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‘Do you wish I was different?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Where’s that coming from?’
‘I don’t mind if you do.’
‘I mean, – I could do with you actually emptying the dishwasher when you run it,’ Haley says. ‘But I don’t want – different how?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters enough you asked,’ she says. ‘I just don’t get what’s brought this on. Have I said—’
‘Not you,’ he says. ‘Nobody’s said anything.’
‘Different how?’
He shakes his head, and she can feel it slipping through her fingers like sand, something else he’ll refuse to address and bottle away and if this cropping up years later is any indication, this is something they probably shouldn’t ignore.
Haley comes up behind him, rests her chin on his shoulder. He tilts his head to let it lean against hers.
‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘I’m overthinking.’
‘You? Never.’
She wraps her arms around him and his hand clasped over hers is cold. Waiting him out doesn’t usually go well – Aaron is good at taking the uncomfortable subjects and burying them and keeping his face stubbornly blank, all traces of the associated emotions just gone, and he’ll do it until they have no choice but to move on to whatever else they have to talk about. ‘C’mon. I’ll tell you if you really are reading too much into it.’
‘You wouldn’t know,’ he says. There’s no annoyance, no malice. Just a fact: she won’t.
‘I won’t if you don’t tell me what we’re talking about,’ Haley says.
She tilts her head against his neck, feeling the faint thump of his pulse, and can all but hear him thinking. If she’s lucky she gets maybe a quarter of the thoughts running through his head at any given time – still a quarter more than anyone else ever does. And she’d be lying if she said she never wished he was more open, but it has never been about her. She can’t help Aaron if she doesn’t know what he’s asking for.
That he’s said anything at all is a confusing mix of relief and worry – it’s been bothering him if he’s gone so far as to mention it to her, but she doubts he’ll bring it up again after this.
‘You know how to talk to people,’ Aaron laments. She feels the tension bleed out of him, air rushing out in a quiet sigh. A weight off his shoulders.
Except that… doesn’t make sense.
‘So do you,’ Haley says. ‘You’re better at it than I am—’
He pulls away. ‘Not in the right way.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks. ‘Is it about earlier? I thought you were getting on fine with the guys, you seemed like you were enjoying it.’
Aaron paces. She perches on the edge of the bed, smooths out the covers just to do something with her hands.
‘I could do it,’ he says, ‘but none of it’s real.’
‘Small talk?’
He inclines his head. Kind of. ‘This is the part where you tell me I’m thinking too much.’
‘I still don’t understand what you mean,’ Haley says. ‘Small talk is kind of fake, yeah, I’m just not sure what about it is so…’
‘It’s not small talk,’ Aaron says. ‘I know it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t see the need for it but it’d be fine if that was all it is. But it isn’t. It isn’t supposed to be hard to just – talk.’
She listens.
‘I can do it, I know what I’m supposed to say but only because I remember it. It isn’t natural. And everyone else seems to enjoy it and – and I want to – but—’ Aaron stops. ‘This is going to sound ridiculous.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Haley says.
‘Remember whenever someone snuck drinks after rehearsals?’
That takes her back and – oh, she’s got some kind of idea where this is coming from, if he’s thinking back to high school. To the names the boys called him and the ones the girls did too, just quieter. ‘Yeah.’
‘And we’d be fine until a teacher was coming and someone would say ‘act natural,’’ Aaron says, watching her reaction. She nods. ‘And you knew what normal was because you had been acting natural up until that point, and you thought you were but someone says that and you realise that you know what you need to be – how you have to act – but you can’t. You know what natural is and you know what you should say and do but there’s always something just in the way of letting you actually be normal?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I think I get it. That’s always what it feels like when you first meet someone.’
Aaron glances away and back at her, but he only meets her eyes briefly. ‘And once you get to know them, it feels natural?’
‘Yes,’ Haley says, and it feels like the wrong answer.
