I sit cross-legged next to her and take a deep breath. “Sometimes my dad would come home in really bad moods and he’d pick at every single thing—the house was messy, dinner wasn’t ready, my brother and I hadn’t done our homework yet—and I fucking hated waiting for him to come home, never knowing what mood he was in.”
She sits up and moves in front of me, crossing her legs too so her knees are resting against my shins. It’s such a simple thing to do and when her hands rest against my calves, I want to keep going.
“I tried to do everything before he had a chance to complain about it. Keeping everything tidy just became a habit after that. I like being helpful and keeping things tidy is an easy way to help people.”
“I’m sorry for being so untidy.” She offers a coy smile. “I have a habit of leaving a path of destruction in my wake, both literally and metaphorically.”
“Like a wildfire.”
She nods, bringing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “I don’t mean to be.”
My fingers trail patterns on either side of her ankles, while she rests her chin on her knees. “This is the bit where you tell me something about you so I don’t feel awkward for being the only one sharing.” I’m only half joking, but she smiles. “That’s how this works, right? A secret for a secret.”
“I love that you think I’m sharing to make things even and not because I’m totally incapable of keeping my thoughts in my head when I’m around you. What do you want to know? I’m an open book, Callaghan.”
“You keep mentioning little things about wanting to change. What’s the deal with that? I think your perfect, so I don’t get why you’d want to.”
Lifting her head, she stares at me for what feels like forever. Pools of the most beautiful emerald green looking right at me, but for once, she’s totally quiet.
“I’ve told myself for years how self-aware I am and how I’m my own person, but I’m not,” she says eventually. “It’s really hard admitting you’re the person standing in the way of your own happiness, but I realized I was the problem a while ago. I just didn’t know where to start. You ever feel like you’ve made something your entire personality? So much so you don’t know how to disconnect yourself from it?”
“What do you mean?”
She rests her head back on her knees, slowly shrinking herself before me. “I know I’m messed up, right? And it’s like, if I’m the first person to say it then people can’t use it to hurt me. If I’m the first to say how much emotional baggage I have, then people can’t use it to push me away, because I’m the one who knew it was there. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah.”
“And I know I struggle with rejection, so I don’t give people the chance to reject me. I search for physical connections with people, to feel validated, because I need someone else to prove to me that I’m wanted. So I call myself self-aware because I know those things about myself, but in reality, I don’t know anything about myself. I say I’m my own person but every choice I make is because of something someone else did. That isn’t being my own person.”
“You are wanted, Aurora. You’re incredible and you can be your own person.”
“There’s something about Honey Acres that makes me feel good,” she says quietly. “It feels so fragile right now, but I’m starting to remember what I like about myself. I want to make choices that make me happy. And I’m scared when I go back to Maple Hills, I won’t want to try so hard anymore. That I’ll be surrounded by so much external noise that I’ll forget this feeling.”
“I won’t let you forget, don’t worry.” My words hang in the air between us like question marks, because neither of us have mentioned that when the summer is over, we’ll be heading back to the same place. I did two years before meeting her, it’s not unreasonable to think I could do another two without seeing her since the college is so big.
Aurora rolls onto her stomach, arms tucked under her head, her hip pressed up against me. Her touch makes me feel settled, a feeling I can’t say I’m used to. It’s familiar and safe, like there’s an unspoken agreement between us as her skin presses into mine. We ease into a natural silence, something becoming common between the two of us, where I don’t question it and she doesn’t fill it and, for the second time, I drift off to sleep beside her.