Page 80 of Apathy
I couldn’t count my friends because it wasn’t the same level of caring. I loved Lauren, I loved the rest of our crew of misfits, but I couldn’t help but wonder if we would ever hang out if it wasn’t for our families.
“Moonshine,” he murmured, pulling my head closer to his. He pressed his forehead against mine, exhaling softly. “You need to talk to me. I don’t like seeing you worried.”
“I’m just…” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I just don’t want to go back to reality.” I played with the soft hair at the nape of his neck, while he held me in a tight embrace. His chest pressed against my chest, his heart beating in the same rhythm as mine. “I don’t want to lose this,” I whispered, admitting my biggest fear.
I wasn’t afraid of a faceless man that was still out there. I wasn’t scared of pitiful looks or judgmental ones, but I was terrified of losing this, whatever this was.
“I’m scared that once the light comes up in the morning, you’ll go back to ignoring me—”
“Hey.” He moved back, looking straight at me.
“No, wait. Just let me get this off my chest and then you can say whatever you want to say.”
I thought he would protest, that he would try to convince me without listening to me, but I should’ve known that Ash wouldn’t do things I would expect other people to do.
I moved further away and sat at the edge of the bed, avoiding looking at him. If I looked at him, I would lose all the courage I gathered, and I needed to get this off my chest.
“The last two years have been filled with sorrow and cruelty you could never imagine,” I started, looking at my hands folded in my lap. “Some days, it felt like I was stuck in an endless loop of bad dreams, and I could never wake up. At first, I thought I was imagining things, that my mind started creating scenarios that weren’t real, but they were. They were so real that I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with screams waiting on the tip of my tongue. Sometimes I remembered those things in the middle of the day, and it was like a flashback slamming into me. And no matter how many drugs I swallowed, how much alcohol I drank, how many faceless guys I slept with, I could never forget.”
“Moonshine,” he choked out, reaching out for me, but I moved further away.
“Wait, you need to hear this. Just… Let me say these things, okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed.
“But then you came, and I still don’t know what pulled me to you, what called to me, but something did. Ever since that day in that first class, you were living in my head, and you didn’t even know. And then, well, things happened between us, and you started ignoring me. Which was fine, because I made myself believe that it didn’t mean anything, because it couldn’t. How could I care about somebody else when there was nothing left inside of me to accommodate another person?” When he didn’t say anything, I continued talking, playing with the bracelet Dylan gave me when we were just kids. “But as usual, as with everything else, I was wrong. And now you’re here. You’re everywhere, Ash, and I don’t know what to do once you go back to your usual cold demeanor.” I looked up, only to see him listening carefully. “I don’t know what to do once you decide that you don’t want to have anything with me and my fucked-up head, because I care. I care about you more than I would like to, and it sucks, because I don’t know if you care about me. I can’t take one more disappointment after everything I went through.”
My hands started shaking, and I pushed them underneath my thighs, hiding how nervous I was. I was baring my soul to him, and I hoped that he would accept it. I hoped he wouldn’t reject me, that he wouldn’t run from what we could have.
“And I’ll understand if you can’t do this, whatever this is, in front of everybody else, but I think you should know that I can’t do it only behind closed doors. I refuse to be a secret. If that’s all you’re looking for, I think it would be best if we just end it all here.”
One second… two… three… four… and then a whole minute passed before he reacted. Of all the reactions I would’ve expected him to have, this one was the last one on my list.
Ash smiled.
Not one of those wicked, little smiles I liked so much. Not the egoistical one that Kane so often had, but the relaxed, satisfied smile that took over his entire face, lighting up his eyes, warming the entire room. I never saw him smile like this, and I cherished the moment, because it was only mine.
His smile was only mine.
I didn’t care that he was forbidden fruit, and my father would’ve killed me if he knew I was sleeping with a guy he didn’t know about. He would make my life a living hell, more so than now, if he knew that I wasn’t collecting his precious information from Kane and his family.
I thought Ash would be angry, that he would get up and leave, but when he moved from the spot where he was sitting and closed the distance between the two of us on the bed, I knew I made the right choice by telling him how I really felt.
“Are you trying to get rid of me, Moonshine?” The bastard smirked as he pressed his palms against my cheeks, pulling my head higher so that the only thing in sight was him. “Did you really think I could let you go after all this? Do you know what I do the entire day that I’m not here with you?” he asked, as his thumb started making circles over my cheek.
“What?” I croaked, burning with the need to know.
“I think about you. I think about the taste of your lips, or how you lift your eyebrow when somebody is pissing you off. I think about this body of yours,” he said as he placed one hand on my hip. “This body that was made for me.” He lowered his head and pressed his lips behind my ear, eliciting shivers all over my body. “I started putting vanilla syrup in my coffee because it tasted like you. I want to be with you every single moment of every single day. I want to hold you. I want to tell the world that you belong to me. You know why?”
I shook my head, unable to utter the words. He was destroying me and building me up with his words. He was taking the broken pieces of me and starting to glue them back together.
“Because I belong to you, Moonshine.”
It wasn’t a declaration of love. It wasn’t a promise of forever, but it was a promise of something better. He was giving me everything I never even knew I wanted, and he was doing it so delicately, so carefully, as if I was made of porcelain.
As if he knew that one sudden movement, one more surprise, would shatter me.
“Y-you… You drink your coffee with vanilla syrup?” I frowned as I asked because vanilla syrup in coffee tasted like pure shit.
