Axel King {likes random nudity} (nomoreclothes) wrote in reduxpitch, @ 2016-10-14 17:37:00 |
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If he were being honest, Axel was feeling a little neglected. Not a lot, because he knew that Ashleigh was dealing her sister, but he'd felt for a while that they had, together, become stagnant. Their relationship had gotten comfortable quickly on, and he was okay with that; Ashleigh was challenging and uncompromising, and that kept him on his toes. He needed it. But in being uncompromising, she didn't open up. Axel had gotten used to it as her friend, but they had been dating for months, and he felt like he didn't really know her any better now than he had before. He was pretty sure it wasn't on purpose, and wasn't really anything against letting him, as opposed to others, inside her shell, but that didn't change the fact that she wasn't opening up to him, and that he wasn't content with going with the flow anymore. And maybe some of that was his own fault. He wasn't ignorant of the fact that, until Ashleigh, he'd lived his life full of casual romances. Maybe that was what she thought this was. Maybe the problem was simply that she didn't know how serious he was.about her. It wasn't like he'd told her he loved her yet, after all. He’d been waiting for her to say it first, because he didn’t want to scare her to put undue pressure on her, but it was becoming increasingly more apparent that that probably wasn’t going to happen. So Ashleigh needed a push. Not necessarily a push to admit to feelings she didn’t have, Axel didn’t want that, but a push to open up if she wanted to continue seeing him. And that, he supposed, was the big question. Axel knew how he felt, knew that he would stay with her for as long as she would have him, but he honestly didn’t know how she felt. She was so bottled up, it was hard to tell if she was only still with him because it was convenient, or because it had become the status quo. Or, possibly worse, if this distance was her way of shutting him out completely and breaking things off. When he could take it no longer, Axel invited himself over to her place about the time he knew she usually got off work. He didn’t actually expect her to be home yet, but was hoping her sister would be; he wasn’t entirely sure Ashleigh wouldn’t just brush him off even though he’d shown up in person, but her sister likely wouldn’t. And she didn’t. Alicia let him inside, told him Ashleigh would be home soon, and left him to his own devices. Something about taking a walk or going to see a friend or something. It wasn’t important. What was important was that Axel had never been left alone in his girlfriend’s space before, and he was curious. What was it they said, something about a person’s cabinet in the loo telling you everything you needed to know about them? Something like that. What he found surprised him, not because the bottle was there, but because she didn’t tell him. It really wasn’t any of Axel’s business what was in her bathroom and what wasn’t, but getting help for her anxiety, that would be a huge change for most people, and would be something a normal person would divulge to their partner. In Ashleigh’s case, it was just one more thing she’d kept hidden away, unwilling to put any trust in him at all. It kind of hurt, on top of everything else. When Ashleigh finally got home, Axel was lounging on her sofa, reading a random book with an interesting cover that he’d pulled off a shelf. “Hey babe,” he said casually, not looking up. -- Ashleigh’s life, usually so ordered and well-regulated, had been an uncomfortably unpredictable roller-coaster ride since Terence asked Alicia for a divorce. For a time, she’d devoted every waking moment to making sure Alicia was okay, making her get up and go to work and shower, cooking healthy things for her to eat. She’d given up her own extra-curricular activities, her ballet and dance, because she hadn’t wanted to leave Alicia alone. Then, things had started to improve. Alicia still hadn’t wanted to talk, but she’d needed less obsessive micromanaging. Ashleigh had started to risk going back to classes and then - as she really should have predicted, Alicia had suddenly gone downhill again. Ashleigh hadn’t even known why, until Terence had let her know. Through all of it, or at least the last couple of weeks, Ashleigh’s body had been adjusting to new anti-anxiety potions. By now, according to the healer she’d spoken to, she ought to be more or less even. Mostly, she felt the same way she’d always felt - the way she’d felt before whatever strange effects the chocolates had had on her. It was good not to feel out of control, to feel like she could actually handle Alicia and everything that came with her. She was a lot less certain about therapy. She’d had two sessions, with two different therapists, and found both of them barely more informed than she was. She expected more from someone who’d devoted their working hours to studying what she’d only read about in her spare time. She’d been supposed to have another session that evening, but she’d turned up at the office only to be told there’d been a double booking and she’d have to come back another time. So that was a third name struck off Ashleigh’s list. She