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“Well, I mean you…” She took a deep breath and rubbed my back awkwardly like we were old people or something. “He… You guys…connected?”
I nodded. “If we’re going to be so wanky as to call it that, yeah. He was just…” I sighed. “I don’t know, Hads. We can just sit in silence for hours and I feel better. He knows when I need to laugh and when I need to talk and when I need to just not say anything. You know he sings at me when I need a laugh?”
“What?”
I nodded again, my forehead rubbing on the desk. “He’ll sing me a totally unexpected song. Like, full on girl-power power ballads; Katy Perry, Leona Lewis, Mariah. There was a Steps song at one point.”
“Please tell me it was ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ and he did the dance.”
I huffed a laugh. “Yes.”
“No! Really?”
“Yes, really. Dance and all.”
“Piper?”
“Hadley?”
“Marry him, now.”
“What?” I huffed a sceptical laugh.
“Do you think maybe you’ve made a terrible mistake?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it seems to me that you’ve found someone to serve every single function you could want in a human being – I mean, I’ve obviously been replaced – so…maybe you’re with the wrong guy?”
“Really? You think?”
“Okay, no need to be sarcastic.”
“It’s not like I could bewithRoman, though.”
“Sounds like you already were to me.”
Hadn’t I told him the exact same thing? And hadn’t we both realised in the moment that for all intents and purposes we had been together? I may have not let myself believe he wasn’t with other girls, but I’d believed him when he’d said he wasn’t. I’d lost my first real boyfriend before I’d even realised that’s what I’d had…
“And, you weren’t replaced,” I changed the subject so I didn’t have to think about what I might have had.
“Babes, you really didn’t feel good?”
I sighed again. “I can’t explain it and it sounds weak and stupid. But, Roman didn’t care. I could be in a total shit, I could be happy, we could justbearound each other and it was so…easy. I didn’t question if what I was doing what right or wrong. I didn’t feel like I had to pretend because I shouldn’t have any problems.”
“You really thought I’d judge you?”
“I don’t know. I just worried, you know. Like, what does Piper Barlow have to worry about? But, here I was feeling down and awkward and just…I don’t know. It was tiring, pretending I was fine. I didn’t have to be like that around Roman. We had a rule, no apologies. We just accepted each other for how we were at the time. There were no expectations, there was no pressure.”
“And, he fixed you?”
I didn’t know if I should sigh or laugh at that, so I made a weird combination noise. Sometimes, it felt a whole lot like Roman had accidentally fixed a part of me, but in reality that wasn’t quite the truth.
“No... Not fixed. No guy – no person, really – just makes all that go away, Hads. But he made it easier to handle, less stressful. Less like I was a whiny bitch, or how I felt was stupid or wrong. With him, it was easier to…breathe, I guess. I could just be me around him and he accepted every me I am.”
And, it was true. Roman hadn’t made everything better; I wasn’t magically healed or whatever because he’d been in my life. I still felt shit sometimes and I still felt lonely in a sea of people sometimes, for no obvious reason at all. But, him making me feel like it was okay – likeIwas okay, like I wasn’t abnormal and still a good person – it made it easier for me to accept myself and that lessened some of the intensity. He let me be me, and being me wasn’t always so hard anymore.
“Okay, all this is just cementing in my mind that you chose the wrong guy.” She pulled me out of my head and I sighed.
