Page 51 of Hot Summer

“Please, I already know your favorite color.”

“What is it, then?”

“Blue,” Cas said simply. “You wear blue almost every day.”

A parade of Ada’s blue bikinis, dresses, tops, adorable pajamas, floated through her mind. Her favorite, without a doubt, was the two-toned strappy bikini Ada’d worn earlier that week, but even the ratty tie-dyed jumper Ada was currently wearing had its merits.

Cas reached out gingerly and fingered the tattered cuff of Ada’s sleeve, her index finger sliding against the hole torn in the seam. Cas watched the way the loose threads caught on her skin before she looked up. She’d intended to meet Ada’s gaze, but found Ada’s eyes trained on the soft circles Cas was dragging along her sleeve.

She watched Ada watching her for a long beat before she swallowed and pulled her hand away. “Anyway, yeah, it’s blue. What do you think my favorite color is?”

“If we’re just going off clothes, it’s black,” Ada said flatly, and Cas had to laugh.

“Okay, you’re not wrong. Though, I’m also partial to a nice lavender.”

“Are you?”

“You seem surprised.”

“I am,” Ada said, rolling onto her side now and tucking her right arm up underneath her head. “I didn’t picture you as a pastels girl.”

Cas opened her mouth to argue the point, but there was no point. “Fair enough.”

Neither of them said anything for a few long moments. The silence would have been easy if they weren’t both lying on their sides, facing each other. In this position, it felt like there was a tether pulled tight between them. The anticipation of something building, tugging behind Cas’s gut, pulling her forward...

Ada smiled. “But okay, if you already know my favorite color, what do you want to know?”

“Anything.” Every piece of information Cas learned about Ada felt like she was getting something special. Precious. Cas was hoarding them, very Gollum and that ring, and it was sort of embarrassing but she also couldn’t quite help it. “Something I don’t know.”

Ada hummed softly and rolled onto her back, revealing a stretch of her bare stomach. Cas skipped her eyes across it before drawing in a deep breath and mirroring the position.

“I can start if you want,” Cas said quietly.

“Okay.”

There were a million things that Cas could’ve told her. Millions of things that Ada didn’t know. But Cas wanted to tell her the big thing, the thing she hadn’t talked about with anyone but Aisha and Skye in the days after it all fell apart. It terrified her, the impulse to open up about this, but she wanted to, wanted Ada to know this about her. To understand her.

“I was engaged once. A few years ago.” A long exhale, a weight being lifted off her shoulders. “It was the last real relationship I had.”

Ada’s expression blossomed with understanding. “Oh.”

“Yeah. We were a few weeks away from our wedding when she called it off. She wanted to move back home and she didn’t want me to come with her.”

Said like that, it was almost simple. Almost erased all the pain and desperation and god-awful heartbreak Cas had barely survived after Saoirse left. It made it seem inevitable, like Cas was always going to be leaving tragic, rambling messages on Saoirse’s voicemail and then sobbing in the shower.

“That’s really horrible,” Ada said. She took Cas’s hand, their fingers weaving together. “I’m so sorry.”

Cas looked down, watched the smooth progress of Ada’s thumb along the side of her index finger. It was the first time they’d held hands like this. Close, the soft touch of the duvet, the brush of the breeze on their exposed skin. It was intimate, something that was just theirs.

“It hit me like a fucking train.” She’d meant to laugh it off, but it came out thick, choked. “One day, I’m getting final fittings done, and the next, she’s standing at our door with all her shit packed.”

How empty her flat looked without all Saoirse’s color in it. How the sheets still smelled like her, no matter how many times Cas washed them.

“I felt like my heart was getting ripped out of my chest,” Cas whispered. She could still feel the echo of that pain, not the full brunt of it, but the memory. Cas knew, now, that their relationship had been crumbling for months, that Cas was hastily holding it together with whatever she could while Saoirse already had one foot out the door. But Cas’s heart still broke a little for her past self. For all the ways she’d tried to heal herself from something that had torn her apart so completely.

“No wonder you haven’t wanted to get close to anyone since.”

“I didn’t even know how to. Now...” She shook her head. “Now I think it’s just easier, you know? Keeping to myself.”

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