by Ali Merci
“Uh…” Carmen hesitated, the words in her head tripping over one another and falling into a nonsensical heap as something in her rushed to offer some sort of explanation. She felt an irrational need to justify herself. “He, uh, he wanted me to wear it, and, well, I mean, this sport means everything to him, you know. And it’s the first away game of the seas—”
“You don’t…” Asa’s voice was oddly gentle, before he pressed his lips together, clenched his jaw, and let out a small yet heavy sigh. Slowly, his eyes met Carmen’s.
Her heart skipped another beat, but it hurt a little this time around.
“You don’t have to explain,” he eventually said, his voice quiet yet audible over the shouts and loud conversations around them.
Carmen didn’t realise she’d been holding her breath, until he’d spoken those words and she exhaled what seemed like all the air she had left in her lungs.
“Oh?” It fell past Carmen’s lips sounding like a surprised question than an acknowledgement.
Asa’s gaze shifted to the grounds in front of them, and Carmen followed his line of sight. Both of them watched a very familiar figure, who was as tall as Asa but with a slightly larger physique, move around the field like a graceful predator who was on a mission to own the night.
“I get it now,” he murmured, his eyes still following Hunter’s movements on the field, “you love him, as I once loved Isla.”
Carmen was holding her breath again, but this time she didn’t seem to know why.
“I…I—yeah.” She looked away just as Asa’s eyes landed on hers once again, and she resumed toying with her soda can.
The minutes ticked by after that, and when Carmen realised that Joyce wasn’t back yet, she swept the stands and then spotted her a few rows down, speaking to a few other familiar faces.
Asa shifted in his seat next to Carmen, catching her attention.
“Once, uh, once Wyatt or Lyra comes back, just let them know I left, yeah?” he asked, not facing Carmen fully, but tilting his head in her direction to show that he was addressing her.
Carmen’s stomach sank to her feet. “You’re leaving?” She couldn’t help but ask, somehow managing to conceal the disappointment in her voice.
Asa stood up, slipped his phone into one of his pockets. “Yeah. I was actually supposed to get dinner after the game with Wyatt and Lyra. But I’m not feeling up to it anymore. Just let them know; I’ll drop them a text anyway.”
“Say something say something say something goddammit say something just say anything,” she frantically thought. “No no no no don’t say anything don’t make yourself look like a fool—
Say something say something tell him how you feel say anything just open up to him, Carmen—”
“Asa, wait!”
Asa was just about to step down to the row of seats below the one they were on, when Carmen leant forward in her seat and shot her arm out, wrapping her fingers around his arm and tugging it.
He stopped dead in his tracks and his eyes snapped to hers with the speed of lightning, then dropped to his hand where her fingers were making contact with his skin.
“Shit shit shit what are you doing you idiot, you absolute idiot,” she chided herself.
Carmen quickly pulled back her hand and self-consciously cradled it with her other palm, tapping one of her feet nervously against the ground.
He was staring at her with a mixture of hesitance and confusion, those warm eyes of his, questioning and curious.
“I, uh, I—I would actually—” she tried to say. Oh for God’s sake, Carmen, she told herself. “I mean, what I’m trying to say is that…that it’d be nice if you, um, if you could stay.”
The pause that followed her words was the loudest silence ever, and the shouting and screaming from the stands faded away to nothing.
“What?” Asa blinked, his forehead creasing as he continued to stare at her.
Carmen placed her palms on her knees and prayed he didn’t see the way she gripped them so tight in order to steady her erratic heartbeats and faltering breaths.
“I said…” she began slowly, “that I’d like you to stay.”
Something like surprise flickered in Asa’s eyes but he covered it up quickly. The slight tremble in his voice when he uttered the next words however, he wasn’t so quick to conceal. “You do?”
There was a pang in Carmen’s chest, right where her heart resided. “Well, I don’t want you to leave.”
He turned his body around to directly face her. “Which one is it? You want me to stay, or you don’t want me to leave?”
She knew what he was asking, and they weren’t the same thing.
Did she want him because she chose to have him, or did she want him simply because she didn’t want to deal with an empty space he’d leave behind?
Carmen looked into his eyes, saw his guard up, and then lifted her lips into the softest of smiles. “I want you to stay.”
Something in Asa’s posture seemed to soften, a very subtle gesture, but Carmen was drinking in all the little things. Then he stepped back up and settled into the seat next to her.
“Well, I guess I could put up with the rest of the game for tonight,” Asa remarked with a casual shrug of his shoulders, sparing a glance at Carmen briefly before looking away again.
“I suppose you could,” she murmured back, her eyes watching the players move around the field as it began drizzling and a ghost of a smile graced her lips.
62.
Just One Night
“You actually understand what’s going on?” Asa asked after fifteen minutes or so of silence.
When Carmen looked at him in confusion, he gestured towards the game being played in front of them.
“Football?” she asked, a corner of her mouth lifting into a smile. “Yeah, used to watch it a lot back when I was a kid.”
He nodded, humming in acknowledgement and then shifted his gaze back to the field.