got home, a little later than her usual time, with a bagful of ingredients for yet another healthy mood-lifting meal. It was, undoubtedly, the result of the anti-anxiety potions that meant she didn’t jump out of her skin when Axel greeted her from the sofa. She did have a moment of garden-variety anxiety that she might have made plans with him and forgotten, like she’d forgotten her plans with Aisling. A quick mental review of her schedule reassured her that she hadn’t. Besides, Axel was much more likely to show up at random than Aisling was. She surveyed Axel, putting the shopping bag down by her feet but not otherwise moving. He was reading one of the books about anxiety she’d given him months ago, which either meant he was concerned about the state of her mental health, or he’d never read it in the first place. “Hi,” she replied. “Is Alicia home?” -- Well, obviously Axel was concerned about his girlfriend’s mental health, that was an all the time thing. Not because she needed worrying about, but because he cared about her. He’d cared even before, when they were merely begrudging friends, but he hadn’t felt much like he was allowed to care, not like he could now. Though, it probably was totally true that he wouldn’t have read any books on anxiety before they started dating, if he had known far enough beforehand. It probably would have surprised Ashleigh to know that he actually had thumbed through the books she suggested, reading bits here and there on the specific topics that sounded interesting; most of it actually was pretty interesting, it was mainly just the bits about science and brain chemistry that he skipped, because that was just too smart for him. When she asked about her sister, he finally looked up and put the book down on his chest, but didn’t get up. “I think she said something about a walk or her flat or something,” he responded. “She still staying here?” Obviously, since the younger Spinnet had been there to let him in, but he and Ashleigh hadn’t really spoken at length for him to get whatever the plan was, if there was one to be had. Knowing Ashleigh, she’d probably let her live there if that was what she wanted, and while that was all well and good, Axel hoped a little bit that the other woman could go back to her own home so he could have his girlfriend back. Not that he’d ever actually say that. “Plans tonight?” -- Ashleigh felt a flare of irritation when Axel asked if Alicia were still staying there. That he didn’t know one way or the other was a mark of how little they’d talked lately, how little interest he seemed to have in her life. It was something that had been nagging at the back of her mind since he’d described his dream of her working in interior design as ‘crazy’, as if he didn’t even know that was something she was interested in, when she redesigned her flat several times a year and he’d even helped her to tile her kitchen to her own specifications. That he should be similarly clueless about what was, currently, the biggest stress in her life made her question whether she could rely on him at all. Not, of course, that she’d been trying. Ashleigh hated to admit she needed help she couldn’t find and pay for herself. Going to a healer and a therapist was, in a way, actually easier than talking to people she was close to. “I’d have told you if she left,” she pointed out. It would have been a dry, factual journal entry rather than anything more intimate, but she wouldn’t have neglected to mention it. That Axel hadn’t bothered to find out where Alicia was going, or for how long, was also annoying. Ashleigh could cook and leave her leftovers to heat up, of course, but not knowing where to start looking if Alicia didn’t return still made her anxious. She hadn’t yet reached a stage (and might not ever) where she trusted Alicia not to get herself hurt, or in trouble, or to do something stupid. She knew it was her own anxiety, and that there was really no reason Axel should anticipate it, so she bit back a question demanding more details. The thought that the ‘friend’ could be George Weasley would plague her until Alicia did return. “Not anymore,” she answered, picking up the shopping to carry it into the kitchen. She would leave it there, with stasis charms, until Axel decided he wanted dinner, or until Alicia came home. For herself, she hardly wanted to eat. She did fix herself a cup of coffee and carry it through to the living room. “I was supposed to be at a meeting, but it got cancelled at the last minute.” She sat with him on the couch, feeling very much as if she’d forgotten how to talk like a normal person. If Axel didn’t want to hear about Alicia, Ashleigh had very little else to offer in the way of conversation. -- Insisting that she would have told him was what finally spurred him into sitting up, because he didn’t actually believe her. Maybe she’d have told him about this particular thing, about her sister going back to her own place, but after getting a better idea of just what, exactly, she hadn’t been telling him, he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. Taking medication was a big step, and they both had to know that, but would she see her sister moving back out as a big step too? Was it just the big stuff she was keeping from him? Or