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Eagerly she filled Aaron in on the details and he laughed at her description of how her father’s hideously disfiguring injuries came about.
“Your mind is seriously weird, Al. You know that, don’t you? You really should write romances or a script for Netflix or something. It would be a hit.”
Why indeed not? Her sky was wide and limitless right now.
So limitless in fact that she opened her mouth and out popped, “It must have affected you too, you know, not having your mum around?”
And just like that, clouds rolled over the sun. Aaron’s face hardened, his mouth thinned. “Andrea made up for it.” He shrugged. “And you get on with life. It’s not a missing body part.”
“I don’t know… Maybe it’s not so different, you know—me not having a dad, you losing your mum—it leaves scars, doesn’t it? Like, at an emotional level.”
Why, oh why was she pushing him? She felt her eyes smarting as she stared at his face. A muscle in his jaw ticked and he looked over her head, his face expressionless. “It’s a long time ago. I choose not to keep dredging it up.”
She couldn’t stop herself from bursting out, “But don’t you think these things make us who we are? Affect the choices we make? Polly says—” She stopped abruptly. This was going hideously in the wrong direction.
The silence between them was filled by a strident passenger announcement. Aaron spoke finally, his voice hard as tintacks. “You shouldn’t listen to so much of Polly’s psychobabble.”
Inside, she wilted. Outside, she pinned on her new, confident,friends with benefitsmask. “Maybe not.” The rumble of the approaching train seemed to shake her bones, but she firmed her legs and stood tall. On the train they did the same things they’d been doing before she opened her stupid mouth—looked at their phones, shared the odd comment—but the wind had shifted direction and the air held a blasting chill.
Why did it have to be this hard all of a sudden? Before allthe sex stuff, Aaron would tell her things, like the way he didn’t get on with his dad after his mum died, how Andrea had made life better when she came on the scene. Admittedly he’d always been sketchy on detail, but it had never felt so hideously awkward before. Now they’d added sex into the mix, it seemed there were “no entry” signs popping up everywhere.
And the problem was, suddenly it seemed so much more important to break them down. Alice sat blindly staring at her phone, aware that Aaron’s arm wasn’t bumping hers anymore.
Why, oh why did sex have to go and complicate everything?
