by Ali Merci
He twisted the knob and pulled the door open, stepping out into the cold November morning—at least, he knew it was supposed to be cold—but Asa felt nothing in that moment, nothing but the emptiness in his rib cage where his heart used to dwell.
“So, no, I’m not walking away, Carmen,” he murmured, not turning around to look at her. “You’re not giving me a reason to stay, even after I asked you for one.”
And then he was walking past the porch where he’d kissed her breathless, where he’d murmured “Mi amor, mi cielo, mi sol” against the warmth of her skin, where he’d been foolish enough to believe they were a binary pair capable of giving parts of themselves to each other when it was obvious now that he was the only one who’d ever done the giving.
He’d poured parts of himself into her with every touch, every embrace, every kiss, every “I love you”, but she’d never trusted him with parts of herself. She’d never allowed herself to be vulnerable in his presence. And Asa was paying for it because all those bits he’d given away were no longer with him. He felt incomplete, knowing he could never patch himself back without those pieces.
He climbed into his truck, ignoring the empty passenger seat, the goddamn autumn leaves scattered all over the streets and trying not to think about the fact that while he was here, he’d left his heart back there. And that he was probably never getting it back.
53.
The Pain Death Leaves Behind
“It’s going to cost you Asa.”
Those had been Hunter’s words.
And what had Carmen done? She’d tossed them to the wind and went about with a blindfold hoping that her feet wouldn’t waver on the path she was walking on. The blindfold was removed now, and all that greeted Carmen was the sight of Asa on one path and herself on a completely different one.
Not parallel paths—no. Because parallel roads never met, did they?
Asa and Carmen had met though, had crossed paths. Had lingered around even. So, then what were they?
Intersecting lines? Roads that cut into each other at a certain point before heading in the opposite directions forever? The kind that never met again?
No, Carmen refused to believe that. She didn’t want to even entertain the thought that Asa had been nothing more than a passing cloud, a ship that had stayed in one harbour for too long and had to sail away now.
There was a museum in her head, with walls the shades of brown and gold, with seventeenth-century quotes engraved into the frames of every masterpiece he’d inspired her to make.
And Carmen didn’t know how to burn that down; she didn’t want to choke on the ashes of its remains.
But she then realised Asa hadn’t known about this museum, had he?
She’d never shown him. Never allowed him even the tiniest peek at those paintings she’d created using the sun’s glow from his eyes, the honey from his voice and the gold from his heart.
His heart that had opened its doors for her three months back, ever since that moment under that tree in the parking lot when he’d given her journal back. A heart that had done nothing but give and give and give without asking for anything in return.
His heart that, for the first time, had asked her for something in return just a moment ago—a tiny infinity ago. His heart that had asked for a piece of her heart in return.
And Carmen didn’t even give what it wanted, she wasn’t able to give Asa what he wanted.
They always spoke about how much courage was needed to take the leap and fall headfirst into love, but they never spoke of the rare kind of bravery it took to let someone love you back. A form of bravery that Carmen was beginning to realise she didn’t have.
She’d been the wings of those who’d forgotten how to take flight, a rock to hold onto for those who’d felt the ground beneath them crack wide open. She’d allowed her bones to carry fragments of the people she crossed paths with. But she’d never given any room for anybody to do the same for her in return.
She didn’t have it in her to let someone be her wings while she found her own pair and worked on fixing them. She didn’t have it in her to let someone be her solid ground when it was her world falling apart. And she most certainly didn’t have it in her to allow someone else to carry fragments of her heart in their bones.
Carmen only knew how to take, never to give.
And the problem with takers was that they never knew where to draw the line, where to set the limit. Until, eventually, the givers said enough.
Asa had said enough.
He’d forgotten to take his heart back, though. Because she could still feel its beats pulsing through her own veins, its steady thumpity-thump echoing within the walls of that museum in her head.
He’d cut open his chest and handed his heart over to her on a silver platter, and now it just sat there in Carmen’s shaking palms, and oh God oh God oh God, she didn’t know what to do with it anymore.
She didn’t want to feel its warmth, its weight, its tremble. She didn’t want Asa to let her keep it.
But she should’ve known. Asa San Román always had a tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve and place it in the hands of whoever could inflict the most damage on it with the blind trust that they wouldn’t.
It was funny, really, how even now Carmen could read him like an open book. How she knew him like the back of her hand even in his absence.
And she’d never given him the chance to know her as intimately.
Was she sorry about the pain she’d caused? Yes. Was she sorry about her inability to wear her heart on her sleeve? She didn’t know. She didn’t think so. Perhaps not.
Carmen waited for the need to apologise for it, but no such thing came. How was she supposed to apologise for who she was? Ever since she could remember, she’d had her heart under wraps. There was no one who’d ever asked her to open up, no one who told her she was worth knowing underneath all that gentle exterior and the smiling face.
The art of self-preservation was all she’d ever known throughout her entire life. Did she really have it in her to start taking those defences down?