was she just trying to put distance between them? Regardless of whether or not Ashleigh knew she was doing it, she was putting distance between the two of them. He let her move about, deciding to wait until she’d settled in order to say something. The urge to laugh it off and ignore it was there, but Axel had reached a breaking point, and if they didn’t talk about how little they were talking, how little she was telling him, then there was no point in them being together at all. And that wasn’t, in the slightest, what he wanted. He gave her a minute after she stopped talking, his body leaned forward on his elbows, before looking over at her. “Would you have told me? Because I’m not so sure you would have.” -- “Of course I would have,” Ashleigh responded immediately. She never took well to people questioning her competence - and it didn’t occur to her that perhaps her aim of being a competent girlfriend was a little sad. She would have told Axel about Alicia because it directly affected him - whether or not he could apparate straight into her flat, how much he could expect to see Ashleigh, how stressed he could expect her to be. She hadn’t mentioned her medication, it genuinely hadn’t occurred to her to do so, because it only affected herself. She hadn’t told Alicia either. She had told Aisling, and Higgs, but that had been because both of them had noticed that something was off and needed fixing, and she wanted to assure them she was taking steps to fix it. Axel, so far as she could tell, hadn’t noticed when her appetite had dwindled almost to nothing, nor when she’d lost weight, nor that her anxiety had been through the roof. Since they were talking about living arrangements, and since Ashleigh had no idea as yet that they were talking about anything else, she added, “She doesn’t want to move back to the flat she shared with Terence, so we’re talking about her staying here.” Nothing had been officially decided yet. Ashleigh was torn between feeling like she was duty-bound to offer Alicia a room in her flat and feeling like she needed to stop being her sister’s caretaker. If she stayed, Ashleigh wondered if she would ever get her life back. -- It wasn’t a matter of incompetence, not that Axel could really had predicted that was how she would take his question. If he were better at having these types of conversations, he might have known to fully explain what he meant instead of giving her one line at a time, but he rarely took things seriously, and also had never had a long-term girlfriend before, so he didn’t really know that people didn’t really take it well when you questioned them and didn’t say why. As it was, when she immediately responded, he looked like he didn’t believe her. And she was still talking about her sister. Did she really not know something was wrong? It seemed a little incredible to him that someone who could be both self-aware and informed could also be so clueless. “Ashleigh, I really didn’t come over here to talk about your sister. I fully understand that she’s been your priority because she’s had a rough go of it, but we’re having problems too, and I don’t think you even see it.” -- He was right, in as much as Ashleigh hadn’t realised he’d come over specifically to talk about anything. She almost said so, then stopped herself. There was no way to say that she thought he’d come over just for the pleasure of her company that didn’t sound like she was whining about not seeing him enough - which would be hardly fair as it was very much her own (and, perhaps, Alicia’s) fault. “I see at least one problem,” she said, feeling her pulse lift despite the anti-anxiety potions. She was so tempted to tell him she just didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have time to fix problems with him when all her energy was bent on trying to fix everything for Alicia. She wasn’t sure she had the emotional resources to deal with anything more than she was already handling. “I doubt it’s the same one you see.” Because, really, if it was then he was the one that needed to fix it, and she doubted very much that was how this conversation was going to go. She could have waited for him to answer, but as far as she was concerned she wanted this conversation over as quickly as possible. “You’ve known me since I was eleven,” she reminded him. “But you don’t seem to know basic things about me. Or you don’t notice. You’ve been in this flat how many times over the last few months, without noticing I change the decor every few weeks, without noticing the stacks of interior design magazines.” She wasn’t going to mention how he’d failed to notice that she was struggling. Then he’d think she was asking for help. -- No, that certainly wasn't the problem Axel was thinking of, but while the urge to get defensive and keep her from deflecting was strong, the fact that she’d given up this information was exactly what he needed. She clearly had a problem with him that he hadn’t known about, and who knew how long she’d been bottling it up; he couldn’t really guess from that snippet what, exactly, he was supposed to know about her, but the simple fact that she was telling him there was a problem was a start. If she was willing to simply admit to having problems, then they could fix it. He just needed