“You keep letting the world rest on your shoulders and it’ll eventually become too heavy for your back, mi amor,” he murmured. “That’s where the bending starts. And then will come the breaking.” He tilted his head and slid his cheek down hers, stopping when his mouth touched her neck and placed a lingering kiss there. “So let it go. All that dead weight, everything that drags you down, just let it go.”
“I don’t think I can,” she said quietly, circling her arms around Asa’s neck and clasping her hands together behind it.
“You can.” He smiled, kissing her neck again. “If you’re strong enough to let the weight of the world in, you’re strong enough to let it out too.”
“You really believe that?” she asked him, tilting her head to the side and pressing her lips in a tight line.
“Yes,” he replied without any hesitation. “That’s one of the things I love so much about you—you’re not the kind who lets the world take away from you, but the kind who gives back instead.”
Carmen offered him a soft smile at that, and Asa’s chest tightened painfully when he saw a spark of brightness flare up in the grey of her irises.
“My fourth grade teacher used to tell us something like that that every single day without fail,” she reminisced, a nostalgic look on her face. “She used to tell us that we shouldn’t allow the world to change our smiles, but let our smiles change the world. Can’t remember whose quote it was.”
“I can’t remember either,” Asa said, trying to search through his memory for a famous name. “But it’s true, you know. Once you learn to let go of all the extra weight, there’s more room for letting in the other things.”
“The other things?” Carmen knitted her brows.
“Yeah.” Asa shrugged. “The little things. The simple things. People too.”
“People?”
“Yeah, Carmen. People. The ones who love you, the ones who genuinely care, the ones who’d bring down the moon to your fingertips just to see your face light up.”
There was a pause, not just in their conversation, but in the air around them. And then a few more beats of silence passed.
Carmen unclasped her hands from around Asa’s neck and leant back, a frown tugging at her mouth. “You think I don’t let people in?” she asked, something unidentifiable flickering in her eyes. Asa wasn’t surprised, though. So much about her was indecipherable to him.
As much as he was certain that she could read him like an open book, he was also certain that she only ever allowed him glimpses of her pages.
“I think,” he began cautiously, “that you don’t let me in. Not the way I let you.”
One of Carmen’s hand wrapped around herself and her other one reached for that chain around her neck, igniting a spark of frustration in Asa’s gut.
“I let you in,” she defended herself. “There’s nobody else that I’ve let this close to me but you. I mean, you literally have the power to crush me if you want to and I wouldn’t hand over that kind of emotional power to just anyone, Asa.”
“That’s not letting me in. That’s acknowledging the fact that you’re in love with me,” he pointed out gently, his heartbeats picking up speed as the panic regarding the direction this conversation was heading towards infiltrated his bones.
Asa noticed Carmen’s fingers tighten around the chain resting on her neck, and he clenched his jaw, fighting the urge to yank her hand away and hold onto it with his own, reminding her that she could use him as an anchor instead of the goddamn chain.
But that was Carmen West, always using inanimate objects as her solid ground, as her rock. Whether it was the godforsaken chain, or her art journal. It was always the things without life, without a beating heart that she ran towards.
And Asa was always standing right in front of her with an outstretched arm, waiting and waiting and waiting for her to just reach out and take it in hers. And Carmen was always looking right past it.
“It’s the same thing!” She threw her hands into the air, and jumped down from the table, folding her arms across her stomach defensively.
Asa didn’t understand why she was slipping into a defensive mode. This was the same girl who had never failed to speak with her heart on the tip of her tongue, who had never been afraid to say whatever was on her mind.
But that had been when Asa was falling for her and now that he had, there seemed to be some kind of barricade blocking Asa’s access to every fibre of Carmen’s being. Asa sighed and lowered his head into his hand, a palm running down his face with restrained exasperation.
“No, it isn’t,” he muttered, his words sounding muffled through the gaps between his fingers. “You know it isn’t.”
“What do you want from me, Asa?” she asked, sounding tired all of a sudden.
“You,” he told her softly, removing his hand from his face and looking right at her. “I want you.”
“And you do have me!” Carmen exclaimed, unfolding her arms and moving towards Asa again, kneeling in front of him and taking his hands into hers. “You have me, Asa.”
“Do I?” he asked quietly. “Do I really?”
“What does that even mean?”
“What happened last night?” he asked, drilling his eyes into hers. “You said it went bad.”
He felt Carmen tense, felt her hands about to let go of his, but he grabbed them and held on. She’d warned him about her tendency to pull away from people and then to push them away too.
He had promised her, that day in his truck, to never let go, and this
