Page 19 of Haunt Me

“Are you in pain?” I ask her.

“You mean my knee? No, it’s fine. Thank you for binding… Thanks.”

“No problem.”

She looks at her book. “Areyouin pain?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You were crying,” she says. “Barely able to breathe. You were not ok.”

My eyebrow shoots up. “How could you tell?”

I don’t deny that I was crying. It feels surreal, talking to a girl who looks like she might be a ghost. Admitting to her, of all people, that I was hurting.

“I could,” she shrugs. She does that a lot. It drives me crazy. “Are you in pain now?”

“Kind of, yes.” What is it with this girl? Why does she get the truth out of me so effortlessly?

“I am too,” she admits. “But not from my knee.”

“I know what kind of pain you’re talking about. I think.”

She looks down. “If you know anything about pain,” she says, “I’m sorry.”

The familiar dull ache begins behind my eyelids.No.She can’t do this to me. She doesn’t get to break me just like that. But, man, that ‘I’m sorry’ she said. And the way she said it. As if she saw me. As if she saw my pain.

As if she can feel it.

As if like recognized like.

God, I hope that’s not true.

I get up, but then I hesitate.

“Can I sit down next to you so we can maybe… do this together?” I ask her.

“Do what?”

“Hurting.”

She looks at me for a really long time. Her eyes are so unnerving, I’m sure I flinch about a million times. But I don’t look away.

“Yeah,” she says finally, making room for me even though there’s a literal forest available. But I want to sit next to her. Almost touching her arm, but not quite. Almost feeling her warmth but not quite.

So we sit there for the next two hours, hurting together.

I could spend the whole week like this, I think.The whole year.

I don’t know it yet, but I will.

…

I meet her on Monday after classes are over.

I bring my violin with me again, and I play the music I wrote that night for her. Eden just sits there, quietly, listening to me try to figure out how the music goes, without being awkward and impatient, as if we’ve known each other forever.

“It’s nice,” she says at some point. “This version.”

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