A few beats of silence passed before Carmen turned her face towards Asa and picked up the conversation. “Wait, do you mean that you don’t get the game?”
“No, I do get it,” he said, leaning backwards and relaxing against the seat, as his gaze remained on the field. “Sort of, I mean. Wyatt’s a fan. I’m not. He just makes me tag along with him to watch the games. But I don’t know, I just forget the football terms and roles of the different players easily.” He paused, smiled to himself, and then shook his head. “Swimming is so much simpler, honestly.”
Carmen stared at the side of Asa’s face as he said that, wondering if maybe sitting on these stands and hearing the crowd roar and their school’s name being chanted during every achievement reminded him of what he was missing out on this year.
“I’m really sorry that you can’t be a part of the meet, you know,” Carmen told him seriously.
Asa’s eyes snapped to hers, mild surprise evident in them.
“Thank you?” He sounded unsure of what he say. “I don’t think you’ve ever brought it up before.”
Carmen’s shoulders lifted into something resembling a shrug, seeming to be at a loss herself. “I don’t know… I guess it just didn’t click for me to ask you about it or we just never had any conversation that could’ve led to the topic.”
“Maybe,” Asa murmured, and then dropped his eyes to his lap as one of his hands began picking at the material of his dark jeans. “But you could have still asked,” he added in a quieter voice.
Carmen’s breath caught in her throat and without permission, her mind raced through various times she’d spent with Asa. Had she never inquired him about his feelings? Had she never asked him if there was something on his mind, bothering him?
He always seemed so put-together in her eyes—he was her solid rock—that somewhere along the way she forgot he needed some solace too.
“I’m sorry,” Carmen said, the apology genuine and raw on her tongue. “It never—I never—I don’t know why I didn’t—”
“I hate it when yo
u apologise to me,” Asa suddenly said, stopping his fidgeting with his jeans and raising his head to meet her eyes. “I really do. All I want to do when you apologise is tell you to stop saying sorry because…well, I don’t even know why. I just feel like I shouldn’t be someone you need to be so sorry around.”
Carmen’s eyes stared right back at his as she drank in his words and let it flow through her. “Then…” she started hesitantly. “What do you…what kind of ‘someone’ do you want to be to me? Who do you want me to see you as?”
Asa’s brows furrowed the tiniest bit and Carmen’s eyes watched his lips part slightly, the wheels in his head turning as his eyes kept flickering between Carmen’s own ones.
“Your favourite hiding place? Your panic room? I don’t know how to put it into words, Carmen.” He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers, but also somehow leaning in even closer, leaving the rest of the world behind them. “Just somewhere that you can scream into all you want, pour out your heart whenever you feel like it’s getting too heavy and trust that every word you spill would never leave that room. Just for you to know that whatever pieces you give me would be for my eyes only; that I wouldn’t dare give those pieces to anyone else; that I would keep them safe. I just want to be—” He came to an abrupt stop as realisation flickered in his eyes. The next words he uttered weren’t even words, but a single shaky breath; “I want to be your art journal.” One of his hands left the arm of his seat and reached towards Carmen’s cheek, before he froze and pulled away, his fingers curling into his palm as he did so. “Am I asking for too much?”
It was a genuine question, not a rhetoric one, not a mocking one, not a self-sympathising one. Asa wanted to know—to really know—if he was asking for more than Carmen could ever give.
Carmen’s mouth parted, her throat constricting with all the raw emotions that were pouring out of Asa’s very being and filling her up from the inside. She felt an odd prickle at the back of her eyes but furiously blinked it away and swallowed past the painful lump in her throat.
For a painful moment, she wished he would love her less. It made her want to cry—the intensity of his feelings for her. To this day, she wasn’t able to understand it, how he loved her when she wasn’t even the whole version of herself.
And when she continued to look at him then, she knew right down to her bones that he was indeed the safest place she’d ever known. After all, Asa was warmth. And if Carmen did choose to put her trust in his hands, she knew he’d hold on to it with a death grip and never let go.
But, above all, Carmen wanted to let him in. She wanted him to take a sledgehammer to the dam built inside her heart and just let all the pain, and the hurt, and the guilt rush out of her system.
Asa wasn’t asking for too much. He was asking for the one thing Carmen wanted to give him but just didn’t know how to. So with her heart in her throat, Carmen slowly lifted a trembling hand and placed it atop one of Asa’s, the inside of her palm resting gently above the back of his. “No,” she told him softly, and he heard her. Even with all the background noise, he heard her. “You’re not asking for too much, Asa.”
His eyes fluttered shut, a few breaths passed, and when he opened them again, they were a shade darker. “I’ve missed hearing you say my name in that way,” he mumbled.
Carmen frowned in confusion. “What way?”
“Like it means something to you.”
“You’ve always meant something to me,” she told him in a hoarse voice.
Asa didn’t say anything for a few heartbeats, and instead just watched her with thinly veiled caution in his eyes. And then something in his composure cracked, and exhaustion flooded his face, so many emotions flitting across his sharp features that Carmen couldn’t pinpoint them as they all rushed to form whirlwinds in his eyes.
