Page 104 of Unapologetic Love Story

Nobody takes care of me. And that’s fine.

Most of her adult shutdowns had taken place on public transport. The Underground mostly. Once, there’d been a bad one on a severely delayed train from Waverley to King’s Cross; she’d spent the first forty-five minutes of the journey cowering in the bathroom.

Because really, the hardest part about a shutdown wasn’t your body feeling as though it were giving up. It wasn’t the crushing pressure. Nor the difficulty breathing, let alone speaking. It wasn’t your irregular heartbeat. It wasn’t everything slowing down. It wasn’t the fear or the ache or the loneliness.

It was knowing that they all thought you were weak.

‘It’s just,’ Raina spoke, with too much fatigue to mask. Too much weariness to censor. ‘I believe what I say on the podcast. I do. I talk about loving yourself and all of the parts you cannot change. You kind of have to care for the parts of yourself that the world doesn’t like. Those parts need it the most. And I do mean that. When I say it.’

‘But?’

‘But when you’re having a shutdown, and you’re in public because you just couldn’t hang on until home . . . I always feel this enormous sense of failure. Like, damn. There I go. The version I’ve been trying to make them see is gone.’

She could feel him staring at her and she was too raw for eye contact. She lay back on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling.

‘I’m so lucky to be self-employed,’ she whispered. ‘I can follow my own rules and routine. Be my own employer. I don’t need to beg anybody for any accommodations. But I think of all the neurodivergent people going about their business. In schools, offices, all of these places. And most of them will have no idea that they’re wired differently. They won’t have been told that’s why they find certain things challenging. So, all of these people, thousands of them, just get up every day feeling a small stab of worthlessness. They endure screeching commutes, office politics that they have no patience for, plus a hundred little mind games, and they don’t think, This is terrible, someone should do something about it, but instead go, I’m terrible. I can’t handle this the way everyone else can.’

‘You’ve been there?’

Raina would never be able to fully process how decades of feeling like a broken product had shaped her. No, I know I look like the thing you ordered but I’m actually made a little bit differently. No, it’s not a fault or a design flaw. No, it’s not, stop saying that it is. It’s not. It is not. You might like me just as much as the typical product if you’d only give me a chance. It’s not a design flaw, I swear. All right, maybe it is. Fine, it is. If you say so. My God, just stop saying it.

But there was no design flaw. She knew that now.

‘Oh, yeah. I’ve been there. I’ve gone from “I’m nothing” to “No, I’m not. The world just needs a rewrite”. With some new types of pens.’

‘Your podcast doesn’t hand-hold. Your listeners presumably know the basics already,’ he said softly. ‘But . . . what does it feel like? Being autistic?’

She eyed him. ‘What?’

‘I want to know. For me.’

‘It’s . . .’ Raina thought about the question. So earnestly asked. Asked with enough caring to scare her. ‘It’s like you see the rest of humanity playing a game. All together. They’re having fun. It’s sunny. It’s warm. You want so badly to join in. So, you try. But you don’t know the rules. They all do; they were taught or told. Or they learned. Their brains are designed to pick up the rules quickly. Sometimes, they don’t even need to be instructed. You keep trying to join in anyhow, even though no one will tell you the rules of the game. You keep losing, and the more you lose, the angrier they get. More bitter. More aggressive. Being told you know exactly what’s happening. They accuse you of losing the game on purpose.’

She paused, her voice shaking a little too fiercely.

‘But you press on. You make so many mistakes and you can’t correct them, you see. Your brain doesn’t have the little cog that allows you to learn automatically after one mistake. You often don’t know what you did wrong. You can’t run an analysis on yourself like a computer. But if the exact scenario comes up again, you’ll choose a different option. But life isn’t a video game or a choose-your-own-adventure. No two things are ever the same. So, life can become one long game that you’re not great at playing. Sometimes you’re just told to leave and never come back.’

She closed her eyes.

‘But your brain has other cogs. Parts that they don’t have. Beautiful parts. But the game . . . it’s never about that.’

She finally met Tom’s gaze and froze at how protective he looked. She pressed her thumb against his bottom lip, forcing it into a pout to make both of them laugh.

‘You’re getting close to answering my favourite question.’

His words jolted Raina out of her vulnerability. He still wanted to know why she’d started the podcast. She considered telling him. In that moment, feeling fragile and close to breaking, she almost did.

Instead, she sat up. She placed the water glass a little too carelessly on the coffee table. Then she dropped down onto the carpet before him and crawled into his lap. He groaned as she kissed him and his hands seized her waist and slipped beneath the fabric of her clothes to touch skin.

‘You need to rest, sweetheart.’

‘It was a tiny one, I told you.’

‘I know. But I don’t want you to burn out.’

She pulled her head away from his neck to examine his handsome face. His expression was unguarded. He looked at her with such devotion it was almost painful. She stroked his bottom lip and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

‘I didn’t think anything could scare you, Tom Branimir.’