her to tell him. So he swallowed the quick retort and turned his body more towards her. “I notice a lot of things I don’t mention,” he reminded her, though he was reasonably sure he didn’t know what connection he was supposed to have made with redesigning her flat, “but I can only see what you let me see, and it honestly hasn’t been much. And maybe that’s my fault, because you don’t know that I want to see you, but I do. I do want to really know you, and I’m sorry if I’m the reason you don’t know that.” -- “Then why don’t you mention them?” Ashleigh asked. She still didn’t believe that Axel had had any idea of her interest in design, but if he had why would he have kept it secret? What would the point be? She met his eyes as he turned towards her, feeling, if anything, more defensive than ever. She had always expected she wouldn’t be very good at being a girlfriend - and especially at being Axel’s Girlfriend. They were too incompatible, by which she really meant that she was too difficult. She’d been surprised when their relationship had gone more smoothly than she’d expected. And now Axel was here, when Ashleigh was already stressed to the point of needing medication, telling her she was too difficult after all. That he didn’t, as she’d been coming to believe, accept her the way she was. Probably, it had been a foolishly romantic notion in the first place, and one Ashleigh was surprised at herself for having. If her family couldn’t like her as she was, what chance did Axel have? She stood up again, though she had nothing in mind to do now that she had. “I’m not a mysterious person,” she said, because she really thought of herself as straight-forward. That she was reserved, and that that made it difficult for people to know her, wasn’t something she’d ever become aware of. Her friends seemed to manage. -- Unfortunately, Axel had no idea why Ashleigh was so upset that he didn’t say everything he thought or noticed about her, or that she’d taken that silence to mean he was just oblivious. Had he known that, or that part of the reason she was so defensive was because she thought she was the problem, he could have told her she was wrong and maybe set this whole thing right. “No, but you obviously don’t trust me,” he replied, although he didn’t entirely believe that mysterious wasn’t a word he could apply to her. Being that his whole career was based on word choice, ‘mysterious’ wasn’t the word he’d use, because it didn’t invoke exactly the right picture, but just looking at the definition, it would still work. Axel would rather use words like...cryptic, perplexing, or abstruse. Perhaps part of the draw was that Asleigh Spinnet was a puzzle he wanted to solve, but Axel didn’t believe that his interest in her would wane once he did. -- “Of course I trust you,” Ashleigh responded, still standing in the middle of her living room. If she didn’t tell Axel things, it wasn’t because she thought he would tell everyone, or that he’d reacted badly to the information. She just - assumed he didn’t care to know. “I haven’t hidden anything from you. I haven’t refused to answer anything you’ve asked. I don’t understand what you mean when you say I don’t let you see much.” Ashleigh was rather of the opinion that she let him see everything, and he just didn’t notice. Did she have to spell everything out? She really wasn’t sure she had the energy. After her initial defence, she remembered that there were some things she had deliberately kept from Axel. Not many, and not recently, because she didn’t count just not mentioning things that were only her own business. She leaned against the side of the couch furthest from him. “It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she said again. “I just - I’m used to handling things myself. I’ve always had to be able to.” And, really, things were no different now. Oh, Ashleigh knew that Aisling would have done anything in her power to help her if she needed it, but Ashleigh also knew (or thought she knew) that Aisling didn’t want a weak, dependent person for a best friend. “Do you remember when we went to the fair in Hogsmeade?” she asked, honestly not sure Axel would remember. -- There was a strong need to interrupt her, to insist that yes, she had indeed hidden things from him. And maybe the problem was that they defined ‘hidden’ differently, because she might not have consciously decided she was going to not tell him certain things, but that didn’t change the fact that things had happened in her life, and decisions had been made, that he had no way of knowing about without hearing them directly from her. But he didn’t interrupt her, because she seemed to be building up to something, and if that would lead to sharing, he couldn’t risk an interrupting keeping her from sharing whatever it was. “I do,” he responded, and because she seemed to need him to be explicit, he continued, “and I remember that other people experienced stuff after they went. I didn’t. But you’ve been iffy, and I didn’t want to push, so I thought if you had, that you’d talk to me when you were ready.” Clearly he’d been wrong and they’d both been waiting for the other to mention it so they could talk about it. Assuming, of course, that Ashleigh would have. Axel didn’t know anymore if that would have