I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized this yet. I’d been trying so hard to push Aiden under the rug and forget him, but people don’t forget the loved ones they lose. They make peace with them being gone. In order for me to get over my broken heart, I had to make peace with the person who broke it.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it. Let’s go to the museum.”
We didn’t say much on the hour-and-a-half drive to Salt Lake City. I think we’d just automatically come to some sort of silent agreement that the following discussion should wait until we were walking through the exhibits of the Natural History Museum. Friendly ground and all that. We were both at home in any museum. Washington DC was our Graceland.
Being there with Aiden was as familiar as it always was, and yet it was different now too. It was strained and slightly awkward in a way it never had been with us ever in our lives. It wasn’t just the unresolved issues. We had both changed over the last few months.
We were well into an exhibit on the history of ancient civilizations when we finally started to talk. We were standing in front of a display of Zallinger’s March of Progress when Aiden brought it up. He looked at the figure of the Modern Man and sighed.
“You know what I think it was?” he asked. At first I didn’t know what he was talking about. He pointed at the statue and said, “This is you. You are fully evolved. I’m still just here…” He walked over to the next figure down the line—a statue of good old Cro-Magnon Man.
Somehow I managed not to smile. I studied the less-evolved human a moment and then pushed Aiden a little further down the line. Neanderthal Man was tempting, but I walked him all the way back to Homo Erectus.
He looked at the hunched over figure, who was almost more ape than human, and frowned. I don’t know what his problem was. It seemed about right to me.
“I don’t even merit early Homo Sapiens?”
“I thought this was generous,” I said dryly.
Aiden tried to be offended, but he ended up smiling. He looked at me a second too long. “I miss you, Aves.”
His smile widened, but the fact that he missed me hurt. I had to start walking again.
“Avery.”
Aiden grabbed my hand and pulled me to a stop. “It’s the truth, Aves. I miss you like crazy.”
When he didn’t let go of my fingers right away, I jerked back and folded my arms. “Why’d you stop talking to me?” I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice, but my eyes welled up, giving me away. “I don’t understand what I did to make you hate me.”
Aiden started to reach out to me but stopped himself and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I never hated you. I was never even mad at you.”
“Then what happened?”
Aiden sighed. He glanced around us. “Dinosaur bones?”
I nodded, and he tentatively held his hand out as if he wanted me to take it.
Nervous energy spiked through me.
“Come on, Aves.” He curled his fingers up in a “give me” gesture.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I placed my hand in his. Aiden wrapped his fingers around mine gently and then smiled at me. I felt my face get hot, so I looked at the ground.
Aiden began to walk with me across the museum. I concentrated on our hands, swinging loosely in the space between us, and tried not to freak out. I had more questions now than I did before. I knew this was something boys do—Grayson took my hand pretty much every time we walked anywhere together, and sometimes he held it when we were driving—but Aiden had never acted like this before.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Aves. I was really confused. The way we were raised was…”
His voice trailed off when he couldn’t find the right word for it. I would have supplied something, but I didn’t know how to describe it either.
“Do you remember when your dad split and you and your mom lived with us for a couple months? I remember crying every night for weeks after you guys got your own place. I didn’t understand why you had to leave.”
I smiled at the story, but it made me sad too. I had my own set of memories from then. First I lost my dad, but Aiden was there and made it okay, but then we left him too. It took me a long time to understand why.
“Growing up the way we did,” Aiden said. “It was like I had a twin sister who lived a mile away. You’re my best friend. You always have been, but it’s like we never had a choice about that.”
My lungs tightened in my chest. He felt forced into being my best friend?
“I’m sorry.”
“I never minded, Avery. I couldn’t have asked for a better best friend. When I started talking to Mindy, all the sudden nothing made sense anymore. I liked her. I’d never really liked anyone before because I always had you. But I didn’t like you the same way I liked her.”
I tried to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. “You liked me like a sister.”
Aiden shook his head. “I always knew you weren’t really my twin sister, but I didn’t know exactly what you were to me, either. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, I guess. But why didn’t you ever tell me? You were in that class with Mindy all semester, and you never mentioned her even once.”
Aiden sighed, and his pace slowed to almost a stop. People in the museum weaved around us. “I think that was my first mistake. When I got partnered with Mindy at the beginning of the semester, she helped me a lot with my speeches for class.” He shrugged. “I liked giving the speeches. It was fun and I was good at it, and I liked Mindy because she was different. I didn’t tell you because it was the first thing I’d ever done on my own. You and I did everything together. This was something that I could do by myself. I’d never needed that, but once I had it, I really liked it.”
Aiden stopped in front of a large dinosaur display and raked his free hand through his hair. “We did so much together that it was like I wasn’t my own person. I didn’t know how to separate us. I didn’t know who I was without you. I needed something that was mine, you know? Mindy and debate did that for me. I was afraid that if I told you about them, I would lose that feeling.”
I glanced up at Aiden. He was staring at the dinosaur but not really paying attention to it. As I looked closely, I could see how strung out he was. I hadn’t noticed it before because of the bruises covering his face, but he looked tired and stressed. His eyes and cheeks seemed a little sunken in as if he’d lost some weight recently. He was pale and his hair needed a cut. He hadn’t been his normal self for a while.
In that moment I realized that Aiden needed my acceptance as much as I did. We weren’t meant to be apart. Maybe we weren’t meant to be together the way I’d always imagined, but we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives avoiding each other, either.
I gave his hand a small squeeze. “I would have understood. I would have given you all the space you needed.”
Aiden squeezed my hand back and tugged me closer to him. “I should have realized that,” he said with a sigh. “I’m really sorry, Aves.”
I shrugged. “It’s okay. I was never really upset about that anyway. I just didn’t understand why you wouldn’t even talk to me anymore.” My eyes started burning again. “It was like you hated me. You were my best friend. You were the person I loved most and trusted most in the whole world, and all of a sudden you weren’t a part of my life anymore.”
I pulled my hand from Aiden’s in order to wipe the tears that gathered in my eyes. I walked down a little ways to a drinking fountain and gulped down some water. I even splashed a little on my face. It helped ease a bit of the panic. I sat down on a bench and attempted to get my emotions under control again.
Aiden sat down, leaving a foot of space between us like he wasn’t sure I wanted him near me.
“It was the same for me, you know,” I said, sniffling. “I didn’t know who I was without you, either. I don’t think there was a part of me that didn’t include you. When you abandoned me, it was like half of myself was just gone. First my dad left me, and then you. I didn’t even know how to breathe anymore. If Grayson hadn’t been there to hold me together, I don’t know what would have happened.”