“Honey?”
Her dad’s voice sounded from somewhere behind her, and Carmen turned away from where she was standing, staring at the door that Asa had just walked out of several minutes ago. She saw it in his troubled eyes, in his sad smile.
“How much did you hear?” she asked, voice hoarse and drained, the evidence of all the unsaid words streaming down her cheeks.
“Enough,” he answered softly. “You guys weren’t exactly whispering. And my room isn’t soundproof.” He offered her a wry smile, but the worry in his eyes remained.
“Fighting is normal.” Carmen swallowed. “It happens.” When her father’s eyes only grew more worried, she began to fidget. “It does,” she insisted, an irrational sense of anger simmering inside her.
“That didn’t sound like just a fight, Carmen,” he told her slowly, hesitancy evident in his demeanour.
Her father was right. It hadn’t been a fight, it had been an ending. It was love in the cruellest form, ending before it had a chance to begin. The start and the finish lines just blurring into one another’s edges until it wasn’t possible to tell them apart.
Crash and burn. They’d always been a train wreck waiting to happen. And now that the collision had occurred, Carmen was desperately looking for the parts that could be salvaged, still blind to all the other damage lying around.
“I’m sorry,” her father said, a crestfallen expression on his face.
She didn’t have the energy to look confused, to even begin to understand what that apology meant. “For what, Sad?” She sighed, looking around and realising she no longer recognised these walls, the furniture. It was a house. A house. Carmen was tired of waiting for it to become a home.
“For letting you lose both parents the day your mother died,” he told her, shoulders sagging as he lowered himself to the last step of the narrow staircase and seating himself there.
“Mum didn’t d
ie,” Carmen said, devoid of all emotion. “She killed herself.”
Her father flinched, a shadow passing over his features and clouding his eyes. “Nobody saw it coming,” he whispered, a haunted expression on his face. “One day she was with us and the next she wasn’t.”
“Nobody ever sees the bad stuff coming.” She didn’t know who she was speaking to anymore, her eyes growing unfocused and staring at nothing in particular. “It’s like a car crash. Nobody sees it happen until after the damage is done. And after that, what can apologies even do? You just stand on the sidelines and watch the car burn.”
Her father frowned, pulling his brows together slightly. “You have a choice there though, Carmen. You either watch it burn, or you run towards it and try getting the person trapped in there out.”
Carmen’s eyes zoomed back into focus and flickered towards him. “Won’t you burn your hands in the process?”
Her father smiled. “Would you be able to live with letting them burn out of self-preservation?”
Carmen realised she had been in a burning car for a while now—and she still was, choking on the fumes, inhaling the smoke, trapped beneath the flames.
Was she going to be able to live with herself if she gave up on her salvation? If she condemned her own self just like everyone else?
Could the shell of the person she was now shove her hands through all that damage and try dragging out the person she was underneath all that wreckage?
Perhaps the key to letting someone else in was allowing herself to let in the potential to be the person she could be. Because keeping out the pain and the loss and the devastation was not a method of easy breathing; it was holding her breath as that pressure in her chest just grew larger each day. Building walls was easy and it kept away all the hurt, but Carmen was beginning to realise it also kept away all the love.
And that had been Asa’s only crime—loving her when she didn’t know how to let that love get past her walls.
•••
Asa’s hand hesitated, hanging in mid-air, before he finally gave in and knocked on the door.
Mrs. Martin’s face greeted him, her mouth forming an exhausted smile as her eyes landed on him, recognition flickering through them.
“Asa.” She smiled warmly. “It’s been a while.”
Asa swallowed past the lump that had been lodged in his throat ever since two days ago, when he’d walked out of Carmen’s house.
“Hey, Sarah.” He smiled easily, nostalgia sweeping through him at the sight of someone who’d been like a second mother to him during his friendship with her daughter. “Is Isla home?”
“Isla?” she repeated, sounding almost sad. “Not Isles anymore, huh?”
Asa offered her a sad smile, a dull ache settling in his chest at the memory of the girl he’d once considered family. The loss didn’t hurt anymore, but there was a bittersweet throbbing that arose occasionally on moments such as these.
“I’m sorry for how things turned out,” Sarah Martin said, opening the door wider and allowing Asa to step in. “Sometimes I feel like you were the last piece of good she had in her life.”
“She didn’t want help, Sarah,” Asa murmured, his tone kind.
“I know, son.” She sighed. “And I don’t blame you for choosing yourself.” She shrugged, but her eyes looked tired, worn out.
Asa wondered what it must be like for her to have a daughter and yet not have her at the same time.
“Go ahead.” She motioned with her head towards the direction in which Isla’s room was. “You know where to find her.”
Asa shot her a small smile. “Thanks, Sarah.”
His knuckles rapped on the familiar door, before dragging his fingertips down the hard surface, a thousand different memories spent in this house flashing through his head.
