Obsessed(6)

He looked at me again. “I saw you with her. Just now.”

“I didn’t think you were even paying attention.”

“I’m always paying attention to you.”

Warmth settled in my chest. I felt my cheeks heat. He’d said it so matter-of-factly, I started to think there wasn’t anything more in that statement. Or else he’d be more affected than how he looked. I took a breath and reminded myself this was Aston, a boy I lived with, a boy everyone would soon refer to as my brother. Still, I struggled.

“I’m not a follower,” I then told him, looking down at the pavement because it was less challenging than his eyes. “Just because Cindy said something, that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. I like how you are and I don’t want you to fit in or be different. I came here because I prefer you over them.”

He was still bending and unbending the top corner of the page when he said, “Sorry. I just…I thought…”

“You thought wrong,” I finished, nudging him playfully on the shoulder. “Now read to me.”

The furrowed brow returned. “I’m not that great, El.”

“You’re great at everything, it’s so annoying.”

“Reading is still my weakness.”

“I don’t care. Just read.”

More excuses. “Some of the words might be wrong.”

“I. Don’t. Care.”

He exhaled slowly. “I’m slow.”

I grinned. “I have all day.”

He licked his lips, hesitated, and then began reading. I listened to his voice, watched his mouth move while the warmth within me grew. Then I leaned against his side and rested my head on his shoulder. Eventually, he brought his arm around my shoulders and held me there against him. We looked more than sister and brother like this, and I could feel the countless eyes pinned to us, but I didn’t care.

I cared about the warmth he gave me, the feeling of fullness that settled in my heart just being around him. I cared about Aston so much, he was starting to consume my every waking thought.

The struggle was real.

Ugh. It was eating me up inside.

*

I wasn’t supposed to really like him. I was supposed to love him in a brotherly fashion. In my parents’ eyes, he’d come to me when I was nine years old and therefore too young to understand love beyond the familial kind. They figured we’d grow up together like siblings, and we played together and fought like siblings did. Yet…there was not one sibling-like bone in my body for Aston. I’m not even going to pretend I tried to grow one either.

No, I never wanted him to be my brother. I never wanted to love him that way. I may have been young, but I was a romantic at heart. Always a romantic. Always seeking love and a happily ever after, and I found it in him. He was my haunted, brilliant prince, and he was the one locked up in a tower in need of saving, and I wanted to do that. I wanted to save him, make him happy, so much so it became a fulltime occupation for me. I knew later on how silly that sounded, but at the time, that want became my dream and I yearned for it so badly.

Love just happened. You don’t feel the journey, you don’t see the warning signs, you don’t realize you’re in the middle of it until you are and the emotion is slapping you hard in the face. And along with the feeling of heart-stopping love, there was fear too. Fear of the unknown. Of the wrongness of it all. And then devastation. Devastation in the purest, rawest form when Daddy came home and proudly proclaimed, “Aston is now officially adopted.”

Heart failure. Oxygen ripped from my lungs. World spinning before my eyes. Shaking in my fingers. Realization dawning…dawning until I had no choice but to face reality and its ugly truths.

Aston was no longer just the foster child inside our home. No longer my best friend. No longer the boy I crushed hard on for three whole years.

He was my adopted brother.

Heart breaking…breaking…

Soul plummeting…plummeting…

I pretended to be happy. We celebrated with pizza, and I smiled while my eyes ached to cry, while my heart tore apart from within, while I stared with a lump in my throat at Aston’s happy, oblivious face. It was the longest, most excruciating dinner of my life, and I would never forget the moment we locked eyes at one another. It was fleeting. Maybe three seconds tops, but there was something there in his expression that mirrored my feelings. It was like…there was conflict in him too, and he wanted me to see it.

He was hurting too, although I couldn’t know for sure, and godddd, I needed to know for sure.

After dinner, Daddy took him out on a drive, bonding with him man-to-man, father-to-son. Meanwhile, I locked myself away in my bedroom and sobbed and sobbed…and sobbed.