“Regan?”
“No, never mind, it’s stupid.”
He laughed, reaching out, and slid his thumb over her cheek as she leant solemnly against his palm.
“Regan,” he said after a moment, “I love you.”
She closed her eyes, exhaling deeply.
“Why doesn’t it sound stupid when you say it?” she muttered, shaking her head with an irritable sigh, and then she crawled into his arms again, curling around his torso.
“Probably because I say stupid things all the time,” he said. “You’re used to it.”
He felt her smile twitch.
“Are you being like this because I don’t have a mother?” he asked, feigning solemnity.
“Yes. I’m feeling very soft, like I need to nurture you.”
“I’m fully formed, Regan, I don’t require any nurturing.”
“Don’t you?”
He realized she was serious.
“Why did you do it?” she asked, pulling away to look up at him. “Try to hurt yourself.”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“Weren’t you?”
This, too, was serious.
He sighed, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Why?”
“I just…” He thought of Masso’s words. “I’m just made like that, I think. It wasn’t anything that happened, not like I was sad or upset about something. I just—”
He quieted for a moment, considering the delicacy of what he could say and preferring the safety of silence, but she tapped his chest.
“Tell me,” she said.
He lifted a brow, turning to her. “It’s stupid,” he said wryly, and she sighed.
“Fine, so I was going to tell you I love you,” she said brusquely. “Now finish your thought.”
Something ballooned in his ribs, cracking them. He felt himself fill up in the fractures, lifted, and since it had been an offering, he resigned himself to acceptance.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”
Regan was silent.
“Except,” Aldo admitted, “when I have these … addictions. Obsessions, my father calls them.”
She cleared her throat quietly. “Like time?”
“Yes, like time. Or—” He broke off. “Or you.”
For a moment she said nothing, and immediately, even before her silence, he wanted to take it back. “I don’t mean that you’re an obsession, sorry, that sounded crazy, I just meant—”
“No, I understand,” she said, cutting him off. “I get it, I do. I think maybe it might be unhealthy, but fuck it, I don’t know, who even gets to decide what’s healthy?” She sounded confident, coldly irreverent. “We don’t even understand time, so how are we possibly supposed to understand health, which is a concept we made up? I don’t just feel differently about you—I feel more, a lot more. It’s like you woke up something inside me and it won’t be quiet. It refuses to calm down, and why should it? It’s not like ‘oh, you make me happy,’ it’s not something as clichéd as that. You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.”
She paused, slightly winded, with a glance up at him.
“If this is unhealthy or obsessive or whatever, who gives a fuck,” she said. “You won’t hurt me, will you? We’re not hurting anyone, we’re just—whatever, we’re in love. Fuck it, we’re in love, and why should we have to explain that to anyone?”
She sounded agitated, almost angry. “You let me be me, I like you when you’re you. Why is that bad?”
“It’s not bad,” he said.
“Right, so don’t apologize.”
Her rant was over as quickly as it had begun. She slid back to his chest, settling herself there and said, serenely, “By the way, I said I love you. Did you hear it?”