“So, I noticed you were missing in the cafeteria.” He left the remark hanging, probably expecting her to tell him why she was skipping lunch.
“Not hungry.” She shrugged.
She wasn’t looking at him, still staring at her journal, but she could feel his eyes on her as they burned into the side of her face. She wondered if he was going to call her out on the bluff and push her for an explanation.
Instead Asa just sighed and placed his chin on top of his folded hands. “By the way, I ran into Willa.” He chuckled lightly. “We totally forgot about how we were supposed to hang out last week.”
Carmen looked up at him then, her eyes widening slightly as a guilty smile tugged at her mouth. “She wasn’t upset, was she?”
He shook his head. “No, she wasn’t. I think it was pretty obvious after the fight with Carson that I wasn’t going to make it. You could’ve gone with her, though.”
Carmen just shrugged half-heartedly in response. “Eh, wasn’t in the mood then.”
There was a few seconds of silence, and she knew what Asa was going to say right before he did.
“I’m guessing that had something to do with Hunter running into us?”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “He really knows how to rain on someone’s parade.”
This time Asa’s chuckle was humourless and had an edge to it. “Rain? He brings a whole goddamn hailstorm.”
Carmen shot him a look. “You really hate him,” she remarked.
“I do.” Asa’s tone was unapologetic. “But I’m also trying to let go of all the focus I used to direct towards him. All it does is bring me down.”
“That’s honestly good to hear.” She smiled softly. “Because nothing he says to you is true, and you don’t deserve to have it hanging over your head.”
“Take your own advice some time.”
Carmen froze, her smile slowly fading away. “What?”
Asa narrowed his eyes at her. “You know what. All those things he said to you the last time we were in this room together. None of that was true either. But you took it to heart, I know you did.”
She looked away from him and picked up one of her charcoal pencils, flipping the page of her journal to a fresh, blank one. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And you’re upset right now, too,” he continued, disregarding her attempt to sweep her misery under the rug. “So, I’m just going to stop beating around the bush and ask you point blank if he’s the reason you’re holed up here during lunch.”
“It doesn’t matter, Asa.” She sighed heavily.
“It does to me,” he said, his voice suddenly quiet.
Her heartbeats were skyrocketing again so loud that she was amazed Asa himself couldn’t hear them.
“Because you feel like it’s your job,” she muttered, unsure if she wanted to steer the conversation down this road but unable to shake off what Hunter had said last week when he’d run into them in this very classroom.
Asa lifted his chin from where it was resting on top of his hands and stared at her in perplexity. “What does that even mean? My ‘job’?”
Carmen pressed her lips tightly together, not at all certain about what the outcome was going to be, but she just needed to ask him. She had to know.
“Hunter,” she explained, “when he was here last week…he said…he called you the resident saviour and me damaged goods.”
“Carmen—”
“And then,” she cut him off. “Then he said that you like broken things.”
“I remember every single word he said, Carmen,” Asa said through gritted teeth, an unimpressed look on his face.
“Well, good.” She shifted her gaze away from him, looking down at her fingers instead. “Because I want to know if you’re here, skipping your own lunch, to check up on me because you actually care or... Or because like he said, I’m just another broken thing for you to patch up.” She drew in a long shaky breath, her fingers trembling as she clasped her hands together in a tight hold. “I want to know if you’re saying that me being upset right now matters to you because—”
“—because I love you,” Asa said, unblinking. Not a shred of hesitancy in his demeanour.
Carmen’s eyes were on his so fast, she didn’t know how her brain registered the sudden shifting of her sight so quickly. “What?” Her voice was so quiet, so terrified, that she wouldn’t have been surprised if Asa hadn’t heard her at all.
But he did. He heard her.
“I’m not here because I look at you like some stupid project, Carmen,” he told her seriously but there was no mistaking the way his voice shook and how his hands were gripping the headrest of the chair like it was his lifeline. “I’m not going to try and convince you that you’re not broken and that Hunter was wrong, because yes, you are broken.” He paused, hesitating, then slowly unclasped his hands and placed his palm on her wrist. “But so am I. So is Hunter himself. And Isla, and Willa, and all the other seven billion people.”
“And...” Carmen swallowed. “And that’s okay, right?” She tried to sound firm, because whenever she’d seen someone with a heart that wasn’t whole, she loved them regardless of it. But her words sounded more of a question than it did a statement.
“Of course, it is,” he murmured. “How else can the light get in?” His eyes fell on something near her journal and he nodded towards it. “Now that you’re certain I’m not asking because I think of you as something to repair, mind telling me why you’re so worked up that you broke