It swung open, leaving Asa’s fingers touching air instead as his eyes met a pair of electric blue ones. They widened, shock passing through them before going back to being cold and detached.
“Can I come in?” he asked, shuffling on his feet uncomfortably.
Isla didn’t say anything and just went back in and dropped down on her bed. But she’d left her door open so Asa took that as permission to enter.
His eyes scanned the room, frowning when he noticed all her posters were taken down and empty beer bottles scattered on one corner of the wall next to her bed.
“You’ve been drinking,” he remarked, a sinking feeling in his stomach as his eyes flickered to Isla who was watching him silently.
“If you came here to judge—”
“No,” he quickly said, shaking his head. “No, of course not. That’s not why I’m here.”
“So why are you here, Asa?”
He pressed his lips together, his mind racing a hundred miles before he sighed heavily and sat himself down on the swivel chair across from her.
“You took down all your posters,” Asa commented, tilting his head to the side.
“Yeah, well, Arctic Monkeys no longer interest me,” she muttered, leaning her back against the headrest of the bed.
“What happened to all the photographs? The ones of all your cheerleader competitions?”
“I quit the squad.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Oh.” Asa looked away, the sinking feeling in his stomach becoming more prominent.
“Don’t.”
His eyes travelled towards her again. “What do you mean?”
“Stop worrying.” She sighed. “Stop feeling for me—I’m not your problem anymore.”
But Asa had loved Isla Martin once, thought of her as family even. Asa’s heart still loved the people he’d once loved, even if he no longer had room for them in his life. Even if he had to take the longer route just to avoid bumping into them and risk seeing familiarity and nostalgia in the eyes of someone who was now a stranger.
“You weren’t a problem,” he murmured. “Not at first. You were a friend then. My best friend.”
“Beginnings are always happy, Asa.”
Asa, not Ace.
He waited for the pain, but it didn’t come, and in a way, it made him feel at peace. He no longer needed her the way he used to before.
“The middle is supposed to be better,” he mused out loud.
“The middle is where everything starts going south.” Isla laughed humourlessly. “And when that happens, the end becomes inevitable, right?”
Asa’s forehead creased, looking at Isla with perplexity. “Where did we go wrong?”
“Not we,” she said quietly. “Me. You remained loyal ’till the end, until you decided enough was enough.”
“You’re not angry?”
Isla’s eyes met Asa’s, surprised flashing through them. “At you finally learning how to choose yourself? Of course not, Asa. I was frustrated it took you long enough to take a firm stand, but... but at the end of the day, all I did was take from you. And takers never know when to stop.”
“You said.” Asa hesitated, “You said I should’ve just learnt to have thicker skin and let things go…”
“And that should’ve been your first red flag,” she said, dropping her eyes to her hands as she picked at a few loose threads on her bedspread. “There isn’t anything wrong with you just because you can let in emotions. It’s the people who tell you that you need to change your softness who have something wrong with them.”
“And what is wrong with people like that?” Asa asked quietly, looking down and pulling his brows together. “Why do people who are so detached set their eyes on people who like wearing their heart on their sleeves?”
“Because their exterior is hard. They let the world turn them cold, instead of fighting back to remain soft and warm. And people like you, who have fought back and keep fighting back every day, remind people like me of our weakness. Of our inability to be soft despite what the world throws at us.” Isla narrowed her eyes at him, the wheels in her head obviously spinning. “Asa, why are you asking this?”
“I... I want to understand,” he mumbled, shifting his gaze from the floor to her face.
Isla let the confusion on her face show. “Understand what?”
Asa’s mind flashed with snippets of the morning two days back, his chest constricting and squeezing the air out of his lungs at the memory.
“Hunter,” he replied.
Isla’s curious expression morphed into one of shock and then transformed into anger.
“What is wrong with you?” she hissed, throwing him a look of utter disbelief. “You just jumped out of the frying pan by getting out of that negative environment with me! And you want to head into the fire now?”
Asa sighed exasperatedly, rubbing a hand down his face. “I’m not going to become best buddies with him, Isla. I just need to understand—”
“What?” she snapped. “Understand what, Asa? Why he put you through what he put you through? So that, what? You can start the journey of forgiveness?” She laughed sardonically. “Right. And here I was, actually feeling proud that you learnt to let go of the things that made you unhappy. But no, you’re just trading one toxic person for another.”
“I need to know whether he has any good in him, Isla. The way I found good in you,” Asa muttered, feeling tired all of a sudden. He felt tired a lot these days.
“Why?” she asked, her tone pained. “You owe him nothing. Nothing! He doesn’t deserve to have you look for any redeeming qualities in him! Why do you do this to yourself again and again? Why can’t you just keep away all the hate and the bad?”
“Isla, I’m not asking because I want to forgive him or make room for him in my life...” Asa pressed his lips together, the skin on his forehead growing more creased by the second, “I just need to know how anybody could see anything redeemable in him. And considering both you and Hunter are basically two sides of the same coin, there’s no better person to ask.”