“I want to believe you,” he told her, and she heard the underlying helplessness in his voice. She heard the slight tinge of fear and the doubt. “I really do.”
“But?” Carmen asked in a quiet tone, tearing her eyes away from his, because the heartbreak imprinted on every inch of his face was more than she could bear.
“But I gave you a loaded gun once,” he said. “And I’m wondering if I’d be a fool to give you a second.”
Carmen had no response to that.
•••
Asa supposed he’d spaced out and lost all sense of his surroundings because suddenly the stadium erupted into the loudest of cheers that night and all around him, people had jumped to their feet. It was absolute pandemonium.
It didn’t take him too long to realise the cause of the celebration when he saw that the students who were cheering and on their feet were ones he’d seen around occasionally in their school hallways. Asa trailed his eyes towards the field where the red and white jerseys of the Vikings could be seen running around the ground, victorious grins slapped on the faces of the football players of his school.
Without meaning to, his eyes drifted towards the familiar boy who was the team captain. Asa didn’t think he’d ever seen Hunter happy. But right now, the usually cold and impassive boy had a grin on his face and a kind of pride in his eyes that Asa knew too well from experience. It was probably something only an athlete would be able to recognise.
Asa caught a glimpse of the Hunter that Carmen seemed to adore so much, and Asa wondered what kind of damage must have been done to him in order for that boy to have grown thorns in every corner of his being.
“Well,” Carmen said from beside him, a soft smile on her face as she watched the players on the field celebrate for a few seconds longer before turning to face Asa. “I should probably start heading towards the parking lot.”
Was his time with her over already? It was too soon. He wondered if any amount of time spent in her presence would be enough.
“Oh?” He raised a brow, masking his unwillingness to let her go. “Your dad’s here?”
Carmen wrinkled her forehead. “No.” She shook her head. “I came with Joyce.”
Asa’s eyes scanned the bleachers, but it was hard to spot anybody since people were abandoning their seats now that the game was over.
“I don’t see her anywhere,” he pointed out, squinting as he kept looking for the familiar mop of brown hair with a purple highlight.
“Yeah, I have no clue where she is either. But we agreed to meet by her car in the parking lot.”
Asa’s frown deepened, and he glanced at Carmen. “Is that even safe? You don’t know this school, this neighbourhood.”
“It’s not like it’s going to be deserted.” Carmen shrugged. “There’ll be plenty of people about.”
Asa’s eyebrows knitted together as he stood up from his seat, casting one last sweep over the stands. “Still,” he muttered, scratching the side of his head uncertainly. “Let me walk you to her car at least.”
When Carmen didn’t respond, he shifted his body to face her and found that pair of thunderclouds he’d grown to love already examining his face with a kind of look he couldn’t decipher.
And it was so easy, in moments like these, to get lost in her eyes and allow himself to be whisked away by whatever he found in them. This time though, Asa wondered if maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to be more cautious. After all, what harm could come from deciding to guard his heart? He’d experienced his fair share of consequences of leaving it unshielded and naked on his sleeve.
And although Asa was by nature a heart-over-head person, he decided a little self-preservation seemed sensible enough this time around.
“Okay, Asa,” Carmen finally said, her voice so soft that it was almost carried away by the sudden gust of wind that blew past. Both of them snapped their eyes to the sky at the same time when they heard the rumbling of thunder; it sounded much closer now.
“It’s probably going to start raining again.” Asa sighed, stepping back and gesturing for Carmen to walk forward. “It’s been raining every night for the past few weeks.”
“Hmm.” She nodded in agreeme
nt, slinging her bag over her shoulder and walking past Asa, her arm brushing against his torso with what little space the rest of the crowd allowed them.
For that tiny heartbeat, all Asa could do was watch—and feel. Whether it was the top of her head grazing along his chest, or her arm pushing into the hollow right beneath his ribcage as people squeezed past and pushed them closer together, or the length of her leg pressing against his. And though he couldn’t put it into words, there was something hauntingly beautiful about the way the wind picked up the hair strands covering the side of her face that was in his line of sight and letting them fall behind her shoulder.
His eyes trailed down her profile, the way her eyes fluttered shut when a sudden spray of water hit her as it began drizzling; the way her lashes formed dark crescents that stood out against the ivory of her skin; the crease on her forehead that only deepened as more students began flooding the exit gates.
It was funny, really, how he could be stuck in the midst of a massive crowd that was trying to get home or find some temporary shelter from the rain, but all that his eyes sought out was her.
Asa didn’t understand, and he wondered if he ever would.
“Wow, I didn’t expect it to be this crowded,” Carmen interrupted his stream of thoughts, her voice louder than usual as she tried to speak over the loud chatter of everyone else. “I feel like we’ve been standing on this same spot for ages now.”
“High school football is a pretty big deal around this town,” Asa said easily enough, his voice not giving away the vulnerability that came with being around Carmen.
A few more minutes passed and the two of them had finally made it to the exit when something caught Asa’s eye.
He didn’t stop walking—his hand hovering over Carmen’s lower back, but not actually touching it as she walked ahead of him—when Isla’s eyes met his from where she remained seated at the top row of one of the stands.
