the strange camouflage I was able to build around myself.

Killian looked at me like an equal. As though he understood.

That thought unnerved me. The idea that someone wouldn’t try to repair me, as almost all of my friends and family had tried to do at some point. They didn’t realize they were doing it, but they all did. It was so normal to me, I could never find offence in it.

He looked at me as though there was nothing broken about me.

And I didn’t know what to do with that.

‘We need a song,’ he said, breaking my reverie.

‘A song?’

‘Yeah. A song for our love.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Isn’t that for real—’

He made a chastising sound and I fell silent.

‘Fine,’ I agreed. ‘What’s our song?’

‘What’s your favourite piece of music?’

I thought for a moment.

‘“Ghost” by Indigo Girls,’ I said eventually.

That song made me feel human and so very few things made me feel that way.