She didn’t have it in her to let someone be her wings while she found her own pair and worked on fixing them. She didn’t have it in her to let someone be her solid ground when it was her world falling apart. And she most certainly didn’t have it in her to allow someone else to carry fragments of her heart in their bones.
Carmen only knew how to take, never to give.
And the problem with takers was that they never knew where to draw the line, where to set the limit. Until, eventually, the givers said enough.
Asa had said enough.
He’d forgotten to take his heart back, though. Because she could still feel its beats pulsing through her own veins, its steady thumpity-thump echoing within the walls of that museum in her head.
He’d cut open his chest and handed his heart over to her on a silver platter, and now it just sat there in Carmen’s shaking palms, and oh God oh God oh God, she didn’t know what to do with it anymore.
She didn’t want to feel its warmth, its weight, its tremble. She didn’t want Asa to let her keep it.
But she should’ve known. Asa San Román always had a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve and place it in the hands of whoever could inflict the most damage on it with the blind trust that they wouldn’t.
It was funny, really, how even now Carmen could read him like an open book. How she knew him like the back of her hand even in his absence.
And she’d never given him the chance to know her as intimately.
Was she sorry about the pain she’d caused? Yes. Was she sorry about her inability to wear her heart on her sleeve? She didn’t know. She didn’t think so. Perhaps not.
Carmen waited for the need to apologise for it, but no such thing came. How was she supposed to apologise for who she was? Ever since she could remember, she’d had her heart under wraps. There was no one who’d ever asked her to open up, no one who told her she was worth knowing underneath all that gentle exterior and the smiling face.
The art of self-preservation was all she’d ever known throughout her entire life. Did she really have it in her to start taking those defences down?
“Honey?”
Her dad’s voice sounded from somewhere behind her, and Carmen turned away from where she was standing, staring at the door that Asa had just walked out of several minutes ago. She saw it in his troubled eyes, in his sad smile.
“How much did you hear?” she asked, voice hoarse and drained, the evidence of all the unsaid words streaming down her cheeks.
“Enough,” he answered softly. “You guys weren’t exactly whispering. And my room isn’t soundproof.” He offered her a wry smile, but the worry in his eyes remained.
“Fighting is normal.” Carmen swallowed. “It happens.” When her father’s eyes only grew more worried, she began to fidget. “It does,” she insisted, an irrational sense of anger simmering inside her.
“That didn’t sound like just a fight, Carmen,” he told her slowly, hesitancy evident in his demeanour.
Her father was right. It hadn’t been a fight, it had been an ending. It was love in the cruellest form, ending before it had a chance to begin. The start and the finish lines just blurring into one another’s edges until it wasn’t possible to tell them apart.
Crash and burn. They’d always been a train wreck waiting to happen. And now that the collision had occurred, Carmen was desperately looking for the parts that could be salvaged, still blind to all the other damage lying around.
“I’m sorry,” her father said, a crestfallen expression on his face.
She didn’t have the energy to look confused, to even begin to understand what that apology meant. “For what, Sad?” She sighed, looking around and realising she no longer recognised these walls, the furniture. It was a house. A house. Carmen was tired of waiting for it to become a home.
“For letting you lose both parents the day your mother died,” he told her, shoulders sagging as he lowered himself to the last step of the narrow staircase and seating himself there.
“Mum didn’t die,” Carmen said, devoid of all emotion. “She killed herself.”
Her father flinched, a shadow passing over his features and clouding his eyes. “Nobody saw it coming,” he whispered, a haunted expression on his face. “One day she was with us and the next she wasn’t.”
“Nobody ever sees the bad stuff coming.” She didn’t know who she was speaking to anymore, her eyes growing unfocused and staring at nothing in particular. “It’s like a car crash. Nobody sees it happen until after the damage is done. And after that, what can apologies even do? You just stand on the sidelines and watch the car burn.”
Her father frowned, pulling his brows together slightly. “You have a choice there though, Carmen. You either watch it burn, or you run towards it and try getting the person trapped in there out.”
Carmen’s eyes zoomed back into focus and flickered towards him. “Won’t you burn your hands in the process?”
Her father smiled. “Would you be able to live with letting them burn out of self-preservation?”
Carmen realised she had been in a burning car for a while now—and she still was, choking on the fumes, inhaling the smoke, trapped beneath the flames.
Was she going to be able to live with herself if she gave up on her salvation? If she condemned her
