Their Days of Nights

53 : Break

November 2011

Kimberly

"Woah!" Aya enters our room, surprised to see me. "I didn't expect you'd be here," she adds as she walks toward her bed.

It's almost eleven in the morning. I'm halfway through an old John Irving novel that I found from a thrift store that also sells secondhand books.

I close the book and drop it on the side of my bed. "Uh... Why not?" I ask her. "Last I check, I still live here."

She shrugs.

I narrow my eyes at her as she sluggishly sits down. "You think I'm spending way too much time with him. Don't you?"

She shrugs again.

"We're allowed to spend our individual times, you know. I saw him last weekend, and he's picking up his sister from the airport today. Plus, it's good to have a break from time to time."

"You don't need to explain to me, Kim."

She reaches for her shoes and pushes them under her bed.

I move away from the headboard and sit on the edge of mine. "How's the party?" I ask.

"The usual. I walked from The Stage to here, so I guess I sweated out the alcohol I consumed there."

I went home right after our shift. Aya stayed with our friends from work. They asked me to go with them, but I made up an excuse about my stomach not feeling well earlier. It's partially true, and they didn't have to know that I only meant I was hungry.

"You can always join us, you know," Aya says. "Nobody's going to push you to drink if you don't want to."

"I know that. But I don't know if I can stop myself, though. You're there the first time I took too much and almost lost myself. I have something good now. I don't want to ruin it by going back to how weak I was. You have no idea how hard that is. My cracks aren't exactly glued together after all."

She moves further onto her bed and rests the back of her head on the windowpane.

"Kim."

"What?"

"You never told me about what happened last month."

I sigh. "I already did," I say as I scratch an imaginary itch on my nape.

She demands me to give more details. "I told you about how I lost my virginity after graduating high school," she adds. "Why won't you do the same?"

Because I'm not like you, I want to say. But I keep it to myself.

"He was gentle," I say. "It was nice. I came. He came. The end."

I'm not elaborating any further. It's personal and intimate. I'm not going to defy his privacy. Not even with Aya.

"Ugh. Fine," she sighs. "Whatever you say. But tell me one thing, Kimberly."

I nod.

"You're not...getting married...like tomorrow, right?"

"No, of course not. Not even soon. No."

"Good."

"You'll be the very first to know... When that happens. I'm not going to just leave you here, you know that."

She yawns and lazily drops on her bed. "Oh, I almost forgot." She sounds like she's about to sleep any second now. "Nick was there."

"Where?"

"The Stage."

"Nick, from Benjie's office?"

"Yup. He's with a bunch of people. He...uh...he talked to me...and it ended with us exchanging numbers."