How we meet

Chapter 34

The air was heavy with your anxiety. You spent your time filping through your notes. You couldn't read the page though, not matter how many times your eyes traveled across your notes and list of chores, you couldn't remember a thing. The words didn't stick in your mind and the moreyou failed to calm your racing thoughts the more it drove you crazy. You were so angry with it all. You were frustrated, you need to talk to someone, you needed to be held and told that it would all be fine but nothing you told yourself would let your build up the courage to tell N.
You dug through soil and dirt trying to ground yourself. Parts of you wished to sink deep into the coolness of the earth. If a worm could make it their home you wished to have such a home too, to be hidden in dry damp dirt. You could avoid all of humanity's problems at least. Yet even as you let the loose soil slip through your fingers, you found yourself gazing at N.
A tounge-tied words glued your mouth shut, yet your heart raced when you eyes found the others. He had dirt on his face. He probably rubbed his cheek. You tapped your cheek lightly, and he wiped at the dirt.
"Got it?"
"No." Not at all it had only made the smuge of dirt worse. It draged from the bridge of his nose to his jaw.
With a bit of work and a muddy hand print on your pants you walked to him. You reached up to him, swipping a towel from nearby shelves. As gentle as a phantom's kiss you dragged the cloth across his skin. Your warmth seeped through the rag it muddied by the stickiness of the greenhouse.
N gazed down at you. His thoughts had gone silent. His entire mind had been set aflame. His cheeks were glazed in the same peach as his heart. He reached towards you, a hand coming to rest on your cheek.
"I should tell you something." it tumbled from your lips, you confessed to the anxiety and the fear. You spilled the fact that you had been actively avoiding talking to him.
You had tossed another coin. How long would it take to know the outcome? How many coins had you dropped in without realizing? Would telling him, make him distance himself? Will it all fall apart?
"When your ready." He knew that you had been unpreaped. He knew what it was like for something to fall apart overnight. As soon as you were free and ready to tell him, he would listen to every word.
So you held yourself, you wrapped your arms around yourself. Your fingers tapped against the side of the glass. The steam of a warm hot chocolate stung your nose. Venipede happily nibbled on his snack, he looked out the window, he watched people pass by on the street. You looked into the glass, you looked not at N but at the swirling chocolate. 
Everything was hard to share. It was hard to recall the details. Faces and whispers of your past were hidden behind the fog of childhood and growing up. You hadn't shared it with anyone before, you hardly even let yourself think about it.
You told him. You tried to keep it straight. You tried to form the series of events in your mind. You supposed this was what it was like to be an author. The words were jumbled, strung together like a cat's ball of yarn. It twisted together and tied itself into knots. You sat there pulling strings apart, and detangling the tail as N listened.
You explained it softly, your words were hushed even in the solitude of your cozy cottage. You spoke as if your father was listening. You talked like you did back in the house, with quiet thank yous and pleases, that didn't mean a thing. Your words were coated in a false sugar, loaded with the sharp glass shards on your tongue.
You were raised in a small town, it was a quiet place. Filled with people who knew everything about one another. Secrets and gossip spread faster than wildfires. The mysteries of the rich houses on the outskirts were always spreading through the small web of people. For the most part it was sweet, mostly retired old people and families who wanted to focus on their kids lived there. The perfect place for a child to be isolated.
You shared the truth, you whispered about the rumors, you explained the reality of the fiction. You explained the large office and exquisite labyrinth of books and texts. The museum of government notes and ancient languages. Your father had a fascination for those old kingdoms of the past.
You explained the meeting you once overheard mentioned how at one point you were his prized calculator. The computer who never was wrong, the robotic thinker that could figure out the mistakes and the missing variables. You were human though, I suppose it was just better off if you weren't human. If you were a computer, it would have made it easier.
You explained your haunting room, laced with books and texts that you found no joy in. You told of your escapes, your journeys into the woods. Then you explained the fire. The large hand that ripped pages from your books, that tossed your floral paintings and drawings into the blaze. The smoke, the ash, and the fragments that laid scattered across cold wooden floors.
Then you told N of the large cat. The sharp claws, and her sharp teeth. Your body shook and you wished to drown in your cold glass. You wished that you hadn't explained it, you wished that it wasn't important. You never stopped talking though. Even as tears glazed your cheeks, as salt burned your lips. You spoke with a shaky breath but you held firm. You told him how you had learned every Pokémon in the woods, how you had been attacked there too by a scared venipede that had been kicked out of its home.
N held himself together well, he let your emotions flow through him. He let his understanding burn within himself. His eyes stayed on you, he looked at your hands, he felt that if he looked at your face and head that you would feel too uncomfortable with him. He let his anger at his father melt away and be replaced with yours. The man who raised him had also raised you, two monsters had raised children, and now the broken scared children sit together. They sit together, with a mutual understanding. They share their stories, they exchange their truths, they tell of their fears and explain how fate has treated them wrong. They sit there together, holding hands as an empty glass of hot chocolate sits next to a cold one.