been the case. -- Ashleigh hadn’t expected that. If he had noticed, he’d given no previous indication of it as far as she’d been able to tell. “I turned the chocolate down, but then you took one and told me to eat it,” she reminded him, as gently as she possibly could. “I didn’t want you to think it was your fault.” She let her body slide back into the seat, still leaning against the arm rest. If Ashleigh looked at it in her own ruthlessly logical way, it was Axel’s fault. Without him, she wouldn’t have been there and she certainly wouldn’t have eaten the chocolate. That didn’t mean she wanted him to blame himself. “I still can’t really explain what happened.” And that, of course, just made it worse for Ashleigh - who liked to have neat explanations for everything. “I was just - scared. More anxious than usual, and about different things. I didn’t want to eat.” Saying it all out loud, she could see a little more what he meant about her keeping things from him. “Having Alicia here helps,” she added. “And makes it worse. It’s easier to sleep knowing someone else is here, and I have to eat so she’ll eat, but…” She trailed off into silence for a moment. She didn’t want to complain. “Looking after her doesn’t give me a lot of time for myself.” Understatement of the year. “Or you.” -- Axel didn’t feel guilty about the chocolate, but he also hadn’t heard about what it was, specifically, that made everyone go through the mostly-horrible things; if that was the cause, it would have explained whey Ashleigh, and not Axel, had been affected. Realizing that did make him feel something, but he wasn’t going to dwell on it. It had happened months ago, and fixating wouldn’t change or make anything better. No, he chose to focus on what she was actually admitting to going through. He wanted to hug her as she spoke, to wrap her up and make her feel safe, and if she were any other girl he’d dated, he would have done it without a second thought. But Ashleigh was different and didn’t always react the way he thought she would; sometimes things he thought would be comforting or romantic weren’t to her, and he didn’t want to make her more anxious by invading her space if she’d prefer to not be touched. Axel compromised by scooting over beside her and resting his hand on her knee, but leaving enough room between them so she wouldn’t feel like he was suffocating her. That was the idea anyway. “I don’t mind that part so much as long as we’re talking, Ashleigh,” he told her gently. Obviously he missed being around her as much, but as long as they were still communicating, if she was telling him about the things going on around her and in her head, if he could do the same for her, then he could wait until whatever was taking up her time and focus had passed. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything so you’ve had to go through this alone.” -- Ashleigh had known Axel for long enough, and been dating Axel for long enough, to understand - at least somewhat - what touch meant to him. It meant, she was fairly sure, that he wasn’t as disappointed with her as she’d thought. He wasn’t telling her she wasn’t good enough and couldn’t ever fix it. Logically, Ashleigh could see that her needing to change wasn’t a sign that that Axel didn’t like her. She had intended to come into the relationship willing to compromise, she’d known she would have to if she wanted to be with Axel. She’d just… forgotten. So, bringing all of that back to mind, she shifted closer to Axel and settled her head against his shoulder. This was how they’d started, sort of. “I’m used to going through things mostly alone,” she said. “I told Aisling and Higgs.” She didn’t know if that would make it worse for him, to know that she had opened up to other people. (Frankly, if he got annoyed about Aisling she was going to think that was silly. Aisling had been her friend as long as he had - longer, really, given she and Axel hadn’t exactly been friends at first sight.) Aisling and Higgs had both, also, commented on her distress without her bringing it up. “I try not to let anyone notice.” She had to be the responsible one, after all, she wasn’t used to letting other people help her. Unless they were professionals. Closing her eyes, she tried to relax against him. Alicia wasn’t home, but Ashleigh wondered if she could go to sleep anyway. It was tempting. “I’ve been prescribed anti-anxiety potions,” she said. “They should take me back to how I was before. Which wasn’t perfect, but at least I knew how to manage it. And I’m trying to find a therapist who isn’t a total idiot, but that’s going to take longer. I don’t really know if it will help.” -- His arm automatically went around her back when she moved closer, and he kissed the top of her head. That was how Axel knew that things were going to be okay and that they could fix it, because if Ashleigh didn’t want the physical contact, there wouldn’t be any physical contact. For the most part, that was okay, even for someone like him, but he did need that contact for reassurance, even if it wasn’t in her nature. Really, he wasn’t all that surprised when she said that Aisling knew, even if their friend hadn’t brought it up. No, the only part of that that Axel really felt uncomfortable about, was that she’d talked