“You too?” Her voice was soft, sympathetic. “I figure I was just born broken, and nobody wants to take the time to figure out how to fix me.” She busied her hands among the beads, but she wasn’t really doing anything with them — the equivalent of playing with her food.
“And as soon as they realise that the things they want to fix aren’t the things I want to fix — that’s the end.” She really can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. She ran the half-finished piece through her hands and asked, in a musing tone, “Do /you/ think it’s bad for two people in a relationship to fight?”
“I think, sometimes people think they’re really up for the job. That they’re ready to find you sitting at your dinner table with nothing but a bottle of scotch and red eyes and… they think they can just take you apart like an engine, examine your deepest, innermost thoughts, and put you back together in one night… and then they realize it takes time, and that’s one thing they can’t offer, because they’re so fucking ready to jump into the deep end…”
The lad’s anger spiked with every word he spit out, laden with venom and hurt he’s bottled up since Allison up and left. He laid it all out unabashedly at first, but soon found himself trying to sweep the whole angsty revelation under the rug.
“I think it’s normal. To fight every once in a while, I mean. Perfect relationships are boring — you need room to change and grow.”
Summer looked up at Ace as his tone intensified, eyes widening a little. Apparently she’d accidentally ripped open a well of pain, and she put the necklace down to reach out a hand and put it on his knee. “I’m sorry,” she offered. She looked down, and back up at him. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Her own memories didn’t matter in the face of this. Yeah, Jesse had hurt her, expecting a kind of perfection she was never going to attain, but this — if they’d known each other longer than an hour she would have offered to hug him.
In exchange for his words, she said, “That person — that I was with, before — he … believed if you really loved each other you wouldn’t fight. And I’m … kind of a temperamental person.”