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Conor
I don’t know why I went with Aurnia to the bus stop.
I shouldn’t have.
I’d gotten exactly what I’d wanted. Or what I’d said I’d wanted. Thought I’d wanted.
After our fight, Aurnia had embraced the idea of Limerick. In the shop she was already talking about living on campus. About packing her bags. About how difficult it might be for her to come visit once the semester started. But that she would try. If she could. But she probably couldn’t.
Her interactions with me were also exactly what I’d wanted. Cool. Professional. Brief. Her eyes hardly met mine in the parlour anymore. If I found her at the apartment, she was bent over a Limerick Art School pamphlet that she didn’t look up from when I came in. An opportunity to move on from Dublin, from me had presented itself and she was taking it. And that was good. That was what I wanted. Right?
I couldn’t ruin her life if she was far away. That’s what she would soon be, far away. That’s why she was walking to the bus stop that cloudy, heavy afternoon: for a chance to get far, far away.
So why didn’t I just let her go? Say goodbye, good luck from the door of the shop? Wave from the big window till she was out of sight? Go back to my business, my literal business, and send her nothing but best wishes and nothing more? Why did I insist that she needed help with the little tattered backpack that couldn’t have had much more inside it than her portfolio, a few folded clothes, and her toothbrush? Why did I offer her my jacket when the bus stop wasn’t more than a block and a half away? Why did it sting when she refused it?
“You don’t have to wait with me,” Aurnia said as we stood under the makeshift bus stop, nothing more than a piece of corrugated metal on wooden posts littered with gang tags.
“Did you remember the CVs from the printer?” I asked as she checked the schedule on the faded, tattered pinned-up paper once more.
Aurnia’s eyes flashed to me, more contact than she’d given me since Rian told her about the interview, and I was surprised at how much anger there was.
“Seriously,” she said, focusing on the gum stuck to the metal roof of the bus stop. “You can go.”
“I can throw out some practice interview questions while we wait. You know—”
“We’re not waiting,” Aurnia said, not looking over at me. “I’m waiting. I don’t know what you’re doing.”
She’d braided her hair for the journey, but the wind had already tugged free several strands that lashed her pale cheeks. Why did I want to tuck them back behind her ear for her? Why did I want to block the wind for her? Hold her tight? Keep her warm? All I should have wanted was for the bus to come and Aurnia to get on it and for it to carry her far, far away. Far, far away from me. Away from ruin.
“If that’s what you want,” I said.
Aurnia snorted.
I stepped closer to ask her what the hell that was about when her phone rang. She slipped it from her back pocket. Her whipping hair concealed her eyes from me as she flinched and rejected the call. The phone was back in her back pocket without hesitation. Aurnia was leaning out from the stop, looking past me for the bus as if I were a ghost down the street.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Nobody,” was Aurnia’s answer.
“It was saved as ‘Don’t Answer’.”
Her hair had covered her eyes. Not the screen.
She shrugged. “Some asshole trying to sell something.”
“Aurnia.”
Aurnia yanked her hair back behind her ear as she turned to face me, chin jutting up defiantly.
“Conor, go,” she said. “Just go. I’m not your problem anymore.”
“You were never my—”
I stopped myself, dragging my hands in frustration through my hair. How was I supposed to tell her that I was the problem? I was a thirty-year-old fuck up that was going to weigh her down like stones lashed round her ankles. I was bad news and bad luck and bad timing all rolled up into one big fucking bad package. I was somehow, some way going to ruin her life before it even began. I was talking from goddamn experience. I knew. I knew.
“Aurnia,” I said, exhaling unsteadily through my nose, “just tell me who that was and I’ll go, okay?”
Aurnia laughed bitterly.