His mouth presses into a thin line and he goes back to his pacing. Even facing the other way she can hear him swallow, exhale raggedly; she wants to stand with him but she isn’t sure if he’d want it.
(She loves Aaron but sometimes, sometimes, she thinks she doesn’t really know him. Not when it matters the most.)
Her mouth is dry and her voice uncertain. ‘Aaron?’
‘It’s never natural,’ Aaron says. ‘Except you. But everyone else – it should be, but it never is. Doesn’t matter how long I’ve known them. It never gets easier.’
She wants to give him a reason. An explanation. She wants to say something more than a platitude, a hollow reassurance, wants to say anything at all.
‘Just tell me I’m overthinking,’ he pleads. ‘I need to know everyone feels like this and we’re just refusing to talk about it.’
‘Sometimes,’ Haley says. She can’t lie – can’t tell him what he wants to hear, but can’t tell him she’s never felt like that either.
‘I thought it was everyone,’ Aaron says like he hadn’t heard her. ‘I knew it wasn’t but it wasn’t anything wrong with me, it was because I was living with him.’
‘And it was going to fix itself when I moved out,’ he says. ‘When he died, it was because I had lived with him for so long. And when we finished high school, it was because college was so different. And there was always an excuse for why I was still like that but it didn’t matter because it was going to – I’d change. I’d be different.’
He runs a hand through his hair.
‘I knew it shouldn’t be easier in court than talking to a stranger,’ Aaron says. ‘I’m not stupid. I thought it would get better.’
‘Since high school?’ Haley says softly. ‘You’ve felt like this school?’
‘Before,’ Aaron says. ‘It was fine. There was a reason there was something wrong with me.’
‘There’s nothing wrong—’
‘What else do you call it?’ he says, and if his laugh wasn’t so bitter the shine in his eyes would give him away. ‘It’s not good. I can’t talk to someone without feeling like I’m pretending to be someone.’
‘So maybe it isn’t normal,’ Haley says. ‘So what?’
‘Why wouldn’t you want me to be different?’
‘Is that what you meant, then?’ she says. ‘Normal? Because I don’t wish you were different, I didn’t and I still don’t.’
‘Maybe you should,’ he says. ‘I know what I’m like. People think you deserve someone who isn’t as cold.’
Cold hangs in the air like an echo of every awful thing she’d heard thrown at him. At sixteen, ‘cold’ would’ve been considered merciful. And that is only the things she knows, the things he’s told her.
She swallows, her eyes prickling. Maybe she’s said to Jess that he’s hard to read, that she’s irritated with him because those things happen when you live with someone, but not when he’s around. They’ve had their arguments but their apologies are more sincere than whatever they’d said in the heat of the moment – she’d thought. This idea he’s got, she doesn’t think she’s fed into it, but if she has?
He hasn’t ever said. How is she supposed to know?
‘I love you,’ Haley says, tries and fails to keep the hurt from her voice. ‘That’s why. I don’t know what I’ve done that makes it so hard to believe.’
‘You haven’t,’ Aaron says. ‘You never have. It’s—’
She steps in front of him, on the straight line he’s walked up and down and up and down their bedroom, presses her hand against his, trembling in midair. Laces their fingers together and stands close; his breath is warm, his eyes wet and stormy.
Frightened.
‘There’s something wrong with me,’ Aaron says. She feels it in his chest more than hears it, a low rumble between his thumping heartbeat. He swallows. His voice is still strained. ‘I don’t know what it is, or why.’
‘I know,’ she says.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says. ‘It never stops—’
‘I know,’ Haley says. She hugs him hard and his fingers curl in the back of her sleep shirt, little bursts of wet heat on her shoulder as he buries his face against her neck. His hair brushes her cheek. ‘It’s okay.’
‘Sorry,’ Aaron chokes out. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s gonna be okay,’ she promises. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be okay.’
‘Sorry,’ he repeats.
Haley runs her fingers through his hair as he sobs, blinking back her own tears. For him, for her, for everything which makes him think it warrants his apologies.