What that really meant was ‘no’. ‘No, this hurts, stop.’ So she stopped, running the discarded necklace through her hands again. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t mean to bring that up for you.” They didn’t look at each other for a moment, avoiding gazes and pasts and thoughts, and then she cleared her throat
“So, uh, how long have you lived here?”
Ace tried to force down the annoyance building up inside of him.
But no.
That is his pain. It isn’t up for grabs, up to share with anyone else.
Those are his unshed tears, his figurative wounds that would scab over in time but always leave scars that run deep.
Thankful for the distraction, he answered in one quick breath, “Just a few months. Don’t ask where I was before then.”
“You must’ve moved in while I was gone for spring break,” Summer mused. Until the heat wave, she hadn’t actually paid any attention to her neighbors except to notice that they existed. Well, there was that couple weeks when the folks below her were fighting constantly, and she could hear them through the floor — that had sucked. “Do you go to school around here, or what?”