Page 39 of All That We Are Together

“The basics.” I sat down in the passenger seat.

“The basics? Clothes, stones, and a dead body?”

I tried not to grin, chastising myself for letting the reins go so quickly. But Axel just was that charming, and I remembered then why I had missed him and forgot all the reasons I had hated him for three years.

I looked out the window while we left behind my neighborhood in Brisbane. It was a sunny summer day, and the cloudless blue sky accompanied us all the way. We were almost outside the city when he turned on the radio. The melody of3 Rounds and a Soundsurrounded us.

“So you’re going to sleep in a hostel…” he said.

“Yeah. I got a good price because the owner knows Oliver.”

“You could have stayed at my brother’s place.” He then made a breezy gesture. “Or mine.”

The speed with which I turned my head must have been a clear sign of how much that comment disturbed me. I looked him over while he drove, hands calm on the wheel, and asked myself how itwas possible that Axel could just accept this situation so easily, as if all we’d lived through years back meant nothing to him. For a second, just one, I envied him. But then I simply felt pity.

Pity because Axel would never die of love for someone. And at a certain moment in my life, I had, and I knew the sensation well, and there was nothing else it could be compared to: that electrifying feeling when a person touched you, the way your heart sped up when they smiled, the way the whole world revolved around a boy who, despite his many defects, was perfect in my eyes.

I realized long before that he might not be the best thing for me or for my heart, which was crying out for relief. And so I slammed on the brakes.

But I still kept the memory with me.

I passed two people who were obviously in love on the street one day, and I knew what it was they were feeling and that Axel would never know what that was like. He would never love enough to fight for it tooth and nail, despite everything, against everything.

“Leah, are you okay? You didn’t answer me.”

I forced myself to look at him, hard as it was.

“I’d rather stay in the hostel, it’s more comfortable.”

“More comfortable for who?”

“For me,” I replied curtly.

38

Axel

Restraint. It wasn’t the first time I’d been hounded by that word with her around. I had restrained myself years ago, when I started to feel something for her. I thought it was bad, that it wasn’t right, that I couldn’t let anything happen between us. But I failed and fell in all the way, because suppressing my primal yearnings wasn’t something I was as good at as I’d have liked.

And now I was back in the same situation. Restrained. Unable to stop ruminating about how she’d put her life back together, how she had someone else, how she’d left what we had behind. It was like traveling to the past, to those forgotten feelings: having her there and dying to touch her and not being able to do it, swallowing my words, my lust, my desire.

I drove a while without saying anything, concentrating on the road. Leafy trees bordered the asphalt, and I had the strange feeling I was getting closer to her with every mile we left behind, as if we were returning home. And we were, in a way, even if just temporarily. I glanced at her. She had her head leaned back and was looking at the blurred countryside through the window.

“I remember you being more talkative.”

“For real?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Except for the year you stopped talking, obvs.”

“Very funny,” she muttered, then turned away.

“You honestly don’t have anything to tell me? You didn’t do anything interesting for three years?” I kept on because, as always, I preferred her bad mood and cutting replies to her silence. Leah’s silences were…dangerous.

She wrinkled her nose and looked straight ahead. “I painted, I studied, I went out.”

“You’re overwhelming me with all those details.”

“Why don’t you tell me something about you?”