“Hey, Asa?” Wyatt spoke after a while. “How’d you fall in love if you never got to know all of her? Like how does that work?”
“Because when you fall for someone, it’s never for every single part of them,” Asa said seriously, his voice low. “You fall in love slowly, one piece of them at a time. You never get all of someone at the beginning itself. Whether it’s one week from now, or a month, or even a year, there’ll always be something you haven’t yet discovered in the person you love. There’s still another piece buried in them that’s going to make you fall a little bit more. The start of a relationship doesn’t mean the end of falling in love.”
“So even if she didn’t let you all the way in...” Wyatt let the question hang in the air between them, tilting his head to glance at Asa.
“Even if she didn’t let me all the way in, it doesn’t mean I fell in love with an illusion or a mirage. Whatever pieces of her she gave me, they were real. Her not opening up to me doesn’t invalidate my feelings. It just doesn’t let me love her the way she deserves to be loved. It creates a barrier in our relationship that sort of leaves us…stagnant. We couldn’t move forward. And you know me, I don’t do half measures. I can’t.”
“But it was real.” Wyatt smiled, eyes warm.
Asa let out a small laugh, and even to his own ears, it sounded a little broken. “Of course it was real,” he murmured, feeling that hollow space inside him ache for a fleeting moment.
It was real. Asa knew it was real.
Because the pain was real.
That knife with the jagged edge twisting into his chest was real. That emptiness in his rib cage where his heart had once been was real because Carmen goddamn West was real. And when you fell in love with someone as real as her, there was just no going back.
“Look, man,” Wyatt sighed heavily, debating with himself for a few seconds before speaking again, “I’m not a romantic, just a good listener, really. But I’m also smart enough to know that this world lacks realness right now. Genuineness. So if you’re lucky enough to stumble across something as real as what you have, then you don’t let that kind of shit slip through your fingers. You fight for it. You hold on and you never let go.”
“Even if it feels like I’m the only one fighting?” he asked quietly.
Wyatt shrugged. “You can’t fight by yourself forever. She’ll either join you or tell you there’s nothing left to fight for. But yeah, until one of those two happens, you keep fighting.”
Asa thought about Carmen, then: her hands on his face, asking him to tear down his armour because she believed there was beauty in what was inside; defending him from his own self; and her thumb caressing his cheek when she told him that he made this world a better place.
And it hit him then: the cold unforgiving truth that there was no letting go of the one person to whom you’ve showed your soul.
55.
The Unforgiving Truth
That dark cloud which had been hanging over Asa and following him around for the past week seemed to dissipate momentarily—not completely gone, but lingering in the distance. But he was still thankful because that gloomy haze seemed to have stopped clouding his vision and allowed him to see things a little clearer.
The chat with Wyatt seemed to have released some of that pressure in Asa’s chest, allowing him some breathing space. Asa found that he could walk a little straighter, a little taller—like the whole world wasn’t about to cave in around him just then.
It wasn’t so much about that he was actually considering the possibility of them having another shot together, but the simple discovery that Asa didn’t need Carmen to relieve that pressure in his chest.
Yes, she might have put it there and she might have been the one who made him feel like he’d been holding his breath ever since that god-awful morning after Thanksgiving. But letting some of that hurt out, opening up to Wyatt—that was what made him feel like he could breathe a little again.
So yes, it was nice for him to know he didn’t depend on her, but the fact still remained that if he could choose, he would choose for her to be the one he spilled his heart to. And he’d keep choosing her.
Asa was choosing her now. He was choosing to plant his feet into the ground and to fight. Because, after all, their foundation had always been solid, hadn’t it? They’d started off right. It was only somewhere along the middle that they’d started to crumble. A place where Asa knew he wanted to keep going and Carmen couldn’t make up her mind. That was what had hindered the progress of wherever it was that they’d been heading towards.
Asa’s mind kept flickering back to that morning, wondering if maybe he could’ve approached the matter in a gentler manner, if maybe he should’ve subdued his usual aggressiveness.
Perhaps he should have toned down the yelling. Perhaps he shouldn’t have allowed much of his hurt to be seen so that Carmen wouldn’t have the guilt factor added to everything else she seemed to be going through.
But these were all things that were of a fixable nature. They—Carmen and Asa—were fixable. He should know. He’d been broken one too many times only to patch himself together, and something told him Carmen had done so too.
The morning of the fight was fixable. Because if Asa went to her now, without feeling ambushed the way he had when he’d run into Hunter there, he knew
