68. Bash
Bash
I’ve never studied this much in all four years of college…
She has me wrapped around her finger. Anything she asks for, anything she needs…
I want to give her. It feels stupid to say that I prayed for someone like her to come into my life…
but it’s true…kind of. I honestly couldn’t have prayed up an exact replica of Lydia.
She’s better than anything my mind could have thought it wanted before she existed in my world.
And I mean that purely in a friendship way, just the person she is at her core.
Don’t get me wrong…I like her…too much even.
But it’s more than that with her, always has been.
We’ve fallen into a rhythm together. After my therapy session today, I swing by the café to grab her order and mine.
When I see her walking towards me, I hold out the coffee like it’s our secret handshake in the form of a paper cup.
She takes it smiling, and it hurts how big my grin is around her.
We fall into step with each other, and it always feels too in sync to be by accident.
The library is quiet this time of day, our favorite time to catch it.
Most days, our study sessions look like half studying actual class work, and half studying each other, falling into effortless conversations.
Sometimes the conversations are light, sometimes they’re deep, sometimes they’re everything in between, and last until way after our coffee is gone or cold.
Being around her has become the least stressful part of my days.
The fear I used to carry, about ever caring again, about sticking my neck out far enough that someone could chop it off, somehow went straight out the window without asking.
Somehow, Lydia was thrown into my life in probably some of the messiest ways possible, and has just…
stuck. Really, I’m the one who’s stuck. I’m the one who doesn’t want to leave her orbit.
We pull out laptops, notes, and pens, trying to start on Chapter 8—behavioral economics—but conversation takes over instead, and we let it. We roll into conversations that don’t really matter but do because they feed me pieces of her little by little.
After playing a game of real-life ‘friends, siblings, or dating’ with students around the library, Lydia throws out a conversation I wasn’t ready to catch. “So…how many hearts on campus have you broken, Bash?” The tease is light, but her eyes are curious.
I huff. “Zero.” I swivel my pen in my fingers. “Haven’t been a relationship person with most of my time here.”
Her eyebrows lift. “By choice or by just not having any candidates?”
“By fear,” I say, being honest. “After my sister…” I exhale through my nose. “Loving anyone felt like inviting loss in. I didn’t want to willingly start something I couldn’t survive.”
She leans back, sipping her coffee, considering that statement. “I get that…but you shouldn’t close yourself off to the possibility of happiness, even if it’s scary. You deserve to experience it.”
“It doesn’t scare me the same way anymore. Especially…recently,” I hear myself say it before I can decide whether it’s smart to or not. The sentence hangs between us. The tension thickens in that quiet, sweet way that makes you want to say something stupid to break it. So I do say something stupid.
“Which guys should I be jealous of on campus?”
She blinks, shocked at first, then smiles, and I can see the mischievous wheels turning. “You would be jealous of all the men who are in love with me here on campus?” The tease in her tone is loaded.
“Honestly?” I ask. “Yeah. I would.”
Her smile softens. “Well, good thing there aren’t any,” she says, then pauses, looking up at the ceiling like she’s about to tell on herself. “Well…except my old drug dealer, who…kind of told me he loved me.”
I freeze, a beat too long. “Oh, were you two—?”
“No,” she says quickly, shaking her head.
“It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t in love with him or anything.
We were—friends, I guess, in a messed-up way.
I used him to hide…and to get high,” she says, laughing a little, needing to add some humor.
“He cared…maybe too much, but I wasn’t able to be anything more for him… or for anyone.”
An image flashes in my head—the night of her overdose, a guy with sad eyes covered in tattoos on the sidewalk. I don’t ask if it’s him. Not everything has to be labeled. But I can’t help but wonder if that was him. It would make more sense if it was.
“So…how was your,” I start gently, already wishing I’d kept it lighter, “last real relationship…was it…good?”
Something shifts in her body language and expression. I notice it right away and regret asking that now.
