“You called me?” he asked after a while, one of his hands fidgeting with the locks of his hair near his forehead. Pulling it then flattening it down, only to mess it up again.
She opened her mouth to respond, but a beat passed and she still couldn’t say anything. What was there to say? “You’ve been avoiding me since lunch,” she pointed out, not entirely certain whether she should have said that.
His hand froze, as if not expecting her to call him out on it so brazenly.
“I didn’t think we had anything to say to each other.” He sighed, running a hand down his face, looking tired in a way that Carmen was all too familiar with. Eyes so weary as if the exhaustion ran way deeper than he was letting on. Carmen knew exactly how that felt.
She also knew no amount of rest was going to cure that.
“Maybe you didn’t,” Carmen said, her heart doing rounds of nerve-wracking bungee jumping, plummeting down to her stomach and being yanked back up before it could hit the ground. On and off. On and off. On and off. Again, and again.
“But I have a few things to say to you,” she told him quietly, her fingers picking at the loose threads on the sleeve of her other arm.
Asa sighed, dropping his shoulders, too tired to pour any more energy into pretending he could carry all the weight on his back. “Can’t it wait?” he asked. “I’m really not in the mood.”
“But I won’t get to speak to you until tomorrow.”
He raised a brow in question.
“I don’t like it when someone I care about has to go to sleep with a heavy heart,” she said, chewing on the bottom of her lip because her heart was falling, falling, falling. Falling into that bottomless pit of uncertainty and fear that always appeared whenever she spoke with her heart and soul on her tongue.
She didn’t know what to expect, but maybe it wasn’t the way Asa’s hand froze midway as he ran it through his hair. Maybe it wasn’t the way his coffee eyes zeroed in on hers like he was seeing something precious there that he hadn’t found anywhere else. Maybe it wasn’t the way he swallowed, as if he needed to feel his Adam’s apple move in order to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.
It certainly wasn’t the manner in which he was looking at her now, like he’d witnessed something fall from up above and land right in front of him.
He called her name like there was a constellation waiting to be named after her, and now he was staring at her as if she herself was a celestial being. It pained Carmen to know that he was just a guy with awestruck eyes who thought she was a falling star when in reality, she was nothing but a meteor who only caused havoc and destruction, bringing nothing but pain.
“Don’t…” His voice was hoarse, and his eyes looked conflicted. So conflicted, in fact, that if eyes were indeed the windows to one’s soul, Carmen would see the war raging on inside him. “Don’t say—don’t talk to me in that way.” He was struggling, and it was plain to see.
Carmen saw it in the way his palms kept curling into ironclad fists in order to hide the fact that his hands were trembling. His eyes stayed stuck on hers despite how his shoulders and jaw looked tense, as if he was about to take off running.
In that moment that had somehow turned into yet another one of their infinites, Carmen found herself wanting something she’d never wanted before from another person. She wanted half of Asa’s weight—half the struggle she saw him carrying on his shoulders but wearing it as a cape instead.
“In what way Asa?” She cocked her head to the right slightly, narrowing her eyes and furrowing her brows. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it.”
He shut his eyes, as if her words troubled him deeply, and he couldn’t bear to look at her and hear them at the same time. “I know, Carmen,” he said in a pained voice. Oh how she ached to rip away the hurt from his veins. She wanted to flush it out of his system and remind him that pain had no business flowing through his bones when he had a heart made of a gold that rivalled the radiance of the sun itself.
He opened his eyes, and they looked so intense that Carmen felt her heart flutter in her ribs, wanting to spread its wings and fly, no longer comfortable with being caged.
“I know you didn’t mean anything bad by it,” he said, his breathing sounding uneven even to her ears. “But that’s the problem.” His fists clenched tighter if that was even humanely possible. Carmen pressed her lips, wanting to force his palms open; she was sure he was hurting himself. “You shouldn’t—you shouldn’t be speaking to me that way. I’m not… I’m not.” He stressed on it, as if there was no better way he could explain himself than that. “And you are.”
To Carmen, it made sense. It made more sense than it ever would if he’d tried explaining himself further. She offered him a small smile as she walked closer and then slowly, but without any hesitancy, her hands found his. She let her palms cover his own, as her fingers fought to uncurl his fists. Her eyes were greeted with the sight of pale red crescent-like indents on his skin.
“Why do you hurt yourself, Asa?” she murmured, her thumbs running over the indents on both his palms.
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered. He didn’t pull his hands away and, for some reason, it warmed Carmen’s heart.
She tilted her head up, meeting his eyes and frowning
