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One
Aela
Now
Haveyour eyes ever met someone’s across a crowded room?
Have you ever looked into that person’s eyes, and somehow known you were theirs?
That they were yours?
I was fifteen when that happened to me.
It wasn’t the first and only time it happened either. It kept on happening, only with the same guy. Over and over and over, it occurred.
Our eyes would connect, and it was like the sun would peep out from behind the clouds on a dull day.
I knew it sounded like nonsense, but it actually wasn’t.
Every time my gaze was captured by Declan O’Donnelly’s, I knew we were meant to be together.
That was what made things so awkward.
I wasn’t his.
He wasn’t mine.
He was my best friend’s.
And that was only the start of all the trouble.
My father had been low down on the totem pole in the Five Points’ Mob for most of my life, meaning I’d been pretty much a nonentity. Only when he’d been promoted had I started attending a decent school, and that was where I met Deirdre.
She was the kind of girl who knew everyone and everything, and somehow, she’d taken me under her wing when I arrived at St. Mary’s Middle School for Girls.
Nearly twenty years later, I still wasn’t sure if that was the best thing that had ever happened to me or the worst.
Deirdre had been kind and sweet to me. Enough so that I hadn’t realized what a manipulative bitch she was until I was nearly seventeen.
You read that right—for nearly six years, the cow managed to pull the wool over my eyes. But I didn’t do what I did to get back at her.
No, back then I’d been too innocent to be so conniving.
I’d appreciated her friendship when I’d suddenly gone from a regular, run-of-the-mill PS162 school to a private Catholic middle school.
When St. Mary’s had been forcibly closed due to—and this always amused the hell out of me—abuse because the nuns used to get whippy with it when you were really bad, we’d had to go to St. John’s High School.
Amixedprivate high school.
For girls who’d only been surrounded by other girls all their school life, it had been groundbreaking. For me, it was just normal. Still, I’d been allowed to meet Deirdre’s Declan for the first time ever, and when wehadmet?
That was when the whole world crashed and burned to a halt.
All this time later, as I sat beside his hospital bed, I still couldn’t believe how powerful that moment had been.
I was an artist now. A mom. I wasn’t some dopey kid who had her head in the clouds, her hands covered in paint—although they still were most of the time—and her will easily molded to what others wanted.
With the power of time, a reputation that had been hard-won, and after coming to terms with being a single mom, I was still mind blown by that connection.