“I’m sorry,” I say immediately, palms up. “You don’t have to answer that. I shouldn’t have—”
“No.” She shakes her head, eyes flicking down at the table and back to me.
“I asked you first, I started this, it’s a fair question.
” She takes a breath that looks like it hurts and sets her cup down carefully.
“The last—and only—relationship I had was…from fifteen to seventeen.” The words come out gently, but I can hear how they hurt her.
“He was…not very kind. To me. To himself. It got bad fast. He’s the one who killed himself,” she swallows, “in front of me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Two words that are too small, but the only thing I have to give her. “You don’t have to talk about it if—”
“It’s okay to talk,” she says, almost like she’s reminding herself.
“I think keeping it all inside is what made me run, made me use things to numb so I didn’t have to think about it.
Talking seems to be the better way out now.
” She looks past me. “He was…verbally pretty awful. Physically abusive, too. It got really bad. He taught me that love feels like waiting for a storm to pass and hoping you just don’t drown in it first. And after he died…
well, before he died, he made it his mission to leave me with a pretty big scar for after he was gone, bigger than any of the physical ones he gave me.
I had broken up with him, and like in the way he knew I wasn’t coming back this time.
So, he made his death all about me, told me it was my fault…
and also told the world it was my fault…
told everyone that I pushed him to do it.
I dealt with bullying before…my whole life, actually, but it was really bad after that.
He made me the villain to everyone else, made sure I had to live with that. ”
My stomach drops in that way that feels physical, like a floor giving or the drop in a ride.
The thought of someone hurting her, putting their hands on her, treating her less than the most valuable thing on this earth, kills me…
makes me want to kill him…if he wasn’t already dead.
How can someone do that? What had to be so messed up in his head that he could even do that?
I can’t seem to make myself feel bad for him, though.
Anyone else, I would try to analyze their life, their childhood, their trauma, how they got there.
But I can’t. Not when it comes to her. I try to feel bad for thinking it, but can’t.
I’m glad he’s in the ground. Almost wish I could have put him there myself.
I tamp the feelings down. She doesn’t need my rage.
She has her own. What she needs, I think, is my presence.
The most boring thing I know how to offer.
I don’t even register I’m doing it until I feel her hand under mine.
Her hand is warm and small, and the contact sends a current up my arm that has very little to do with lust and everything to do with being alive at the same time and in the same space as her.
She stares at it, but doesn’t move, not away at least; it almost feels like she moves into it.
I eventually pull back, not wanting to overstep any more than I just already did.
“We can go back to studying,” I say after a moment.
She exhales and smiles a little. “Let’s read about choice architecture before my brain tries to set off those smoke alarms.”
The look she gives me reassures me that I didn’t just cross any line she wasn’t comfortable with, and I feel the relief wash over me.
We work for a while in this easy rhythm with each other before we pack up in that unhurried way that feels scary comfortable, like neither of us wants to leave.
“Hey,” she says, shyly as she stands up. “Greek game night is this weekend. You should come…with me. My roommates will be there, too,” she adds quickly.
I place a hand over my chest. “Is this you asking me on a date?” I’m aiming for funny, but land somewhere closer to being a dork.
She tilts her head and gives me the most playful and flirty smirk. “Maybe I am.”
I grin before I can help it. “I’d love to. Actually, Mason hasn’t shut up about it, so he’ll be thrilled you’re getting me to come.”
“Okay, good,” she says softly with a smile. “It’s…just nice to have more sober people around…makes the drunk ones less…”
“Annoying,” I finish.
She laughs and then nods.
Before the caution part of my brain can wake up and lecture me on the bad idea, I stand up and hug her.
She’s stiff at first, but quickly melts into it, her hand finding the spot they fit perfectly on my back.
She smells like cinnamon gum and coffee and something that’s probably just her, light and sensual at the same time, a scent that I think is my new favorite.
We walk out together, and I walk her back to her dorm like I always do.
“I’ll…see you around,” she says, walking towards her building’s door.
“See ya, Lydia,” I echo.