Circles ━ Evan Buckley

004: LOVING ME IS...

CHAPTER FOUR: LOVING ME IS...
song of the chapter: messy, renee rapp

Love is a feeling that Indiana thought she knew well.

It was, at one point in time, a word that she used multiple times a day, through text when she's at work and whispered against lips when she returns home. She thought that she knew love like an old friend, back then, like a feeling she had always known. Now, Indiana sees love for what it is.

Loving someone is only prolonging the inevitable heartbreak.

It's programmed in our brains that everything ends eventually, from the first breath we take to our last and every breath in between, we are only living just to die. If you choose to love someone during your short time alive, then you're the fool. Everything ends, even the love we claim to share.

Indiana knows now that what she felt for Hugo was not love. It took two years, countless therapy sessions, and a million teardrops, but Indiana finally has clarity. She can name her feelings now, recognise them for what they are and not for what she wished they had been.

It was compulsory, the love she felt for Hugo. He made the first confession, he made the first move, and up until the moment that the castle crumbled, he had always been the one to imitate their firsts.

And it's not like Indiana was forced into the relationship. She had been a willing participant, and she had enjoyed every minute that they spent together until she found out that he had betrayed her. She had loved him at one point, Indiana is sure of that much, but she's just not sure how she loved him.

Athena loves to talk about how Bobby is her big love. She tells everyone that she has loved different people at different points of her life, and she loved them just as fiercely as she loves her husband now.

She waxes poetry about how she would not be the person she is today if she had not loved them, that they had a part in carving her into the woman she is now. She loved them then, and the love lingers in her heart in the same way that our breath hangs in the cold air now.

So Indiana tries her best to keep her cousins words in mind as she fixes her lipstick while also trying her best to justify going out on a date with a man who she's only had one conversation with. As it turns out, the suitor that Athena had intended to set her up with was Buck, so really, the situation worked itself out better than Indiana could have imagined.

Still, Indiana looks at herself in the rear view mirror of her car now, and she wonders silently if this was such a good idea after all.

Buck is a great guy. Genuinely. He's kind, he's funny, he's good with Clover, and he's easy on the eyes, too, which doesn't hurt. He's everything that Indiana could have hoped for when Athena promised to set her up.

That doesn't calm the unsettled nerves in her stomach, though.

A knock sounds on the drivers side window, then, and Indiana jolts so harshly it's lucky that she doesn't have lipstick up her nose. She whips her head around to look at the window, and her heartbeat slows ever so slightly when she sets eyes on Buck.

"Can I?" He mouths, gesturing to her door.

He wants to open the door for her. Jesus fucking christ.