Summer looks up from her book and freezes. “You … aren’t Flyte.” To that self-evident remark, eyebrows high on her face, she adds, “Who are you?”
“That’s not fair,” she objects, sitting forward. “Sometimes they think that if they treat you like before, things will go back — but sometimes they just don’t see. You curl yourself inside, you yourself hide the changes,” more pensively, “you go back to the old behaviours even when they aren’t really you anymore. That helpless kneejerk response to, oh, parental authority, when you’ve been an adult for ages, but you can’t forget when you were a child.”
Summer blinks a few times, seeing the past, eyelids flickering. “Sometimes you have to force them to see the change.”
“Remember that I have been living a lie for most my life. Very few people knew of what I really was and I wasn’t one of them. Even people I trusted, who knew what I really was, they want everything to go back to the way it was. In reality it won’t work as they will still try and believe that the lie I lived was the truth.” He gazes up to the ceiling. “It may not be fair but in the end that’s life. You may remember your times before the change happened, but you always notice differences and realise why they acted differently towards you compared to others.”
A small sigh is emitted. “Sometimes you do, but it does not always work.”
Very, very gently, she says, “I try not to assume. You might be different from Flyte. Your … past. But you aren’t, are you. It’s the same, mostly the same for you.” She blows out a breath, rubbing her hands over her face. “But you — you’re even more tangled than he is. You didn’t take that time to — I don’t know what he did. Before us. But he’s all swirls and loops and elegance and you — you’re just knots. Knots and tangles.”