about it with her brother-in-law instead of him. Not that she couldn’t have other people too, but that he was the one she hadn’t talked about any of this with, and Axel, then, didn’t know if it was because she was trying to hide it from him specifically, or if it was a test (that he failed) to see how long until he noticed, or if she really just needed everyone else to bring it up in order for her to talk about it. And he was glad she was finally telling him, he really was, but he couldn’t get past why it had taken this for it to happen. He didn’t say anything for a minute, which probably looked like he was processing what she’d said, but only some of it was information he hadn’t already known or figured out, and he was stuck on her trying to keep everyone from noticing. “You know that you can talk to me, right? I know that you feel like you need to take care of everyone else, but you can lean on me--that’s what I want. It’s kinda one of the perks of being in a relationship. Your strength becomes our strength.” -- Ashleigh was sceptical. The problem with taking problems entirely on herself was that she did tend to get tunnel-visioned and forget that other people could help. Aisling’s wealth could certainly have eased a lot of the problems in Ashleigh’s life, but she’d never accepted it, and never been desperate enough to need to. “I don’t want to lean on you,” she said. “It’s not personal. I don’t want to lean on Aisling, either.” She knew too well what it was like to be the one leaned on, to feel that was all she offered to a relationship. She didn’t want to do that to people whose company she genuinely enjoyed. What she needed, what she had in Aisling, was someone who held her accountable for helping herself. Ashleigh wasn’t sure Axel could do that. It was the result of a particularly hard-headed quality that Ashleigh and Aisling shared. “If I talk to you, I don’t want you to offer to fix things for me.” Which was more or less what Ashleigh thought Axel would do, and maybe if it was fair for him to need her to talk more it could be fair for her to ask him not to. “I’m not going to let you fix things for me, so if you tried we’d just fight.” She didn’t need Axel to do exactly what Aisling did, because she already had Aisling for that. “If you want me just to talk to you so that you’ll know what’s going on, I can try to do that, but I’m not sure what else it would accomplish.” She frowned slightly. “Do you want to know just to know?” Ashleigh hadn’t found that most people were all that interested in her life, even those that probably ‘should’ be. Axel had said he wanted to know her, but it was still hard to believe. -- Axel had a lot of things to say in response to all that. “You shouldn’t--” he broke off, his thoughts all jumbled up. He didn’t immediately know whether he should address how he thought she shouldn’t have to be strong all the time, that she should let other people help sometimes, or the fact that yes, he did want to know what was going on even if he could do nothing about it. Because that was how relationships worked, whether they were romantic, platonic, or familial. “It doesn’t really have to accomplish anything,” he finally settled on. “I can’t honestly promise that I won’t offer or try to help if I know I can, but even if I can’t, I do want to know. I don’t need to know everything, but if you tell your sister or your other friends, or if it affects you, then I want to know. Partly because even if that’s not now you mean it, it feels, to me, like the reason you don’t is because you don’t trust me.” Aside from just wanting to feel included in her life, that she might not trust him with the information was one of his greatest fears about this relationship. If Ashleigh needed more proof that this wasn’t a passing fancy, or so he wouldn’t be lonely, he could give that, though it might hurt a little because he thought he’d been obvious about it. Maybe he needed to do more telling than showing. Axel knew that if all he wanted was a warm body or entertainment then he could fix those problems very easily without involving Ashleigh, but maybe she didn’t. He was entirely certain she didn’t know or understand that he’d had the great misfortune of actually falling in love with a stubborn, passionate, self-sacrificing, impossible woman. -- Ashleigh scoffed. “I don’t tell Alicia anything.” It would have been easy to say it was because Alicia had her own problems to deal with, that she didn’t need to share Ashleigh’s. To an extent, that was true, but it wasn’t really why Ashleigh didn’t share things. Alicia always had her own problems, and the dynamic of their relationship never went further than Ashleigh doing her best to help. “I don’t think she’d care,” Ashleigh said, shrugging. “She doesn’t like me. I don’t think she has any interest in my life at all.” Honestly, Ashleigh wasn’t even sure Alicia knew she had a boyfriend, let alone what his name was or what he did for a living. Perhaps the state of Alicia’s mental health could account for some of that, but not all of it. “I suppose I didn’t think you would be either. Not because you’re like Alicia, but just because… it’s not interesting, and it’s not positive.” She turned a little, still under his arm but able to look up at him. “I