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The nights I marked her were the nights she actually looked relaxed and free from the memories haunting her.
And I fucking hated it.
I hated it because I knew what she was doing.
I’d done the same thing for years.
Her inner pain was manifesting outwardly.
My pain had been losing my family. I’d eased that pain by throwing myself at the servitude of the Taylors, forcing myself to fall for another family, all while abandoning my own.
But Neri hadn’t lost loved ones, she’d lost herself.
She’d lost the girl she’d been before.
And she used pain to find her.
Pain to make herself come alive again. Pain to fortify the suppressed memories from ever breaking free and swarming her.
I didn’t want her to let Ethan win by refusing to let herself heal.
But what could I do?
She started getting angry with me when I pushed. She shut down when I got tetchy. Tension sprang between us that wasn’t there before, and I backed down. I bid my time. I obeyed my girl, and did my best to bite my tongue.
But that all stopped the day she flinched from me.
A week before Christmas, she flinched.
Fucking flinched.
She tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. She reached to kiss me in the kitchen, safe to touch me without fear of being caught because her parents were down the street visiting the neighbours.
I’d caught her doing the dishes.
I’d planted my hands on her hips to act out her fantasy of being fucked against the sink. I’d already unzipped. Ready to slip inside her while her hands clutched at bubbles and glasses.
But she jumped a mile when I touched her.
She spun in my arms with wide, worried eyes.
And that was all I could take.
I stormed away.
I slammed my door.
And I knew things were about to get ugly.
Chapter Fifty-One
*
Aslan
*
(Moon in Nepali: Candrama)
“YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHO JUST MESSAGED ME,” Neri said with a smile, stepping into my room as if she owned the place.
“Leave the door open,” I muttered, saving my progress on my latest language app and closing the second screen where I’d been working my way through a math paper I’d found online that was said to be impossible.
It wasn’t impossible.
Frankly, it was easy, and the thrill of completing the page-long calculations had made my brain dance with colours. I’d slipped once—on The Fluke when Neri was doing her math homework a few years ago—and told her that numbers felt smooth to me. Liquid and silky, a pleasure to think about and untangle, but when she’d looked at me like I was lying or worse...making shit up, I’d swallowed down the rest of that truth.
The truth being, I didn’t just feel numbers, I saw them in colour. Technicolour with glowing edges and sparkling curves. Twos were orange, sevens were turquoise. Together, they conjured such a pretty shade that I got goosebumps whenever they appeared in an equation together. I think that was why I was so good at math. It was like a dance to me. A dance where I somehow inherently knew all the steps.
I hadn’t told Neri that part of myself for two reasons.
One, I didn’t want her to think of me as strange, and two...while it remained my little secret, I could pretend the gift came from my father: the father who’d raised me and filled my crib with number toys and games. I didn’t want to think that it might’ve come from my biological father. That this uniqueness might be hereditary and yet another thing I couldn’t escape.
“Why do you want me to leave the door open?” Neri asked quietly, frowning a little at my lack of enthusiasm.
Tossing my phone onto my pillow, I swung my legs to the floor and stretched, popping muscles that’d had enough of manual labour. This week had been insane. I’d spent hours scrubbing The Fluke so it was ready for its rest over Christmas. I’d run countless errands for Jack and spent days ordering new stock and supplies for the new year.
Lucky for all of us, tonight marked the start of our official holiday. Neri had finished school yesterday, and Jack and Anna were already celebrating with a bottle of champagne that they splurged on every year. A bottle with a drunk humpback on the label and the words ‘Whale Plonk’.
Plonk typically meant cheap and barely palatable wine, but this particular winery loved to use the word cheap when they really meant exorbitantly expensive.
“Aslan...are you okay?” Neri asked quietly, leaving the door open and stepping closer to me with a wary glance.
I didn’t want to be mean, but...I couldn’t keep choking on it. “You flinched last time we were together, or have you forgotten? I’d hate to make you feel uncomfortable by being alone with me.”
She gasped. “You know I didn’t mean to. You took me by surprise.”
“You would never have flinched before that bastard.”
