“I don’t know. That’s my honest answer. I broke up with Miko and Harley because I didn’t feel like a romantic relationship was working for me, which I now know is not the same thing as being aromantic. But I can’t deny that in the past I’ve felt sort of uncomfortable, not fully myself in a serious romantic relationship. I also assumed that meant I was aromantic. But now…” I stop talking deliberately, wanting Maeve to fill in the blanks.
But I should know better.
“Now what?” Maeve asks, her eyes searching mine.
“Now there’s you,” I say simply.
Maeve flashes me one of the wide smiles she doesn’t share with everyone else and it feels like the sweetest reward for my vulnerability. It also feels like a facepalm moment as I couldhave made her smile like this a month ago, before she left Vegas, had I just been honest with her then.
“Do you still feel like a romantic relationship wouldn’t work for you?” she tells me.
“I think I’m a bit confused,” I say and pull in a much-needed steadying breath. “I just think I’ve tangled up the way I’m aro with the fact my previous relationships haven’t worked. I think I’ve come to the conclusion I’m better off out of a relationship because I’m aro and I just… I just don’t think that was true. I think that was kinda fucking stupid of me.”
Much to my shock, Maeve starts to giggle.
“What’s so funny?”
“I did the same thing,” she points a pointed red fingernail at her chest. “I told myself that I couldn’t enjoy sex because I was asexual. I told myself I didn’t need sex, and fuck, I still don’t know if Ineedit but I know now I can enjoy it. Or well, my version of sex.”
“Ourversion of sex,” I smile at her, feeling a new lightness in my heart.
“So maybe we do that with a relationship too?” She suggests so hesitantly and quietly it’s heart-breaking. “Maybe we make it our version of a relationship.”
I blink at her and I swear the light in the room gets a little brighter.
“Because…” She clears her throat. “Wait, one more question. How do you feel about me? Honest Answers Only.”
I hold her stare and I’m momentarily confused why she can’t see what I feel for her in my eyes. Surely they tell her all there is to know?
“I feel everything about you,” I say eventually recalling how I said the same thing to my mother.
She blinks and pulls her head back slightly. “You do?”
“Yes, Maeve, I do.”
“I think I feel everything about you too,” she says, and she squeezes our fingers which are still intertwined. “Well, not everything, of course. But I still sort of feel everything. I feel everything that I could possibly feel, if that makes sense. And I don’t,” she looks down at our feet again and this shy, coy version of Maeve is taking me by surprise a little, “I don’t feel like anything’s missing either.”
“That’s good,” I say.
“But I know it could feel like something’s missing for you,” she says and her eyes go big and wide. “Because I know you expect and want sex in a relationship.”
I sigh. “I don’t expect or want anything in a relationship.”
She flinches and I know I’ve said the wrong thing. But it was still my honest answer.
“I don’t mean that in a I-don’t-want-a-relationship kind of way. I mean it in a, I never expected to have a relationship again so I haven’t been thinking about what I would want from it, or how I would want it to look, way.”
Maeve chews on her bottom lip again and I’m almost distracted by how perfect and pink and plump it is. “So you haven’t been imagining what we would look like as a couple?”
“Oh, I’ve been doing that,” I answer with a wry huff of laughter. “I’ve been doing a lot of that, but it hasn’t been very successful.”
“What do you mean?”
I draw in a slow breath. “Every time I think about us, together, I find it hard to think about us actuallybeingtogether. In the same place, I mean. I live in Vegas and you live in Dublin. They’re thousands of miles apart.”
“I know. I think about that too.”
“I would never ask you to leave Dublin, to leave your family, especially with you becoming an aunt soon.”