haven’t had anything positive or interesting to talk about, and I thought that’s what you’d want, so I just haven’t said anything at all.” She didn’t think she’d used being busy with Alicia as an excuse, because she genuinely had been too busy to have time for much else, but it had helped to cover the fact she had nothing to say to anyone. “It’s not you,” she said, aware she was treading dangerously close to cliche but not knowing how else to word it. “I don’t expect people to be interested in my life. Aisling and Higgs are the two exceptions, because they’ve proved that they are.” Which was why she generally needed people to come to her with what they noticed, because otherwise she assumed they didn’t care enough to notice, or care enough to talk about it. “When I was little, I could have an anxiety attack in the middle of the living room and mum wouldn’t notice.” She wondered if that would even mean anything to Axel, whose parents had been so much worse. Their mother had at least tried, and had often been too busy with work to notice much that was going on at home. “And this is where a therapist might actually be helpful,” she said, wrinkling her nose in annoyance. “But I’ve seen two and I was supposed to see a third today and they’ve all been useless.” -- Axel could have assured her that her sister probably did like her and would be interested in what she had to say, but he wasn’t there to fix Ashleigh’s relationship with Alicia, he was there to fix her relationship with him. After they worked all this out, then maybe they could tackle that clusterfuck, but not before. None of the Spinnets really had good, healthy relationships with each other, so it would take quite a bit of time and energy to do anything about it, and Axel didn’t really have that in him at the moment; he was struggling enough just to get her to talk to him. “Ashleigh,” he said firmly but gently, his hand coming up under her chin so he could get her to look him in the eyes as he dropped this bombshell on her. “I’ve been in love with you for an inconveniently long time. But even if I wasn’t, I’d still be interested in even the bad or boring parts of your life because I care about you, and I want to be involved even if it’s not positive.” -- Ashleigh met his eyes, acutely aware that if he was expecting her to jump for joy or fall into his arms (anymore than she already was) he was going to be disappointed. For a minute, she seriously considered saying that ‘I love you too’, even though she wasn’t sure she did, because she had no idea what romantic love felt like, just because it would be easier. If she didn’t, he might leave, and she didn’t want that. “I’m sorry,” she said, which probably wasn’t what he wanted to hear either. “I guess I didn’t give you a chance to be interested.” The thought of trying to be better was exhausting. Trying to be perfect at yet another thing that didn’t come naturally to her, giving up yet more of the time she wanted to use for her own interests. “I’m not good at this,” she said, looking down. She didn’t know how to say that she didn’t know if she loved him, but she definitely care about him and wanted to keep him in her life, but that at the same time she didn’t know if she had the energy. “I hate not being good at things,” she added sadly. “I want to say I’ll be better.” -- No, he didn’t want or expect her to jump for joy or return the sentiment. If anything, he would have distrusted either reaction, because they might not be genuine coming from her. Not that he expected Ashleigh to lie, but she might have felt pressure to react that way because she thought that was what he wanted, and anything other than a genuine reaction would have hurt. But Axel also didn’t need Ashleigh to be in love with him in order to be with her; if she was willing to stick with him because she enjoyed their relationship, then, at least for now, that was good enough. Maybe he would eventually need her to love him, but he was honestly pretty willing to wait for as long as that would take. And if that day never came, then either she’d break up with him or they’d just keep on as they were. “I know, but I don’t need that,” he told her, kissing the top of her head and holding her a little bit closer. “I don’t need you to be perfect, or good at dating me--I’m not really that great at dating you either. All I need is for us to talk.” He kissed her head again before turning to rest his cheek there. “Besides, I’ve had perfect girlfriends. They’re boring.” -- Ashleigh didn’t really believe that perfect would be boring - because anyone boring wouldn’t be perfect for Axel, which really made her wonder why he was with her of all people. She didn’t like the idea that his previous girlfriends had been more perfect, either. But apparently, none of that worried Axel, and Ashleigh wasn’t sure she had the energy right now to worry about it. It would probably nag at the back of her mind. “Stay tonight,” she said softly. She hadn’t invited him to stay for ages, not since Alicia had moved in. She didn’t want to make Alicia feel awkward, or sad. “If I cook now, I can leave leftovers for Alicia and we can eat in my room.” She’d never usually take food into the bedroom, but she’d rather do that than force Alicia to be the third wheel at dinner. |